Antonio Rosmini and representative institutions

SUMMARY

In this article, Georgio Campanini draws attention to the political ideas of the Italian philosopher Antonio Rosmini, who was an active participant in political debate in Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century. The article concentrates on Rosmini's most original idea, his insistence that in a representative system of government it is necessary to separate the securing of the political rights of the citizen from the ordinary processes governing the material interests of the society. Rosmini, who was orthodox in advocating an elected representative system, based on tax and property qualifications, to manage the ordinary business of the state, proposed a special institution, a Political Tribunal elected by universal male suffrage, with an open remit to intervene in government to defend the rights of the citizen. He held that the defence of individual rights could not be left safely in the hands of the state, but must be in the hands of independent representatives of every citizen, regardless of his place in society. Although Rosmini was able to put forward his ideas in the constitutional debates in Italy in 1848, they were not taken up. But his ideas anticipate current interest in Europe into setting up constitutional or supreme Courts to protect individual rights against the state, and Campanini suggests that, in this connection, the idea of their being elected by universal suffrage is worth serious consideration.     

The Structure of Social Practices and the Connection between Law and Morality*

In his work, Jules Coleman has held that the rule of recognition, if conceived of as a shared cooperative activity, should be the gateway through which to incorporate moral constraints on the content of law. This analysis, however, leaves unanswered two important questions. For one thing, we do not know when or even why morality becomes a criterion of legality. And, for another thing, we still do not know what conception of morality it is that we are dealing with. In this article, we will attempt to clarify in greater depth what relations there are between the social practice of law and morality. We will thus see how the cooperative nature of social practices imbues law with a moral force, and how this makes it possible to establish a “weak” connection between law and morality: To see this, we will need to single out some basic features of cooperative social practices, thus setting out a suitable framework for the view just mentioned.