Piero Gobetti's New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing 9781442687080

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgment
1. Piero Gobetti: Turin and Beyond
2. Fascism and Antifascism
3. Of Liberals and Liberalism
4. Writing, Creativity, and the Intellectual
5. Gobetti after Gobetti
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

PIERO GOBETTI’S NEW WORLD: ANTIFASCISM, LIBERALISM, WRITING

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D AV I D WA R D

Piero Gobetti’s New World Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010

Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4149-5

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks. Toronto Italian Studies Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Ward, David, 1953– Piero Gobetti’s new world : antifascism, liberalism, writing / David Ward. (Toronto Italian studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4149-5 1. Gobetti, Piero, 1901–1926 – Political and social views. 2. Intellectual freedom – Italy – History – 20th century. 3. Anti-fascist movements – Italy – History – 20th century. 4. Liberalism – Italy – History – 20th century. 5. Fascism and culture – Italy – History – 20th century. 6. Politics and culture – Italy – History – 20th century. I. Title. II. Title: New world. III. Series: Toronto Italian studies DG575.G6W27 2010

945.091092

C2009-907067-7

This book has been published with the assistance of a grant from the Faculty Awards Committee, Wellesley College. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

In memory of my mother, Phyllis

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Contents

Acknowledgment

ix

1 Piero Gobetti: Turin and Beyond 2 Fascism and Antifascism 3 Of Liberals and Liberalism

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29 69

4 Writing, Creativity, and the Intellectual 5 Gobetti after Gobetti Notes

169

Bibliography Index

202

193

157

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Acknowledgments

This book on the thought and writings of Piero Gobetti has been a long time in the making. I began my initial research and writing in the late 1990s and early years of the new century, helped by Wellesley College’s generous leave policy, a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Grant I was fortunate enough to be awarded, and a summer as a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. In subsequent years, a number of other projects that bore on Italian antifascist culture forced me to put aside work on Gobetti. Nevertheless, parts of these other studies have found their way into the present volume. I am happy to thank and acknowledge Cambridge University Press for allowing me to reproduce a few pages that appeared originally in the chapter ‘Primo Levi’s Turin,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), edited by Robert S.C. Gordon; the Rizzoli Publishing Company for extracts from my Carlo Levi: Gli italiani e la paura della libertà (Milan: Rizzoli, 2002); to the review Nuova prosa for extracts from the article ‘L’otto settembre e dintorni ne I piccoli maestri di Luigi Meneghello,’ originally published in 2006 in the special number entitled Prospettive italiane. Prosa e critica degli italianisti del Nord America; and to Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli, the editors of Athanor who in 2008 published my ‘Il passato del Piemonte nel presente di Piero Gobetti,’ some pages of which appear in the present volume. Over the years, I have delivered papers on Gobetti at numerous conferences and scholarly venues. I thank the organizers of the 1997 Los Angeles meeting of Associazione internazionale per lo studio della lingua e della letteratura italiane (AISLLI); of the 2000 New York meeting of the American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS); of the 2000

x Acknowledgments

Boston meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Italian (AATI); and of the 2001 Philadelphia meeting of the AAIS for offering me the chance to read papers on Gobetti. I am also grateful to Eugenia Paulicelli at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York; to Zygmunt Baranski, Department of Medieval and Modern Languages at Cambridge University; to Patrizia Dogliani, formerly at the Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori, University of Bologna, Forlì campus; and to Francesca Billiani, School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, Manchester University for invitations to lecture on Gobetti. In addition, thanks go to my colleagues in the Department of Italian Studies at Wellesley College: Rachel Jacoff, Flavia Laviosa, Sergio Parussa, and Cristina Pausini. I am, furthermore, indebted to the comments, corrections, suggestions, and objections made by the University of Toronto’s three anonymous readers. Their thoughtfulness has gone a long way to improving this study. It goes without saying that any remaining inaccuracies are entirely my responsibility. For the transparent manner in which all the business involved in publishing a book was conducted, my very sincere thanks go to Ron Schoeffel, acquisitions editor at the University of Toronto Press. Many thanks also go to Gabriela Cavaglià of the Centro Studi Piero Gobetti in Turin for her invaluable assistance, on both the technical and legal sides, with the three images included in this book. My heartfelt thanks go to my wife Eugenia Paulicelli and daughter Anna for their help, patience, and steadfastness in all the years this book has taken before coming to fruition. It is to Eugenia and Anna that this book on antifascism is dedicated.

PIERO GOBETTI’S NEW WORLD: ANTIFASCISM, LIBERALISM, WRITING

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1 Piero Gobetti: Turin and Beyond

The narrative of Piero Gobetti’s life is that of a young man who was both ordinary and extraordinary. There is, for example, nothing special at all about his family background. Part of the general wave of urbanization that saw many people of peasant origin leave their native villages and small towns for the big city, Piero’s parents settled in Turin sometime in the 1890s. In search of a better life and social respectability, Giovanni and Angela set up a small grocery shop in via XX settembre. Born on 19 June 1901, Piero was their only child. His parents dedicated themselves body and soul to their small business, working eighteenhour days and, as Piero tells us, desiring for their son what they had not been fortunate enough to enjoy for themselves: an education.1 It became immediately clear, as Piero made his way through the Italian school system from the Scuola elementare Pacchiotti, to the Ginnasio Balbo and on to the Liceo Gioberti, that he was an extraordinarily gifted child. It is, perhaps, not surprising that he did not have the happiest of times at school. His precocious intelligence isolated him from his class mates, with the result that his real education took place outside the classroom through his own reading or in the company of the few kindred spirits he found. Judging by a few autobiographical pages he wrote some years later, Piero did not have a particularly high opinion of the Italian school system. He called it, in fact, ‘a system of constriction that takes the form of an unfruitful competition to measure the patience of teachers and students.’2 At the Liceo Gioberti, however, he found a more welcoming environment, thanks to two teachers, both of whom had a strong influence on him: one, a professor of literature, Umberto Cosmo; the other of philosophy, Balbino Giuliano. The latter was particularly important as he gave Piero his first introduction

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into the world and the activity that were to be central for the rest of his life: that of cultural reviews and the struggle for political renewal. Spearheaded by reviews such as L’Unità, edited by Gaetano Salvemini, and the other Florence-based cultural reviews of the time, such as La Voce, edited by Giuseppe Prezzolini, the multifaceted, often contradictory movement for cultural and political renewal into which Gobetti stepped was, in the first decades of the twentieth century, at the forefront of Italian intellectual life. Turin Gobetti had a love/hate relationship with the city of his birth. He was immensely proud of Turin’s and Piedmont’s intellectual tradition, and equally proud to feel he was part of its lineage. But he was also extremely disappointed by the awful state into which cultural life in his Turin had fallen. Gobetti, then, is both a product of and a reaction to the political culture of Turin and Piedmont, a city and a region that in the latter decades of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries was the site of a series of tumultuous changes. At the turn of the twentieth century Turin was a city that was on the rebound after a period of crisis that had followed a period of grandeur. The city had been unified Italy’s first capital, and not without reason. Turin itself, and the Piedmont region with it, were by far the most modern and enlightened of the states that made up pre-Risorgimento Italy; the city and region boasted an entrepreneurial middle class and a forward-looking ruling class; the city was on a par, or close to it, with the nation that was its northerly neighbour and with which it enjoyed close contact: France. It had been the Piedmont ruling class that had spearheaded a unification process that otherwise, had it not been for the close diplomatic contacts it had established with France, may not have taken place at all. Last, but by no means least, Turin was the seat of the Italian royal family, the House of Savoy, headed by the new king of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele II. Yet, compared with the overriding reason why the choice fell to Turin, all of the above pales into relative insignificance. Italy’s ‘natural’ capital was not Turin, nor had it ever been, but Rome. Indeed, the eternal city had for centuries been at the very centre of a long intellectual debate, in which almost every Italian intellectual worth his or her salt took part, about Italy’s always desired, seemingly endlessly deferred national liberation and unification. From Dante, onto Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Leopardi, to name but the most

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well-known, it was Rome, and only Rome, that counted. Not by chance, then, Garibaldi’s famous slogan and rallying cry had been ‘Roma o morte!’ not Turin or death! The problem was that in 1860 Rome, still under French control, was not yet part of the Italy that had been liberated and unified, nor were there any immediate prospects of the city joining the rest of the nation. Turin was crowned capital by default, a temporary honour bestowed on the city to be held until the rightful heir to the crown came of age. That Turin’s status as capital was only temporary was no secret to the guardians of the city. Some had even begun to make plans for what would be the city’s post-capital future. Still, in the early 1860s the day in which Rome would come to occupy its rightful place seemed relatively far off. The city was thus taken by surprise when in September 1864 the outcome of the secret negotiations that had been taking place between the French and Italian governments, which ended with the decision to transfer the capital from Turin, became apparent. The deal the two governments worked out stated that in return for the agreement Italy would transfer the nation’s capital and both it and the Papal State would desist from attacking each other, and France would withdraw its troops from Rome within two years. The choice of new capital was left, according to the treaty, to the Italian government, but that turned out not to be a difficult decision. On 18 September, only three days after the signing of the secret agreement in Paris, Florence was designated capital-elect. Florence, like Turin, could also make strong claims to be Italy’s capital. If from a political standpoint Turin had all the right credentials, from a cultural standpoint Florence was unassailable: it had been the heart of the Renaissance; it had produced the great names of Italian literature and art; it had given Italy its national language (whereas in Turin it was as common to hear French spoken as Italian). On a more practical level, Florence could also more easily be defended than Turin from attacks by Austria. But there was one other important card Florence could play: namely, that of not being Turin. In fact, even in the early days of unification a sense of resentment had developed about the hegemony Piedmont was exercising over the rest of Italy. Why, asked Alessandro Manzoni, who had rewritten in Tuscan his national novel I promessi sposi, did the Piedmontese want the king of Italy to place the wedding ring on one of his bride’s toes?3 Although both governments accepted the terms of the agreement, and the capital was transferred, the deal was flawed by a deep misunderstanding. If for France Italy’s acceptance of the agreement was

