In the present volume Danilo Zolo has collected the writings he devoted for some twenty years - from 1985 to 2004 - to Norberto Bobbio's political and legal thought. In the appendix the author publishes a selection of letters that Bobbio sent him over the course of more than twenty years, from 1976 to 1999. They are presented with a wealth of explanatory notes that reconstruct the historical and cultural context of the letters. Their publication, writes Zolo, is meant to be an affectionate tribute to Bobbio's memory as well as a offering to future scholars interested in the history of Italian culture in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Norberto Bobbio has been an important intellectual and moral point of reference for Zolo since the early 1970s. The role he played both as a rigorous and passionate thinker, mindful of the developments of political life, and a model of civil engagement, left a deep mark on Zolo, he tells us. On the one hand, Zolo shared Bobbio's annoyance at the pedantry of scholars, and their lazy indifference to the world's tragedies. On the other, he has always felt the need to reflect on human events with a certain measure of detachment, observing - as Bobbio wrote in his De senectute (Old Age and Other Essays, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001) - the immensity of space and the infinity of time with an awareness of the precariousness of all human affairs, not simply of an individual's life.

Zolo has read, studied and absorbed all of Bobbio's major philosophical and political works, from Politica e cultura of 1955, through Quale socialismo? of 1976 (Which Socialism?, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987) to Il futuro della democrazia of 1984 (The Future of Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). For him, the fascinating aspect of Bobbio's works and civil engagement is his sober, austere and independent "style of thought", which reflects what Bobbio called "the soundest fruits of the European intellectual tradition: the restlessness of the quest, the sting of doubt, the willingness to dialogue, critical spirit, the measure of judgement, philological carefulness, a sense of the complexity of things".

Starting in 1976 Zolo began a rich correspondence with Bobbio that became less regular only in the final years of Bobbio's life. In the course of some thirty years the two men exchanged dozens of messages in which they discussed most often the positions that Bobbio took in his books and papers and, sometimes, those taken by Zolo in his own. The correspondence focussed principally on the questions of democracy, international order, peace and war. The two men had an intense discussion over one of Zolo's books, Cosmopolis(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). While upon first reading Bobbio heavily criticized the book, he later carefully reflected upon it. An "unrepentant cosmopolitan" - this is how he wittily defined himself -, Bobbio disagreed with Zolo's anti-universalist positions, but he found discussion with him useful. On one occasion, as the two men discussed the 1991 Gulf War, the exchange of letters turned into a public, and at times quite polemical, debate in the newspapers.

Some of Bobbio's letters are of remarkable historical and theoretical significance. Among these, a letter from February 1991 stands out in which Bobbio revised his initial moral and legal approval of the U.S.-led war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Another letter dated July 7, 1992 is also of considerable historical interest. There Bobbio expressed his deep discomfort with the scandal-mongering campaign that the weekly magazine Panorama orchestrated against him in June 1992. Panorama had published a letter that Bobbio sent to Mussolini on July 8, 1935, at the age of 25, asking that Mussolini annul a warning that prevented him from applying for a university position. The letter to Zolo contains a first-hand account of the situation of intellectuals and professors under the Fascist regime. Bobbio had himself already been incarcerated in Turin on suspicions of complicity with the Giustizia e libertà anti-Fascist group, and was arrested again in Padua in 1943 on charges of clandestine activity.

Two letters dated April 1, 1996 and March 19, 1997 are also theoretically important. In these Bobbio, discussing the positions taken by Zolo in Cosmopolis, puts forth his point of view on the theory of international relations, the anthropological reasons for violence and the issues of peace and war. Finally, Bobbio's sometimes quite critical evaluations of authors such as Louis Althusser, Biagio De Giovanni, Giovanni Sartori, Niklas Luhmann, Gunther Teubner and Domenico Losurdo are of great interest.

With regard to Giovanni Sartori, Bobbio, as the philosopher of politics that he was, shared most of the reasons underlying Zolo's own critical attitude. He agreed in general with the idea of the serious epistemological flaws of United States 'political science', which Sartori claimed to have imported to Italy. And he unhesitatingly endorsed the phrase "tragedy of political science" borrowed by Zolo from the title of David Maria Ricci's volume. Bobbio, too, felt that Sartori's latest works could hardly be considered original and, most importantly, he rejected - and publicly criticized - his "knee-jerk anticommunism". During a conference organized by Sartori at Columbia University in 1986, Bobbio found Sartori's anticommunism so "gut off-putting" that at the conclusion of the event he voiced his lively dissent before the audience of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, receiving warm applause.

Overall, the image of Bobbio that emerges from this collection is rather unusual: that of a great intellectual whose relentlessly severe judgements of himself, first, but also of his interlocutors, is coupled with deep human sensitivity, kindness and modesty. It is an image unknown to many, who instead remember a stiff, strict and severe professor.

Contents and selected texts

• Presentazione editoriale
• 1. L'alito della libertà e i rischi della democrazia
• 2. L'inquietudine della ricerca, il pungolo del dubbio, la volontà del dialogo
• 3. Fra Machiavelli e Kant
• 4. L'idea di eguaglianza
• 5. L'empirismo di Norberto Bobbio
• 6. Il problema della guerra e le vie della pace
• 7. La teoria del diritto e il diritto internazionale
• 8. Prima che il gallo canti. Un dialogo incompiuto con Norberto Bobbio
• Appendice. Lo spirito critico. Venticinque lettere di Norberto Bobbio [Selezione]
• Nota meta-bibliografica
• Indice dei nomi