The rigorous self-awareness (such a rare quality!) with which Bobbio viewed the world

I have friends who are not particularly fond of Norberto Bobbio. One likes to repeat that former Marxists, after their dialectical excesses, sought salvation in a philosopher whose teaching can be summed up as ‘A cannot be B’. Another goes so far as to say that this philosopher, faced with the party-based politics of the republican left, behaved with the same compromising caution he had previously employed in the face of fascism in order to keep his ‘position’. But no one is harsher than Bobbio himself: ‘For an intellectual who professes to understand how things have gone, indeed who claims to teach this to others, it seems to me that I have understood far too little. Indeed, let’s be frank, I’ve never got a single thing right’, he wrote in 1971 to his contemporary Leo Valiani. I came across these lines in a volume recently published by Biblion, "Un possibile strumento di libertà umana. Norberto Bobbio e il socialismo", which, alongside forty years of correspondence between the two friends, includes an essay by Giovanni Scirocco.

Scirocco is right to immediately cite another passage in which Bobbio admits that his distance from practical politics also stems from a ‘lack of readiness to make decisions’, which in urgent situations can easily lead to wrong choices. Yet it is precisely this awareness that subsequently enabled him to analyse so lucidly the flaws of the Actionist tradition, the ambiguity of the Communists, and the overly vague concept of socialism. In particular, Bobbio never ceased to comment incisively on the anomaly of an Italian Communist Party (PCI) that postponed its shift towards the West but in practice acted as a social-democratic force, and of an Italian Socialist Party (PSI) which, in order to distinguish itself, gradually reduced itself to a purely tactical ‘third-force’ stance. In the face of these two aberrations, he called on both parties to embrace a radical form of democracy: without the struggles of the labour movement, he reiterated, institutions would be hollowed out, but ‘by taking the revolutionary “shortcut”’ they ‘never returned to the rights of liberty’. The philosopher who distances himself from the illiberals is the same man who, after 1989, refused to confuse the mission of the Left with a generic liberal democracy.

Rather, for those who are part of it, it is a matter of removing the obstacles that prevent the most vulnerable from being free – that is, of striving towards a Salveminian ‘integral democracy’. Even Marx can still be of help, provided he is read in a secular manner, like Kant or Weber: the unchecked primacy of the economy and boundless commodification (which now conflates desires with rights) remain valid insights. However, these must be recast within a non-organicist conception of society, where progress is a possibility rather than an inevitability of historical dialectics. Here, though, one might ask Bobbio whether he underestimates the capacity of economic and technological development to continually destroy and recreate social structures, and thus to upend social classes at a pace to which politics is unable to adapt. The problem is that the philosopher needs to reason ‘with a clear head’, or he risks being mesmerised by appearances. Take, for example, during the most intense phase of their correspondence, the exchange of views on the 1968 student movement. Whilst Bobbio is quick to praise it in a rather voluntaristic manner, his friend, on the other hand, immediately recognises its unconscious Stalinism and, with the keen insight of a historian and a militant, draws certain parallels with the European uprisings of the 1920s and 1930s (“but today’s revolutionary students know too much about sociology and too little about history”).

Generally speaking, Valiani is less hesitant when it comes to breaking away from groups: and it is no coincidence that, as an advocate of a presidential republic, he deplores the conventional wisdom on the left that leads people to regard every reform as a breach of a ‘taboo’. Bobbio, on the other hand, tends to take a diplomatic approach to the debate. He does indeed express his disagreements with his fellow travellers, but only on condition that he remains within a well-defined milieu; this prevents him from speaking out promptly and clearly in situations where telling the whole truth would mean finding himself alone or amongst strangers. Yet the philosopher is not unaware of this shortcoming of his. In 1983, he wrote that he was fascinated by Valiani’s account of his own life, ‘especially when I compare it to my own life as a teenager from a middle-class family: whilst you spent your years in prison, in concentration camps, on adventurous journeys and engaged in political activism amongst so many historical figures, I spent mine in comfort, immersed in my studies, competing for a university chair’. It seems to me that this rigorous self-awareness is somewhat lacking amongst today’s cultural elite in Turin: who can study Gobetti or his courageous heirs and, at the same time, without batting an eyelid, endorse the views of D’Orsi or, in any case, disregard the Ukrainian resistance. ‘Macabre jokes,’ Leo Valiani might say – a Central European Jew who grew old in an Italy that never quite resembled him.