PIETRO GIUSEPPE  GRASSO

Capograssi e gli studi di diritto costituzionale

N. 1/1987

Summary - Among Italian scholars of Philosophy of Law, Giuseppe Capograssi stands out also for the attention dedicated to the positive Public Law. In him the live and deep knowledge of the subject frequently rises also to personal and original teachings. But the scholars who cultivated that branch of juridical knowledge remained extraneous to Capograssi's mastery. After the Great War, in the important book "La nuova democrazia diretta" Capograssi submitted to a critical revision the methods still predominant in the Italian School of Public Law, generally founded on positivists and formalist conceptions. He believed contingent and linked with the pre-war period, dominated by the liberal bourgeoisie, the aspiration of the Italian and German Schools to attain a "pure" juridical knowledge, restricted to the norms and to the formal acts of the State-person's will, with the exclusion of heterogeneous, historical, sociological, philosophical elements. In the new direct democracy the Constitutional Law is identified with the institutions, meant as the unexpected outcome of many actions and reactions of the government, in a way conforming to the ideas and representations of the governed. It is necessary to arrive at the equilibrium of all the elements and of the real aspirations operating in the social and political life. Also where exist written constitutions and formal laws, therefore, prevail customs, conventions, praxis, usages. Of the written constitutional system are left only propositions which result in fact operating and open to combine with the reality within "the system of life". The a. also thought of recognizing the constitutional developments and transformations still in course through the accurate investigation of the evolution of the social body.