Norberto Bobbio e il marxismo. Una rivisitazione

In this essay we will trace the relationship between Norberto Bobbio and the more properly political problems of Marxism. First of all, we will dwell on the difficult discussion, in the 1950s, between Bobbio and the italian communists regarding the absence of civil and political liberties in socialist systems and the traumatic denunciation of Stalinist tyranny. Secondly, we will present Bobbio’s innovative interpretation of the notion of civil society in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Then, we will focus on the debate promoted by Bobbio in the 1970s, which involved socialist and communist intellectuals and politicians around the relationship between Marxism and the State. Given the absence of a real theory of the State in Marxian work, it focused on the relationship between democracy and socialism with the aim of rethinking the feasibility of a possible socialism. Finally, we will dwell on Bobbio’s need to revitalise the reasons of the Left and reread Marx (without prejudice) after the fall of ‘real socialisms’.