Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2022) XXIV/1

Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics is an open access philosophical journal, being published only in an electronic format. The journal aims at promoting research and reflection, both historically and theoretically, in the fields of moral, political and legal philosophy, with no preclusion or adhesion to any cultural current or philosophical tradition. Contributions should be submitted in one of these languages: Italian, English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish. The editorial staff especially welcomes interdisciplinary contributions with special attention to the main trends of the world of practice.

The present paper attempts to investigate the conceptual relationship between «Law» and «State» in Gentile’s doctrine. If we consider them discretely, these two elements seem theoretically clear. But, when analyzed together, they assume problematic features and show themselves in a completely different light. When approached in this sense, they entail significant philosophical implications. More specifically, the aim of this article is to argue the condition of «suspension of law» in Gentile’s works. Such condition is determined by the ambiguous position that leaves the legal domain to the mercy of political will, on one hand, and in dependence of morality, on the other. These issues reveal the undeniable contradictions characterizing legal actualism, especially with respect to the concept of law and the relationship between individuals and state authority.

What is the role of the intellectual? And what is the relationship between culture, society and power? This essay attempts to answer these key questions by starting from the ideas that Norberto Bobbio had given us after World War II in the pages of his book Politica e cultura (Politics and Culture ), in which he sketched a figure of the intellectual that was neither partisan nor Olympian, yet vaguely evocative of that Weberian wertfreiheit that already seemed a very problematic concept at the time. Bobbio’s words, which already testified to the crisis of modern public reason, had to be set against the postmodern atmosphere and its effects, its critics and its advocates. Did postmodernism authorise disengagement, inviting us to cultiver notre jardin? Should it be discarded in order to recover a ‘romantic’ image of the engaged intellectual, a sort of ‘Green Beret’ of culture? The proposal of this essay is that the intellectual should play the role of saboteur, only to find himself rummaging through the rubble of History that he himself has contributed to disseminating.

This paper argues that the most effective way to distribute capabilities, as part of a capabilitybased theory of justice, involves the implementation of an unconditional basic income. On the one hand, unconditional access to the means – external conditions – required by capabilities has a positive impact on capabilities’ robustness and security. On the other hand, income, as an external condition, enhances at least three important aspects in the distribution of capabilities: (1) it enhances the multiple realisability of capabilities; (2) it allows for changes across time in the sources of variation that affect the conversion of means into capabilities; and (3) it increases the effectiveness of other external conditions with which income is combined.

In this paper I examine Rorty’s article The Seer of Prague, in which He reflects on Václav Havel’s speech at the US Congress – February the 21th, 1990 – and analyzes Havel’s approach to politics in the light of Martin Heidegger’s and Jan Patoč ka’s Philosophy. Rorty appreciated Havel’s and Patoč ka’s engagement in defense of democracy and civil rights in Seventies’ Czechoslovakia (Cahrter77), despite He criticizes their philosophical aptitude as a political task. On the one hand, I try to argue that Rorty’s claim about freeing liberal-democracy from the problem of metaphysical foundation – as a matter of private life of the philosopher – is incoherent; on the other hand, I try to enhance Rorty’s distributive justice argument (in Achieving our Country) in the light of nowadays populist’s challenge to liberal democracy.