02/2024 – Democrazia, riformismo, Europa nell’opera di Gaetano Salvemini

Abstracts

Alessandro Campi, “Una esecuzione memorabile”: The Death of Giovanni Gentile Between History and Memory

The killing of Giovanni Gentile—eighty years after the episode—continues to raise doubts and discussions. The literature addressing this event, emblematic of the civil war fought in Italy in the years 1943-44, has focused heavily on the theme of the perpetrators and the instigators. Very different and multiple responsibilities have been suggested, to the point of transforming that assassination into one of the many “mysteries” that have marked the history of contemporary Italy. The text invites us to approach the violent death of the philosopher from a different perspective, which could be defined as “meta-historical”. What was the political-symbolic significance of that execution? In what way did it mark Italian history and the national public memory? In what sense, borrowing a phrase from the Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli, can it be considered “a memorable execution”?

Keywords: Giovanni Gentile, Fascism, Civil War, Machiavelli

 

Lorenzo Serra, Between Historical Israel and Poetic Israel: Reflections on Jewish Consciousness Based on Vladimir Jankélévitch

This essay builds together a set of texts by the French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch dedicated to the Jewish question. They represent a crucial point of the French philosopher’s work because, through them, some decisive nodes of his research are developed with more precision. We will focus on some categories marking all of his production: longing, transcendence, messianism, relationship between life and forms. These concepts are now specifically declined in what he defines as “Jewish conscience”. The purpose of our essay is therefore to reconstruct this fundamental part of Jankélévitch’s thought, with the aim of examining some of the central concepts of Judaism: the relationship between a historical Israel and a poetic Israel, the complex question concerning the birth of the State of Israel, the relationship between communism, messianism and Judaism and, finally, how, even today, the Jewish conscience could contribute to the construction of new political constellations, if it avoided the danger, still present today, of complete absorption of that poetic dimension within a monolithic historical Israel.

Keywords: Vladimir Jankélévitch, State of Israel, Judaism, Messianism

 

Riccardo Saccenti, Magnati e popolani. Between Non-Philosophy, Historiography, and Politics

Magnati e popolani is the first major research work that Salvemini produced in his scholarly career. Making use of a combination of philological accuracy, rigorous historical analysis, and careful reading of the archival documents, Salvemini offered a crucial contribution to the study of medieval communal civilization. The contribution examines how Salvemini, in this enquiry on medieval Florence, refined his methodology of historical analysis. In fact, he made use of the historical materialism learned from Antonio Labriola and of the Marxist economic analysis founded in Loria. Moreover, Salvemini took part in the debate on the nature of historical knowledge that took place between the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, involving Benedetto Croce as well as Salvemini’s master Pasquale Villari. It emerges how Magnati e popolani is the very first occasion for the implementation of both a method of historical investigation and an understanding of history as a discipline.

Keywords: Gaetano Salvemini, Middle Age, Florence, Marxism

 

Cristina Cassina, Salvemini and the Mirror of the French Revolution

The article focuses on the volume The French Revolution, first published in 1905 and reprinted on several occasions until the final edition in 1954. After outlining the historical context and the cultural and academic stresses that led Salvemini to grapple with one of the major historiographical problems of his time, it enters the folds of what the author himself called «the best I wrote». Analyzing the particular periodization (1788-1792), the lunges into economic history, the prominence given to certain figures in spite of others, the historiographical theme of the French Revolution ends up reflecting much of the historical and political thought of its young author.

Keywords: Gaetano Salvemini, French Revolution, History, Democracy

 

Paolo Soddu, Salvemini and Reformism

The essay traces Salvemini’s approach to the “reform method” throughout the entire span of his intellectual biography and, therefore, coinciding with his political apprenticeship in the ranks of the Socialist Party in pre-fascist Italy, then during his decades of exile in America and finally during the first decade of democratic construction of republican Italy. In Salvemini’s reformism, gradual and partial achievements were never divorced from a complex vision of Italian political and social reality and long-term goals.

Keywords: Gaetano Salvemini, Reformism, Socialism, Democracy

 

Alberto Guasco, Salvemini, Catholicism, and the Church: Reading Pathways Between Fascism and Democracy

The article focuses on the relationship between Gaetano Salvemini and “Catholicism”, one of the themes that most interested him throughout the eighty-four years of his life. According to this perspective, the text proposes a brief review of his thought according to the three different seasons of unified Italian history: 1) Liberal Age: his attention to the neo-Guelph movement at the time of Leo XIII’s papacy and Giuseppe Toniolo’s social teaching. 2) Fascist Age: his analysis of the agreements between fascism and the Catholic Church, radicalizing his early non anticlerical conviction. 3) Republican Age: impatience with the clerical climate that characterized the first two decades of the new Italian Republic, in Salvemini’s view a “clerocracy” or even a «totalitarian clerical regime».

Keywords: Gaetano Salvemini, Catholicism, Catholic Church, Fascism

 

Andrea Becherucci, Salvemini’s Europeanism

The main purpose of the article is to give an account of Salvemini’s lifelong interest in federalism at both the domestic and supranational levels. If, in the aftermath of Carlo Cattaneo’s “discovery”, Salvemini’s interest in the former, especially in its regionalist variant, manifested itself as early as the end of the 19th century, that for the latter had a slower gestation, thanks above all to the mediation of Ernesto Rossi.

Keywords: Gaetano Salvemini, Europeanism, Federalism, Nation

 

Giuseppe Sciara, Salvemini and Liberalism: An Initial Survey

Although Gaetano Salvemini defines his political and ideological horizon by resorting to the triad liberalism-democracy-socialism, his contribution to liberalism has never been systematically investigated by scholars. This paper proposes an initial survey of this issue, clarifying the theoretical and historical assumptions of his definition of democracy as an ‘extension’ of liberalism, understood in its institutional sense. His conception of individual and political rights, his idea of a constitution and the importance he assigned to civil society and associationism show the strong influence on his thought of English liberalism and in particular of John Stuart Mill. At the same time, his denunciation of the abstract and conservative character of Italian liberal tradition places him at the antipodes of Croce’s idealistic liberalism.

Keywords: Gaetano Salvemini, Liberalism, Democracy, John Stuart Mill

 

Federico Trocini, Salvemini and the Democratic Reconfiguration of Italian Elitism

If some authoritative interpreters have excluded Salvemini from the tradition of Italian elitism, others have not hesitated to emphasise his role as a true precursor of democratic elitism. Still others have highlighted the contrast between the youthful season of his intellectual biography, influenced by Marxist classism, and the mature one, more sensitive to the issues of the elitist paradigm. The main purpose of the essay is, first of all, to give an account of Salvemini’s relations with the three major Italian elitists of the first half of the century – that is, Mosca, Pareto and Michels – and then to verify whether and to what extent elitism marked his political thought.

Keywords: Gaetano Salvemini, Elitism, Liberalism, Democracy