Intellectuals and politics

ABSTRACT. By imagining their audiences, intellectuals invented and constructed the collective identities of nations and transnational communities like Europe or humankind. Four ideal types of intellectuals are outlined by describing them in their relation to politics: the intellectual as cosmopolitan ascetic; the intellectual as enlightened legislator; the intellectual as revolutionary; and the intellectual as the voice of a traumatic memory. These ideal types change over time in response to their focus of attention and their mode of communication. Because of changes in their media (from handwritten to printed books) and changes in their written language (from Latin to French and Italian, and further to vernacular languages), intellectuals were able to change views on past, present and future times. Today, they are involved in (civic) resistance but rarely in politics per se. By renewing the tension of the sacred and profane – the so‐called axial‐age revolution – contemporary intellectuals in Eastern Europe are decoupled from direct political power.     

Man of faith and political commitment: Alcide De Gasperi in the history of Europe

Since the early 1980s historians and others have been radically revising established understandings of the Italian south. New research has undermined the notion of a dichotomy between north and south and has begun to challenge the parameters of the Southern Question itself. The books reviewed here reflect, comment upon and drive forward this process of revision. One suggestion is that representations of the south as 'backward', 'picturesque' or fundamentally 'different' are the product of ideological and political elaboration rather than the reflection of any fundamental reality, and should be seen as part of a neo-Orientalist discourse which justified southern subordination. While acknowledging the strengths of this new history of the Mezzogiorno, this article argues that the neo-Orientalist explanation risks simply restating southern difference and subordination in another form. What is needed instead is a new, and less dichotomized, approach to southern Italian cultures and a recognition of the complexities - and hence the importance - of southern identities.     

Apparitions of Desire: Clive van den Berg and the Art of Historical Unknowability

This paper considers the art of South African artist, Clive van den Berg. Van den Berg has long been engaged in a careful exploration of landscapes and their capacity to bear traces of what is no longer known, often in ways that question the archive fever of contemporary historians and cultural activists. In a variety of media – from fire‐installations to oil pastel, from light and wood to acrylic, in video and in mono‐print – he has probed the history of eros and its relationship to the violences of apartheid, simultaneously citing the aesthetic traditions of the Italian Renaissance and Southern Africa. The paper both describes and explicates the aesthetico‐political ambition of the artist's work as it has developed over the last decade, in the aftermath of apartheid's dismantling.     

Italian neopatriotism: Debating national identity in the 1990s

This article discusses some of the distinguishing features of the debate over national identity that took place in Italy in the 1990s. Reacting against the threats of the Lega Nord and in response to the new ideological and political landscape of the post-Cold War order, a number of Italian intellectuals rediscovered the value of patriotism. Searching for the origins of the Italians' allegedly weak sense of national identity, some questioned the Resistance and the party system that originated from it. While this historical revisionism has been the object of well-deserved criticism, there is another type of thematization of identity which has received less attention: it deploys the old notion of an 'Italian character', which appears frequently in the press and the media. The article shows that this discourse, too, is a way of articulating patriotism, and then reflects on the meaning that this reconfiguration of ideologies and identities acquires in the new context, both domestic and international.     

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.     

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’.     

Plastic arts and nation‐building in Israel

This article begins as an attempt to analyse an apparently paradoxical situation created by two events, which occurred simultaneously in 1948: the establishment of Israel as an independent state and the emergence of the Ofakim Hadashim (New Horizons) group of artists, acknowledged as the most renowned local artists at the time. The creation of the state of Israel may be considered the high point of Jewish nationalism, when the nation celebrated its distinctiveness. On the other hand, Ofakim Hadashim was a group of intellectuals who aspired to disengage their artistic work from the dominant political processes of the time. The basic claim of its members was l'art pour l'art, which ostensibly contradicted the significance of the general political process. This situation is highly interesting since it challenges the general sociological assumptions about the role of intellectuals in nation‐building processes, and also contradicts the usual explanation regarding the Israeli state‐building process. It concludes that an explanation of the social complexity existing in 1948 can be found in an understanding of modernity as a multifaceted phenomenon embracing a diversity of inherently contradictory practices.     