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tantamount to relinquishing hopes that Rome would ever be capital, for Italy the move to Florence was always another stopgap, a temporary move that brought the nation a few steps closer to its natural capital. It can easily be imagined how the people of Turin reacted to the news of the ‘decapitalization.’ The city felt cheated and humiliated by the nation’s fledgling government. If Florence was only to be another temporary home, as everyone knew would be the case, what was the point of moving there? Riots broke out, an occurrence that was comparatively rare in the city, and demonstrators were killed; a duel was fought between Francesco Domenico Botto, editor of the newspaper Gazzetta di Torino, and Giovanni Bottero, editor of Gazzetta del popolo, the former in favour of the move, the latter opposed.4 The cost to Turin in financial terms was enormous, but nothing when compared with the loss of prestige. The city’s great fear was that it would be reduced to a monument that stood for a now past period in Italian national life, useful and necessary then, irrelevant today in the life of the new Italy. In its heyday, Turin’s population had risen from its 1861 figure of 204,000 to 220,000 when it became the capital. But in the immediate aftermath of what became known as the lacerante sottrazione, Turin went though a period of crisis, its population dropping to 191,500 in 1868. Still, by 1892 the loss experienced in the mid-1860s had been more than compensated, the inhabitants of Turin now numbering 329,132, a sure sign that the city had emerged from the initial crisis. Turin’s regained health did not come about by chance. Rather, it was the result of the city guardians’ understanding that something needed to be done if Turin was to have a post-capital future. The ambitious policy that the city adopted operated principally in the realm of the symbolic, seeking to create a new public consciousness of what Turin stood for in the post-capital years and forge a new identity for the city that would ensure its relevance in the Italy of the 1880s. If Turin could no longer be capital of the nation, it was vital that it be something more, indeed a great deal more, than a mere museum. Yet, it was with a museum that one of the most important steps in the work of persuasion and creation of a new public consciousness and identity was taken: namely, the Museo del Risorgimento, which the city planned in honour of the passing of Vittorio Emanuele II in 1878. This, however, was a museum with an agenda. It sought, on the one hand, to offer a new interpretation of the city’s recent past, claiming in the strongest of terms that Turin was unified Italy’s spiritual capital (if not its political one) and that all the good that had come of the Risorgimen-

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to – the struggle for national liberation, unity, patriotism, sacrifice – had its roots in Turin and Piedmont; on the other, the museum, which was housed in the then brand new Mole Antonelliana, originally conceived as a temple for Turin’s Jewish community, offered a picture of a modern, industrial, forward-looking city moving into the future propelled by its illustrious past. In the case of the museum, the exposition that was held in the Mole in 1884 and the volume Torino, to which I will now turn, image came before fact.5 None of the above offered pictures of a Turin that existed in reality; all of them performed, as it were, an ideal, and much desired Turin identity. But it was on the model of this desired identity that an actual local identity was built. The suspicion that the Turin described in the Torino volume bore little semblance to the actual city is betrayed by the hagiographic tone of the descriptions of the city itself and its history that the two editors, two local intellectuals Edmondo De Amicis and Vittorio Bersezio, offer in the volume’s first two chapters. Though no longer the nation’s political capital, Turin was without doubt its spiritual home, the ‘Mecca of Italy,’ as Roberto Sacchetti argues in his contribution.6 But it was also, in the words of Bersezio that summed up the new Turin in the making, the city that ‘thinks and works.’7 As the museum and Esposizione had done previously, the volume arrogated to Turin everything positive that the Risorgimento stood for, marrying that with a push towards modernity and the industrial age: ‘Industry is the poetry of work,’ for example, are the opening words of Carlo Anfosso’s chapter ‘Torino industriale.’8 Although largely fictional, insofar as the city thus described did not exist, the picture of a future Turin launched by the ideological manifesto that was Torino was not entirely without foundation. The idea of a city whose citizens’ feet were firmly on the ground and whose academic institutions abandoned their ivory towers to descend into the practicalities of the everyday life of industry and agriculture chimed very well with the long-established self-image that the citizens of Turin had given themselves in the figure of Gianduia. Originally a puppet created in the eighteenth century, Gianduia became the mask that was seen to exemplify the Turin and Piedmont character: sensible, serious, hard-working, a family man devoted to his wife Giacometta, measured (he enjoys a glass of wine and the chocolate that was named after him, but neither eats nor drinks himself into oblivion), straightforward, not given to flights of fancy. Serio is perhaps the Italian word that best describes him. This context, partly inherited, partly created, made Turin a perfect

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fertile breeding ground for the then ground-breaking work in criminal anthropology by positivist thinkers such as Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Ferri who had made Turin their centre of intellectual operations.9 Lombroso and his circle, in fact, became very much the epicentre of intellectual life in the city. His charismatic personality drew large numbers of people to his lectures, and his Sunday salon, held in his home on the via Legnano, was a meeting place for the Turin intelligentsia. Lombroso’s group of positivist intellectuals were forward-looking and socially committed. Although they called themselves socialist, what they espoused was a socialism that bore heavily on the principles of Darwin’s theory of evolution and on the belief that the discoveries of science would usher in a better, fairer world where social injustice would be overcome. In marked contrast to the socialism that would emerge from Turin in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, theirs was a socialism bereft of any class antagonism and with little or no mention of Marx. Indeed, one could surmise that the theories that Piero Gobetti and Antonio Gramsci were to elaborate a generation later, where it is the friction between classes that sparks change, were a polemical response to what became known, a little maliciously, as Lombroso and his ilk’s ‘socialism of the professors.’ A paternalistic elite that led from above, the Turin group of positivists believed that through education and benevolence the worst ills of industrial society would be eliminated. Far from being a socialism of revolution, this was a socialism of reconciliation, compromise, and a utopian vision of a society without divisions, whether of class or region. Although the limits of such a reformist and gradualist politics are plain to see (and Gobetti and Gramsci certainly saw them), it would be unwise to gloss over the beneficial practical effects that the Turin positivists’ genuine commitment to the betterment of social life brought. It was thanks to their efforts, in fact, that Turin enjoyed high levels of public health, hygiene, and safety in the workplace. No text illustrates better the strengths and weaknesses of the positivists’ socialism than De Amicis’ Cuore, a book that was to become a staple on the curriculum of Italian schools for many a generation. Published in 1886, telling in diary format the story of a year in the life of a third-year elementary school class in Turin, Cuore was an immediate success, becoming Italy’s first literary best-seller.10 The book paints a picture of a utopia well-meant where all social tensions dissolve thanks to the good will and magnanimity of individuals. If society works, says De Amicis, it is because good-hearted people make it work. The text, in

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fact, responds to much the same logic of wish fulfilment as the Torino volume mentioned earlier, offering its readers an image of the organic society they would like to see rather then the one they actually saw. In Cuore, sources of tension are defused by means of a handshake or a hug, as all parties involved realize that the greater good of the community and of the still infant nation is best served by being responsible, generous, open-minded, and fair. Respect for the institutions of family, monarchy, and school is paramount, as is love of country and gratitude for those who created it. It is, for example, the bourgeois Sig. Nobis who gives the class its most important lesson of the year when he proudly shakes the hand of Sig. Betti, a humble coalman, whose son had been insulted by Nobis’ son. Vignettes like this argue for an inclusiveness that gives to each and all a role, whether humble or mighty, in a utopian organic society where everyone knows his or her rightful place and whose unity transcends and obliterates any differences of class, status, and region. But through the figure of another boy in the school, Franti, the incorrigible child who has no place in the micro-community that is being formed and who causes his mother the utmost anguish (‘You are killing your mother,’ the headmaster tells him, in response to which Franti smiles), De Amicis also hints at the unavoidable fact that there are some people one can want neither to hug nor to shake hands with. It is here that we encounter the less attractive side of positivist science and especially the area of it that made Lombroso’s name, criminal anthropology. Although Cuore does not give us any precise details about him (apart from the fact that he has a low forehead), it is no stretch of the imagination to see Franti as a member of the category of born criminals elaborated by Lombroso. These are the members of the community who have a biologically determined propensity for crime and antisocial behaviour that can be predicted in advance by measuring the dimensions of individuals’ craniums: beyond a certain measure they were certain criminals; within it, likely to be upstanding members of the community. According to Lombroso, there are two types of criminal: those who are pushed by circumstance and social and economic injustice into the ways of crime and those who are born criminals (on the basis of the size of their cranium). For the former, a soft approach is warranted that aims at reform and the recovery of the lost soul within the embrace of the community; for the latter, there is no hope, and so they must be separated from the community lest – and before – they do it harm. Such born criminals are criminals even before they have

10 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

committed a crime, as there is no escaping their biological destiny. Although Lombroso’s theories have now been thoroughly discredited on both scientific and ethical grounds, the impact he had on Turin (as well as on the nation as a whole, not to mention abroad) in the final decades of the nineteenth century was immense. In the context of a newly formed and still very fragile nation, then facing an uprising led by brigands in the south, Lombroso’s theories had a reassuring attraction insofar as potential troublemakers – or those his theories created as such – could be identified and isolated, using science as a pretext. Lombroso’s criminal anthropology, then, was a means of keeping society safe by removing from sight those who, it was feared, might tear it apart. The fact that Lombroso also maintained that southerners (not to mention women) were born inferior also helped to make sense of a disorderly south and offer some justification for the violent treatment meted out to brigands.11 Turin in the final years of the nineteenth century was one of Europe’s most flourishing cities with a vibrant social life and a growing business climate. The capital of the Italian fashion and cinema industries, Turin was also home to a small but destined to grow car factory, FIAT (Fabbrica italiana automobili Torino), which was founded in 1899. Yet, despite these achievements successive generations looked back with some disdain on this period of Turin’s life. The sense of malaise was not confined to Turin, but was perceived by a growing number of young and not so young intellectuals all over Italy. What brought together a band of men and women of varying ideological persuasions was a common project that was driven by the conviction that cultural renewal was a necessary and vital first step towards political change. Positivism came out of this reassessment of the cultural state of Italy in a particularly bad way. The slipshod manner of Lombroso’s research and its nature as self-fulfilling prophecy were fully exposed, as was the tendency of the positivist method to belittle the powers of human agency. If our future was, to a great extent, already mapped out or determined, biologically or otherwise, what role did that leave for creativity, innovation, agency, novelty? If poetry was the creation of that which did not yet exist, the saying of something for the first time, then what role did poetry have in this dull, flat age of prose? Looking back on the Lombroso years, the antifascist philosopher Zino Zini, a long-time resident of Turin, spoke of a city where ‘nothing is spontaneous, little is modern.’ This, he went on, is a city that ‘leaned more towards obedience than innovation, and is not curious or sociable at all.’ Recalling the days he attended Lom-

