Ernesto Galli della Loggia and Aldo Schiavone sign a polemical and passionate book between history and politics, built through the experience and encounters of a journey, a reconnaissance of the places of an Italy today on the margins, but in which perhaps our common destiny is written.
«“But are you still there?” The question takes me by surprise, not so much for the curiosity it expresses, but for the veil of menace it carries. “Where?”, I grumble. “But to the Left, no?”, she urges me, my daughter. “Well yes...”, I reply without thinking too much about it, unaware of the quagmire I’m getting myself into.”Why?”. “Why?!?”. Yes, why do I insist on staying in a place that no longer exists? ... A system of ideas and promises betrayed every day by those same people who say they still want to represent it?
Translations and commentaries: Massimo Brutti, Valerio Marotta, Fara Nasti and Emanuele Stolfi
Introduction: Aldo Schiavone
Gustavo Zagrebelsky, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Norberto Bobbio's death, has written a short and passionate book that captures the heart of the thought of the great Italian philosopher, jurist, political scientist and historian of international stature. Bobbio was a “man of doubt,” an expression he used several times in conjunction with his being a “man of dialogue.” The doubt that Bobbio names as a characteristic of himself is, so to speak, the homage to truth that is the stimulus of the question: will what I think, what I believe, etc., be “really true”?
A compendium on the essence of a system of coexistence that the modern world has taken over the past two centuries as its model.
Who would benefit and who would suffer from the constitutional reforms proposed by the current government? Let us not be confused by words like stability, efficiency, governability and the like: they often wrap harsh realities in the babble of the obvious. The Constitution is not literature; it is the most political thing there is.
Three highly respected jurists explain why the proposed reforms violate three cardinal principles of the Constitution: democratic participation, independence of the judiciary and equality among citizens.
If being a constitutionalist means churning out 'opinions,' the constitution too becomes an opinion, indeed a sum of opinions. And it even becomes an opinion that there is this Constitution and not another. Once, at least on this, constitutionalists were united: that Constitution to which they promised to devote studies and energies must be defended and promoted. Today, an era seems to have passed and many are working on the opposite purpose: to change it, to make it unrecognizable. Of course, they say, the purpose is always to improve it. Are they still constitutionalists?
The trial of Jesus Christ as a paradigm of different ways of thinking about democracy.
Is democracy an end or a means? Zagrebelsky proposes three visions of democracy: dogmatic, skeptical and critical. To them correspond three mentalities, three worldviews. The dogmatic sees only the truth to which all must adhere. The skeptic, the reality to which one must bow. The critic, on the other hand, makes his way responsibly through the possibilities. The author's thesis is that only those who possess a critical view of democracy conceive of it as an end.
From the 4th century to the present, civil power and religious power have done nothing but fight each other to wear each other's robes, when they have not agreed, allying themselves, to both fit into the same, single robe.
«There is no secularism either when religion, singular or plural, meddles in the affairs of the state, making the state an affair of religion, or when the state meddles in the affairs of religion, making religion an affair of the state. Secularity means prohibition of meddling, whatever its content, it being irrelevant whether hostile or benevolent».
Against the ethics of truth means in favor of an ethics of doubt. Beyond appearances, doubt is by no means the opposite of truth. It is the reaffirmation of it, it is a tribute to truth, but a truth that always and again has to be examined and re-discovered.