Treves, Renato (1907–1992)

Born in Turin, Italy, of a Jewish family, Renato Treves devoted his first academic study to the diffusion of Claude Henri de Saint-Simon's (1760–1825) doctrines in Italy. He then turned his attention to German neoKantianism, with special regard for Hans Kelsen's (1881–1973) Pure Theory, whose first Italian-language version he edited.

Treves's contributions to this field earned him an invitation to lecture in Uruguay in 1938. At that time, with fascist race laws depriving him of his civic rights [Page 1521]at home, he opted for voluntary exile in Tucumán, Argentina, where he taught both legal theory and sociology, added field research to his experience, and largely modified his scientific views. In Diritto e cultura (Law and Culture, 1947), the turning point of his writings, he rejected all ontological and conceptual views and paved the way for a sociological approach to law.

Returning to postwar Italy as professor of philosophy of law at Parma University and, after 1948, at Milan University Law Faculty, he was a protagonist in both the renaissance of sociology in Italy and the foundation of sociology of law in Italy and internationally. His work with the Centro nazionale di prevenzione e difesa sociale (National Center of Crime Prevention and Social Defense, Milan) proved highly fruitful in this respect.

Some of the landmarks in Treves's career as a social scientist are especially telling. In 1962, in addition to becoming the first president of the International Sociological Association's Research Committee on Sociology of Law, he took on the direction of a sweeping interdisciplinary inquiry into how the Italian judiciary coped with social change, which generated twelve volumes. From 1969 onward, he gave official courses in sociology of law in Milan.

In 1974, he founded Sociologia del diritto, Italy's specialized journal on sociology of law. His first comprehensive introduction to sociology of law appeared in 1977. In a book published in 1987, he produced a newly conceived description of its tradition and methods. Here, he described sociology of law as the fruit of three currents of modern thought—sociological, political, and juristic—and as reaching full maturity when such authors as Max Weber (1864–1920), Theodor Geiger (1891–1952), and Georges Gurvitch (1894–1965) brought micro and macro approaches to converge into a single scientific discourse.

Treves kept faith with a Weberian and Kelsenian vision of sociology of law, as distinct from legal science. He advocated empirical research as a means of testing theories critically and favored open as opposed to closed social portraits of law. Primarily, he argued in favor of a perspectivist and relativistic vision of both law and society, combating all kinds of absolutism, in both science and politics, from a liberal socialist stance that he upheld in many of his writings, including his last collection of essays, Sociologia e socialismo (Sociology and Socialism, 1990), his true spiritual testament.