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broso’s lectures, the man he now called the ‘genial Lilliputian,’ Zini describes a performance situated halfway between science and cabaret, between ‘prodigio e ciurmeria’ (wonder and swindle), a smoke and mirrors show more at home in the theatre than in the laboratory.12 The waning of the primacy that positivism had enjoyed in the final twenty years of the nineteenth century was due to a number of factors, but two in particular: first, the optimistic conviction that society would gradually and inevitably develop along predictable scientific lines with a minimum of social friction was questioned by the emergence of the working-class masses, for whom progress through class struggle rather than gradual evolution was paramount; and second, the growing apprehension of many Italian intellectuals that positivism had ushered in a materialist and bourgeois culture that ran counter to the spiritual mission to which the Italian nation had been called. It was largely his apprehension of the limits of positivism, the philosophy on which the resurgent new Turin was based, that caused Gobetti to seek alternatives. If positivist materialism had eclipsed spirit, now was the time for Italy to set the balance right and jettison its unfortunate and damaging dalliance with positivism and embrace idealism, and with it the primacy it gave to spirit and mind over matter. Indeed, Gobetti did not agree at all that the Turin of the professors had inaugurated a new age. As he wrote in October 1918 to Lionello Fiumi, the birth of Gobetti’s first cultural review Energie nove (EN) is to be seen as a sign of an awakening in a city that is ‘dead.’13 ‘Asphyxiating’ is another of the terms Gobetti used, on a number of occasions, to describe his city.14 Indeed, it was to the task of breathing new life into his city that Gobetti’s first venture into the world of public debate – EN – was dedicated. After two years of activity, Gobetti was able to say, a little hyperbolically (and presumptuously), that now ‘in Turin there are some buds, the beginning of a cultural awakening, the like of which has not been seen for some time.’15 Although more politically minded than its literary counterparts in Florence, Gobetti’s Energie nove, as well as another Turin-based review, in which Gramsci was involved, and that also had the word ‘new’ in its title – L’Ordine nuovo – marked a similar radical departure from the kind of socialism that had been practised by the Lombroso school of professors. Lurking behind the positivists’ benevolence towards the working class was the fear that a fully emancipated proletariat would usher in an age of revolution rather than one of gradual, relatively painless reform. To guard against such an eventuality the best course of

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action was to domesticate and appease the masses. This was the last thing Gobetti and Gramsci wanted to do. They both had realized that the working class was the new protagonist on the social scene and in no city better than Turin, with its factories, entrepreneurs, and industrial base and culture, could its dynamic potential come to the fore. But Turin was far from being the only Italian city where debate on cultural and political renewal was the order of the day. Florence, with its own cultural reviews, and Naples, the home base of Benedetto Croce, were also in the vanguard of the anti-positivist, idealist new wave that Gobetti enthusiastically joined. A New Italy The intellectual, cultural, and political climate of the Italy of these decades betrayed all the tension and frustration that came with the beginnings of a new mass society. Many of the intellectuals who were to gain prominence at the outset of the twentieth century – the Florence-based Giuseppe Prezzolini and Giovanni Papini, who co-founded the review Leonardo with Prezzolini, as well as Benito Mussolini – were part of what has been called the ‘generation of the 80s,’ meaning those born in the penultimate decade of the nineteenth century.16 The Italy in which they grew up and spent their formative years was far more urbanized and educated, far less illiterate and, as a consequence, far more ambitious than its precursors. What characterized them most clearly was a sense of frustration and impatience with the world and the nation they saw around them and a desire for change, for renewal. In artistic terms, this is the time of avant-gardes, movements like futurism, expressionism, and surrealism, a time of concerted efforts to break with tradition, and break with it in sometimes violent ways. The sense of frustration was an echo of a more generalized malady that was felt by the newly formed and still forming lower middle class, a relative newcomer on the Italian social scene. Products of Italy’s process of modernization, these were men and women who found employment in the low-level intellectual jobs that an ever more modern society had created in the state bureaucracy, in offices, in schools, and in the emerging world of mass media, especially journalism and publishing companies. This was a class of people who had, as it were, fallen through the cracks of the Italian political system and who felt unrepresented and misunderstood by the two dominant political forces of the day, on the one hand, the conservative Italian Liberal Party, and on the

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other, the Italian Socialist Party. Finding no stable political home, and drifting in a no man’s land, the piccola borghesia were attracted to the extremes of the political spectrum, either tending towards the reactionary right or the revolutionary left. Indeed, La Voce, the most prominent review of the early years of the twentieth century in Italy, set out to be the public voice of which this new and demanding audience had been deprived. The intellectuals who gravitated around the La Voce group also saw their role in very different terms from the generations that had preceded them. The style and tone of their writings and pronouncements were far more acerbic, bombastic, sarcastic, iconoclastic, and violent than had ever been heard before in Italian cultural-political life. By way of illustration, it is sufficient to sample a brief excerpt from the ‘Discorso di Roma’ that Giuseppe Papini delivered in 1913 to an audience of futurists. Here the key term, similar in meaning to another term he used to describe himself, incendiario (arsonist), is teppista (hooligan): They have called me a charlatan, they have called me a hooligan, they have called me vulgar. I have accepted with a joy I cannot confess to these insults, which have become magnificent praise in the mouths of those who pronounce them. I am a hooligan, I cannot deny it. I’ve always liked breaking windows and other people’s balls, and in Italy there are some illustrious craniums that bear the bruised bumps of the stones I have thrown. In our dear country, full of parvenus, there is not enough intellectual hooliganism. We are in the hands of the bourgeois, of the bureaucrats, of academics, of the slow-witted, of the clumsy. It is not enough to open the windows, let’s smash down the doors.17

One of the strongest undercurrents of the turbulent times was nationalism. At around the same time as reviews like La Voce came into being, other reviews with a decidedly nationalist bent such as Il Regno, founded by Enrico Corradini in 1903, and later L’idea nazionale, also founded by Corradini, in 1912, appeared on the scene. For Corradini’s followers, Italian renewal was to take the form of colonial expansion into Africa, which they saw as a necessity if Italy was to emerge from the state of crisis into which it had fallen. Many of the intellectuals who were open to Corradini’s suggestions and would go on to argue strongly for Italy to enter the First World War, were deeply disappointed with the state of post-unification Italy. Rather than heralding the advent of Italy’s rightful emergence onto the world stage on an equal footing with the Euro-

14 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

pean Great Powers, the Italy of the post-Risorgimento years paled in comparison with the grandiose hopes and dreams that many patriotic intellectuals had cultivated. Italy, no longer the nation of poets and adventurers that it was supposed to be, had fallen into the hands of the mediocre and the unambitious. Italy was now a rather prosaic Italietta, a travesty of what Risorgimento hopes for the nation had been. Extremists like Papini and Corradini, as well as futurists like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who sang the praises of the cleansing effects of war, and the poet-seer Gabriele D’Annunzio, who put his immense rhetorical skills to the task of pushing Italy into the Great War, were not, however, the only intellectuals on the scene. More moderate voices, like those of Croce and Gaetano Salvemini, who belonged to a generation prior to the generation of the 1880s, also made decisive and important contributions to the debate on renewal. Though less strident, less incendiary, they too were nonetheless outspoken and committed supporters of the drastic and urgent need for renewal in Italy. The drive for renewal thus took on various forms: some sought it out by way of extreme left-wing politics; others by way of extreme right-wing politics; some through colonialism; some through war; some through a return to the aristocratic values they thought would guarantee Italy’s greatness; some through a self-image of Italy as a proletarian nation; some saw salvation in the working class, while others saw in that same working class the road to Italy’s damnation. One of the fruits of this intellectual turmoil, as we shall see, was the intransigent antifascism that would characterize Gobetti’s thought and writing once fascism came to power. But it is well to recall, rather soberly, that fascism itself was also a product of that same drive for renewal, even though the fascist recipe for renewal was very different from Gobetti’s. A good number of the intellectuals involved in the same push for renewal of the first two decades of the twentieth century either officially joined or at least welcomed the coming to power of Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Fascism itself, at least in part, saw itself as a modernizing force. The film Camicia nera, directed by Giovacchino Forzano, and made in 1933 to celebrate ten years of Fascist rule, is a semi-fictional, semi-documentary propaganda film that purports to narrate Italian history from 1914 to 1932, putting enormous emphasis on how under fascism great strides had been taken towards making Italy a modern nation. The malaria-infested Pontine Marshes, south of Rome, for example, as the film tells us, were drained and redeemed. The film, in its documentary moments, is also not shy about listing how many kilo-

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metres of roads had been constructed, how many kilowatts of power had been made available, how many homes and public buildings had been built.18 Gobetti saw precious little that was modern or modernizing in fascism. But it would be demanding rather too much of Gobetti if we were to chastise him for not having seen fascism as an agent of modernization. Gobetti’s experience of fascism came, to a great extent, from the wrong end of the manganello, the club that Fascist squads used to beat up their opponents. Gobetti was twice the victim of beatings; he was arrested twice, on the first occasion spending five days in prison; his reviews were censored, sequestered, and eventually ordered to cease publication; he saw what happened to Matteotti, the Socialist member of parliament kidnapped and then murdered by the regime in 1924; living in Turin, he saw at close quarters the burning down of the headquarters of Gramsci’s L’Ordine nuovo in 1922 and, in December that same year, the attack on the Turin Trade Union offices that culminated in the murder of Pietro Ferrero (his body being dragged behind a truck through the streets of Turin as a trophy to be dumped, still alive, at the feet of the Vittorio Emanuele II statue, where the job of killing him was completed). As it laid out its stall in Turin, there was nothing about the fascism Gobetti saw before him to give him any inkling about what would become much later its modernizing tendencies. What Gobetti did understand about fascism before most of the intellectuals involved in the campaign for a new, improved Italy did, was that fascism neither would nor could lead towards the kind of renewal they desired. Gobetti saw clearly that fascism could never offer that which he held most dear: namely, self-emancipation, self-regulation, and autonomy. Even though they were both children of the same cultural and political turbulence, of the same desire to make Italy anew, of the same confused cauldron, Gobetti and fascism could not be further apart. It was, in fact, his realization that fascism was antithetical to any vestige of self-emancipation that gave him and his thinking a precise direction and identity. Everything that Gobetti stood and argued for is resolutely and thoroughly antifascist. The intransigence of his stance is the greatest strength of his antifascism, but it is also one of its greatest limitations. Despite the differing paths intellectuals of all persuasions followed, the desire they all shared for a broad-based renewal of Italian life stemmed from a common perception: namely, that it was fundamental that men and women retrieve the power of individual and collective