THINKING AFTER HITLER: THE NEW INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY1

This review essay seeks to direct attention to intellectual history as a new and flourishing subfield in the historiography of post‐1945 Germany. The essay probes and critically interrogates some of the basic arguments of Dirk Moses' prize‐winning monograph German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. It does so by engaging with a series of German‐language monographs on key intellectuals of the postwar period (Alexander Mitscherlich, Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse) or groups of intellectuals that have appeared during the last few years. The essay also includes two books that focus on intellectual transfers from and to the United States and hence transcend the purely national framework. The essay highlights some broader themes such as West German intellectuals' confrontation with the Nazi past and with the memory of Germany's failed experiment with democracy during the interwar Weimar Republic. It also discusses the significance of the West German student movement in the 1960s for West German intellectual history. The essay concludes with some broader reflections on writing intellectual history of the postwar period, and it points to some avenues for further research. It underlines the significance of intellectual debates—and hence of intellectual history—for charting and explaining the process of postwar democratization and liberalization in the Federal Republic of Germany.     

Meridionalismo,the crisis of liberalism,and the advent of Marxism in post‐risorgimento Naples

For an ideology described by Marx himself as one that was suitable only for advanced societies, backward Naples ironically served as the point of entry for Marxism in Italy. As theorists and activists, the great Neapolitan Marxists—Antonio Labriola, Carlo Cafiero, Arturo Labriola, and Amadeo Bordiga—completely dominated the initial stages of the movement. For an understanding of the severe socio‐economic conditions that did much to make Naples the incubator of radicalism in post‐Risorgimento Italy, the literature of the meridionalisti (southern reformers) remains indispensable. Under attack on both sides of the Atlantic by a new generation of historians who admirably seek to produce a nuanced history of the South by rising above the stereotypes associated with a one‐dimensional image of the “Southern Problem,” the meridionalisti require supplementing today as historians. Nevertheless, the reaction against them has been too extreme. They remain invaluable eye‐witnesses to the conditions and events that formed the historical context of Marxism's momentous appearance in Italy.     

Recent works on Italian capitalism: A review essay

Abstract

Italy's capitalism has traditionally differed from that of its major trading partners: state‐owned enterprises have played a larger role, securities markets have been relatively less developed, while corporate power in the private sector has been concentrated to an unusual extent in the hands of a few family‐controlled business groups. Since the 1970s, Italian big business has seemed unable to steer a new course in an increasingly global economy. When belatedly and under tight budget constraints Italy finally started privatizations in 1992, many hoped that this would bring about a long‐delayed modernization of financial markets, an increase in competitive market pressues, and some ‘democratization’ of corporate power. This article reviews a book edited by Fabrizio Barca which puts these recent experiences into a much‐needed longer historical perspective, and other books offering non‐scholarly views on the present state of Italian capitalism.

Fabrizio Barca (ed.) (1997) Storia del capitalismo italiano (Rome: Donzelli), pp. 1‐634, 60,000 lire, ISBN 88‐7989‐252‐5 hardback.

Filippo Cavazzuti (1996) Privatizzazioni, imprenditori e mercati (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1‐83, 10,000 lire, ISBN 88‐15‐05562‐2 paperback.

Alfredo Macchiati (1996) Privatizzazioni tra economia e politica (Rome: Donzelli), pp. 1‐160, 18,000 lire, ISBN 88‐7989‐254‐1 paperback.

Giuseppe Turani (1996) Isogni del grande nord (Bologna: II Mulino), pp. 1‐138, 15,000 lire, ISBN 88‐15‐05721‐8 paperback.     

Italian identity: Catholic responses to secularist definitions,c.1910–48

In united Italy, assertions by Catholic militants about their nation's true identity have been bound up with polemic against secularist forces and with claims about the position due to the Church in Italian society. They have insisted that Italy's authentic traditions are Catholic and that her true greatness resides in her being the heart of Christian civilization. Hostile or threatening ideologies, e.g. idealist philosophy and Communism, have been stigmatized as alien to Italian tradition. In the face of Fascism, with which the ‘Catholic world's’ relations were ambivalent, there was a major ideological campaign to assert a Catholic definition of the keyword romanità. The way in which Catholic theoreticians have defined the ‘nation’ in organicist terms have been linked to strategies of ideological defence against state forms, whether liberal or Fascist, perceived to be overweening.     

Italian history and gli italiani nel mondo,Part II

Abstract

Italian historians have not yet seriously confronted the emigration of 27 million Italians as an interpretative theme. Part II of this two‐part article studies Italian migrants’ experiences in France, South America, Switzerland and Germany, comparing ‘Latin’ and ‘Germanic’ receiving areas to the English‐speaking world discussed in Part I. A focus on these other sections of the Italian diaspora challenges some fundamental interpretations of historians of Italy about emigration: Italian migrations to these areas were neither limited to the late nineteenth century, sparked by the economic crises of those yean, nor a product of the ‘problem of the Mezzogiomo’. Italian historians have special opportunities to study return migration to Italy, and to interpret Italy's own evolution into a multicultural receiving country, by comparing it to the models of multi‐ethnic nations where Italian migrants once settled around the world.     

