Potere, libertà e autonomia. Paradossi del pensiero giuridico all’epoca della crisi

This paper aims first to stress that some modern legal categories, such as power, liberty and autonomy, are heuristically inadequate. Moving from the current doctrinal debate on the ‘covid-19’ pandemics, I will argue that this emergency is likely to exacerbate the ongoing crisis of the liberal conception of law. This theoretical framework, which is grounded on the legality of political action and validity of norms in relation to a hierarchy of normative sources, is no longer able to work without considering the ‘governmental’ devices employed by the State. On a similar ground, I will maintain that conceiving liberty as a kind of subjective right cannot succeed in emancipating the individual from the ‘paternalistic’ power of the State: the idea of liberty needs a concept of autonomy connected to the free recognition of our duties towards the ‘other ones’. To conclude, I will state that all these theoretical hypotheses can help to reform, if not to transform, the conceptual framework of contemporary jurisprudence.