16 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

agency that had been denied them by positivism. Positivism had shackled the human spirit and the creativity that came with it, reducing life to scientific formulas, determinism, evolutionism, and the sense that the future had already been mapped out in advance. Change would come about once the creative agency that positivism denied was returned to the dynamic hands and hearts of men and women by way of idealism, the philosophy of renewal. In the winter of 1918, it was into this world that the seventeen-yearold Piero Gobetti enthusiastically took his first intellectual steps. In the summer of that year he had taken (and passed) his final high school examinations, a year ahead of time so he could fulfil his patriotic duty and enlist in the Italian army and join the war effort. His plan, though, was thwarted by the November Armistice that brought the Great War to an end. But already by that time, following very much in the footsteps of the Florentine reviews, Gobetti had published the first number of his own cultural review, Energie nove. This was, he wrote in a letter to Ada Prospero, who was also a student at the Liceo Gioberti and would later become his wife, ‘a student periodical of culture that will be concerned with art, literature, philosophy, social questions etc.’19 The stated aim of EN was very much in line with that of the Florentine reviews: ‘a work of intensification of culture and action,’ as Gobetti added in the same letter. The programmatic article entitled ‘Rinnovamento’ (Renewal), published in the first issue of EN and written while the war was still being fought, makes clear the importance Gobetti, even as a seventeenyear-old, gave to serving the nation both culturally in terms of spiritual renewal as well as in terms of personal sacrifice and dedication. The review’s aims, he writes, ‘while others offer their blood and while we also prepare ourselves to offer ours’ were ‘to bring a fresh wave of spirituality to the petty culture of today, bring into being new movements of ideas, and furnish society and the fatherland with the aspirations and the thought of young people.’20 Although Balbino Giuliano, one of Gobetti’s high school teachers, wrote the main articles for EN’s first two editions, it subsequently became more of a one-man show, and Gobetti himself bore much of the brunt for the review’s content, writing more than half of the articles that appeared in the sixteen months of its life from November 1918 to February 1920. Not surprisingly, given that it was a review founded and edited by an adolescent, EN could hardly be called original. In fact, even though it dedicated a good deal of attention to literary and cultural issues, EN bore many of the traces of the intellectual and the re-

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view whose footsteps Gobetti had chosen to follow: Salvemini and his Florence-based L’Unità.21 Salvemini was born in Puglia in southern Italy in 1873, but had studied, graduated, and carried out research at the University of Florence, where he had written mostly on the Middle Ages. He had been a pupil of Pasquale Villari, a well-known positivist who had written Lettere meridionali in 1875, a series of analyses of the ills of the post-unification Italian south: extreme poverty, corruption, crime, brigandage, and illiteracy. Salvemini survived the massive 1908 earthquake in Messina, where at the time he had held a chair in history at the local university, but his wife, five children, and sister did not. As a member of the Partito socialista italiano, Salvemini soon became very active in politics, working for electoral reform and a vigorous southern policy, apportioning much of the blame for the present sad state of Italy to Giovanni Giolitti, a liberal politician who had served as prime minister or minister in several Italian governments. As we shall see, Salvemini’s distaste for the man he called the Ministro della malavita (minister of underworld crime), on account of his corrupt practices, his ‘transformism,’ and lack of scruples, was echoed in Gobetti’s own forthright critique of Giolitti. In 1911, however, Salvemini fell out with the Socialists over differences in domestic and foreign policy and founded the review L’Unità, which he edited until 1920. L’Unità was a mirror of the positivism of Salvemini’s formative years. Its aim was to address the specific problems then being faced by Italy and offer up concrete answers. In Italian, Salvemini’s approach was known as problemismo, a brass-tacks attitude to the pressing issues of the day that set him apart from the overly abstract and theoretical thought that characterized some of his former allies in the Socialist Party. Gobetti recognized in Salvemini’s work ‘the most noble effort to give to liberalism its conscience. [Salvemini’s review] represented […] a precursor of new times.’ 22 L’Unità was ‘a review to love above anything else. It is the only review by competent and honest people in Italy’; it was ‘the most fertile political school Italy has had so far this century.’23 The Salvemini group of intellectuals afforded Gobetti his first active political experience. He was the driving force behind and founder in March 1919 of the Gruppo torinese degli amici dell’Unità, and in April of that year he attended the group’s national congress in Florence, out of which came the Lega democratica per il rinnovamento della politica italiana, a political entity that was to serve as a training ground for what Salvemini’s followers thought Italy needed most urgently, an enlightened and modern ruling class. At the congress, Gobetti met Salvemini

18 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

for the first time, as well as other intellectuals, including Prezzolini, with whom he was to have a deep and sometimes fractious relationship. If Gobetti was very taken by Salvemini, calling him a ‘genius’ in a letter he wrote to Ada, Salvemini seemed to be equally taken by Gobetti, even offering him the job as editor of L’Unità (which Gobetti turned down).24 Although Gobetti always claimed that his intellectual work was political, he never joined a political party or aligned himself with any group, other than Salvemini’s. From 1918 to1920, he was an active participant in the Lega, although never sparing it words of criticism about how on many of the questions that were discussed there was too little clarity and too many divisions.25 As its name suggests, the League sought to work for political renewal in Italy by striving to develop a new, enlightened, and progressive ruling class, the absence of which was at the core of the nation’s problems. With the reviews he founded and edited, Gobetti wanted to do much the same. In addition to acknowledging his debt to Salvemini, Gobetti was also quick to tip his hat to La Voce. In a letter in which he seeks Croce’s opinion on Energie nove, the review’s aims are described as ‘the same as those of the militant idealism that has animated La Voce’;26 and in another letter to Croce, Gobetti writes of how the ‘present need’ is to do what Salvemini had suggested: ‘win the peace,’ by equipping the nation with what it needed to make it work.27 Despite having a teenager as its editor, EN was a serious cultural review, a great deal more than a former schoolboy’s plaything. Indeed, Gobetti felt no embarrassment or reticence whatsoever in asking intellectuals of the calibre of Croce, Giovanni Gentile, and the economist Luigi Einaudi to contribute articles. In line with the mainstream of cultural debate of the day, one of EN’s key themes was renewal. ‘We want to bring a fresh wave of spirituality into today’s culture, solicit new movements of ideas, bring to our fatherland the aspirations and thought of young people,’ he wrote in the previously cited ‘Rinnovamento,’ published in the first issue of EN in November 1918.28 If Energie nove was heavily indebted to Salvemini for its practical approach to the concrete problems of the day discussed in its columns, such as school and electoral reform, foreign policy, the southern question, etc., and for its searing critique of Italy’s liberal establishment, especially Giovanni Giolitti, it was equally indebted to other intellectual figures of the time. If Salvemini provided EN with its practical inspiration, there were three other figures who also played crucial roles in Gobetti’s formation and who gave EN its philosophical basis in ideal-

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ism: Gentile, Croce, and Prezzolini. Gentile’s relationship with Gobetti is discussed in detail in chapter 2; Prezzolini’s in chapter 4. In this chapter, let me say a few words about Croce, whose thought represented for Gobetti the overthrowing of the determinism of the positivist era. By returning into the hands of individuals the power with which to make the world anew, Croce’s idealism and its theorization of the ceaseless creativity that drove progress had an immediate attraction not only for Gobetti, but for whole generations of Italian intellectuals. Faith in the inherently creative potential of individuals was equivalent to a kind of secular religion that bestowed on life the sense of mission, purpose, and spirituality that humankind could not live without, but on which it had to draw from deep within its own resources, rather than being beholden to imposed systems of belief. When Gobetti, as he often does in EN, writes of spirituality and religion, it is to Croce’s idealism that he refers. Spirituality and religion are always immanent, never imposed; always the product of ceaselessly creative forgers of history, never the product of dogma. The importance Croce’s thought gave to the creative individual was a reaction to the diminished role attributed to individual agency by positivism. As such, Croce’s thought ran counter to both Italy’s philosophical and political status quo of the early twentieth century. Indeed, as we have already had occasion to note, many of Croce’s followers, like Prezzolini and Papini, were outspoken opponents of the Italy that had emerged from its unification process. The campaigns for renewal and reform that reviews like La Voce carried out, based on Croce’s idealism, but pushed now to an extreme, also inspired and influenced Gobetti’s Energie nove. In fact, resonances of Croce (as well as Prezzolini and Gentile) are everywhere in EN.29 But by 1920, Gobetti had begun to harbour doubts about EN, and he brought the two-year experience to a halt. The years following the First World War were tumultuous in Italy – the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio had occupied the city of Fiume as a protest at the way Italy had been treated by the Great Powers at the Versailles Peace Conference; and the general election of November 1919 had resulted in a defeat for the Liberals, and led to doubts about the relevancy of liberal ideology and the liberal ruling class in postwar Italy.30 Gobetti came to the conclusion that the piecemeal approach to politics and culture that his EN had inherited from Salvemini’s L’Unità was no longer sufficient and that a more ambitious and deeply rooted political project was necessary. In February 1920, he announced that EN would suspend publication for

20 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

an unspecified time, an intermezzo, as he called it, so as to be able to assess what its best next steps were to be. In fact, EN was never to be published again. In its stead, Gobetti founded his second review, La Rivoluzione liberale (RL), which was to attain an even higher profile. In the meanwhile, during the interlude, Gobetti, aimed to enjoy ‘a little honest silence,’ and continue his study of Russian and dedicate himself to his university courses at Turin University’s Faculty of Jurisprudence, from which he was to graduate in June 1922 with a thesis on Vittorio Alfieri supervised by Gioele Solari.31 In February 1922, after having collaborated during the previous year with Gramsci’s L’Ordine nuovo as theatre critic (Gobetti’s reviews are now collected in the third volume of his works), the first issue of La Rivoluzione liberale was published.32 Although in part the continuation and development of the Energie nove experience, RL also represented something quite new. If EN had largely been inspired by the political and cultural agenda of La Voce and L’Unità, La Rivoluzione liberale soon developed a political agenda of its own as a bastion of intransigent antifascism and as a forum in which Gobetti argued for a new kind of liberalism, the revolutionary liberalism of the review’s name (both of which will be the subject of the chapters that follow). RL’s resolutely antifascist stance soon attracted the attention of the fascist authorities. A few months after the August 1922 attack on the Turin offices of L’Ordine nuovo by a Fascist squad, and the March on Rome in October of the same year, Gobetti suffered his first arrest, suspected in February 1923 of ‘belonging to subversive groups that are conspiring against the state.’ In May, he was arrested once again and his office, which was in the home he shared with Ada, whom he had married in January 1923, was searched. By this time, Gobetti had acquired some notoriety and his persecution by the Fascist government became the object of a question raised by a number of (non-fascist) parliamentarians. An undersecretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs responded that ‘Gobetti had collaborated with L’Ordine nuovo in Turin, an anti-national newspaper; the review he edits has been conducting for some time a campaign against the institutions and the Fascist government; the Prefect felt entitled to order a search and the arrest of Gobetti in the interests of public order.’33 The interest the Fascist regime had for Gobetti was not to weaken. In May 1924, Mussolini, who was well aware of Gobetti’s editorial activities, sent the following telegram (see Figure 1.1 below) to the Turin Prefect: ‘It has been referred to me that the well-known Gobetti has recently been to Paris and is now in Sicily. I ask to be informed and

