Mario Grandi

In the law and philosophy thought of Luigi Mengoni the subject of values and of their relation to work is embedded in a systematic thought where the legal discourse is viewed as a discourse linked to the law and to legal dogmatic (made up of inventio and demonstratio) and open to the contributions of the other social sciences. While the Kantian formalism devalues values as objective ideas, Luigi Mengoni assumes as theoretical option the perspective of the material ethic of values as objective and knowable logic-material structures, and of the rationality of value judgements and of the problem of justice. In political contexts of pluralism and competition of values the positiveness scheme is re-conceptualised according to the axiological perspective which includes value judgements socially accepted, both at the moment of the inventio and at that of (dogmatic) demonstratio. The ontological status of values as objective ideas is logically connected with the assumption of value as a fact of rationality, according to the congnitivistical hypothesis. According to Luigi Mengoni knowing values has nothing to do with the knowledge of phenomena: it is rather based on the dimension of possibility, on the logic (and judgement) of likeness, in connection with the Leibnizian thought. In particular, with reference to costitutional rules values are modified by the secularisation process: indeed, they represent points of view that are historically conditioned and legitimised by social-political consensus. The evolution of labour law is strongly concerned with the emergence of values in the written law, especially of ethic implication of catholic social doctrine, which is particularly analized by Luigi Mengoni in his essays on social encyclicas.