Abstract
Piero Gobetti has been described as “one of the most remarkable figures in twentieth-century Italian culture,” someone who can rightfully be understood as “a political thinker of classic stature.”1 Yet outside of his native Italy, Gobetti is virtually unknown. In America and the rest of Europe, precious little is written of him or of his ideas. Just who, then, was this figure and what accounts for such exuberant praise? A short summary might begin to clarify matters.
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Notes
Paolo Bagnoli, “Piero Gobetti and the Liberal Revolution in Italy,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (1997): 34, 37.
David D. Roberts, “Frustrated Liberals: De Ruggiero, Gobetti, and the Challenge of Socialism,” Canadian Journal of History 17 (1982): 62.
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. See
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/.
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);
Bobbio, Italia fedele; Anna Maria Lumbelli, Piero Gobetti “Storico del presente” (Turin: Deputazione Subalpina di Storia Patria, 1967).
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).
See, for example, Giuseppe Bedeschi, La fabbrica delle ideologie: Il pensiero politico nell’Italia del Novecento (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002), 142, 143.
Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).
Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 178–79.
Ibid., 182.
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 by
Chaïm Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).
Here, I draw upon Larry Seidentop, “Two Liberal Traditions,” in The Idea of Freedom, ed. Alan Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 153–74.
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.
See Charles Taylor, “Kant’s Theory of Freedom,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 318–37.
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).
For a discussion of the New Liberals, see Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978).
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;
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.
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.
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.
On “metonymy,” see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1980), 35–40.
Norberto Bobbio, Saggi sulla scienza politica in Italia, 2nd ed. (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996), 222.
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© 2008 James Martin
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Martin, J. (2008). Introduction. In: Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616868_1
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