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Figure 1.1. ‘Mi si riferisce che noto Gobetti sia stato recentemente Parigi e che oggi sia Sicilia stop. Prego informarmi e vigilare per rendere nuovamente difficile vita questo insulso oppositore governo e fascismo’ (1924). for you to keep watch over him and make once again difficult the life of this inane opponent of the government and fascism.’ On the morning of 9 June, clearly acting on orders, a group of Fascist thugs handed out to Gobetti a first beating, his home was once again searched, his correspondence sequestered, and the issue of La Rivoluzione liberale that was about to be published was seized. This did nothing to dissuade Gobetti from his antifascist stance. After the Matteotti murder, he intensified his antifascist activity, publishing in September 1924 an article entitled ‘Come combattere il fascismo’ (How to fight fascism), as a result of which he was victim of a much more violent beating that had drastic consequences on his already not very robust health.34 Nevertheless, Gobetti expanded his editorial activity with the foundation in December 1924 of the literary review Il Baretti (named after the Turin intellectual Giuseppe Baretti who had published La Frusta

22 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

letteraria [The literary whip] in 1763). Gobetti’s persecution by the Fascist regime continued throughout 1925. The first two issues of La Rivoluzione liberale were seized, as was the 1 February issue ‘on account of defamatory writing about the powers of the state tending to discredit the national forces.’35 Three other issues of RL were also seized, the reason given for the 8 March seizure being the ‘tendentious quotations of writers from the past.’36 Given the objectively difficult circumstances, which meant that ‘our action in Italy is becoming more and more difficult and provisional,’ Gobetti began to consider transferring his editorial activity to Paris, where he planned to set up a European publishing company that would publish in French works of ‘a European character.’37 Five more seizures of La Rivoluzione liberale were to follow in the second half of the year. On 11 November, Gobetti received a diffida (notice) from the Turin Prefect that prevented him from legally engaging in editorial work ‘in consideration of clearly anti-national activity.’ Gobetti mentions in a letter to Prezzolini, with whom through the years he had maintained a constant if tormented dialogue, that he had learned that the ban had ‘presidential origins’ (meaning it came directly from Mussolini and so could not be appealed against).38 Gobetti was left with little choice other than that of abandoning Italy and moving to France. Leaving his wife and month-old son Paolo behind him, Gobetti set off for Paris in February 1926. Prezzolini had also moved to Paris after he had been nominated to be part of the Istituto di Cooperazione Intellettuale (even though his nomination was not supported by Italy’s Fascist government), and he helped Gobetti with the practical matters of finding a house and an office. Gobetti was already sick when he arrived in Paris. On his journey, he had been met at the Genoa train station by Eugenio Montale, the future Nobel Prize–winning author whose first collection of poems, Ossi di seppia, had been published by Gobetti.39 He had never enjoyed robust health and the beatings he had received from the Fascist thugs had done nothing to improve it. Gobetti’s health rapidly deteriorated, and he was taken first to a better quality hotel than the one in which he was lodging and then to hospital. Prezzolini, along with Federico Nitti, another Italian resident in Paris, visited and assisted Gobetti. He died at the age of twenty-four on 15 February 1926 and was buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery. This study of Gobetti’s thought and writings is not the work of a historian, nor that of a political scientist. It is the work of a scholar trained

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in literary studies. Even though neither Energie nove nor La Rivoluzione liberale was a literary review, and even though Gobetti paid rather scant and ever decreasing attention to literary issues in his own writings in EN and RL, there are good reasons to believe that approaching Gobetti by way of literary studies is worthwhile and may even pay dividends. Gobetti was first and foremost a writer. Apart from his experience with Salvemini’s unitari, Gobetti never joined a political party or group. Even though, as we shall see shortly, he admired immensely the workers who were involved in the 1919 Factory Council Movement in Turin, he knew that his place was not behind the barricades. Rather, he saw clearly that his most potent political weapon was his pen and the role he could play as editor and organizer of culture. Indeed, writing was a fundamental part of Gobetti’s activity as an intellectual. He wrote an enormous amount. A survey of his writings from the fall of 1918, when EN was just getting off the ground, until his death, just seven years and some months later, reveals that his collected works number three densely packed volumes of about 1,000 pages each; and that the volume published in 2003, gathering what has been saved of his correspondence from 1918 to 1922 (and so not including the last three very intense years of his life), amounts to 400 pages. Writing was at the very centre of Gobetti’s universe. Indeed, the efficacy of the role he carved out for himself within Italian political life was contingent on the efficacy of his writing as an instrument of persuasion. It was through his writing that Gobetti was a militant intellectual, a young man who, like the precursors he so admired, sought to have his say and work to form and reform the hearts and minds of his readers. All his editorial activity was driven by a desire to create the conditions for the emergence of what Gobetti called ‘new moral types,’ new protagonists on the Italian intellectual and political scene, those who were to form the basis of an enlightened, modern ruling class. The creation of such new Italians was his goal; his means were language and writing. His preferred tactics were verbal portraits of the intellectuals from past and present that he most admired and most despised. Their function in the economy of his work was to provide the basis and inspiration for the emergence of new Italians, either starting points for inspiration, or models to be utterly avoided. Very often, it is the case that what Gobetti valued most in the people he admired were their personal qualities as much as their intellect or their ideas. In Croce, for example, Gobetti saw not only the sworn opponent of positivism and the proponent of idealism, but also an example of the human values he

24 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

came to respect most: sobriety, responsibility, and a word in Italian that Gobetti uses time and time again, serietà (best translated as ‘earnestness’). Gobetti wrote of Croce in the second issue of EN, praising his Filosofia dello spirito as the ‘most Italian (and most seria) work that we have given to civilization for some years.’ Croce knew full well his role was that of a ‘creator of consciousness,’ and to attack him, as some critics had done, and to whom Gobetti was here responding, is to ‘attack the serietà of study and national education.’40 As Norberto Bobbio has suggested, in Gobetti’s writings it is far easier to see how Croce functions as a symbol rather than as a specific philosophical influence: ‘Croce’s teaching is more about method than substance: serietà against dilettantism; severity against carelessness […] it would be difficult to trace which of Gobetti’s ideas goes back to the theses that Croce expounded in the four volumes of his Filosofia dello spirito.’41 Indeed, as Giancarlo Bergami has noted, Croce did not share Gobetti’s enthusiasm for Salvemini, nor his distaste for Giolitti, nor his faith in the talents of the working classes, and he never took up any of Gobetti’s many invitations to write for his reviews. 42 Gobetti’s admiration for Gramsci follows a similar path. Although he immediately understood the importance of Gramsci’s nondeterministic Marxism and the value he attributed to self-emancipation, which would be a central plank of Gobetti’s own thinking, what also struck him was Gramsci’s personal qualities: his dedication, his sense of sacrifice, the fact that he worked eighteen hours a day, his ‘moral fervour,’ his ‘sincerity,’ his ‘disinterestedness.’ Gramsci, he wrote, was an ‘apostle and an ascetic.’43 Gobetti writes with a purpose: that of inspiring, motivating, encouraging, and prompting his readership into action as productive agents of change in the political and cultural life of the nation. The readership to which he addresses his writings was made up of like-minded, young liberals who were equally disappointed and frustrated at the abject state of Italy and of Italian liberalism. Taking their lead from the past and present heroes of Gobetti’s narrative of renewal, it would be from the ranks of such disaffected young liberals that the necessary new energies, new blood, and new life would come. Gobetti’s project, then, rests on a rhetoric of persuasion, as James Martin has pointed out.44 But such reliance is not without its pitfalls. For one thing, the need to foreground, to ‘write-up’ exemplary figures and events, either in a positive or negative light, leads to a lack of subtlety in Gobetti’s thinking. Gobetti tends to write either with great admiration about the figures and events of his day and of days gone by, or with great disdain.

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These individuals are to be imitated as healthy examples or avoided like the plague. There is not much in-between. This creates, on the one hand, a fertile terrain for polemic; on the other, it offers little in the way of subtlety. Nor is there much space for humour in his writings, indeed one searches in vain for such touches. What one does find, however, is sarcasm, and sarcasm of a very bitter sort that tends to demolish Gobetti’s villains, or overwrought praise for his heroes. Gobetti’s writings are structured on a very Manichean base, splitting the world into two opposing and antagonistic camps, the one being played off against the other. If, for Gobetti, the new revolutionary liberalism that his writings promoted had all the answers, traditional Italian liberalism had none. Critics have not been slow to point out the unsophisticated nature of Gobetti’s writing on historical events. Was Italian Prime Minster Giovanni Giolitti really the nullity that he seems to be in Gobetti’s portrait? Why is it that Gobetti could not appreciate the years of relative social peace and affluence, as well as steps forward in education and suffrage that took place under Giolitti? Could Gobetti not understand the complexities of history or the fact that politics is always based on compromise, on give and take, that it is the art of the possible and not the art of the dreamer? And could he not have seen that the fascist project, which Gobetti dismisses in unconditional terms, was a child of the same drive for modernization and renewal that fuelled Gobetti’s own project, and as such may not have been deserving of the total and utter condemnation Gobetti reserves for it? Was there nothing modern or modernizing about fascism?45 And how seriously can one take Gobetti’s claims that the Factory Council Movement and the Russian Revolution were liberal in nature, and that Lenin and Trotsky, even though they did not know it themselves, were pursuing a liberal agenda? From a purely historical standpoint, this is fair criticism. The account of traditional Italian liberalism that Gobetti gives us is not that of many historians; the account he gives us of fascism would also not meet with the approval of every fascistologo; his picture of Vittorio Alfieri is not that of many literary scholars. Yet, while acknowledging that Gobetti’s history is not always that of historians, we would do well not to dismiss him simply by virtue of the fact that he has got historical events and figures wrong, or has taken too many liberties with them. Indeed, to dismiss Gobetti on account of a lack of historical accuracy would be to do him a grave disservice and merely to scratch at the surface of his writings. Gobetti’s seemingly outlandish and brash statements to the effect that Lenin and Marx were engaged in what turned out to be a

