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Rubbettino Editore

BRUNO LEONI THE SCHOLAR


Author(s): Friedrich A. Hayek
Source: Il Politico, Vol. 33, No. 1 (MARZO 1968), pp. 21-25
Published by: Rubbettino Editore
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43206842
Accessed: 17-06-2016 21:36 UTC

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BRUNO LEONI THE SCHOLAR

by Friedrich A. Hayek

Even three months after the tragic event it is difficult to believe


that Bruno Leoni is no longer among us. Lovable and dynamic, he
lived life with such an intensity that more than most men he seemed to
embody life itself. By a cruel fate he was taken from us at the height
of his powers when great accomplishments justified the expectation
of even greater achievements. He had a nature so rich that even after
many years of friendship one constantly discovered new and unsuspec-
ted facets of a great personality of a kind for which we sometimes
envy past ages, but which we scarcely ever encounter in our own time.
Perhaps your country is fortunate in still producing more such figures
whom elsewhere we associate with the renaissance. Among the citizens
of the world of whom he had become one and among whom I mainly
met him, he was unique.
Though this very lecture hall evokes the poignant memory that
less than four years ago I was privileged to speak here under Bruno
Leoni's chairmanship - and to enjoy his and Mrs. Leoni's hospitality
at their home at Turin, - it was mostly in distant parts of the world,
in the United States and Japan as well as in various cities of Europe,
that I mainly knew him. I can therefore tell you nothing of the greater
part of his life, at Pavia, Turin, and Sardinia, of which you all know
much more than I do. I must confine myself to speaking about Bruno
Leoni as a scholar and international figure, the man who gained de-
votion and respect wherever he went, and of whom I am proud to
speak as much in the name of our common friends all over the world as
in my own name.
We all soon found that there was much more in the man whom
we chiefly knew as a distinguished scholar, a devoted adherent of the
cause of freedom, and a tireless and inventive organizer in the service
of this cause.
We soon caught glimpses of a deep understanding of the arts and
of music, especially of oriental art and also of orientar philosophy, -
and not least of the arts of life, of the skill and zest in enjoying all
the fine and beautiful things which the world has to offer. Of all these
Jnany sides of Bruno Leoni which made his companionship so attractive,
I do however not know enough to speak about them at any length. In
what follows I must confine myself to the three aspects of his work in
which for some ten or twelve years our efforts had run parallel courses
and where in consequence I had come to know him rather well. The
first is his effort to overcome the departmentalisation of the social
sciences and especially to bridge the gulf which has come to separate
the study of law from that of the theoretical social sciences. The second
is the effort to provide a satisfactory intellectual foundation for the

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defence of individual freedom, in which he so strongly believed. The
third point will be certain important suggestions contained in his lite-
rary work which to me seem to point the way to the solution of some
central intellectual difficulties of political theory, but where, since Bruno
Leoni was not given time to work them out fully, it will be the task of
those who wish to honour his memory to try to continue where he
left off.

But before I turn to my chief task, I must say a few1 words


about the character of my association with Bruno Leoni. The honour
that your venerable university has done me in asking me to speak on
this sad occasion, makes it seem desirable that I explain what limited
authority I have for the performance of this task. I first met Bruno
Leoni fourteen years ago at the University of Chicago where I was
then teaching and where he had gone, I believe, mainly to deepen his
acquaintance with Anglo-American law and political institutions. We
soon discovered on how many points our interests and ideal coincided
and this brought him soon into that international organisation of scho-
lars and publicists for the study of the conditions requisite for the pre-
servation of individual freedom, the Mont Pelerin Society, which I had
started a few years earlier and to whose affairs he was later to give
so much of his time and energy. We again spent some time together
almost ten years ago at Claremont College, California, at a seminar
devoted to the problems of liberty, where he delivered that course of
lectures on Freedom and the Law about which I shall have to speak
more fully later. It was then that I first came to see Bruno Leoni's
capacity of inspiring an audience, his untiring readiness to discuss
intellectual problems at every hour of day and night, and his general
zest for life which made him grasp all opportunities for instruction and
enjoyment which the environment of the moment offered. I may be
permitted to mention here a little episode which occurred on that
occasion. We lecturers at the seminar were kept pretty busy and valued
the three hours after the mid-day meal during which we had no definite
obligations. When Bruno Leoni regularly disappeared during that period,
we drew at first the natural conclusion. But how wrong we were! He
had discovered an opportunity of taking flying lessons at a nearby
aerodrome and spent at the controls of an airplane the hours we others
used for rest!
Not long after this I again encountered Bruno Leoni in the United
States ; not in person but following in his footsteps and noticing the deep
impressions he had left behind: In 1961 I succeeded him as Distin-
guished Visiting Professor at the Thomas Jefferson Center of Studies
in Political Economy of the University of Virginia and could feel
the great impact he had made.
But even before that we had been drawn more closely together by
the invaluable services he rendered in a crisis in the affairs of the
international society to which I have referred already and of which he
thereby became and remained to the moment of his death the driving
spirit. Since Bruno Leoni had nothing to do with the origin of this

