| Abstract: | Federico Chabod was one of Italy's most respected historians in a period that ran from the late 1920s down to the 1950s, and hence was an important intellectual protagonist in the intellectual culture of both Fascist and post-Second World War Italy. In this article Stuart Woolf re-examines Chabod's intellectual itinerary in both these periods, and focuses in particular on the course of lectures on the idea of Europe that Chabod gave in 1943-4 and 1958-9 (the latter were published in 1961 as the Storia dell'idea d'Europa). Like Marc Bloch's Etrange défaite, Woolf argues that Chabod's reflections on the idea of Europe and the role of Europe in world history were symptomatic of the response of a minority of committed intellectuals to the disasters of two world wars. The author sets Chabod's arguments in the context of debates on the nature of Europe and its historical role both before and after the Second World War, and offers a critical retrospective evaluation of Chabod's conclusions. |
