Intellectuals’ Engagement in Italy: Sebastiano Maffettone and the Public Intellectual

The public intellectual is the subject of a lively scholarly debate. It is often said that intellectuals have increasingly lost interest in speaking to a broad public and engaging with important real-world issues – something that it is said has been primarily inspired by Rawls’s normative political theory. This paper suggests that Rawls’s theory had a unique impact on Italian philosophy. Here, the ‘public intellectual’ refers to an approach, which was developed in Italy, especially by Sebastiano Maffettone, as a theoretical alternative to a more traditional ‘engaged’ model.