The word “legitimacy” and its derivations (legitimate, legitimation, etc.) are widely employed in scientific language as they also are in current usage. In fact, we find them in several areas, from that of reasoning (“this conclusion is legitimate”) to that of law (“judgment of legitimacy”, “legitimate family”) and politics (“legitimate sovereign”). It is particularly in this latter domain, however, that they have their normal use as qualifications for power, and it is this particular aspect that I shall consider in this (...) paper. In accredited political language “legitimacy” designates a principle, or criterion, of justification for power (acting and commanding) and, correlatively, of the obedience that is its due. (shrink)

Sex has become to-day a sort of secular religion, i.e. a mass-belief in a new world entirely redeemed from its evils by revolution. Hope in revolution presupposes the ideas of man's original innocence and of society'sresponsibility for evil. As no political or economical revolution can entirely liberate man from his aggressiveness, the sexual revolution isproposed as the basic step towards the new world. But a totally free sexuality, breaking the dialectics between Eros and Thanatos, gives way to the deathinstinct and (...) therefore to a world of struggle for domination, not of liberty. (shrink)

Le droit peut-il être le gardien de la paix? Telle est l'une des interrogations qui se dessine au travers de l'oeuvre du philosophe italien du droit Sergio Cotta (1920-2007). Résistant pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, puis professeur à l'Université de Rome, Sergio Cotta n'a eu de cesse d'interroger le droit et sa fonction dans les rapports entre les hommes dans une réflexion dynamique en prise avec situations actuelles et vécues. Le présent ouvrage, composé d'articles parus dans différentes revues scientifiques, se (...) présente comme une introduction à l'oeuvre de cet éminent penseur du droit. (shrink)

I DO NOT INTEND to present, in this paper, either a renewed account of the classical doctrine of natural law, or a modern version of its foundation in human nature. This does not mean that I consider superfluous or meaningless both these tasks. Indeed, I am convinced that the notion of natural law is still important for a full understanding of what we mean by "law." Natural law could be interpreted, for instance, as the transcendental condition of legal experience. And (...) metaphysics--as the "ultimate knowledge of being," to put it in Edmund Husserl's terms--could prove that the being of man, analyzed in its structure, offers a convincing ontological foundation of the law. (shrink)