Alexandre Passerin d'Entrèves

Alessandro Passerin d'Entrèves (26 April 1902 – 15 December 1985) was an Italian philosopher and historian of law. He was noted for his scholarship on political thought, particularly in the mediaeval and early modern period, and natural law theory. D'Entreves was a native of the Aosta Valley, Northern Italy. He studied at the University of Turin, where he wrote a thesis on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and later pursued a doctorate at the University of Oxford, with a thesis on medieval political thought and the constitutionalism of Richard Hooker. He held academic positions at the Universities of Messina, Pavia, and Turin. During World War II, he participated in the Italian resistance in the Aosta Valley. He served as the Serena Professor of Italian at Oxford from 1946 to 1957 and taught at Harvard University in the Spring of 1957. In 1969, he co-founded the Political Science Faculty at the University of Turin and became its first president. He was also president of the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy from 1967 to 1971. His notable books include "The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought" (1939), "Natural Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy" (1951), "Dante as a Political Thinker" (1952), and "The Notion of the State" (1967). His personal interests included alpinism, music, and collecting classical records.