Norberto Bobbio

This book explores the writings of Norberto Bobbio (1909-2004) who was Italy’s foremost political, legal, and democratic theorist, a distinguished historian of political and legal ideas, and one of the country’s most perceptive public intellectuals throughout the second half of the twentieth century in Europe.

Bobbio’s work offers a unique vantage point for understanding the evolution of twentieth-century ideologies, in Italy as well as in Europe. His biography, scholarship, and militant writings were marked significantly by the vicissitudes of Italian political history, as the country transitioned from constitutional monarchy to Fascist dictatorship to democratic, parliamentary Republic. These events, together with the international challenges posed by the Cold War, made his life and publications an unusually wide-ranging mirror into the complexities of European history and politics. His native country, in fact, provided him with a magnifying glass to scrutinize the respective principles and contaminations of rival ideological traditions in a national and transnational key. The chapters in this volume, written by scholars based in Europe and North America, combine historical contextualization with historical analysis to illuminate the complex ways in which Bobbio studied rival ideologies, examined the relationship between their past and present, and assessed their potential to forge the trajectory of democracy in the future.

This book is an insightful resource for advanced students, researchers and scholars of Politics, History and Philosophy, as well as those interested in Italian and European Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Political Ideologies.