Ripensare la sovranità. Dal laboratorio del giovane Kelsen agli esordi dell’ “Età Laski” (1905-1931).

The thesis focuses on one of the most important political categories in the history of ideas, sovereignty, addressed through the elaboration proposed by Hans Kelsen mainly in the 1920s. Hoping for the removal of the traditional notion of sovereignty, he gave birth to a new view of sovereignty as a formal, a-historical and a-substantial concept, which pivots the entire legal and ethical-political system, configuring itself - through the hypothesis of the primacy of international law - as a condition of possibility for a peaceful and democratic community. The analysis of Kelsen’s theory is followed by a confrontation with the pluralist perspective of the English philosopher Harold J. Laski who, starting from a point of view opposite to the Kelsen's one, attentive to social and moral reality, paradoxically arrives not only at a radical critique of sovereignty, but also at hoping, like Kelsen, to remove it in view of a peaceful international society. In this sense, Laski and Kelsen, despite their scientific, methodological and cultural differences, represent, in the criticism of sovereignty and the state-centric paradigm, two sides of the same coin.