Abstract

Benedetto Croce taught Norberto Bobbio to distinguish between two kinds of commitment, namely an intellectual and a political one. The expression “politica della cultura” effectively translates the idea of the autonomy or independence of scholarly and intellectual research. Another idea which was passed on from Croce to Bobbio is that of liberalism as the theoretical basis of every form of civil government insofar as the liberal conception rejects any notion of “Providence” as a covert agent of history. But Bobbio differed from Croce since he never believed that democracy could essentially contradict the perspective of liberalism, and was convinced that true emancipation is a sort of “conguagliamento delle libertà,” or, in other words, that it implies a strong relation between individual political rights and the demands of social justice