Abstract

Maurizio Fioravanti coined the term «unheard constitutionalism» to describe Matteucci’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 Bobbio’s legal positivism, Matteucci’s constitutionalism could have represented a significant turning point in postwar Italian legal culture, instead the broad debate on legal positivism 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 influence on Italian legal scholarship from the mid-1960s onward.