Abstract

Giuseppe Dossetti was one of the main intellectual voices of a group of young catholic professors that, in 1946, were elected to the Italian Constituent Assembly as representatives of the Christian Democracy. In the heated debate between the various political forces within the Assembly, it was this group's ideas that shaped many key provisions of the Italian Constitution. Among these is the notion that freedom needs to be limited and oriented - a principle established in order to avoid the re-emergence of certain features of the Italian liberal State that arguably had facilitated the rise of fascism.