From Risorgimento to Il Politecnico: impegno and intellectual networks in the Einaudi publishing house, 1945

The article unveils the (dis)continuities between two post-WWII journals, Risorgimento and Il Politecnico, both published by Einaudi in 1945. By reassessing the publishing history of Risorgimento from a genealogical perspective, the article aims to chart the evolutions of the then current intellectual debate on impegno. Specifically, by analysing the relevant contributors’ correspondence and the essays that were published in the journals, the article examines the journals as sites of networking but also tension between different intellectual habitus. This will illuminate not only how the two editors-in-chief (Salinari and Vittorini, respectively) took different positions in relation to both the literary field and the PCI (Italian Communist Party), but also the opposition of editorial staffs – based, respectively, in Rome and in Milan – in relation to the publisher Einaudi.     

Communists on the Brink: The Gorizian Comrades of the Early Post-War Period

Much is known about the early post-war history of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). However, considerably less attention has been directed to its later affiliations; those in regions at the time contested in terms of their national sovereignty and which were consequently integrated to the PCI national party structure at different stages over the course of the late 1940s and 1950s. They include the communist organisations in the former Venezia-Giulia region or the Julian March, on Italy's north-eastern border with Yugoslavia. Drawing on new empirical evidence, this paper looks at the singularly pragmatic nature of the contemporary communist movement in the Gorizian Province, as illustrated in its responses to a series of testing situations and paradigm-shifting developments. It examines these comrades' trajectory from revolutionary pro-secessionists intent on annexing their region to the new People's Republic of Yugoslavia, to ‘Italian’ communists' intent on superseding the majority Christian Democrats in the immediate context. Themes addressed in this analysis include those of agency, geopolitics, political and national identity.     

From political enemy to profane reality: the ‘friend–enemy’ relation in the political ideology of Italian communists

Abstract

The ‘friend–enemy’ relation represented an essential ideological mainstay of the thought and action of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the years of republican Italy. This relation goes back to the aftermath of World War I when Soviet communism became established as a global revolutionary movement. The PCI’s strategy of delegitimation of political opponents underwent substantial changes over the years of republican Italy. The long period spanning Togliatti and Berlinguer’s leadership of the party saw a change in political culture destined to alter the very nature of the ‘friend–enemy’ relation. Particularly in the 1970s, with the so-called ‘moral question’, a new antiparty public discourse became established and was implemented mainly against the parties in government. This paved the way to a more radical and absolute logic of enmity that, in the long run, overwhelmed the PCI itself in the dramatic transition from First to Second Republic.     

The Role and Relevance of Intellectuals vis-à-vis the French and Italian Communist Parties in the Early Post-war Period. A Regional Grassroots Study

Taking as cases in point a French and an Italian communist party federation in the early post-war period, this paper considers the role and relevance of intellectuals vis-à-vis ‘the party’ from the perspectives of ordinary communists in regional contexts. New empirical evidence suggests that beneath surface parallels there were key differences in that respect, which apart from anything else, resulted in some very different responses to the macro political events of 1956. It appears that those differences related to core communist principles; interpretations of communist militancy; the nature and functioning of democratic centralism in the organisations in question; and matters of human agency. This paper examines the nature and extent of those constants and variables, accounts for them in their immediate and wider contexts, and evaluates what all of that can tell us about coherence and cohesion of French and Italian communism, and by extension that of the international communist movement, at that time.     

Paragone: notes on hegemony and realism in the 1950s

This article focuses on the literary review Paragone and on the debate on realism articulated by the review and by the Cultural Commission of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1950s. By analysing the review’s internal composition, correspondence between its contributors, and records of the PCI’s Cultural Commission, this article highlights a series of issues relating to the debate on realism in the 1950s, as a critical time, in both aesthetic and political terms, for the determination of Italian culture’s identity profile. Specifically, the article discusses the key features of the debate on realism that unfolded in Paragone, and relates these to the debate simultaneously developing within the Cultural Commission. This comparison allows us to argue for a close connection between the aesthetic habitus displayed by an independent review and that embraced by a cultural institution with a distinctly political as well as cultural agenda.     

A Conflicted Nation. Storia dell’Italia nella Guerra Fredda (1943–1978)

This roundtable assesses the arguments and importance of Guido Formigoni’s book Storia dell’Italia nella Guerra Fredda (1943–1978). This book is essentially composed of seven 70–80-page broadly chronological chapters, each of which might almost be expanded into a short book in its own right. The chapters perform the difficult feat of shifting constantly between the foreign policy of the Italian state (which was so often driven by domestic political considerations) and the political consequences of international events on the debates (or polemics) taking place in the Italian polity. There can be few works of international history in which the linkage between the domestic and foreign policy ‘levels’ is so clearly demonstrated. Indeed, one of the key objectives of the book plainly is to show that although there may be countries where foreign policy is carried on with blithe indifference to domestic politics, Italy is certainly not one of them, or was not during the Cold War years. Mark Gilbert introduces the book on which Federico Romero, Maud Bracke and Michele Marchi engage in a detailed commentary, to which the author replies.