Bobbio, Norberto

(1909–2004)

   Born and raised in Turin, Norberto Bobbio was a professor of political and legal philosophy at the University of Turin from 1948 to 1979 and was made a life senator in 1985. Bobbio was born into an upper-class, pro-Fascist family, and it was only when he reached university that he began to make the acquaintance of a formidable group of intellectuals and critics of the regime. His friends included such luminaries as Cesare Pavese, Carlo Levi, the future publisher Giulio Einaudi, and the journalist Vittorio Foa. Bobbio had a somewhat ambiguous relationship with Fascism. As he very honestly admitted in his 1997 autobiography, he was willing to write servile letters to the minister for the universities protesting his commitment to the Fascist cause; on the other hand, he and his closest friends were strong critics of the theory and practice of the Fascist state and were identified as troublemakers by the police. Bobbio’s life was changed by the war and by the resistancemovement to Fascism. He was a member of the Partito d’Azione/Action Party (PdA) and took part in clandestine activities in Turin during the war. Bobbio believed that the resistance was a moral turning point for Italy, and he was always passionately committed to the democracy that emerged in 1948. He was scathing about the student revolutionaries of the 1960s, who claimed that postwar Italy had constructed an oppressive antidemocratic regime, although he did sympathize with many of their criticisms of the Italian university system. Bobbio’s early academic work was in the philosophy of law, and he holds an important place among contemporary scholars of this field. He was also an expert interpreter of Thomas Hobbes and edited De Cive for an Italian audience in 1948. The nature of the political conflict in Italy, however, meant that he was forced to debate concrete political questions with communist thinkers. Asecular democrat and a liberal, he persisted in defining dialogue as a corrective to the limitless nature of human folly and exaggeration. In his view, dialogue is the only route to democracy. Two famous books, Politica e cultura (Politics and Culture, 1950) and Quale socialismo? (Which Socialism? 1976) were the result of Bobbio’s attempts to keep open dialogue with the Partito Comunista Italiano/Italian Communist Party (PCI).

   By the beginning of the 1970s, he had become a supporter of the Partito Socialista Italiano/Italian Socialist Party (PSI), regarding it as a force that had moved away from the orthodox Marxism of the PCI and toward cooperation with the left of the Democrazia Cristiana/ Christian Democracy (DC) in pursuit of a new progressivism. Yet he was never a PSI “loyalist.” He was one of the few socialists who openly criticized Bettino Craxi in the 1980s. Bobbio wrote a number of important works of political philosophy while in “retirement.” His thoughts on the future of democracy, on just war theory, and on human rights were all translated into English (as well as numerous other European languages). His book Destra e sinistra (Left and Right, 1996) was actually a best-seller in Italy and elsewhere in Europe—an unusual fate for an academic book in any field, let alone in one as challenging as political philosophy. In 1992, Bobbio was spoken of as a potential candidate for president of the Republic; to his relief, the proposal came to nothing. When this heir to the liberal-socialist tradition of Piero Gobetti, Gaetano Salvemini, and Carlo Rossellidied in January 2004, he enjoyed growing international fame as one of the key European political thinkers and intellectuals of the postwar period.