Sunday, November 01, 2009

A political life -- Norberto Bobbio

Curiously enough, I found this book on sale at the PU store, and I thought it would be interesting to read, because Bobbio is one of the best known thinker and professor in Torino.
The book was OK, but not great: there are quite a few passages that are interesting because they allow the reader to get an idea about Bobbio's thought, how his opinions came into being. On the other hand many passages are not very interesting (unless you are a specialist, I think), in particular when he writes about his speeches/communications/letters with people who are now perfectly unknown (but they probably were well know in the past, or in the philosophical/academic environment).

I report below some of the passages that I found the most interesting.

"On the right there is the the error of agnostic or conservative liberalism, which leads to freedom without justice. On the left there is the error of authoritarian collectivism which leads to justice without freedom." [pg. 40]

However, I am also unsuited to politics, because I suffer from the academic's typical profession deficiency, that of being an eternal doubter. If you carry out research, especially in the field of human sciences, you can, once you have examined all of the pros and cons, end your study with a question mark. As can be seen, there are profound existential reasons that have contributed to keeping me from public office: a politician has to be a man of action, which I am not by any stretch of the imagination. [pg. 141]

Day by day, I could see a moral problem emerging in which the Socialist were mixed up: the enforcement of moral standards in public life was a question of good government, and the basis of democracy. <...> (letter to Craxi) "It is not that I am an unaware of the objective difficulties that the party faces, caught as it is a rock and a hard place, and I therefore consider your concern over safeguarding the party's independence by not taking my part in any preconceived electoral programme to be correct. But the problem is that your unscrupulous exercise of power has made you less and less credible. Even you good intentions seem increasingly the ones that pave the way to hell. [pg. 148]

I argued that there had never been such a trend in democratic countries towards the integration of a great economic power and an equally great cultural power, through an extremely powerful instrument like television, with political power, as was occurring before our very eyes.This was the result of Berlusconi's 'entering the field', and, within the few months of an election campaign, becoming the prime minister of a government that even claimed to represent the quintessence of a liberal state. [pg. 158]