Abstract
Autore:
Turco Giovanni
Titolo:
"La politica come dovere. Profili filosofici del pensiero politico di Carlo Francesco D´Agostino"
Carlo Francesco D’Agostino
(1906-1999), man of learning and action,
founded – in Rome – the Centro Politico Ita -
lia no (Italian Political Centre), in 1943. In the
years of the Italian constitutional assembly,
he outlined a Project for a New Constitution,
as an alternative to the emerging lines of the
Italian constitution. From a philosophical
perspective, this article analyses the foundations
of D’Agostino’s philosophical thought,
his critiques of liberalism and social modernism,
and his approach to the issue of legitimacy
and constitution. He was motivated by
the view of politics as the science of the good,
and hence, as a means to the common good.
Politics requires knowledge of human nature
and hence of his perfective development. In
this sense law is the determination of what is
just, and, thus, the ordering principle of the
political community. Legitimate authority is
primarily the exercise of a duty of care for the
common good; the good is the foundation of
freedom, not the other way around. In virtue
of the natural sociability of man and of anyone’s
debt towards one’s community, political
responsibility – in its various forms – constitutes
a duty of justice. Carlo Francesco
D’Agostino was a subtle critic of both Christian
democratic theory and liberalism. About
the former, he complains about the assumption
of liberty – in the modern sense of selfdetermination
– as the criterion for (common)
good and equality as a criterion for liberty.
Concerning liberalism, D’Agostino identifies
its fundamental fault in the pretence to govern
the political community, while excluding the
objecting knowledge of human nature (and of
the political community itself). In this way,
the denial of a capacity for truth to reason deprives
liberty itself of any foundation.