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successful liberal political endeavour should act as a clue, and a strong one at that, that what is at issue in Gobetti’s writings is something more than, or at least not contained by, historical accuracy. Rather than an analysis of the past, what interests Gobetti is a vision of the future. This is most at stake in his writings, not so much the past as the future, or at least the past is put in the service of a vision of the future. Even when he deals with the past, his eye is on the future, and in 1920s Italy, on a future that bore little resemblance to the present. Always future-oriented, Gobetti’s history is of what the past could have been, or should have been, and what the future might be. Gobetti was very candid about the kind of history he was writing. In the first issue of La Rivoluzione liberale, published in February 1922, Gobetti gave pride of place to an article entitled ‘Manifesto’ in which he offered an overview of the reasons why Italian liberalism was in such a sorry state. Three conditions had led to the crisis: ‘the lack of a ruling class […]; the lack of modern economic life or a technically advanced class (skilled workers, entrepreneurs, savers); the lack of consciousness and the direct exercise of liberty.’46 Gobetti traced these three lacks back in Italian history from the Renaissance through to the unification process and after. In the following issues, Gobetti answered some of the objections that had been raised about his article. In one of these, Filippo Burzio put forth the kind of objection that would be made often of Gobetti: namely, that he forced history into preconstituted schemes. ‘It seems,’ he wrote, ‘that the power of the logic distorts reality.’47 Gobetti’s reply to Burzio is a clear indication of the role the past was to play in his writings and thought. ‘Our interpretive scheme,’ he wrote, ‘is not history […] in any precise sense. Rather, it is our history,’ by which he means the history of a group of young men and women who are intent on making history. Gobetti concludes his reply to Burzio (and to others who had also made comments on ‘Manifesto’) with this assertion of the necessity of a bold vision of the past in order to open up the future: ‘The experiences of the city states, of the Renaissance are not histories of failures, but indications of states of mind, of insuppressible aspirations. There is little point in asking whether we will be able to carry them on, to complete them: but the task is more realistic than one might think today, requiring the reckless realism that is able to see and create reality where others chatter, fearfully, of utopias. That is why it is the task of our lives.’48 For Gobetti, change did not come about smoothly, one phase of history silently fading away, another taking its place. That was a recipe for stagnation and atrophy. Change, as Gobetti saw it, came about vio-

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lently through friction, clash, and tension. It had to be made to happen and his task was to sow the seeds so that real change could come about. Social antagonism, rather than collaboration, clash rather than acquiescence were to be encouraged and worked for. It was the sparks given off when opposites came into contact with one another that fuelled progress and history and made the future. More even than ‘intransigent,’ ‘revolution,’ and ‘liberal,’ some of the terms readily associated with Gobetti, the key word in his lexicon is ‘new.’49 The title of his first review was ‘New Energies’; the kind of Italian he envisaged was a ‘new moral type’; the working class was to be the new protagonist he sought to bring onto the national political scene. Indeed, in ‘Manifesto,’ Gobetti managed to employ the adjective three times in one sentence: the aim of La Rivoluzione liberale, he wrote, was to bring ‘a new concretism that will generate a new history […] our task is the elaboration of ideas for the new ruling class.’50 Guglielmo Alberti has reported in his Fatti personali that one of the strategies Gobetti used to persuade potential contributors to write for his reviews was to convince them that they ‘had something new to say’ on a given subject.51 And what Gobetti himself had to say was always new, or so he tells Ada in a letter of 1923: ‘I cannot help but smile when I see my old things. Every day I feel new. For example, my work on Alfieri [...] today I would do it in a completely different way.’52 In another letter to Ada he writes, ‘Our love is becoming what it must be: a new world.’53 In the present the future can only be imagined or guessed at. Gobetti took upon himself the task of imagining and suggesting the kind of Italy that might be, were the reforms and changes he argued for put into practice. Even when Gobetti draws on events and figures from the past, he does so not so much to sing their praises as remnants of a past long gone, but as indications as to what a possible (and desirable) future could be. Gobetti’s writings, as some of the critics who knew him best have noted, are not best read as histories, but as propaganda, as integral components of a political project. In this vein, Bobbio has written of Gobetti that ‘the most vivid image that we have of [him] is not that of the historian, but that of an agitator of ideas, a missionary, a protagonist of history in progress and even perhaps a guide to future history.’54 Critics have chastised Gobetti for his tendency to take leave of the historical record. This study, however, while recognizing the accuracy of this criticism, argues that it is precisely in their performative, future-oriented, visionary functions that the vibrancy, value, and greatness of Gobetti’s writings and thought lie.

28 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

The present study approaches Gobetti through the ideas that run through the whole gamut of his writings and through the heroes of his intellectual autobiography, those who influenced him most, and from whom he learned the most. Gobetti’s heroes and villains fall into a series of categories: one is that of his unquestioned heroes like Croce, Salvemini, Alfieri, and Matteotti, to whom Gobetti remains faithful throughout, save an occasional word of criticism; another is that of the villains who remain villains throughout, like Giolitti and Mussolini; a third is that of heroes who pass over to the side of the villains, like Gentile; and a fourth is that of villains like D’Annunzio and Roberto Farinacci, but who are villains in whom Gobetti glimpses some redeeming feature. I have chosen not to follow a strictly chronological order. Rather, I have adopted an approach that examines the key thematics that run through the entirety of Gobetti’s writings and thought: fascism and antifascism; liberalism and liberal revolution; writing and the role of the intellectual. In the course of his writings, all of these questions interact and overlap. When speaking of fascism one cannot help examining Gobetti’s critique of the failures and limitations of Italian liberalism; his intransigent antifascism can only be understood in the context of the liberal revolution he hoped to bring about; and underlying all the components of his thought is a reflection on what the role of the intellectual could and should be in order to engineer the badly needed change that was to renew and reform the nation and its citizens after the catastrophic experience of the Fascist regime. I have chosen to place Gobetti’s analysis of and response to fascism at the forefront of this study. Fascism shaped Gobetti’s life, thought, and writings, and it is as an antifascist intellectual that Gobetti will be best remembered and why he is still worth reading today.

2 Fascism and Antifascism

To claim that Piero Gobetti was antifascist even before fascism came to power in Italy in 1922 is less far-fetched than at first blush might appear. Like a number of the young men and women of his generation who grew up in the Turin of the opening decades of the twentieth century, as early as his late teens Gobetti had already developed a personal system of ethics that was to accompany him for the rest of his tragically brief life and place him at loggerheads with everything fascism represented. When it became clear, as it did to him almost immediately, that fascism was on a collision course with the liberal values he held most dear, Gobetti was able to define himself and what he stood for as antifascist. For Gobetti, antifascism was less a political or ideological stance than it was an ethical one. In his terms, antifascism amounted to a way of being, thinking, and behaving that invested the entirety of one’s existence, both in the public and private spheres. There could be, he was convinced, no politics, no involvement in civil society, no opposition to fascism that was not underpinned by a resolute personal integrity and extreme ethical rigour. As such, Gobetti’s antifascism can be seen as the kind of existential antifascism of which Guido Quazza has written and on which one of his students, Giovanni De Luna, has expanded greatly.1 Much more than an ideological add-on or extra, antifascism as defined by Gobetti, structured and underlay one’s behaviour as son, daughter, boyfriend, girlfriend, father, mother, friend, or comrade. Or as he wrote of his own antifascist stance: it ‘does not take the form of adherence to any ideology, but is something broader that is so part of us that we could say it was physiologically innate.’2 In describing his commitment to antifascism as ‘a duty of the times,’ Carlo Levi, a close friend of Gobetti’s, expressed much the same idea. So too did an-

30 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

other of his close associates, Augusto Monti, when he wrote: ‘Fascism has been the stone against which to compare Italian liberalism. Real liberals, even those who were in other parties, immediately, instinctively, were against fascism. The deeper liberalism was rooted in them, the more they felt repugnance for fascism.’3 The ‘something broader’ that is at the heart of Gobetti’s antifascism is an ethic of self-realization and self-emancipation that has its roots in liberal values. Yet, while remaining always faithful to liberalism, Gobetti understood this latter as far more than an ideology of the free market. Rather, he saw liberalism as an underlying principle or, as he put it, a faith that created the conditions of liberty and autonomy necessary for the self-emancipation and self-realization of individuals, which was at loggerheads with everything that positivism represented.4 If positivism was the disease, the cure to the bankrupt intellectual and moral state of Italy was the kind of secular idealism that thinkers of the stature of Gentile and Croce espoused: namely, an immanentist philosophy that placed the creation of truth and the making of history back where they belonged, in the hands of freely operating human agents. Drawn face-to-face with the specific problems and circumstances of their historical lives, human agents came up with their own creative and viable solutions. For Croce, and for Gobetti with him, creativity is only creative insofar as it is innovative and unprecedented, not if it follows models, schemes, or codes inherited from previous ages and designed to solve different historical problems. Human creativity and history is at its most authentic when it is ground-breaking and not the result of the mechanical application of laws or rules.5 In the second part of this chapter I will go into the details of Gobetti’s personal scale of ethical values. Suffice it to say for the moment that at the heart of it is the question of autonomy, which is modulated in his thinking in a number of ways. By autonomy, Gobetti meant that individuals enjoyed the right of self-determination, not only at the collective and national, but also at the personal level. It meant that the free-thinking individual was far removed from any imposed dogma, doctrine, superstitions, or inherited systems of belief or thought. Or at least, if the subject is to some extent always beholden to some doctrine, then it should be an individually developed doctrine that comes from within rather than being imposed. The autonomous individual is not a blind follower nor is she or he a slave. It is on the back of Croce’s writings that Gobetti is led to valorize autonomy and reject any form of transcendence. Autonomy is also at

