Italy

Centro Nazionale di Prevenzione e Difesa Sociale

In 1962, the Centro Nazionale di Prevenzione e Difesa Sociale(CNPDS, National Center of Crime Prevention and Social Defense), an association founded in Milan by Adolfo Beria di Argentine (1856–1929), an influential judge from the reformist side, sponsored a wide interdisciplinary research project on the Italian justice system as it related to social change. The CNPDS offered the lead to Renato Treves (1907–1992), a legal philosopher and sociologist who theorized about the need to construct a sociologically grounded vision of law and who served, at that time, as the first chair of the International Sociological Association's Research Committee on Sociology of Law after its foundation in 1962.

The justice system project, in which many scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds took part, culminated in the publication of twelve books covering a wide range of subjects, most of them sociological in aims and approaches. In his final report, in 1972, Treves adopted a position that was at once scientific and political in that he distinguished between the various contributions based on their more profound inspiration and did not conceal his preference for those that displayed a pluralistic and reformist stance. Thus, he was disinclined toward either conservative functionalism à la Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) or Marxist conflict theory. This conclusion was to earn him some criticism, especially and not surprisingly from the Marxist side.

Law and Society Developments

The early 1970s were extremely lively years for the sociology of law. It is no coincidence that in 1974, Treves launched the specialized journal Sociologia del diritto through the CNPDS with a view to bringing together the widest possible range of subjects and voices on the sole condition of their commitment to scientific rigor. A competing journal, La questione criminale, also came into the arena with a diametrically opposed profile. Its editors, Alessandro Baratta and Franco Bricola, advocated a militant analysis of those fields of law, especially in the criminal system, in which the repression of the weakest society members was particularly tough. This journal came to a sudden end, and Baratta himself launched a successor journal, Dei delitti delle pene.

This competition started afresh during the 1980s—under different labels, yet sometimes with the same protagonists—when the pluralistic and researchoriented vision upheld by Treves and his school became a target of arrows from the supporters of the all-embracing, self-referential, and autopoietic system theories à la Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998). These latter ideas were highly popular among younger Italian scholars, regardless of whether their inspiring ideology placed them more on the right than on the left.

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