Blurred images: Indro Montanelli’s anti-politics

Through a close reading of Indro Montanelli’s 1944/1945 novel Here They Do Not Rest, this article argues that the famous and popular Italian journalist Montanelli contributed significantly to a particular Italian form of ‘anti-politics’ after the fall of fascism. It argues that anti-politics in Italy provides the foundation for the county’s right-wing populism and that it makes a significant contribution to political and historiographical revisionism of the fascist past. Indro Montanelli is read as an important architect of this revisionism and as such read against his popular image.     

Hegel's critique of the enlightenment

Franco Venturi famously emphasised the importance of the ‘English Model’ for Italian reformist culture in his Settecento riformatore. This essay contributes to the history of the development and evolution of the ‘English Model’ beginning with its influential appearance in Antonio Genovesi's 1757–1758 translation of John Cary's 1695 Essay on the State of England. The ‘English Model’ was not a stable concept and, in fact, one tradition inverted the model's meaning, rejecting the need for protectionism and instead embracing a providential faith in laissez-faire. This tradition began with an important, but falsified footnote in Carlo Denina's 1769–1770 Rivoluzioni d’Italia. In this note and the tradition that adopted it, Lorenzo de’ Medici's imagined English wool factories became the locus of this inversion, and, through a reading of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, blaming the Medici as agents of Italy's aberrant historical development became an alternative to blaming English economic imperialism in late eighteenth-century Italy. The narrative of Medici involvement in the decline of Italy was finally realigned with Genovesi's original intention under the auspice of Pope Pius VI in 1794.     

Sender,those who have not returned: Carlo Salsa and his ‘Trenches’

Abstract

Carlo Salsa’s book ‘Trenches: A foot-soldier’s tales’ (Trincee. Confidenze di un fante, 1924) was one of many published in Italy after the end of the First World War. It describes the facts of the war as they were lived by officers and soldiers on the Italian front line. The article tries to compare the book with the contemporary war literature in Italy and in Europe, without forgetting the use of the international historiography on the matter. Thus, it is analysed the way an Italian author described to his readers the brutal carnage of the war in years when Fascism was the rising star in Italian policy and the censorship was becoming the more and more a thornily factor for every writer of those days. From this analysis it is possible to note the quality of the volume both from the literary point of view, and its historical value as a reliable testimony of the facts, stepping up our knowledge of what the war literature was for the Italian public opinion after the 1918. As it is possible to note, the book puts under test our notions of the role played by this kind of literature in shaping the Italian political life at the end of the 1910s and at the start of 1920s, when Italy was becoming a country lead by the Fascist regime.     

Patrick McCarthy and the Other Italy

Abstract

This contribution examines the place of the South in Patrick McCarthy's analysis of contemporary Italian politics, and in particular the ways in which his reading of the work of three leading southern writers – Leonardo Sciascia, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Salvatore Satta – contributed to his definition of the peculiarities of the relationship between the citizen and the state in modern Italy.     

Tradition and Reform: Aristotle’s Response to Modern Alternatives

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to articulate an Aristotelian alternative to two prominent contemporary ways of understanding human freedom and dependence on the past, and to the implications these understandings have for political life. While a liberal tendency, following Machiavelli’s emphasis on new modes and orders, understands political life to begin with breaking from the past, the more conservative camp in modern thought, following Burke in his emphasis on tradition, understands political life to begin with laws and customs inherited from the past. Aristotle’s teaching in his Nicomachean Ethics on the freedom and responsibility that make human beginnings possible points us, I propose, to a better understanding of political founding than either modern alternative. In the Politics, he connects the city to natural beginnings in the family but also calls the first who founded a city one “responsible for the greatest of goods” (Pol. 1253a31-32). And in the Ethics, he offers his own founding of a way of inquiring about politics, which engages with his predecessors, as a model for politics itself. In this way, Aristotle offers us a deeper understanding of political founding and change, even presenting his own philosophic inquiry in the Ethics as its ground and model.     

