L'influenza di Herbert Spencer nel pensiero politico di Vittorio Emanuele Orlando

Abstract

The “Spencer doctrine”, according to Orlando, “does not look at the external forms of government that a population can gives itself”, but “at their essence, at the forces that constitute them and that keep them alive”. These are considerations that contrast also with the alleged “empiricism” of Orlando and with the alleged “reasons” of his “blindness”. There is no “empirical character of liberalism” or of “Orlando’s politics”, which may have determined his own “weakness” to “the rise of fascism”, nor justify the conviction that Orlando, a “pure democratic”, would have been “forced to cancel his past”. In short, there is nothing “intimately contradictory” that can justify an “Orlando problem”: “politics is, at the same time, a problem of material force and moral force, and one can not be truly possessed without the other, as well as one cannot really exist without the other”