The Ends of Ideology

A seemingly offhand personal note toward the end of this slim but remarkable volume of political theory conveys the earthy origins of an abstract egalitarian impulse. As the child of a bourgeois Italian family, Norberto Bobbio recalls how he would go to the country during summer holidays and play easily with the children of peasants:

Our friendship was based upon a perfect understanding, and the class differences were completely irrelevant; but we could not help noticing the contrast between our houses and theirs, our food and theirs, and our clothes and theirs. . . . Every year when we started our holidays, we learnt that one of our playmates had died the previous winter from tuberculosis. I do not remember a single death among my school-friends in the city.

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