Abstract
In this book I have aimed at demonstrating Giuseppe Mazzini’s influence on the origins of fascist ideology in Italy. The most disturbing question underlying this historical process lies in the fact that this was the final development of a political thought aimed at liberating Italy, spreading freedom, and creating a democratic republic. In the nineteenth century Mazzinianism was, indeed, an ideology, incarnated in a political movement, which successfully contributed to liberating men and inspiring their ethical lives.1 In the twentieth century, however, Mazzini’s ideas were subjected to different interpretations and applications, not entirely without analogies to Marx’s ideas, which the Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio, looking at the fate of communism in the last century, described as the “utopia capovolta” or overthrown utopia.2 In the twentieth century, as pointed out by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, it may be the fate of ideologies—given their nature as political weapons and not theoretical doctrines—to change, at least in part, their content as they come into contact with political life.3
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Notes
See the recent interpretation and anthology: A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations, ed. Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. For a broader picture see Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism, 1830–1920, ed. C. A. Bayly and Eugenio F. Biagini, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. On the role of Mazzini in the education to democracy in his own times, Arianna Arisi-Rota, I piccoli cospiratori. Politica ed emozioni nei primi mazziniani, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010.
Norberto Bobbio, “L’utopia capovolta,” La Stampa, June 9, 1989, collected in the volume by the same title, Bobbio, L’utopia capovolta, Turin: La Stampa, 1990.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), New York: Meridian Books, 1958, p. 159.
See most recently Mazzini e il Novecento, ed. Andrea Bocchi and Daniele Menozzi, Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2010.
For a recent assessment of the study of ideology see: The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, ed. Michael Freeden and Marc Stears, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 (in which Emilio Gentile refers to Mazzini as a precursor of “total ideologies,” although guaranteeing “individual liberty,” pp. 63–64).
Apart from Alberto M. Banti’s work, which I discuss in detail below, this literature includes: Silvana Patriarca, Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy, ed. Silavana Patriarca and Lucy Riall, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; Manlio Graziano, The Failure of Italian Nationhood: The Geopolitics of a Troubled Identity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 (orig. ed. Rome, 2007); Suzanne Stewart Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
See the influential Alberto M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento: Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita, Turin: Einaudi, 2000; this was followed by Banti’s Europe-wide exploration L’onore della nazione: Identità sessuali e nazionalismo in Europa dal XVIII secolo alla Grande guerra, Turin: Einaudi, 2005. Banti’s work has contributed to initiating a cultural turn in the study of Italian nationalism well represented in the collective volume he coedited with Paul Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia: Annali 22, Il Risorgimento, Turin: Einaudi, 2007.
Alberto M. Banti, Sublime madre nostra: La nazione italiana dal Risorgimento al fascismo, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2011.
Ibid., p. 201.
Ibid., pp. 160–161.
Ibid., p. 50.
Ibid., p. 60.
See Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, “Della Nazionalità come fondamento del Diritto delle Genti,” Inaugural Lecture at the University of Turin, January 22, 1851, in Mancini, Diritto internazionale: Prelezioni con un saggio sul Machiavelli, Naples: Marghieri, 1873, pp. 31–33. In these pages Mancini still considered “races” as “natural varieties of one unique and originary species” (emphasis in the original). He also insisted on the prevalence of the “conscience of Nationality” (ibid., pp. 35–37). I draw this quote from Simon Levis Sullam, “I critici e i nemici dell’emancipazione degli ebrei,” in Storia della Shoah in Italia: Vicende, memorie, rappresentazioni, ed. Marcello Flores, Simon Levis Sullam, Marie-Anne Matard Bonucci, and Enzo Traverso, vol. 1, Turin: UTET, 2010, p. 40.
Lucy Riall, “Martyr Cults in Nineteenth-Century Italy,” The Journal of Modern History, 82, 2, June 2010, p. 259. According to the reading of Riall and Patriarca, Banti himself follows in the wake of George L. Mosse by “conceptualiz[ing] nationalism in terms of a ‘political religion’” (see Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall, Introduction: Revisiting the Risorgimento, in The Risorgimento Revisited, p. 6).
Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796, London: Allen Lane, 2007, p. 130.
A. James Gregor, Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Emilio Gentile, Italiani senza padri: Intervista sul Risorgimento, ed. Simonetta Fiori, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2011, pp. 68, 50, and 32.
Angelo O. Olivetti, Il sindacalismo come filosofia e come politica: Lineamenti di sintesi universale, Milan: Alpes, 1925.
See, for example, Edoardo Malusardi, Elementi di storia del sindacalismo fascista, prefazione di Giuseppe Bottai, 3rd ed., Lanciano: Carabba, 1938.
Armando Lodolini, La repubblica italiana: Studi e vicende del mazzinianesimo contemporaneo, 1922–1924, Milan: Alpes, 1925 (“Biblioteca di coltura politica,” ed. Franco Ciarlantini). The volume collects documents and writings of the pro-fascist Unione Mazziniana.
Marco Aurelio Bocchiola, L’eredità di Giuseppe Mazzini, 2nd ed., Milan: Scuola di Mistica Fascista Italico Mussolini, 1933 (“Quaderni della Scuola di mistica fascista ‘Italico Mussolini’”).
This encounter was first described by Emilio Gentile, The Origins of Fascist Ideology, 1918–1925, trans. Robert L. Miller, New York: Enigma Books, 2005 (orig. ed. Bologna, 1996), pp. 281–293 in particular.
Alessandra Tarquini, Il Gentile dei fascisti: Gentiliani e antigentiliani nel regime fascista, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009.
Giuseppe Bottai, “Il pensiero e l’azione di Giuseppe Mazzini,” a speech given at Genoa on May 4, 1930, published in Giuseppe Bottai, Incontri, Milan: Mondadori, 1938 (a second, enlarged edition of the volume was published in 1943).
See Roberto Vivarelli, Il fallimento del liberalismo: Studi sulle origini del fascismo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1981, p. 137; Vivarelli, Storia delle origini del fascismo: L’Italia dalla grande guerra alla marcia su Roma, vol. II, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991, pp. 396–398. Vivarelli is followed by Giovanni Belardelli, Il Ventennio degli intellettuali: Cultura, politica, ideologia nell’Italia fascista, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2005, pp. 245–246 and 252–254.
As noticed above, reference to Mazzini is extremely limited in Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. David Maisel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994 (orig. ed. Paris, 1989), which also insists on the “gulf that divided Corradini from Mazzini” (p. 9), that is, nineteenth-century from twentieth-century Italian nationalisms. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986 (orig. ed. Paris, 1983) does not mention Mazzini.
Only the post-risorgimento “palingenetic climate” (with no mention of Mazzini) is of interest to Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 195–199.
A recent critique of Sternhell on Italian Fascism is David D. Roberts, “How Not to Think about Fascism and Ideology, Intellectuals Antecedents and Historical Meaning” in Id., Historicism and Fascism in Modern Italy, Toronto-Buffalo-London: University of Toronto, 2007, who incidentally also calls for a reconsideration of Fascism’s “serious reassessment of the legacy of Giuseppe Mazzini” (p. 197).
Silvio Trentin, Stato, nazione, federalismo, Milan: La Fiaccola, 1945, pp. 70–73. At the same time, like all antifascists (as we have seen), Trentin could claim their “spiritual relation”(“parentela spirituale”) to Mazzini, which he referred in particular to Carlo Rosselli after his violent death, see the article “L’ostacolo,” Giustizia e Libertà, July 23, 1937, in Trentin, Antifascismo e rivoluzione: Scritti e discorsi 1927–1944, ed. Giannantonio Paladini, Venice: Marsilio, 1985, p. 338.
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© 2015 Simon Levis Sullam
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Sullam, S.L. (2015). Afterword. In: Giuseppe Mazzini and the Origins of Fascism. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137514592_8
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