Baratta, Alessandro (1933–2002)

Alessandro Baratta was born in Rome and died in Saarland. Having completed his academic training at Rome's La Sapienza Faculty of Law, Baratta began specialized studies in Germany, namely in Freiburg, Göttingen, and Saarbrücken. Here, he became familiar with German penal theory and the philosophical circle of the early 1960s: German existentialism, the Kantian spirit, the debate on Marxism and phenomenology, the rebirth of natural law, and the revival of critical social theory. In those years, he published many important books on legal theory and the science of penal law.

Baratta's most refined and mature work from the 1960s is Natura del fatto e giustizia materiale (Nature of Fact and Material Justice) (1968), in which he repositioned the debate on “Natur der Sache” within a dialectical-realistic perspective. Beginning in 1971, he taught sociology of law and philosophy of law at Saarland University and was director of its Institute for Legal and Social Philosophy. In these years, his research interests focused on criminology, the comparative study of criminal justice systems, and the social construction of deviance. He came into direct contact with the situation of the penal systems in Latin America, where he carried out empirical research.

Baratta founded and directed the journal La questione criminale (1975–1981), renamed Dei diritti e delle pene in 1983, which publishes social, historical, and legal studies on crime and penal law. In the articles published in these journals, Baratta formulated his concept of “critical criminology,” a critique of the processes of criminal stigmatization, the concept of an integrated criminal science, and the project of a “minimal criminal law.” He also carried on an intellectual struggle against the criminalization of the socially excluded. Baratta's book Criminologia critica e critica del diritto penale (1982) offered a deconstruction of traditional criminological concepts and represented a political-criminological manifesto. Philosophie und Strafrecht (1985) collected some of his important articles written between 1959 and 1974.

Baratta's research focused on a functional connection between law and society, mediated through the values and ideologies in law and law theory. His aim was not just to describe the ways in which legal systems reproduce themselves materially and ideologically but also to see how the same systems take part in the more general process of material and ideological reproduction of society.

Following this line of thought, Baratta first analyzed the forms of juridical discourse and method; in a later phase, he focused on the reconstruction and critique of law and legal culture. At that point, his critique of law and ideologies became a critique of the social reality: an attempt to unveil the idealizations mystifying the real functions of the legal institutions.

Baratta's third area of research concerned the definition of a positive ideology of law—a theory of “material justice” as a concrete project or utopia—in opposition to the given reality of law and to the social relations it helps to establish. Highly sensitive to dialectical thought, Baratta took the dialectical relation between Sein (“is”) and Sollen (“should”) as a reference point in his intellectual work, interpreting Sollen as a concrete potential for satisfying the historically determined needs of the individual: a potentiality descending from a given development of productive power within a sociohistoric configuration. In this perspective, Baratta formulated a project of “law in the facts” whose emancipatory power resided in the autonomy and human value of the subject.

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