Colletti twenty years after his death between Marxism and Kant

Twenty years ago, unexpectedly and prematurely, Lucio Colletti, one of the most influential Italian philosophers of the second half of the 20th century, died. I met him when, while studying at La Sapienza, I was attending the chair of another heavyweight in the Faculty of Philosophy, Tullio De Mauro. After a couple of Colletti's lectures on Kant, however, I realised that I had to change course. In those years (we are in the early 1990s) Colletti was lecturing on themes and authors that had led him to abandon Marxism, to which he had linked his international fame as a scholar. Two Kantian theses, one could say with some simplification, were crucial. On the one hand, the distinction between real opposition and contradiction that Colletti had uncovered in a pre-critical Kantian writing, unknown to most, from 1763. Contrasts that occur in reality are one thing: think of two physical forces pushing in opposite directions. The 'oppositions' that occur in thought, i.e. contradictions, are another. The two, Kant warned, should not be confused. What does this have to do with Colletti's abandonment of Marxism? It has a lot to do with it. That confusion would infect, via Hegel, not so much Marx, but Marxism. As early as the 1960s, Colletti distanced himself from Marxists for whom capitalism was corroded by internal 'contradictions' destined to dissolve into a new society. A thesis that also had tragicomic applications in the exact sciences. I remember Colletti almost shouting from his chair to denounce the fact that some zealous comrades had written at the entrance to the prestigious institute of physics in Rome (the one of Fermi and Parisi, to be clear) that physics is 'bourgeois' precisely because it is obstinately tied to the principle of non-contradiction.

But as I was saying, there is a second thesis that Colletti takes from Kant, and which ultimately also determined his departure from a non-dialectical form of Marxism, understood above all as an analysis of capitalist society and a programme for its overcoming. Again, a reminder may help to fix the ideas. Colletti was fond of saying: 'It may be true that in the theory of knowledge Kant got everything wrong [even then transcendental idealism did not enjoy a good press], but in political theory there is no one who catches up with him in terms of his ability to reconcile a ruthless scrutiny of men and society with a programme of reform and improvement of both'. At the time of these statements, almost twenty years had passed since the famous Philosophical-Political Interview of 1974, the text with which Colletti closed with Marxism everything. Few remember that that abjuration did not target the long-stigmatised dialectical drift. Colletti now argued the provocative thesis that there was no political theory (sic) in Marxism, especially if understood as an analysis of the state. And this for a specific reason: the alleged imminent triumph of socialism would render such an analysis obsolete. The various real communisms around the world, in short, exercised their power with the sole justification of being vanguards of a world that was soon to come. What better excuse for their nefarious acts against civil and political freedoms, for the ruthless authoritarianism with which they ruled, for the sacrifices of rights and truths they demanded in the name of advancing history? Faced with the social and moral ruin that so many still struggled to denounce, Colletti realised that the 'sun of the future' had become a nightmare and found in Kant that political theory that Marxism lacked. Individual freedom became the normative heart of the system. In 1974, however, Colletti still believed that freedom could be realised without the other pillars of the liberal state, first and foremost private ownership of the means of production and representative democracy. While this libertarian turn attracted the sympathies of the extra-parliamentary left, as Giuseppe Bedeschi recalls in Il Foglio, it also attracted the critical attention of Norberto Bobbio who, in an essay-review of the Interview, woke Colletti from his residual dogmatic slumber. Direct democracy or self-government of the producers are one step away from despotism if they are not inserted into a framework of constitutional rules capable of preventing democracy from imploding by its own hand, and of guaranteeing against any popular will those civil and political liberties so dear to the libertarian soul of my master. In Kant Colletti had found that political theory that Marxism lacked. And, perhaps in spite of himself, he had become a liberal.