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Abstract: The author argues that the unity, coherence, and completeness of both the theory of law and the theory of politics and democracy throughout Bobbio's work was produced by the fruitful connection that he established between the approaches of several different disciplines. Bobbio was able to connect legal theory and political philosophy, and to entwine theory itself, whether legal or philosophical, with meta-theoretical and methodological reflection. In Bobbio's work even the theoretical-analytical approach was connected with an analytical history of ideas. Bobbio's capacity for synthesis and the systematic theoretical character of his investigations found specific expression, according to the author, in four fundamental connections: that between democracy and law; that between law and reason; that between reason and peace; and that between peace and human rights. This doctrinal framework, according to Ferrajoli, already suffices to establish Bobbio as a great teacher and thinker. Nonetheless, Ferrajoli also draws attention to certain aporias in Bobbio's thought. Thus the author argues that Bobbio fails to recognize the influence of strictly defined constitutions on the legal order and continues to defend a merely formal conception of the validity of legal norms and of democracy. Bobbio retains a non-evaluative conception of legal science without considering the internal criticisms regarding the lacunae and antinomies that constitutional norms forcibly reveal with respect to both legal science and the practice of jurisdiction.
1. Bobbio's Style of Thinking
Norberto Bobbio has always been admired for his extraordinary ability to draw relevant distinctions: to analyze concepts, to clarify the different senses in which they are employed, to dismantle, to compare and contrast, and to reassemble the all too often misleading or ambiguous terms that belong to our theoretical-legal and philosophical-political discourse. But the aspect of Bobbio's teaching that I wish to emphasize here is concerned not with these distinctions, but rather with the connections which he establishes between theoretical concepts, and also between the approaches of different disciplines. It is this extraordinary capacity for analysis and also synthesis, this attitude to the relevant distinctions, but also to the problem of organizing and relating them, that accounts for the considerable fascination that Bobbio's thought has held for me ever since I was fortunate enough to become acquainted with Bobbio and his work almost half...