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Norberto Bobbio (1909–2004), a prominent legal and political philosopher, was instrumental in developing Italian legal positivism and made significant contributions to democratic theory. Committed to the rule of law, he was an important voice of the reformist and liberal-democratic left in Italy.

Born and educated in Turin, Bobbio obtained degrees in jurisprudence and philosophy in the early 1930s and taught law and political science from 1935 to 1984, the year in which he was nominated lifetime senator. Although raised in a middle-class environment that welcomed fascism against the perceived threat of socialist revolution, he associated with leading antifascist intellectuals and liberal socialists from the clandestine groups Justice and Liberty and the Action Party, helping to found the latter in 1942. He was jailed for brief periods in 1935 and 1943 for antifascist activities.

In early writings, Bobbio distanced himself from the predominant currents of idealism represented by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, briefly sketched phenomenological approaches to legal science and sociology, and elaborated a theory of social personalism aimed at transcending individualism and collectivism. In the 1940s he criticized existentialism as an apolitical and decadent philosophy, arguing that its tendency toward solipsism and antirationalism undercuts its own focus on action and individual responsibility, notions crucial in the democratic struggle against fascist dictatorship.

Upon fascism’s demise, Bobbio engaged in debates over the shape of the new Italian political order. Increasingly influenced by Carlo Cattaneo’s positivism, he argued for secular and tolerant politics, liberal democratic rights and institutions, economic and social rights, and domestic and international federalism. After an unsuccessful candidacy to the Constituent Assembly in 1946, he withdrew from politics to concentrate on research and teaching. He propounded a “neo-Enlightenment” rationalism that substituted theoretical rigor and empirical study for idealism’s speculative abstractions. Against efforts to revive natural law theories, Bobbio launched Italian legal positivism in the 1950s through a synthesis of logical positivism and Hans Kelsen’s pure theory of law—a perspective he supplemented in the 1970s with a sociological account of how law functions in advanced industrial societies.

Bobbio consistently defended liberal democracy against Marxist critics—such as Galvano Della Volpe and Palmiro Togliatti in the 1950s and Antonio Negri in the 1970s—who tended to denigrate citizenship rights as bourgeois ephemera and ignore concrete mechanisms of political rule. He advanced a “minimal” definition of democracy outlining certain “rules of the game” for arriving at collective decisions nonviolently, such as universal and equal suffrage, majority rule with minority rights, and the freedoms of expression and association. To redress democracy’s many “broken promises,” such as the persistence of oligarchies, Bobbio called for representative institutions to permeate civil society (bringing democratic principles to other domains where collective decisions are made) and an extension of welfare state protections.

With the development of nuclear weapons, Bobbio questioned conventional theories of “just war.”Viewing state sovereignty as a primary cause of war, he urged the construction and democratization of international institutions such as the United Nations to safeguard human rights and resolve disputes nonviolently—a notion he termed legal pacifism.

Alarmed by increasing economic inequality and the persistence of authoritarian impulses in Italian politics, Bobbio argued in the 1990s for the continuing salience of the political distinction between left and right, and aligned himself with what he viewed as the left’s long-standing project of realizing justice and liberty.

Bibliography:

Anderson, Perry. “The Affinities of Norberto Bobbio.” New Left Review 170 (July-August, 1988): 3–6.
Bellamy, Richard. Modern Italian Social Theory. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987.
Bobbio, Norberto. The Philosophy of Decadentism, translated by David Moore. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948.
Politica ecultura. Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1955.
The Future of Democracy, edited by Richard Bellamy, translated by Roger Griffin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Which Socialism? Marxism, Socialism and Democracy, edited by Richard Bellamy, translated by Roger Griffin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Democracy and Dictatorship:The Nature and Limits of State Power, Translated by Peter Kennealy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
The Age of Rights, translated by Allan Cameron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, translated by Allan Cameron. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Il problema della Guerra e le vie della pace, 4th ed. Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino, 1997.
Greco,Tommaso. Norberto Bobbio: Un itinerario intellettuale tra filosofia e politica. Rome: Donzelli, 2000.
Urbinati, Nadia. “Liberalism in the Cold War: Norberto Bobbio and the Dialogue with the PCI.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8, no. 4 (2003): 578–603.