Abstract

Norberto Bobbio's jurisprudential work has been offered, and seen and passed over as a legal positivist theory of special purity. This paper however argues that that pretended purity is quite problematic, by first showing all the internal mobility of Bobbio's legal philosophy. Indeed, its various sequences are not at all fully congruent, especially as far as its last phase is concerned. Here Bobbio seems to be well aware that traditional legal positivism, also or especially under its «analytical» version, is not able to take ac¬count of the recent development of modern legal orders now shaped as Constitutional and Social States. The crisis of the previous positivist certainty is also due to the changes of paradigm that are experienced within analytical philosophy. The move from a «first» to a «second» Wittgenstein indeed is not irrelevant for Bobbio's final openness to a pos¬sible «post-positivistic» view.