Abstract

This paper aims to analyse the debate between Nicola Matteucci and Norberto Bobbio concerning legal positivism and constitutionalism. Moving from the recent republication of a well-known writing of the former together with Bobbio’s private response, I will discuss this confrontation, which can be partitioned within three levels. At the first level, it deals with the role and nature of legal science. With his argument, however, Matteucci shows that his theses – and Bobbio’s as well – implicate a specific conception of the law-power relationship (the second level) which, at the very bottom, is undergirded by peculiar assumptions in philosophy of history (the third level).