Conflicting obituaries: the Abyssinian ‘outlaw’ Debeb as treacherous bandit and romantic hero in late nineteenth-century Italian imagination

In 1886 the Abyssinian chief Debeb became a public figure in Italy as a rapacious colonial bandit. However, over the next five years he acquired additional public personas, even contradictory ones: as a condottiero ally, a ladies' man, a traitor, a young Abyssinian aristocrat and pretender to an ancient throne, a chivalrous warrior, and a figure representing the frontier and an Africa mysterious and hidden to Europeans. Upon his 1891 death in combat, he was the subject of conflicting Italian press obituaries. For some commentators, Debeb exemplified treacherous and deceitful African character, an explanation for Italy's colonial disappointments and defeats. However, other commentators clothed him in a romanticised mystique and found in him martial and even chivalrous traits to admire and emulate. To this extent his persona blurred the line demarcating the African ‘other’. Although he first appeared to Italians as a bandit, the notion of the bandit as a folk hero (the ‘noble robber’ or ‘social bandit’, Hobsbawm) does not fit his case. A more fruitful approach is to consider his multi-faceted public persona as reflecting the ongoing Italian debate over ‘national character’ (Patriarca). In the figure of Debeb, public debates over colonialism and ‘national character’ merged, with each contributing to the other.     

Debunking the cliché of Italian military cowardice: the Italian military internees and Guareschi

This article has two goals. The first is to challenge the cliché (outside Italy) of the cowardly and clownish Italian soldier by recalling the voluntary journey to concentration camps (Lagers) of 650,000 soldiers and officers, the so-called Italian Military Internees (IMI), who said ‘No!’ to the German ‘invitation’ to swear an oath of loyalty to the Reich upon the declaration of the armistice on 8 September 1943. Despite a reign of terror in the Lagers in which they were interned, most continued to resist until they died or were repatriated at the end of the war. The second goal is to examine the idiosyncratic evocation of officers’ experience as IMI by Giovannino Guareschi in his Diario clandestino (1949). He played a major role in the IMIs’ ‘unarmed resistance’ in the four Lagers in which he was interned and the work consists mostly of material written in situ for his companions in misfortune.     

A tribune named Niccolò: Petrarchan revolutionaries and humanist failures in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories

Given Machiavelli’s fascination with ancient Rome’s plebeian tribunate, it is not surprising that he would take an interest in Cola di Rienzo, the Roman who declared himself Tribune of the Plebs in 1347. However, Cola appears just once in Machiavelli’s corpus, in a single short and enigmatic chapter in the Florentine Histories. This paper argues that Machiavelli nevertheless quietly elaborates on Cola’s legacy later in his Histories, when he introduces Stefano Porcari, another ‘Roman citizen’ whose reform efforts fail catastrophically. Though Machiavelli never explicitly criticizes Cola, he does blame Porcari for exercising poor judgement. This blame, importantly, is entwined with Machiavelli’s allusions to the humanist writings of Francesco Petrarch. By placing these accounts of Cola and Porcari side by side, this paper aims to reveal the Florentine Histories’ complicated relationship with Petrarch, Italy’s most famous humanist. The web of cross-references among Cola, Porcari and Machiavelli himself indicates the latter’s vexation with the sort of rhetorical idealism that Petrarch’s famous endorsement of Cola’s revolution came to represent.     

A legal theory for the nation state. Pasquale Stanislao Mancini,Hegelianism and Piedmontese liberalism after 1848

ABSTRACT

This article aims to shed light on the Italian liberals’ contribution to the post-1848 European debate on nationality, representative government and the theory of the state, through focus on the political thought of Pasquale Stanislao Mancini. Building on Vico and Hegel’s philosophies of law and history, Mancini developed a sui generis tradition of national liberalism that founded representative government on a theory of the state that identified freedom and nationality. Far from being the passive and provincial adaptation of Anglo-French currents of liberalism, Mancini’s political thought, while engaging with the contemporary European debates on freedom and constitutional government, nurtured an original constitutional theory that connected conflicting ideas of cosmopolitan freedom and national patriotism.     

Piero Gobetti and the Liberal Revolution in Italy

Abstract

Piero Gobetti, who died at an early age in 1926 after a severe beating by Fascist squadristi, is one of the most remarkable figures in twentieth‐century Italian culture. A writer and thinker with deep political commitment, Gobetti launched the reviews and journals during the political crisis in Italy between 1918 and 1925 which provided a meeting point for the otherwise dispersed forces of the Italian Left. The republication of his essay ‘The Liberal Revolution. An Essay of the Political Struggle in Italy’ ‐ the fifth edition since it first appeared in 1924 — has reopened the debate on Gobetti and provides an opportunity to consider Gobetti's ideas outside the context of the often politically motivated interpretations that have been placed on them.     

