Un patrimonio di indignazioni. Ancora sul realismo di Danilo Zolo

Danilo Zolo’s political and legal realism has been qualified as “critical” and some scholars have detected in it an “unsolved tension” or a “paradox”. Nevertheless, Zolo offered a convincing solution to this alleged paradox. In his research on Otto Neurath’s “reflexive epistemology”, he distinguished “value judgements” from “prescriptive propositions”. If evaluations are unavoidable in science, then it is impossible to ground deontological systems. The social and political critical theories cannot but refer to a “common legacy of indignations”, whereas normative legal and political philosophy falls in the “deontological fallacy”. Zolo’s realism proves to be consistent, even if one can highlight three subsequent phases: the first more “realistic”, the second more “critical” and the third both radical and pessimistic.