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the heart of his championing of the absolute separation of church and state, as well as of his view of the way the state should be organized: having no time at all for the idea of a centralized state, Gobetti envisaged, rather, a system where power was devolved to the local and regional level, where laws and measures could be enacted that would meet local needs and demands. As far as the economy was concerned, he was for a free market approach where competition could be fair and unhindered by protectionist measures, subsidies, or any form of favouritism or cronyism. Yet, if one could pinpoint one single reason why Gobetti places autonomy at the very centre of his personal system of ethics then it would be the fact that autonomy opens up the future to experience. For Gobetti, what happens in the future is not the result of any plan laid out in advance, nor is it the fulfilment of any prophecy about the way the world should be. Rather, Gobetti’s tomorrow is entirely the product of creative individuals working freely, shorn of the shackles of habit, apathy, dogma, superstition, and blind but misplaced faith: ‘Action must live by history (by concreteness); but insofar as it is action it is something new and free that cannot be reduced to its past; it is born unprecedented, it creates unforeseen values.’6 Clearly, when fascism came to power it represented an affront to everything Gobetti believed in and held most dear. For one thing, the fascist state was ruthlessly centralist, emanating laws for the entire nation that paid no attention whatsoever to the specifics of local realities. Fascism demanded obedience rather than initiative; passivity rather than agency; and the delegation of problems to a higher authority rather than creative solutions. Under fascism, there was no space nor indeed need for either autonomy or creativity. It was, then, a rather smallish step for young men and women like Gobetti to call themselves antifascist, there was a certain logic to it, given that fascism seemed to encapsulate everything they detested. It also solved something of a thorny problem for them, insofar as belonging to any of the subcultural categories then available to them in the Italy of the 1920s was very problematic indeed. The coming to power of fascism gave them an identity they had not previously had, or at least prior to the coming of fascism, they did not have a phenomenon against which to describe who and what they were. Although liberal in outlook, Gobetti and his like were too enthusiastic about the working classes to fit into traditional liberal categories, but also too liberal to fit into socialist or communist ones. They were too secular to be Catholic; too invested in the autonomy of

32 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

the individual to be able to feel completely at home in the Socialist Party or, when it came into being in 1921, the Italian Communist Party. In his writings, Gobetti often made positive reference to Protestant culture, bemoaning the lack of a Protestant Reformation in Italy that would have provided the nation with the kind of dynamic, enlightened, and entrepreneurial bourgeoisie it had never had and, according to Gobetti, badly lacked. But there is an air of desperation about the way Gobetti turns to Protestantism, as if he had realized that this was one of the very few alternatives he had. In fact, Gobetti, looking around for like-minded allies, is forced to figure himself as an Italian Protestant, a member of a low-profile group that, to all intents and purposes, hardly existed at all in Italy, and certainly had no political role. It was for reasons such as these that Gobetti began to see himself as a member of a heroic minority, an elite, exiles in their own land who were completely out of step, and happy and proud to be so, with the vast majority of the nation. As he wrote in 1924: ‘Antifascism is a question of aristocracies, nobility, style. It is a dignity you acquire with sacrifices and renunciations. Only proven and persecuted minorities have the right to make this claim.’7 Or, to paraphrase a few lines from Eugenio Montale, a poet whose first collection of verses Gobetti published in 1925, it was easier for him to know who and what he was not, and what he didn’t want (‘ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo’) than who and what he was and what he wanted.8 These verses, although not often interpreted in a political context, do go some way, however, towards suggesting how Gobetti sought to resolve his crisis of political identity. In fact, it was by defining what he stood for – integrity, autonomy, self-emancipation, etc. – as the antithesis of everything fascism stood for that he arrived at a definition of his own political stance thus giving him an identity he would not otherwise have had. The identity that Gobetti, the son of a grocer, had most disdain for and against which he protested most vociferously was that of the class from whence he came, the middle class. But his attitude towards the middle class was deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, he idolized enlightened and dynamic members of the bourgeoisie like Gianni Agnelli, founder of FIAT and fellow citizen of Turin, whose entrepreneurial spirit and creative activity in the economic sphere produced wealth and jobs. For such people, the movers and shakers, the modernizers of Italian society, Gobetti had an unending admiration. If there was a field where individuals could prove themselves as autonomous, creative subjects working for the common good and continued progress of society it was the field of business. On the other hand, Gobetti had lit-

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tle or no time at all, for the middle-class masses. Far from provoking admiration, they disgusted him. In his eyes, the middle-class masses were conformist, amorphous, inert, and parasitical, a dead weight on society. At various times in his writings, Gobetti describes them as sheep, slaves, non-beings. Here is but one example: ‘Rhetoric and political games [politicantismo] are the untreatable vices of an Italy that is incapable of a modern industrial life. The middle classes are the class of office workers, the class of courtiers, provincial types, eager for patriotic and sporting excitement, forced by poverty into compromises with dignity, clinging desperately to meagre salaries [...] their nonpolitical stance, their lack of political maturity, the courtier-like sycophancy, their parasitical nature are the fixed characteristics of vast sectors of society who have seen modern life only in its most clumsy form of American sports.’9 Gobetti, however, was far from original in this. Many of the intellectuals from the generation immediately preceding his, those of the opening decades of the twentieth century, were just as damning in their critique of the middle-class masses, which for many constituted the real Italian malaise. Much of this disdain was aesthetic in origin. Compared with the rarefied world of high culture that had been the training ground of most Italian intellectuals and constituted their horizon and points of reference, the style of life of the newly wealthy middle classes, who had emerged on the social scene in the wake of Italian unification, seemed cheap, vulgar, trashy, materialistic, and common. There was then, it needs to be said, a great deal of snobbery behind the intellectuals’ disdain.10 It was the sorry state of the nation’s middle classes that led many intellectuals to the conclusion that Italy was in the throes of a deep moral and spiritual crisis, and that the backward middle classes were an albatross around the neck of a nation, preventing it from achieving modernity and the greatness the Risorgimento had promised. The acutely felt sense of national crisis led many of Italy’s leading intellectuals to make the case for the necessity and urgency of a cultural and spiritual renewal. In the forefront of this movement for cultural and spiritual renewal was a figure who, along with Croce, and perhaps even more than Croce in the years leading up to the coming to power of fascism, was to be of great importance for Gobetti’s early intellectual formation: Giovanni Gentile. Giovanni Gentile In February 1921, writing of the effect the philosophy of Gentile, for which the name ‘actualism’ was coined, had had on the young men

34 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

and women of his generation, Gobetti could not be more fulsome in his praise. Gentile’s work, he wrote, had ‘brought down (or rather: lifted up) philosophy from the level of professorial disputes to the immense concreteness of life. It is in him and in him alone that individuals recognize a master of morality and an entire new generation draws inspiration from his thought to bring about renewal.’11 What drew Gobetti to Gentile was undoubtedly the project of cultural and spiritual reform that was the centrepiece of the latter’s philosophy. Having neglected to learn the lessons imparted by the great Italian thinkers such as Giuseppe Mazzini, Antonio Rosmini, and Vincenzo Gioberti (these latter two were the subject of Gentile’s university thesis), the Italy of the opening decades of the twentieth century, argued Gentile, had lost its way and was prey to a spiritual crisis. Writing in the years immediately prior to the Italian Risorgimento, these thinkers, but above all Mazzini, had been able to take the notion of Italy that had been elaborated in an abstract manner by generations of Italian intellectuals and turn it into something worth fighting for and acting on. Thought was not enough for Gentile, it had to be combined with action, thus his reverence for Mazzini’s motto of ‘thought and action.’ Mazzini, wrote Gentile, ‘inculcated into many the conviction that only that thought which expressed itself in action was real thought.’12 This made of Mazzini a perfect exemplar of what Gentile understood the philosophical school of idealism to be: ‘a faith in an ideal reality that must be sought [...] a conception of life that must not limit itself to present fact, but which must progress and transform itself incessantly in order to conform to a superior law that acts upon souls with the force of the soul’s own conviction’ (5). Idealism endows life with a sense of mission, a sense that there is something else that is worthwhile pursuing, ‘a conviction that life is not what it is, but what it ought to be, with all its duties and difficulties, requiring always effort of the will, abnegation, and hearts disposed to suffer in order to make possible the good – an anti-materialist and essentially religious conviction’ (6). Although the sense of mission was perceived most acutely only by a minority composed of the most dynamic and talented protagonists, it was through the leadership and example of this elite group that the Risorgimento became the essentially spiritual movement of national liberation that in Gentile’s mind underlay the whole experience: ‘at the bottom of all the variety of ideas and tendencies, there was a shared basis – a faith in the reality and the power of ideal principles that govern the world. [It was a faith in which there was] a common opposition to materialism’ (6).

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This synthesis of ideas and energies began to come apart in the post1876 period, when the Liberal left (rather than the Liberal right to which Gentile owed his allegiance) came into power as a governing party. This was a period that saw greater material well-being, greater literacy and education, and the coming into being of a far more secular society, all of which Gentile rather dismissively terms Italy’s ‘demo-socialist phase’ (11), in which ‘the character of public life was shaped from below’ (19), rather than from above by a virtuous minority. Gentile did not take kindly to these changes. For him, the atomized, individualistic society that the new ruling class had ushered in was a period in the nation’s life that was utterly out of step with the ideals and values that were proper to Italy, and which had come to the fore in the Risorgimento. Now the nation seemed to have opted to play safe, to lower expectations and horizons, to content itself with material and not spiritual satisfaction, its life had become prosaic, when it ought to have been poetic. It was as if the nation had been forbidden from attempting anything great – ‘One was not to dream of assuming any pretence of being on the level of the Great Powers or their proper equal’ (9); the Risorgimento experience was a closed chapter not to be continued – ‘the light of the Risorgimento went out’ (10): ‘It was necessary, for the time being, to fold away the old and glorious banner. One was not to speak of war, nor of anything that might signify and require national pride and consciousness of a program to be undertaken in competition with the Great Powers’ (9) (this latter reference is to colonialism). If the Risorgimento had been a time of duties and sacrifice for a greater cause, now ‘life was conceived as devoted entirely to the satisfaction of rights’ (10). The dominant ideologies of the day, socialism and the liberalism of the left were ‘both individualistic in so far as they deny a reality superior to that material life which has its meaning in the individual. Materialists are always individualists’ (11). Idealism had been the remedy against materialism and individualism, but it was now on the wane, replaced by a new philosophical orthodoxy, which would become Gentile’s bête noir (and not only his): namely, positivism. As far as Gentile was concerned, positivism was a philosophical school that fetishized facts and figures and imprisoned people in a passive contemplation of what was made to appear as an eternal and unchanging present. ‘Crude positivism,’ he writes, lapsed into materialism, conceiving reality as a finished something that limited and conditioned the lives of human beings, and which ultimately dominated them beyond every exigency and moral pretext [...] Everyone