The role of the sartoria in post-war Italy

This article aims to build on established scholarship by highlighting a little-studied area of fashion production, that of the regional Italian dressmaker. Using one woman's wardrobe as a lens through which to consider established patterns of consumption, this article examines the role of the sartoria or dressmaker in post-war Italy. After a brief discussion of the reputation and dynamics of the related but more exclusive Italian couture, the author defines the characteristics of clothing produced by Italy's regional, small-scale dressmakers and their importance within Italy's fashion system. The author draws conclusions based upon close examination of one woman's wardrobe, created by the Turin workshop Sartoria Grimaldi and now housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum's permanent collection. A selection of this wardrobe was researched and exhibited for the first time in 2014 within the Museum's major exhibition ‘The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945–2014’.     

The English Patient and the Italian Risorgimento: Medical Tourism and the Body Politic in Giovanni Ruffini's Doctor Antonio (1855)

Doctor Antonio (1855), Giovanni Ruffini's novel of therapeutic travel, cross-cultural love and Risorgimento propaganda, pairs an English patient's quest for renewed health in Italy in the 1840s with the concurrent resurgence of the Italian nation through political action. An Italian revolutionary activist turned man of English letters, Ruffini wrote seven novels in English, of which the second, Doctor Antonio, was his greatest critical and popular success. Employing the popular Victorian practice of recuperative travel as a key plot device, and using this device to convey Italian political messages to nineteenth-century English readers, the novel offers a context-specific variation of the rhetorical tradition of representing the ‘body politic’ as a site of health, disease and medical management. This essay investigates Doctor Antonio's relation to Anglo-Italian literary, political and medical contexts in the mid-nineteenth century. More specifically, it analyses how the novel's medical plot supports Ruffini's aims of challenging negative stereotypes of Italians and advancing the cause of Italian liberalism. A reading of Lucy Davenne's illness and treatment as an allegory for the condition of the ailing, but potentially resurgent, Italian nation is developed and critically reflected upon. The intersection of medical and political frames of meaning in the text is further explored by interpreting the space and community of Lucy's convalescence as the model of an ideal society to which both English and Italians might aspire. Finally, the essay considers the novel's material impact on the development of medical tourism in northern Italy, and the political significance of this impact.     

Becoming imperialist: Italian colonies in Fascist textbooks for primary schools

The essay explores the way in which primary school textbooks in Fascist Italy played an important part in disseminating the colonial discourse. Starting from a brief overview of the education system and textbooks in Liberal Italy, the essay reviews the changes made by the Fascists after 1922: Gentile's reform; the national commission for primary school textbooks; the introduction of the testo unico di Stato (single state-approved texts). These changes reveal the increasing emphasis on colonial topics and the development of the ‘new Italian man’. The impact of 1936 as a turning point in Fascist colonial policy following the conquest of Ethiopia and the proclamation of the empire of Italian East Africa is highlighted by the ways in which primary school textbooks reflected Fascist ambitions to imbue pupils with a new imperial consciousness.     

The reasonable republic? Statecraft,affects, and the highest good in Spinoza’s late Tractatus Politicus

In his final, incomplete Tractatus Politicus (1677), Spinoza’s account of human power and freedom shifts towards a new, teleological interest in the ‘highest good’ of the state in realising the freedom of its subjects. This development reflects, in part, the growing influence of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Dutch republicanism, and the Dutch post-Rampjaar context after 1672, with significant implications for his view of political power and freedom. It also reflects an expansion of his account of natural right to include independence of mind, a model of autonomy that in turn shapes the infamous sui juris exclusions of his unfinished account of democracy. This article focuses specifically on the Tractatus Politicus, a hitherto under-addressed work in Spinoza’s corpus and one too often considered indistinct from his earlier Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670). It argues for a reconsideration of its importance to early modern political thought, particularly regarding the role of the state in realising the freedom and harmony of its subjects through reasonable laws.     

The crisis of the Italian state: then and now

Abstract

The article argues that Patrick McCarthy's Crisis of the Italian State was a book of great value by an author who was a partisan in the struggle to reform the Italian political system. The book's argument that lasting reform of Italian politics is only possible if middle class Italians begin to act as citizens, rather than as clients who regard the state as a source of potential largesse, has proved to be a far-sighted one, although at the time it seemed simplistic. Many of Italy's current troubles stem from the failure of Italy to go beyond the ‘overworked state’.     

