Law and Politics

In 1861 Dostoyevsky stayed with Alexander Herzen in London. It was during his stay there that he got the inspiration for Chapter 5 of the second part of The Brothers Karamazov: the legend of the Grand Inquisitor. Dostoyevsky’s proposed interpretation of the three temptations of Christ in the desert is a pretext for examining the moral basis of a mass society in which people are, or appear to be, possessed by an inner strength which determines collective and individual behaviour, eliminating all possibility of rejection or revolt.

It was first the Gods and then the Sovereigns who imposed their duties on men. Then came the age of rights, which freed us from them. Today it is again the time of duties. But mutual duties, among equals. For ourselves, for our future.

This book explores the nature of the law, discussing its underlying reasons, its origin and the different meanings it has acquired over the course of time. Diritto allo specchio is, so to speak, the law’s self-awareness, a radical inquiry which examines its historical and cultural roots: roots which are complex and cannot be reduced to univocal assumptions. For it often gives rise to the disputes which characterize its practice both in the courts of justice and in civil society.

Law is a specific form of social regulation distinct from religion, ethics, and even politics, and endowed with a strong and autonomous rationality. Its invention, a crucial aspect of Western history, took place in ancient Rome.

In some influential circles egalitarian policies are seen as a serious handicap to the economy and a perilous ‘moral gamble’: a certain amount of inequality, the argument runs, is necessary to guarantee economic development. According to this view, a high degree of pollution is acceptable at the beginning because it will disappear when standards of living rise and technologies improve. But there is no sign of that yet: inequalities have continued to widen, the global economic crisis is very serious and the condition of the world environment continues to deteriorate.

From Turin to Lampedusa an (unsentimental) journey through Italy, out of clichés and false optimism. A journey by stages of the mind and heart in the Italy of the economic boom, of dreams and decadence.

A crisp and trenchant dissection of populism today

The populisms that are emerging in many parts of the Western world are the symptom of a latent crisis of democracy (its inability to represent significant sectors of the various populations), which in turn derive from a now evident crisis of politics itself: a crisis of ideas (of ‘vision’), of quality in the political classes (a generalized mediocrity), and of organizational models (the end of ‘mass parties’).