Norberto Bobbio (Italian: [norˈbɛrto ˈbɔbbjo]; 18 October 1909 – 9 January 2004) was an Italian philosopher of law and political sciences and a historian of political thought. He also wrote regularly for the Turin-based daily La Stampa.
Bobbio was a social liberal in the tradition of Piero Gobetti, Carlo Rosselli, Guido Calogero, and Aldo Capitini. He was also strongly influenced by Hans Kelsen and Vilfredo Pareto. He was considered one of the greatest Italian intellectuals of the 20th century.
Bobbio was born in Turin on 18 October 1909 to Luigi and Rosa Caviglia. The middle-class status of his family (his father was a doctor) allowed Bobbio to have a comfortable childhood. He wrote verses and loved Bach and Verdi's opera La traviata. Later, he would develop an unknown illness that caused tiredness and malaise. The feeling worsened with age but became an important part of his intellectual growth.
Bobbio studied at the Liceo Classico Massimo d'Azeglio, where he met Leone Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese, and Vittorio Foa, who would all become major figures in the culture of the Italian Republic. From 1928, like many other youth in the era, Bobbio registered with the National Fascist Party.
In high school, Bobbio met Vittorio Foa, Leone Ginzburg and Cesare Pavese, and at the university, he became a friend of Alessandro Galante Garrone.
In 1942, under the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and during World War II, Bobbio joined the Partito d'Azione ("Party of Action"), illegal at the time, and was imprisoned in 1943 and 1944. He was a candidate in the 1946 Constituent Assembly of Italy elections, but failed to win a seat. With the party's failure in a post-war Italy dominated by the Christian Democrats, Bobbio left electoral politics and returned his focus to academia.
He was one of the major exponents of left-right political distinctions, arguing that the Left believes in attempting to eradicate social inequality, while the Right regards most social inequality as the result of ineradicable natural inequalities, and sees attempts to enforce social equality as utopian or authoritarian.
A strong advocate of the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the limitation of powers, he was a socialist, but opposed to what he perceived as the anti-democratic, authoritarian elements in most of Marxism. He was a strong partisan of the Historic Compromise between the Italian Communist Party and the Christian Democrats, and a fierce critic of Silvio Berlusconi. Bobbio died in Turin, the same city in which he was born and lived most of his life.
Bobbio studied philosophy of law with Gioele Solari; he later taught this subject in Camerino, Siena, Padua, and ultimately back in Turin as Solari's successor in 1948; from 1972 to 1984, he was a professor of political science in Turin.
He was a National Associate of the Lincean Academy and longtime co-director of the Rivista di Filosofia. He became a Corresponding Associate of the British Academy in 1966; in 1984, he was nominated as Senator-for-life by Italian President Sandro Pertini.
The awards received by Bobbio include:
Election into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994
The 1994 Balzan Prize for Law and Political Science (Governments and Democracy)
The 2000 Hegel Prize for a contribution to the development of the humanities
Bobbio also received, among others, doctorates honoris causa from the Universities of Paris (Nanterre), Madrid (Complutense), Bologna, Chambéry, Madrid (Carlos III), Sassari, Camerino, Madrid (Autónoma), and Buenos Aires.
To celebrate the centenary of Norberto Bobbio's birth, a committee was established, constituted by more than a hundred Italian and international public institutions and intellectual figures, which formulated a wide-ranging programme of activities to promote dialogue and reflection on the thought and figure of Bobbio, and on the future of democracy, culture and civilisation. Celebrations were officially opened on 10 January 2009 at the University of Turin.
According to Richard Bellamy, Bobbio was a public intellectual and throughout his life worked on several causes, including the defence of social democracy and supporting nuclear disarmament.
Bobbio's first book was The Phenomenological Turn in Social and Legal Philosophy (1934). It was followed by The Use of Analogy in Legal Logic (1938) and The Philosophy of Decadence (1944).