LÉON DUGUIT AND ITALY

Abstract

The French public law jurist Léon Duguit conquered, since the first years of the twentieth century, a large number of readers in Italy, drawing the attention of great names of Italian legal thought, such as Ugo Forti, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and Santi Romano. Here we assess the reverberation of his work among Italian jurists in order to understand both its extension and the reasons that limited its impact. We concluded that the main obstacle to the deepening of his influence in Italian jurisprudence was a certain conceptual radicalism that led him to question the reality of the state, an attitude hardly tolerable for a public law science inspired by the German Staatslehre. This, however, did not prevent it from being an important reference in the discussion of topics such as the representation of interests, union organization, collective labor agreements, the social function of property even among jurists close to the fascist regime, revealing a fragmented appropriation of his theories, in such a way as to isolate his “anti-stateism”. On the other hand, the centrality he attributed to the concept of public service in defining administrative law gained relevance in Italy only in the 1950s, when French legal science was already discussing the public service crisis.