California Italian Studies

The notion of normative pluralism, whose roots can be tracked all the way back to Santi Romano’s masterpiece (L’ordinamento giuridico, 1918), is identified as one of the possible avenues to tackle the issue of Italian futures – trying to focus on what can be specifically Italian rather than on features that are necessarily shared by other (European) countries. Among the identified possible trends there are an increasingly difficult political decision-making process, and a decline of the institutional aristocracies – issues that can still be phrased using the words of an Italian professional scholar of possible futures, Giambattista Vico.