Abstract
On the face of it, Gobetti’s project for a liberal revolution was not a success. Within only a few years of its enunciation, organized political opposition in Italy was outlawed, parliamentary democracy was replaced by a raft of repressive legislation, and political leaders such as Gramsci were arrested and imprisoned. The deaths of both Gobetti and Amendola in 1926 robbed the antifascist opposition of powerful, critical voices, and effective publicists. Rather than being roused to a liberal revolution, many Italians had instead succumbed, either by force or persuasion, to the authoritarian “revolution” offered by Mussolini.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
For comprehensive surveys of Gobetti’s posthumous intellectual legacy, see Paolo Bagnoli, “On the Fortune of Piero Gobetti in Italian Historiography,” The Journal of Italian History 2, no. 2 (1979), 293–335 and
Ersilia A. Perona, “Alle radici della fortuna di Piero Gobetti,” in Gobetti tra Riforma e rivoluzione, eds. Alberto Cabella and Oscar Mazzoleni (Milan: F. Angeli, 1999).
See Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valetino Gerratana, 4 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1975).
English translations of key selections are: Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quntin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971) and
Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Derek Boothman (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995). On Gramsci’s imprisonment and the conditions under which he wrote his Notebooks, see
Alistair Davidson, Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography (London: Merlin Press, 1977), 242–69.
For a fuller account of the content of Gramsci’s prison writings, see James Martin, Gramsci’s Political Analysis. A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1998), especially chaps. 2–4;
Richard Bellamy and Darrow Schecter, Gramsci and the Italian State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), and
Joseph Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981).
See Gramsci’s letter to the communist party leadership of February 9, 1924, Lettere 1908–1926, ed. Antonio A. Santucci (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), 223–38 and, in particular, “Un esame della situazione italiana” in
Gramsci, La costruzione del Partito comunista 1923–1926 (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), 113–24.
See “Alcuni temi della quistione meridionale” in ibid., 137–58. Below, I make use of the following translation: “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” (September–November 1926), in
Gramsci: Pre-Prison Writings, ed. Richard Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 313–37.
Gramsci, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” 334.
Ibid., 335.
Ibid., 336.
Ibid., 337. Gramsci’s continued interest in Gobetti is further evidenced by letters to party colleagues in 1924 from Vienna, where he had been posted. Gramsci asked that copies of La Rivoluzione Liberale be sent him and also commented positively on the merits of Gobetti’s analysis of fascism. See Gramsci, Lettere, 137–38, 162, 216, and 334.
For excellent discussions of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, see Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought, Bellamy and Schecter, Gramsci and the Italian State. See also the relevant articles in James Martin, ed., Antonio Gramsci: Critical Assessments of Political Philosophers (London: Routledge, 2002), particularly vol. 2, part 8.
Ibid., 1376–78.
Ibid., 937.
See ibid., 763–64, 1049–50, 2302–3.
See ibid., 1353 and 2023.
See ibid., 1815, 1975. See also his recollection of the exchange between Prezzolini and Gobetti on the “Society of Abstainers,” Gramsci, Quaderni, 2216–18.
For a discussion of the postwar “revisionist” interpretation of the Risorgimento as a rivoluzione mancata, see William A. Salomone, “The Risorgimento between Ideology and History: The Political Myth of rivoluzione mancata,” The American Historical Review 68, no. 1 (1962), 38–56. See also chaps.
1 and 6 of Lucy Riall, The Italian Risorgimento. State, Society and National Unification (London and NewYork: Routledge, 1994).
See Gobetti, “Il nostro protestantismo,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 17, 1925) in
Scritti politici, ed. Paolo Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1960) (hereafter SP), 823–26.
Ibid., 318. See also 515.
Ibid., 1683.
On the differences between Gramsci and Gobetti’s interpretation of the Risorgimento, see Richard Bellamy, “Two Views of Italy’s Failed Revolution,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 6, no. 2 (2001), 265–69.
