Nicola Matteucci e Norberto Bobbio. Un dibattito (mancato?)

Maurizio Fioravanti coined the term «unheard constitutionalism» to describe Matteuc- ci’s 1963 essay on Legal Positivism and constitutionalism, a work that largely escaped the attention of legal philosophers of its time. Positioned as a potential alternative to Bob- bio’s legal positivism, Matteucci’s constitutionalism could have represented a significant turning point in postwar Italian legal culture, instead the broad debate on legal positiv- ism that was taking place in those years took practically no account of it. Despite the Bobbio’s missed public answer to Matteucci’s critics, the authors of this essay contend that the essay’s impact clandestinely infiltrated Bobbio’s thinking, exerting a lasting in- fluence on Italian legal scholarship from the mid-1960s onward.