Norberto Bobbio

Norberto Bobbio was the leading Italian legal and political philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century His life and work were conditioned by the vicissitudes of Italian democracy both before and after the Second World War. The experience of Fascism, the ideological divisions of the Cold War, and the transformation of Italian society during the 1960s and 70s, which he described so evocatively in his 'Ideological Profile Of Italy in the Twentieth Century (1969a, 1995a)', prompted and enriched his passionate defence of the constitutional ‘rules of the game’ against those who denied their relevance or would overturn them for reasons of pragmatic convenience