Dear Norberto Bobbio,
Let me say how much I appreciate your generous reply to my reflections on your book, Destra e Sinistra. I did not initially conceive this text for publication and later considered doing so only if you thought a response worthwhile. No reader of De Senectute would wish to cause you unnecessary distractions. So I am all the more touched by your reply. Since there is such substantial agreement between us on the main issues at stake, I can be quite brief in my response to your arguments. There are only five short points I should like to make.
(i) Your description of the contrast between my remarks on your work in 1988 and my recent comments is certainly acute. I had not realized this till you pointed it out, with some justifiable irony. Still, I would hold to the balance of both judgements, regarding the difference between them not so much as a contradiction in my view of your work, but rather as a sign of the productive tensions within your thought. I believe, as I suggested in the 1980s, that much of its intellectual richness—about which you are customarily modest—comes from the confluence within it of traditions of thought often of opposite origins, whose synthesis has not been static, but varied in response to successive historical situations. It seems to me that L ’Utopia Capovolta of 1989 very lucidly marked the dividing-line between one such situation and another, as communism passed away and capitalism was left without ‘barbarians at the gates’, and that the emphasis of your writing has altered correspondingly. I take that as a token of vitality, not incoherence.