Democracy and the rights of women in the thinking of Giuseppe Mazzini

Addressing Italian workers in his Doveri dell’uomo of 1860, Mazzini unequivocally laid out his thoughts on women's rights. The thinker from Genoa, all the more after his encounters with other political philosophers from different national environments such as Britain and France, saw the principle of equality between men and women as fundamental to his project of constructing first the nation, and second a democratic republic. In his ideas regarding emancipation Mazzini, who spent a good 40 years of his life in exile, was one of a small group of European thinkers who in challenging the established customs and prevailing laws not only hoped for the end of women's social and judicial subordination, but also held that changes to the position of women were essential to the realisation of their political projects. Thanks to this respected group of intellectuals, the issue of female emancipation found a place in the nineteenth-century European debate regarding democracy and the formation of national states. The closeness of the positions of these thinkers, and their commitment in practice as well as theory, mean that it can legitimately be argued that in the course of the nineteenth century a current of feminist thinking took shape. This was born of the encounters between and reflections of various intellectuals who met first in France and then in England, and who came to see women's rights not just as a discrete issue for resolution but as fundamental to their projects for the regeneration of nations, or, as in the Italian case, for the construction and rebirth of a nation.     

Northumbria's southern frontier: a review

Northumbria's southern frontier was arguably the most important political boundary inside pre‐Viking England. It has, however, attracted little scholarly attention since Peter Hunter Blair's seminal article in Archaeo‐logia Aeliana in 1948, which later commentators have generally followed rather uncritically. This essay reviews his arguments in the light of more recent research and casts doubt on several key aspects of his case: firstly, it contests his view that this boundary was fundamental to the naming of both southern and northern England and its kingdoms; secondly, it queries the supposition that the Roman Ridge dyke system is likely to have been a Northumbrian defensive work; thirdly, it critiques the view that the Grey Ditch, at Bradwell, formed part of the frontier; and, finally, it argues against the boundary in the west being along the River Ribble. Rather, pre‐Viking Northumbria more probably included those parts of the eleventh‐century West Riding of Yorkshire which lie south of the River Don, with a frontier perhaps often identical to that at Domesday, and it arguably met western Mercia not on the Ribble but on the Mersey. It was probably political developments in the tenth century, and particularly under Edward the Elder and his son Athelstan, that led to the Mercian acquisition of southern Lancashire and the development of a new ecclesiastical frontier between the sees of Lichfield and York on the Ribble, in a period that also saw the York archdiocese acquire northern Nottinghamshire.     

Ruinismo: the Catholic Church in Italy from ‘mediation culture’ to the Cultural Project

It is only seven years since Monsignor Camillo Ruini resigned from his role as President of the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI), yet it feels much longer. The tempestuous events that marked Silvio Berlusconi's decline, on one hand, and the election of Pope Francis to the Holy See, on the other, have made such an impression on recent Italian history that seems to leave no time for reflection on what has happened over the last twenty years. This article explores how, during this time, Cardinal Ruini has re-fashioned the relations between the Catholic Church and Italian politics, following a pattern that has come to be known as ‘ruinismo’. The essay follows the development of the theological-political line of the Conference, from the “mediation” of the “Catholic Party”, the Christian Democrats (DC), to the “policy of presence” of politically committed Catholics, defined in these terms by the ecclesiastical congress in Loreto in 1985 and fully carried out under Ruini's management, with the backing of Berlusconi's governments. The aim is to establish whether and to what extent the “Ruinian” rule may be regarded as the consequence of mainstream Catholic politics of the 1980s and, equally, as a response to the cultural and political transformation brought about by the upheavals of the corruption scandals of 1989–91. Only from this long-term perspective is it possible to determine whether Ruini's exit has brought an end to ruinismo.     

Italy in the digital age: Cinema as new technology

Italian cinema is lagging behind in international standards, both culturally and in production terms. Starting in the mid-1970s, the Italian communication system has begun an irreversible transformation, and yet the ideologies of Italian cinema have remained impervious to the changes and they have consequently severed Italian cinema's links with the dynamic processes taking place in the other western film industries. The result is that today's Italian cinema fails to achieve either a decent production standard or essential synergies with other sectors of the cultural industry. A new political culture of communication is the only possible strategy for making Italian cinema once again a player in the global multimedia system.     

