Introduction

Paolo Bagnoli, “Piero Gobetti and the Liberal Revolution in Italy,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (1997): 34, 37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

David D. Roberts, “Frustrated Liberals: De Ruggiero, Gobetti, and the Challenge of Socialism,” Canadian Journal of History 17 (1982): 62.Google Scholar

Gobetti’s relative obscurity outside of Italy is explained by Norberto Bobbio as a consequence of his place in a distinctive context: “all of [Gobetti’s] work is bound strictly to the political struggle in Italy in a period in which the history of our country, which culminates in fascism, is so different from that of other European nations.” Norberto Bobbio, Italia fedele. Il mondo di Gobetti (Florence: Passigli, 1986), 64. Nevertheless, an English translation of selections of Gobetti’s work has recently been published, although with little historical contextualisation. SeeGoogle Scholar

Piero Gobetti, On Liberal Revolution, ed. Nadia Urbinati, trans. William McCuaig (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). Full public access (in Italian) to Gobetti’s weekly review, La Rivoluzione Liberale, including the work of all those who contributed to it between 1922 and 1926, is publically available on-line in a digital format. This excellent resource was created in consultation with the Centro Studi Piero Gobetti (Piero Gobetti Study Centre) in Turin and can be accessed at http://www.erasmo.it/liberale/.Google Scholar

For a detailed intellectual biography of Gobetti, see Marco Gervasoni, L’intelletuale come eroe. Piero Gobetti e le culture del Novecento (Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2000). For shorter but still illuminating studies of Gobetti’s life and thought, see in particular: Paolo Bagnoli, Piero Gobetti: cultura e politica in un liberale del Novecento (Florence: Passigli, 1984);Google Scholar

Bobbio, Italia fedele; Anna Maria Lumbelli, Piero Gobetti “Storico del presente” (Turin: Deputazione Subalpina di Storia Patria, 1967).Google Scholar

An extensive bibliography of the numerous studies on Gobetti can be found in Giancarlo Bergami, Guida bibliografica degli scritti su Piero Gobetti, 1918–1975 (Turin: Einaudi, 1981).Google Scholar

See, for example, Giuseppe Bedeschi, La fabbrica delle ideologie: Il pensiero politico nell’Italia del Novecento (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002), 142, 143.Google Scholar

Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).Google Scholar

Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 178–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Ibid., 182.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

For a classic statement, see Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. H. C. Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1991). My views have been influenced to some extent byGoogle Scholar

Chaïm Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).Google Scholar

Here, I draw upon Larry Seidentop, “Two Liberal Traditions,” in The Idea of Freedom, ed. Alan Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 153–74.Google Scholar

On this distinction between “negative” and “positive” freedom, see Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118–72. The distinction will be discussed in Chapter 7.Google Scholar

See Charles Taylor, “Kant’s Theory of Freedom,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 318–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

On the development of this European style of liberalism, including its Italian variant, see Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society: An Historical Argument (Cambridge: Polity, 1992).Google Scholar

For a discussion of the New Liberals, see Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978).Google Scholar

On Gobetti and the liberal-socialist tradition in Italy, see James Martin, “Italian Liberal Socialism: Anti-fascism and the Third Way,” Journal of Political Ideologies 7, no. 3 (2002), 333–50;CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Nadia Urbinati, “La tradizione politica italiana,” in Liberal-socialisti: II futuro di una tradizione, ed. Nadia Urbinati and Monique Canto-Sperber (Venice: Marsilio, 2004): 71–96.Google Scholar

For an important, contemporary example of this effort to critically reimagine liberty, see the work of Quentin Skinner: “A Third Concept of Liberty,” Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2002), 237–68. I return to Skinner’s work in Chapter 7.Google Scholar

See Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, ed. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill (New York and London: Guilford, 1999), 217–25. Bitzer’s work is, of course, controversial, and my reference to it here is merely to indicate the need to understand the wider context to which rhetorical interventions were responses.Google Scholar

On “metonymy,” see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1980), 35–40.Google Scholar

Norberto Bobbio, Saggi sulla scienza politica in Italia, 2nd ed. (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996), 222.Google Scholar