Entangled histories: diritto privato e diritto pubblico, diritto del lavoro e Stato sociale nel Novecento italiano

This essay analyzes the interdependence between labor law and welfare state in the Italian legal culture of the 20th century, considering in particular the transition from the centrality of common civil law to the republican Constitution. The relationship between the privatistic-contractual dimension and the publicistic-state dimension, between the autonomy of social space and the legislative intervention, characterizes the whole path, presenting itself as the distinctive feature of Italian ‘social law’. The approximation to the Workers’ Statute in the 1970s establishes a balance between the various polarities, reinforcing a welfare system founded on the binomial ‘work-citizenship’; a structure challenged by the neoliberal wave of the end of the century and by the prospect of an impossible return to the purities of common civil law.