Substituting for Families? Schools and Social Reproduction in AIDS‐affected Lesotho

Abstract: Families, the state and employers all have a broad if differentiated interest in securing the daily and generational reproduction of society. Whereas in Western countries, the past two decades have witnessed a progressive displacement of responsibility for social reproduction from the state to families, in southern Africa, day‐to‐day social reproduction has always remained overwhelmingly the preserve of families. Today, however, the AIDS pandemic is radically transforming family life for many children, and prompting concerns (arguably a moral panic) about the potential breakdown of social reproduction. Even in Africa, schools have long supplemented families in delivering generational reproduction, albeit geared around the transfer of “factual” knowledge and with a narrow focus on preparing new generations of workers. In light of the AIDS pandemic, a number of commentators have suggested ways in which schools could further substitute for the diminishing capacities of families. Based on interviews with decision‐makers and analysis of policy documents, I explore a number of interventions being enacted in Lesotho's schools. I argue that such initiatives remain small in scale and often justified in relation to retaining children in school. In practice both government and employers remain more interested in the generational reproduction of workers than in daily reproduction. If the welfare needs of AIDS‐affected children are to be met through schooling, there is a need for the education sector's role to be understood in relation to an ethics of care, rather than the functionalist production of a future workforce.     

Bringing Back the (B)order: Post‐9/11 Politics of Immigration,Borders, and Belonging in the Contemporary US South

Abstract: Post 9/11, debates about borders, immigration, and belonging have reached a new intensity in the US South. The temporal overlap of growing immigration to the South since the late 1990s and growing nativist sentiment across the US since 9/11 has led southern communities to fuse new regional racial demographics to new national border anxieties. This convergence enables southern political elites to address the changing contours of local communities through recourse to national imperatives of border security, all the while avoiding an explicit language of race in a thoroughly racialized debate. In an analysis of recent political maneuvers in the South, this article examines what happens when debates about nation, community, and borders are relocated to southern spaces heretofore absent in discussions of immigration. It argues that legislative actions against immigrant populations in southern states are virulent and multi‐scalar border policings in which concerns about the social and cultural boundaries of southern communities, new racial projects across the South, and post‐9/11 immigrant anxieties across the US become inseparable. To conclude, it discusses the theoretical insight that this critical assessment of the South's new border projects offers vis‐à‐vis understandings of, and struggles against, exclusion, racism, and social injustice.     

After central planning: The restructuring of state industry in Bulgaria's Bourgas region

Industrial regions in eastern Europe developed under central planning are now confronting the pressures associated with political and economic transition to market‐focused systems. Using the case of the Bourgas region, on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast, the article examines how state industries are faring in these new conditions, analyzing developments in production, employment, ownership, management, market‐orientation and other factors. Massive financial and human resources were poured into the region's industrial development during more than four decades of state socialism, building a modem industrial infrastructure, but one heavily characterized by the particular features and constraints of central planning which emphasized quantity over quality and large‐scale, integrated plants. As central control collapses, the region's state‐owned firms are in crisis. Production is down, unemployment has risen, and except for a handful of plants restituted to former owners, privatization is moving slowly. The region's industries have been battered by highly unfavorable outside forces, yet have been mostly unable to marshal the necessary management, financial, or technical resources to implement coherently any indigenous strategic initiatives to address the changed institutional environment and new supply and demand conditions.     

‘They Finally Found Out that We Really Are Men’: Violence,Non‐Violence and Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era

This article explores how peaceful protest and armed resistance reflected and shaped certain gender identities in the southern US civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, and reveals much about the significance of violence for ‘marginalised masculinities’ within the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. In the Deep South, civil rights organisers found that their non‐violent strategy's connotations of effeminate submissiveness hampered attempts to win over black men to the movement's cause. Conversely, those African Americans who decided to use armed force to protect the movement against racist attacks were proud of their ability to defend themselves and their communities. A comparison of armed resistance efforts in southern civil rights campaigns with those of post‐1965 Black Power groups such as the Black Panther Party shows both commonalities and differences with regard to the inter‐relationship between self‐defence and gender. In the southern movement, the affirmation of manhood remained a by‐product of the physical imperative to protect black lives against racism. Among Black Power militants and their black nationalist precursors, self‐defence, while initially intended to stop police brutality and other racist oppression, ultimately became mainly a symbol of militant black manhood. The Black Power movement's affirmative message countered stereotypes of black male powerlessness and instilled a positive black identity into many activists, but the gendered discourse it produced also tended to perpetuate black women's subordination.