L’estinzione "democratica" dello Stato. Regionalismo politico e diritto in Antonio Pigliaru

This paper enquires into Antonio Pigliaru’s theories about regional autonomy within the Italian political context after the Second World War and the approval of the Republican Con-stitution. Drawing some concepts and intellectual stimuli from Marxist philosophy and Anto-nio Gramsci’s reflections, Pigliaru connects the problem of political and legislative autonomy to the idea of the ‘withering away of the State’. As I will argue, his theories about the plurality of legal orders are of crucial importance for understanding the interweavement of law and pol-itics in this matter, as the ‘reform of sovereignty’ and the transformation of the State may en-tail also a transformation of the concept of ‘law’. To conclude, I will observe that Pigliaru’s conceptualization can be useful in interpreting the attitude of constitutional legal studies to regional autonomy in the contemporary debate.