A 'Narrative' of the Individual-Community Relationship through the 'Lenses' of Criminal Law: Three Sketches of Mystification

Criminal law can be rightly considered the maximum expression of any society’s ideal image, of its ‘Sollen’, in any given time. More specifically, criminal law, also through its peculiar ‘expressive force’, has the power to describe (as a model) and shape (through its legitimate use of State violence) the very delicate relationship between the individual and the community, which is at the heart of any social narrative. Through the analysis of the changes undergone in the past decades by three specific features of Italian criminal law (two criminal offences, i.e. insult to a public official and false accounting, and one criminal defence, i.e. self-defence), this essay will try and retrace how this relationship appears to have changed under different political regimes and through powerful socio-economic transformations, possibly to reveal also the ‘deceptive’ potential of criminal law itself, which we may assume to be related to its intrinsic ‘symbolic’ quality.