Abstract
Gobetti’s liberalism was a liberalism of conflict. The freedom he envisaged was a freedom to contest the meaning and practice of liberty itself. “The method of liberalism;” he said “consists in the recognition of the necessity of political struggle for the life of modern society.”1 It was this conflictual orientation, no doubt, that attracted intellectuals of various persuasions to his review,for it chimed with the prevailing atmosphere of ideological and political ferment that, in the crisis years after the First World War, appeared to promise the combined renewal and reunification of people and state.
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Notes
Gobetti, “Revisione liberale (Postilla),” La Rivoluzione Liberale (June 19, 1923) in
Scritti politici, ed. Paolo Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1960) (hereafter SP), 515.
However, Bobbio notes Gobetti’s “agonistic conception” of history in Saggi sulla scienza politica in Italia, 2nd ed. (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996), 228. Marco Gervasoni also notes, in passing, the similarity of Gobetti’s liberalism with the work of Chantal Mouffe, which I explore later in this chapter: see L’intelletuale come eroe. Piero Gobetti e le culture del Novecento (Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2000), 123, 141. See also Nadia Urbinati, “Introduction: Liberalism as a Theory of Conflict,” in On Liberal Revolution, ed. Nadia Urbinati (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000): xv–lvi.
For a cogent restatement of this view, see Norberto Bobbio, Liberalism and Democracy, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (London and New York: Verso, 1990).
Ibid., 22.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 34–35.
See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
For a discussion of these issues, in particular as they concern “communitarian” critiques of liberal individualism, see Shlomo Avineri and Avner de-Shalit, eds. Communitarianism and Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) and
Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).
My reasoning here follows the criticisms made by Chantal Mouffe. See The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 22–31.
For a critique of Western liberalism in this regard, see Anthony Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984).
See, in particular, Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993).
See, in addition to Mouffe’s work previously cited: William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002)
John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1995) and Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2000)
Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox; Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)
Sheldon S. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” Constellations 1, no. 1 (1994), 11–25; and
Quentin Skinner, “A Third Concept of Liberty,” Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2002): 237–68. Also, from a more analytical perspective, see
Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict (London: Duckworth, 1999).
See Friedrich Nietzsche, “Homer’s Contest,” in his On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Revised Student Edition, 2007), 174–81.
On the link between liberty and conflict, see Piero Meaglia, “Gobetti e il liberalismo. Sulle nozioni di libertà e di lotta,” Mezzosecolo: materiali di ricerca storica 4 (1980–82), 193–222.
See Gobetti, “La nostra cultura politica,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (March 8, 1923), SP, 456–76.
Gobetti, “Liberali e conservatori,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (March 26, 1922), SP, 277.
Gobetti, “Democrazia,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 13, 1924), SP, 677.
See Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1988).
See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 32.
See Chantal Mouffe, ed., The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London and New York: Verso, 1999).
For a discussion of conflict in Schmitt, see William Rasch, “Conflict as a Vocation: Carl Schmitt and the Possibility of Politics,” Theory, Culture & Society 17, no. 6 (2000), 1–32.
Piero to Ada in Gobetti and Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza. Lettere 1918–1926, ed. Ersilia A. Perona (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), 449.
Antonio Gramsci, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” (September–November 1926), in Gramsci: Pre-Prison Writings, ed. Richard Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 335.
For his classic statement on “positive” and “negative” liberty, see Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118–72.
See Charles Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?” in The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, ed. Alan Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 175–93.
This argument is pursued by Skinner in a number of works spanning several years, each with a different context in mind. See, inter alia, “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives,” in Philosophy in History, ed. J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 193–221; “The Paradoxes of Political Liberty,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Value 7 (1986): 225–50; Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and “A Third Concept of Liberty.”
Ibid., 256–61.
Gobetti, “Il liberalismo di L. Einaudi,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 23, 1922), SP, 331–32. On Gobetti’s conception of the state, see Chapter 4.
Gobetti, “Il liberalism e le masse [I],” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 10, 1923), SP, 477–78.
See Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 103–4.
Ibid., 67–69.
Gobetti, “Un conservatore galantuomo.” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 29, 1924), SP, 657.
See Gobetti, “Il liberalismo in Italia,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 15, 1923).
Meaglia, “Gobetti e il liberalismo,” 214.
Ibid., 219.
See Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: HarperPerennial, 1975).
Indeed, at one point, Gobetti claimed that for a liberal, the democratic state cannot be equated with an electoral system since a state is formed through an aristocracy derived from the dialectic of liberatory struggle in society. See Piero Gobetti, “Esperienze liberale [IV],” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 23, 1922), SP, 338–42.
See David Held’s critique in Models of Democracy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 194–96.
See C. B. Macpherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
Bobbio, Saggi sulla scienza politica in Italia, 230.
I have examined Gramsci’s “politics of consent” in Gramsci’s Political Analysis. A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1998), chap. 3.
Interestingly, Mouffe’s work aims to combine both a theory of democratic equality (conceptualized via a neo-Gramscian theory of hegemony) and a version of agonistic pluralism, which I have associated with Gobetti. Her important interpretation of Gramsci can be found in “Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci,” in Gramsci and Marxist Theory, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 168–204.
See David D. Roberts, “Frustrated Liberals: De Ruggiero, Gobetti, and the Challenge of Socialism,” Canadian Journal of History 17 (1982): 59–86.
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© 2008 James Martin
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Martin, J. (2008). Liberty and Conflict An “Agonistic” Liberalism. In: Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616868_8
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