Norberto Bobbio

Works

• 1984The Future of Democracy

  Defines democracy by rules for collective decisions and examines its “broken promises”: the persistence of oligarchies, invisible power and limited citizen education.

• 1994Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction

  Argues that the distinction between left and right survives because it rests on differing attitudes towards equality, while freedom distinguishes moderates from extremists.

Position

Bobbio is on the map as one of the leading voices of Italian legal and political philosophy after 1945. As a legal theorist he brought Hans Kelsen’s legal positivism and analytical methods into Italian jurisprudence and treated law as an ordered system of norms. In political philosophy he wrote studies on the classics from Hobbes and Kant to Marx, Gramsci, Mosca and Pareto, and argued that democracy is best defined by procedural rules: who is authorised to make collective decisions and how. “The Future of Democracy” (1984) measured real democracies against their “broken promises”, and “Left and Right” (1994) located the core of that distinction in the attitude towards equality. Politically he stood for a liberal socialism that joined the defence of rights with social equality, and for a critical dialogue with the communists, whom he challenged to state a Marxist theory of democracy and the state. Habermas took up his procedural definition of democracy; Perry Anderson, in a sympathetic critique (1988), questioned whether liberalism and socialism can be combined as Bobbio hoped. When a letter of 1935 was published in 1992, in which Bobbio, after his arrest, had assured Mussolini of his loyalty to fascism in order to protect his university career, he acknowledged it publicly and described it as an example of the servility that dictatorship forces on people.

Life & context

Norberto Bobbio was born on 18 October 1909 in Turin, the son of a surgeon. At the Liceo Massimo d’Azeglio his schoolmates and friends included Leone Ginzburg and Cesare Pavese. He took a degree in law in 1931 under the legal philosopher Gioele Solari and one in philosophy in 1933, and taught philosophy of law at Camerino from 1935, at Siena from 1938 and at Padua from 1940. In 1935 he was briefly arrested in a police operation against the antifascist group Giustizia e Libertà. In 1942 he joined the Partito d’Azione; from December 1943 he was imprisoned in Padua for some months, and in 1946 he stood unsuccessfully for the Constituent Assembly. From 1948 he taught philosophy of law at the University of Turin and from 1972 political philosophy, until his retirement in 1979. In the 1950s he conducted a public debate with communist intellectuals, collected in “Politics and Culture” (1955), and later wrote widely in the press on democracy, rights and peace. In 1984 President Sandro Pertini appointed him a senator for life. He died in Turin on 9 January 2004.

Further main works

• Politics and Culture (Politica e cultura, 1955)
• Theory of the Legal Order (Teoria dell’ordinamento giuridico, 1960)
• Which Socialism? (Quale socialismo?, 1976)
• The Age of Rights (L’età dei diritti, 1990)
• Left and Right (Destra e sinistra, 1994)