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conflict, I need not enter here into the nature of this crisis which arose,
s may happen in any group, out of a certain incompatibility of tempe-
raments, but which at one time threatened to wreck the society.
Elected its secretary in the midsts of this conflict and for a time, after
the resignation of the president, chiefly responsible for its affairs, he stee-
red it with sure hands through the turbulent waters not only into a cal-
mer sea but into a new period of flourishing activity. The annual meetings
at Turin, at Knokke-sur -mer in Belgium, on the Semmering in Austria,
at Stresa, at Tokyo and at Yichy which he organised were among the most
successful our society has had. At the last meeting at Yichy, only
six months ago, ha was with general acclamation elected president fol-
lowing in that office on Friedrich Lutz and, earlier, John Jewkes, Wil-
helm Boepke, and myself. How great an asset he was to the society
we are becoming only too aware now when we are so tragically soon
faced with the task of finding a successor to him.
I must now turn to his scholarly and literary work of which I
know well only what he published in English and only a small part
of what appeared in Italian.
Bruno Leoni was one of those increasingly rare men who had the
courage to transcend the limits of a specialism and to try and see the
problems of society as a whole. With his tremendous energy and quick-
ness of perception he succeeded in escaping the dangers of dilettantism
which such a broadening out into several fields of study so easily
produces. He was, of course, primarily a lawyer and, I understand,
highly successful as a practizing lawyer. But even within the field
of law he was as much a philosopher, sociologist and historian of law
as a master of positive law. That he was also an eminent political
scientist is perhaps only natural in a teacher of constitutional law as
interested in the history of ideas as he was. He also contributed to the
development of political science in Italy and abroad with the review
II Politico of which he was founder and editor for many years. But
this exhausts by no means the full extent of the range of his curiosity;
I can testify, that he was no mean economic theorist and had worked
through some of the more difficult parts of mathematical economics and
shown a deep insight into some of the methodological difficulties which
modern development in this field raise. This was of course closely con-
nected with another chief concern of his which I have left last: the
general philosophy of science. He was, if I am not mistaken, one of
the originators and most active members of the Centro di Studi Metodo-
logici and the work he did in this connection led him to some of the fun-
damental problems of general philosophy.
A glance at a list of Bruno Leoni's publications shows how varied
his interests were. The list 1 have before me enumerates more than
eighty publications of which more than seventy date from the last twenty
years. Much of this is difficult of access to a foreigner and unknown
to me. I hope somebody will collect his more important occasional
writings into a volume to honour his memory. It is particularly to be
regretted that he did not find time to prepare for publication the

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suggestive and original first volume of his Lezioni di Filosofia del Di-
ritto which deals with the thought of classical antiquity and which in
1949 he had issued in mimeographed form for his students. Especially
his treatment of the relation between physis and nomos in ancient
Greek thought seems to me to contain much that would deserve develop-
ment. From my incomplete knowledge of his writings it seems to me,
however, that the one published systematic book of his, which is available
only in English and Spanish, is much the most important of his works,
both for what it explicitly says and even more for the hints it contains
of further developments, problems it raises without fully answering them
and which it now remains for us, his friends and admirers, to take up
and to develop. In this chief contention it is so unconventional, and
even directly opposed to much that is today almost universally accepted,
that there is some danger that it may not be taken as seriously as it
deserves or dismissed as a crotchety speculation of a man out of sym-
pathy with his time.
It would perhaps be possible to distort the spirited account of his
chief thesis in the assertion that the invention of legislation was a mi-
stake and that the world would do better to renounce legislation altoge-
ther and to rely exclusively on the development of the law by judges and
jurisconsults as has been true of the development of the ancient Boman
law and of the Common law of England. But though a few isolated sta-
tements in the book might lend themselves to such an interpretation,
Bruno Leoni explicitly rejects it. What I believe he was trying to say is
the highly important point that the law which emerges from juris-
diction and the work of the jurists of necessity possesses certain pro-
perties which the products of legislation may but need not possess, but
which are essential if individual freedom is to be preserved. He has
explicitly brought out only some of those properties which judge-made
law necessarly possesses but which all law ought to possess in a society
of free man. He argues persuasively, and has convinced me, that
although the codification of the law was intended to increase the certainty
of the law, it did at most enhance the short-run certainty of the law,
and I am no longer $ure that even this is strictly true, while the habit
of altering the law by legislation certainly decreases its long-run cer-
tainty. He did show further that one characteristic of the rules of just
conduct which emerge from the spontaneous process of law-finding was
that these rules were essentially negative, rules aiming at the determi-
nation of a protected domains for each individual and as such an effective
guarantee of individual liberty. As to many other profound thinkers
the task of the law was to him not so much to create justice as to prevent
injustice. And in his stress on the Golden Bule, Do not do to others
what you do not wish others to do to yourself - a rule which, as he
was fond of pointing out, Confucianism had in common with Christianity
- he suggested an equally negative test of the justice of such rules
by the consistent application of which we might hope progressively to
approach justice.
Perhaps the richness of suggestions which this book contains will

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be full apparent only to those who have already been working on
similar lines. Bruno Leoni would have been the last to deny that it me-
rely points a way and that much work still lay ahead before the seeds
of new ideas which it so richly contains could blossom forth in all
their splendor. It is part of the tragedy of the sudden termination
of this rich life that we can see how much more there was that he might
still have given us.
If I have regarded it as my chief task today to speak about Bruno
Leoni the scholar, it was not only because this was the side of him
which I best knew but also because, just because his work is unfinished,
there is some danger that it may not be properly appreciated. But to
those who stood nearer to him this will seem but a small part of Bruno
Leoni the man. Even to those who knew him mainly professionally
this world must seem a poorer place without him. I can conceive what
his loss must mean to his students to whom he gave so much of his
devotion and energy. But our deepest sympathy must go out to those
for whom he was the center of life, to whom he was able not only
to offer a harmonious and beautiful home but all the kindness of a
generous heart, and where he leaves a gap that nobody can fill. We
know that he was much more than only a scholar; but we hope that it
will be at least some consolation to those whom he has left behind, if
we pay this tribute to Bruno Leoni the scholar.

FRIEDRICH A. HAYEK

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