Solomon’s Table Talk: Martin Luther on the Authorship of Ecclesiastes

ABSTRACT

Martin Luther’s comments in a section of Table Talk continue to be used as evidence that he denied the Solomonic authorship of Ecclesiastes. A comparison of the passage with Luther’s “Preface” to Jesus Sirach demonstrates that the majority of Luther’s comments in that section of Table Talk pertain to Sirach. However, the passage also has clear parallels in Luther’s “Preface to Solomon’s ‘The Preacher,’” suggesting that it is a mixture of Luther’s comments on Ecclesiastes and Sirach. The portions of Table Talk which do pertain to Ecclesiastes have commonly been misinterpreted. Luther does not deny that Solomon was the author of Ecclesiastes; he denies that Solomon was the scribe. He thought that Ecclesiastes was written down by students on the basis of the oral teachings of their master, much like his own Table Talk.     

‘The vandals at home’: Antonio Cederna’s denunciation of the devastation of Italian cities in the postwar period

Writing for the influential magazine Il Mondo, Antonio Cederna relentlessly denounced the projects and works that endangered Italy’s historical and landscape heritage in a period – the 1950s and 1960s – characterized by processes of change that were as intense as they were disordered and contradictory. The battles he waged against the danger of Italian cities being tampered with by those whom he called ‘the vandals at home’ had a significant impact on urban development. In addition, his discourse left a deep and enduring trace in Italian journalism, urban planning and historiography. This article focuses on the early period of Cederna’s journalistic activity: it delineates the core features of his denunciation, paying as much attention to its contents as to the form and manner in which it was expressed, and it assesses the outcome and legacy of his press campaigns both on a material and a political-cultural level.     

Le modèle des petites filles: structure familiale dans l'œuvre de la comtesse de Ségur

This article discusses how Petrarch's self-portrayal as a spokesman for peace, armed with quill and inkpot, is brought forward in the canzone "Italia mia benché 'l parlar sia indarno" and in his epistles of the 1350s. The poet's activity as peace mediator appears in this famous canzone dedicated to Italy well before the epistles were written. Dated to 1344, the poem's thematic kernel seems to have been subsequently unfolded and broken down into the epistles that Petrarch later sent to the political leaders of his day. Petrarch's cry for peace in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is threefold: he invokes spiritual, societal, and teleological peace. The different faces of this threefold pining for harmonic conciliation find an outlet in the invocations of, respectively, Chiare fresche e dolci acque, "Italia mia," and the Canzone alla Vergine. "Italia mia," his most distinctly political text as well as heartfelt plea to the lords of Italy, marks Petrarch's last attempt to recompose the political fractures of Italy within the peninsula itself; from the 1350s onward, Petrarch addresses his political appeals solely to foreign rulers, a sign of the waning independence of Italian states.     

Silvio Spaventa and Marco Minghetti on party government

ABSTRACT

This article contextualizes, explores, and compares a selection of writings on party government and the modern State authored throughout the 1880s by two major representatives of post-Risorgimento Italian liberalism – Silvio Spaventa (1822–1893) and Marco Minghetti (1818–1886). Its comparative analysis unveils two alternative paths for taming factionalism and securing political freedom in modern representative governments: the strategy of monism pursued by Spaventa, revolving around the primacy of the State and its unity; and the strategy of pluralism championed by Minghetti, praising self-government and the multiple associations that enliven civil society. It connects these strategies to the intellectual background of the two authors – the importance of Hegel’s ideas for Spaventa; the implications of Tocqueville’s anti-Hegelianism for Minghetti – and maps them onto their visions of party government. In doing so, it retrieves an important chapter in the Italian debates on parties that has received scarce consideration among Anglophone scholars. It also helps to pluralize our understanding of Italian liberalism(s) in the aftermath of the Risorgimento. Finally, it draws the attention of Anglo-American political theorists and historians to Minghetti’s seminal book I partiti politici e l’ingerenza loro nella giustizia e nell’amministrazione (1881), which offered the first systematic analysis and defense of parties, and their difference from factions, in the history of modern Italian political thought.