See his analyses in Ibid., 2139–81.
On the thesis of Italy’s “backwardness” in Gobetti’s interpretation of fascism, see Marco Revelli, “Piero Gobetti e il fascismo. La teoria della ‘rivelazione,’” in Perché Gobetti. Giornata di studio su Piero Gobetti (Torino, 16 aprile 1991), ed. Cesare Pianciola and Pietro Polito (Turin: Piero Lacaita, 1993), 103–20.
Franco Sbarberi, L’utopia della libertà eguale. Il liberalismo sociale da Rosselli a Bobbio (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999), 47.
For an in-depth discussion, see Anne S. Sassoon, Gramsci’s Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Hutchinson Education, 1987).
See, for example, Stuart Hall’s “Gramsci and Us” in The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988): 161–73.
See, inter alia, the essays in Chantal Mouffe, Gramsci and Marxist Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979)
Massimo L. Salvadori, Gramsci e il problema storico della democrazia (Torino: G. Einaudi, 1970)
Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought, Sbarberi, Gramsci, un socialismo armonico (Milan: Angeli, 1986); and Bellamy and Schecter, Gramsci and the Italian State.
See Ibid., 303, 308. Gramsci’s essay on the “Southern Question” was published in Lo Stato operaio in 1930 and served as a justification for the communists’ appropriation of Gobetti. See Perona’s discussion in “Alle radici della fortuna di Piero Gobetti,” 135–39.
For an excellent account of Rosselli’s life and thought, see Stanislao Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Anti-fascist Exile (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999). In this chapter, I have drawn upon my own account of Rosselli in “Italian Liberal Socialism: Anti-fascism and the Third Way,” Journal of Political Ideologie 7, no. 3 (2002), 339–41.
See Carlo Rosselli, Liberal Socialism, trans. William McCuaig (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Ibid., 761.
Ibid., 78.
See Ibid., 53–54.
See Rosselli, “Non vinceremo in un giorno, ma vinceremo,” Giustizia e Libertà (n. 1, November 1929), in
Scritti dell’esilio. I “Giustizia e libertà” e la concentrazione antifascista (1929–1934), ed. Costanzo Casucci (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), 10–12; “Il nostro movimento e i partiti,” Giustizia e Libertà (n. 10, September 1930), in Scritti dell’esilio, 13–15.
Rosselli, “Agli operai,” Giustizia e Libertà (n. 24, March 1931), in Scritti dell’esilio, 26–32;
C. Rosselli, “Chiarimenti al programma,” Quaderni di “Giustizia e Libertà” (n. 1, January 1932), in Scritti dell’esilio, 35–49.
C. Rosselli, “Liberalismo rivoluzionario,” Quaderni di “Giustizia e Libertà” (n. 1, January 1932), in Scritti dell’esilio, 51.
Ibid.
Ibid., 52.
Ibid., 53–55.
C. Rosselli, “Risposta a Giorgio Amendola,” Quaderni di “Giustizia e Libertà” (n. 1, January 1932), in Scritti dell’esilio, 61. The controversy is discussed in Bagnoli, “On the Fortune of Piero Gobetti,” 302–5 and in Perona, “Alle radici della fortuna di Piero Gobetti,” 137–41.
Ibid., 63.
Ibid., 65.
For an outline of the unifying themes of “Azionismo,” see Giovanni De Luna, “L’Azionismo,” in La politica italiana. Dizionario critico 1945–95, ed. Gianfranco Pasquino (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1995), 165–80. For a historical account, see Claudio Novelli, Il Partito d’Azione e gli italiani (Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2000). The place of Gobetti amongst the azionisti is surveyed in Bagnoli, “On the Fortune of Piero Gobetti,” 305–8.
