1. Basic Income: what are we talking about?The idea of Basic Income grant to provide for fundamental life needs dates back long time in the history of the broader ius existentiae debate (Bronzini, 2011). Basic Income sits in the debate concerning the historical issue of wealth redistribution, rather in the discussion about the allocation of that amount of affluence generated by determined social order, in specific historical time. Indeed, we will see how Basic Income focuses directly on the relationship between social and productive organization, which is at the heart of the capitalist contemporary mainstream development model (Gorz, 2009).A first attempt to summarize this historical debate and to equip research of commonly shared definition of Basic Income has been led by the philosopher Philippe Van Parijs and the political scientist Yannick Vanderborght. In their book, L'Allocation Universelle, they not only rebuild thoroughly genesis of the principle of ius ad vitam, but they also refine what is today the most notorious explanation of Basic Income: a revenue paid individually by political community to all its members, without means test and working requirements (Van Parijs and Vanderborght 2005, trad. it. 2006:5). However, despite this first conceptual framing, which at first glance appears to undermine the social stratification basis in terms of material and symbolic rewards, it is still missing deeper level of specification to clarify the following issues: How much does Basic Income amount to? Who are the exact targets? Is it distributive or re-distributive measure? The extraordinary multitude of approaches and methods employed throughout time to identify the mechanisms of wealth creation have led to great confusion in the definition of what Basic Income is and how it should work.To this day, there has been partial attempt to shed light on the fragmented terminology in the final report of the Parlamentare per l'analisi delle compatibilita macroeconomiche della spesa sociale (so called Commissione Onofri, Roma, 1997)1. Here, the Italian sociologists Chiara Saraceno and Maurizio Ferrera have tried to outline some pathways, addressed to the national Italian government, that will provide for direct support to individual income. In spite of that, together with Greece, Italy is still today the only European country lacking national-net of income support. Saraceno and Ferrera have sketched out distinction among some of the most employed terms for individual cash transfers: Basic Income, Citizenship Income, Guaranteed Minimum income, Insertion Income and Last Resort income. However, we are still lacking careful taxonomy of the several measures calling for cash transfer and of the resulting levels of social protection.The whole redistributive debate orbits around two main phenomenological axes: the crisis of the fordist labour and the crisis of the related welfare system (Sennet 2006, Rifkin 2002, Fraser-Honnet 2003, Paci 2007, De Masi 1999, Mantegna-Tiddi 1997). Therefore, we must interpose the research on the Basic Income idea between the passing of the wage society and the overcoming of the charitable state (Accornero 1997, Paci 2007, Fumagalli, 1997b). For this reason, in this review I will go over the main literature dealing with the idea of Basic Income. First, I will try to outline brief historical bibliography about the issue of ius existentiae. Secondly, I will provide an empirical picture of the experiences of such monetary transfer. Thirdly, I will depict general map of the socio-economic approaches to Basic Income in the contemporary redistributive debate. In conclusion, I will attempt to point out possible research direction.2. The historical background2.1 The Humanist rootsThe idea of right to the essential means for life is certainly not new (Van Parijs and Vanderborght 2005, trad. it. 2006). During the Renaissance thinkers pointed economic and political elites towards the problem of the poor and indigents, extracting it away from the usual church protective layer. …