Giorgio Del Vecchio

Giorgio Del Vecchio: Purged Twice, By Both Sides

In 1938 the fascist government of Italy stripped Giorgio Del Vecchio of the chair he had held at the University of Rome for eighteen years, on the grounds that he was a Jew. In 1945, with fascism destroyed, the new authorities dismissed him again — this time on the grounds that he had been a fascist. Few careers illustrate so exactly what a century of ideology does to a man who spent his working life arguing that law must answer to something higher than power.

A Bolognese Inheritance

He was born in Bologna in 1878, the son of Giulio Salvatore Del Vecchio, an economist — an academic household, and an unusual one in that the son would go considerably further than the father. He studied in Italy and Germany, and the German half of that education is the decisive fact about him: he came back a Kantian at a moment when Italian jurisprudence was overwhelmingly positivist.

The academic ascent was steady and provincial before it was grand. Ferrara in 1904, Sassari in 1906, Messina in 1909, Bologna in 1911, and finally Rome in 1920, where he remained until 1953. He was Rector of the University of Rome from 1925 to 1927 and dean of the law faculty from 1930 to 1938.

Against the Positivists

Del Vecchio's opening move was a refusal. Legal positivism — then dominant — held that law is simply the body of rules a society actually enforces, and that the philosopher's job is to describe them. Del Vecchio denied that the concept of law could be derived from observing legal phenomena at all. You cannot find out what law *is* by cataloguing what various states have done, any more than you can discover what a valid inference is by surveying the arguments people happen to make. The concept has to come from somewhere else.

This is the Neo-Kantian position, and it put Del Vecchio in permanent opposition to the intellectual current of his time and, later, in awkward relation to a regime whose theory of law was that law is whatever the state says.

Three Problems

He organised the whole discipline around three tasks, and the tripartition became his signature. Philosophy of law must first construct the *logical* concept of law — what makes anything a law at all, independent of content. It must then study law as a *social phenomenon*, historically and empirically. And it must finally examine the essential nature of *justice*, the deontological question of what law ought to be.

The elegance of the scheme is that it concedes the positivists their whole domain — the second task is theirs entirely — while denying that it exhausts the subject. Description is one third of the job.

Law as Coordination, Justice as Consciousness

His positive doctrine begins in the structure of self-awareness. Consciousness, Del Vecchio held, necessarily recognises others as subjects rather than objects, and that recognition carries with it a demand for mutual respect. From this he derived his definition of law: the objective coordination of possible actions between subjects according to an ethical principle.

Every term is load-bearing. Law coordinates *actions*, not thoughts; between *subjects*, who are ends in themselves; and it does so according to an ethical principle, which is precisely what the positivists said it need not do.

Justice, on this account, is not a social invention but a necessary aspect of consciousness — something he thought discernible even in primitive form in animals. History shows a progressive evolution toward understanding and realising justice, but the movement is not guaranteed: regression happens, and continuous effort is required to keep justice attached to changing social conditions. He wrote this before 1938 and had ample occasion to test it afterwards.

The Builder

Del Vecchio was that comparatively rare thing, a philosopher who built the institutions his subject needed. He founded the *Rivista internazionale di filosofia del diritto* in 1921 and directed it; established the University of Rome's Institute of Philosophy of Law in 1933; and founded the Italian Society of Philosophy of Law in 1936. His books did the same work at the level of the page — *Presupposti, concetto e principio del diritto* (1921), the *Lezioni di filosofia del diritto*, *La giustizia*, and *Sui principi generali del diritto* (1956) — several of them running to many editions and remaining university textbooks long afterwards.

1938, and 1945

Then the machinery came for him. The racial laws of 1938 removed him from his chair and his deanship. He resumed teaching in 1944, and was dismissed again in 1945 as a former fascist sympathiser. He returned to teach from 1947 to 1953 and was made emeritus in 1955.

The sources do not agree about what he had actually been. One account describes him as initially sympathetic to fascism and later distancing himself; another describes him as consistently advocating natural law and individual freedom against fascist authoritarianism. Both may be partly right — a man can accept the regime's early nationalism and then find his own jurisprudence turning into an indictment of it — but the tension should not be smoothed over. Del Vecchio held high office under fascism, as rector and dean, through 1938.

Why Giorgio Is Called a Genius

The quality at issue is architectural clarity about a discipline. Del Vecchio's tripartition — logical concept, social phenomenon, essence of justice — is the kind of distinction that looks obvious once made and was not made before, and it gave Italian legal philosophy a structure it had lacked. His derivation of law from the reciprocal recognition built into consciousness itself is a genuine piece of philosophical construction, not a restatement: it grounds the dignity of the legal subject in something prior to any state. He redirected Italian legal thought away from nineteenth-century positivism, founded the journal, the institute and the society through which that redirection travelled, and influenced Norberto Bobbio, who became the most significant Italian legal and political philosopher of the following generation. His textbooks were translated and taught internationally for decades.

The counter-case has two parts. Philosophically, Del Vecchio is a systematiser working inside Kant's frame rather than an originator of a frame — his neo-Kantianism was a European movement with many members, and his contribution is its most lucid Italian application rather than a new position. Historically, the claim sometimes made for him, that his natural-law philosophy was a standing rebuke to fascism, is complicated by his having served as rector and dean under it until the racial laws made his position untenable. The 1945 dismissal was not baseless in the view of those who ordered it. He is best described as a first-rate systematic mind whose principles were better than his politics, which is a common enough condition and not a disqualifying one.

Legacy

He died on 28 November 1970, aged ninety-two, having outlasted the regime that expelled him and the purge that followed it. The *Rivista internazionale di filosofia del diritto* survived him. So did the argument he spent fifty years pressing: that the question "what does the law say?" and the question "is this law just?" are different questions, and that a legal science which admits only the first has disarmed itself in advance.

Italy learned in his lifetime what that disarmament costs. He had told them.

Achievements

• Held posts at University of Ferrara and University of Bologna
• Fields: philosophy