See his essays “Liberalsocialismo” (1942); “Orientamento per una nuova socialitá” (1943); and “Complessitá del liberalsocialismo” (1945) in Aldo Capitini, Liberalsocialismo (Rome: Edizioni e/o, 1996), 19–42, 43–50, and 59–66.
Guido Calogero, Difesa del liberalsocialismo ed altri saggi, ed. Michele Schiavone and Dino Cofrancesco (Milan: Marzorati, 1972), 199.
Ibid., 79.
Ibid., 69.
Calogero, Difesa del liberalsocialismo, 77.
Ibid., 226.
An argument made explicitly by Aldo Garosci in “Il passato nel presente. Eredità Gobettiana da respingere e da accettare,” Nuovi Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà 1 (1944): 78–85.
For a detailed account of Croce’s anti-fascism, see Fabio Fernando Rizi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).
See Ada Gobetti, Diario partigiano (Turin: Einaudi, 1996).
On the politics of Croce’s historicism, see chapter 5 of David D. Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
Croce, Politics and Morals (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946), 78, 80.
Ibid., 81. Croce and Einaudi’s positions are republished in Benedetto Croce and
Luigi Einaudi, Liberismo e liberalismo, ed. Paolo Solari (Milan-Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1957). Croce’s view of history was criticised by Gramsci for not recognizing moments of struggle and conflict. For a defense against
Gramsci, see Richard Bellamy, “A Crocean Critique of Gramsci on Historicism, Hegemony and Intellectuals,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 6, no. 2 (2001): 209–29.
On this shift and its continuity with his historicism, see Richard Bellamy, “Between Economic and Ethical Liberalism: Benedetto Croce and the Dilemmas of Liberal Politics,” History of the Human Sciences 4 (1991): 175–95; Norberto Bobbio, Politica e cultura, 2nd ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 2005).
On Croce’s concept of liberty and its influence on the anti-fascists, see David Ward, Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943–46: Benedetto Croce and the Liberals, Carlo Levi and the “Actionists” (Cranbury, NJ and London: Associated University Presses, 1996), 46–52. See also Bobbio, Politica e cultura, 90–93.
Ibid., 310.
On the formation of Italy’s “republic of parties” and the constraints its political system imposed on politics, see Pietro Scoppola, La Repubblica dei partiti. Evoluzione e crisi di un sistema politico 1945–96 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997).
For a fuller discussion of Bobbio’s life, see his autobiography, A Political Life, ed. Alberto Papuzzi (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).
Illuminating assessments can be found in Richard Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory. Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 141–56;
Reset and Corrado Ocone, eds., Bobbio ad uso di amici e nemici (Venice: Marsilio, 2003);
Perry Anderson, “The Affinities of Norberto Bobbio,” New Left Review 170 (1988): 3–36; Sbarberi, L’utopia della liberta eguale, 162–213.
Ibid., 37.
See “Politica culturale e politica della cultura,” in ibid., 18–30.
Ibid., 23.
See Norberto Bobbio, Which Socialism? Marxism, Socialism and Democracy, ed. Richard Bellamy (Cambridge: Polity, 1986).
This critical relationship to the Left underlay Bobbio’s own widely read interpretation of Gramsci in the late 1960s. See his “Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society” in Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory. Bobbio’s various essays on Gramsci are collected in Saggi su Gramsci (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1990).
See Norberto Bobbio, Liberalism and Democracy, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (London and New York: Verso, 1990).
On Bobbio’s interpretation of Gobetti, see Bagnoli, “On the Fortune of Piero Gobetti,” 328–35. Bobbio’s reflections on Gobetti and his influence are to be found in Norberto Bobbio, Italia fedele. Il mondo di Gobetti (Florence: Passigli, 1986).
Norberto Bobbio, Saggi sulla scienza politica in Italia, 2nd ed. (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996), 229–30.
Copyright information
© 2008 James Martin
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Martin, J. (2008). Politicizing Liberalism Gobetti’s Italian Legacy. In: Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616868_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616868_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37105-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-61686-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)