36 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing spoke of facts, of positive things. They ridiculed metaphysics and any reality that might be intangible. The truth was in the facts. One needed to open one’s eyes to see the mirror of truth in nature. Of God, one said that it was better not to speak. Concerning the soul one might speak, but only to conceive it as a physiological phenomenon which one might well observe. Patriotism – like all the other virtues that have their origins in religion [...] – became simply an issue of inflated speech, which one ought to have the good taste not to consider. (10)

Gentile was among the intellectuals who set out, as we have had occasion to see, to rejuvenate Italian culture and breathe new life into the Italian spirit. They went about this in a variety of ways: through intellectual activity and the publication of cultural reviews like La Voce, through involvement in the revolutionary syndicalist movement, through nationalism. Whatever form this cultural awakening took, for Gentile it meant that a mythic dimension to life, something greater than ourselves to believe in, had been reached. The culmination of such a process was Italy’s decision to enter the First World War, for which Gentile, a strong interventista, had lobbied enthusiastically. Involvement in the war was, said Gentile, ‘the resolution of a profound spiritual crisis’ (1). In Gentile’s view, Italy did not enter the war with the primary aim of gaining territory or power. Rather, he saw the Great War as a spiritual experience whose enforced discipline and unity, and sense of sacrifice would be beneficial to those who fought it and to the nation. ‘The war was fought,’ he writes, ‘first willed then sensed and conceived worthy, by Italians: by a people composed of a majority led by a directive minority. It was willed, felt, and valued with such spirit that it could not be dismissed by Italy’s statesmen and military leaders’ (1), who flying in the face of their initial reticence took the nation to war. The war was supposed to ‘cement the nation as only war can, creating a single thought for all citizens, a single feeling, a single passion, and a common hope, an anxiety lived by all, day by day – with the hope that the life of the individual might be seen and felt as connected, obscurely or vividly, with the life that is common to all – but which transcends the particular interests of any’ (2). The nation thus would be united ‘through the shedding of blood’ (2). These are fanciful and, by today’s standards, disturbing words. But they are far from being out of line with similar sentiments expressed at the time by futurists, nationalists, and other interventionists. Still, as Richard Bellamy has noted, it is legitimate to wonder just how many of

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the conscripted soldiers in the trenches, almost all of whom were drawn from the lower echelons of the nation, who were maimed, disfigured, or blown to pieces in combat shared Gentile’s views of the beneficial effect of waging war.13 The facts of the First World War are the strongest possible argument against seeing it as a crucial, salvific moment in Italian history, but facts pale into insignificance when viewed in the light of myth, something that Gentile knew well. If the war had been a bloodbath, it was also, so went the myth to which Gentile and other interventionist intellectuals subscribed, a necessary and useful bloodbath, an experience that bonded Italians together, disciplining them and uniting them in a common cause, a mission in the service of the ideas to which they offered their sacrifice. The First World War brought back to Italy and Italians that same sense of purpose that had characterized the Risorgimento, but which had been lost in the post-unification period. The ideological, class, and regional fractures that had bedevilled the nation, preventing it from being what it properly ought to be, were overcome in the trenches. It was this spirit, this unity, this discipline and sense of duty that had enabled Italy to regain its national pride in the victorious battle at Vittorio Veneto, which redeemed the earlier ignominious defeat at Caporetto. For Gentile, the Risorgimento was an ongoing yet to be completed project to which, even in the twentieth century, Italians were called. The First World War was one further step forward on that path; fascism, of course, was to be another one: Italy’s ‘warrior spirit was kindled by and has survived in Mussolini [...] The same spiritual conception of the world [as in the Risorgimento]; the same opposition to individualism; the same concept of state and nation [...] [came back with Fascism].’14 There should be little surprise that Gentile threw in his lot with fascism, becoming the regime’s leading philosophical voice. His is a philosophy of discipline and he saw fascism, as many conservative liberals did, as a means of implementing policies that would ensure order. From what we have read of his writings, it should also not come as a surprise that he was the architect of the fascist ethical state, an all-encompassing, totalitarian institution to which all citizens were asked to dedicate themselves and show allegiance. This was a state that was superior to the sum of its parts and that could legitimately make demands of its citizens insofar as its core, its nucleus already lay within the citizens themselves. The state, then, was not inter homines, between people and at their service, as the liberal state had been conceived; rather it was in interiore homine, within people, who put themselves in its service.15

38 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

Autobiography of the Nation Gobetti shared much of the diagnosis of the nation’s ills and many of the convictions of Gentile, but on one vital point the one was light years away from the other. If, for Gentile, fascism was the remedy for Italy’s spiritual crisis, for Gobetti, fascism was part and parcel of that same crisis, its latest symptom. Gobetti’s analysis of fascism takes three directions, focusing on those who gave it their support, the amorphous masses; on those whose failings made it possible, the liberal ruling class that had governed Italy up to the advent of the regime; and on the Fascist regime itself. We will see what Gobetti had to say about these latter directions in the next chapter. In the present chapter, we will focus on what Gobetti had to say about those who welcomed it and gave it their passive support. For Gobetti, the real issue is not that there existed a figure like Mussolini, rather that significant sectors of the Italian middle classes were happy that such a figure existed, relieved that he had appeared on the scene. Mussolini and fascism were a product of the middle classes, which, as such, were the seedbed of fascism. Fascism was a phenomenon they had craved, created, welcomed, and supported, albeit passively. The real scandal of fascism was that the middleclass masses had opened their hearts to Mussolini and to fascism, and the political culture that had produced them. Indeed, the middle classes came to be seen by Gobetti as the single greatest obstacle to any project of reform. They, rather than Mussolini, were the real problem. Gobetti is genuinely shocked by the ontological impoverishment that a happy life under fascism brings with it. In place of the vibrancy of the human spirit, the dynamism of autonomous, creative agents whose every action makes history, the Italian middle classes had chosen the easy but cowardly path of deferral and delegation to a higher authority. In fact, what Gobetti came to call his ‘polemic against the Italians’ was concerned far more with contrasting the Italy that had given its support to Mussolini than with Mussolini himself. As Marco Gervasoni has pointed out in his L’intellettuale come eroe, for Gobetti, the term ‘antifascism’ refers to his struggle against that part of the nation that welcomed Mussolini, and with which he wanted no business at all.16 Within the same nation, argues Gobetti, there are two constituencies separated by huge anthropological and moral differences. On the one hand, there are those, the vast majority, who have the ‘souls of slaves.’17 On the other, there are small, virtuous minorities, of which Gobetti and his like are part, that share nothing at all with the majority. Between

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the two there can be no communication, no dialogue; any dialogue that did take place, to use the appropriate Italian expression, would be a ‘dialogue of the deaf,’ a non-dialogue between two mutually incomprehensible styles and languages, the one the antithesis of the other, the one leading its life according to one set of moral precepts and codes, the other according to another. In two important articles, ‘Questioni di tattica’ and ‘Elogio della ghigliottina,’ the former not included in the only published English translation of a selection Gobetti’s articles, he makes his position vis-à-vis the masses and the role of antifascism very clear.18 In the former article, he writes of an ‘antithesis of style’ that characterizes the antifascism of La Rivoluzione liberale, marking out the territory that separates the virtuous elite, the vast minority, from the vast majority. Emphasizing that his opposition to fascism and to all those who have been supine enough to support it passively was ‘an instinct before it [was] an ideology,’ Gobetti goes on to make the important qualification that the struggle he and his companions are waging is not against Mussolini and his government.19 Rather it is against what he calls the ‘other Italy’ that made the man and his regime possible.20 In the second, he writes of fascism as being an inevitable chapter in the ‘autobiography of the nation,’ perhaps Gobetti’s best -known and most quoted remark.21 Similarly, on another occasion, Gobetti wrote of fascism as being ‘the thermometer of our crisis,’ going on to say that the coming to power of the regime represents ‘the measure of the people’s impotence in creating its state [...] Fascism has exhausted its mission insofar as it makes it perfectly clear what the national disease is.’22 Indeed, it would not be going too far to suggest that Gobetti was as much anti-Italian as he was antifascist, fascism being, in Gobetti’s eyes, little more than the entirely predictable consequence of the defects of the Italian middle classes: Fascism has at least had this to say for itself: it offers the synthesis, pushed to the nth degree, of the historical Italian diseases: rhetoric, sycophancy, demagogy, transformism. Fighting fascism must mean remaking our spiritual background, working for new elites and for the new revolution. Fascism is the legitimate heir to Italian democracy, stuck in the corridors of power, eternally conciliatory, afraid of free popular initiative, oligarchic, parasitical, and paternalistic [...] Fascism is the government that the Italy of the idle and the parasitical deserve. Our country is still far away from modern forms of liberal and democratic life and to fight it we must work for a radical revolution not only of the economy but also of the conscience.23

40 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

What the quotations above illustrate is the ‘revelation theory’ of Italian fascism, according to which fascism revealed the true (and backward) nature of Italian society in the opening decades of the twentieth century, a backwardness that was the result of the Risorgimento’s failure to produce a modern nation. Fascism, in Gobetti’s eyes, given the sorry state of Italy, and given the presence of ‘an uneducated people’ who lacked any sense of what freedom means, was an accident waiting to happen, an almost inevitable consequence.24 Mussolini, in fact, was nothing new and he and fascism, or someone and something like them, had been entirely predictable. But what is it that makes Gobetti, a young man in his early twenties and who lived to see only the first three years of the Fascist regime, such an authority on fascism? What is so special about what he has to say from his relatively restricted standpoint that makes him more of an authority than those commentators who approached fascism in its heyday and after its demise? To be sure, there is much of the Fascist regime that Gobetti did not have occasion to observe: the creation of the ethical state; the colonialist adventure; the autarchic economic policy; the racial laws; the alliance with Nazi Germany, to name but those aspects of fascism that come most readily to mind. Nevertheless, Gobetti’s take on fascism is remarkable on at least two counts: first, he seems to have understood early that fascism could count on a great degree of consensus from the Italian people and that it was destined to last some time. This alone is enough to differentiate him from some liberal intellectuals who were confident of the early passing of the regime. They, and their number included Croce, believed that fascism was a short-term solution to their nation’s woes. Once fascism had sorted out the problems and had put the Bolshevik-inspired revolutionaries who were wreaking havoc in Italy in their place, the reasoning went, the regime would have no reason to be and power would be handed back to the traditional political parties of government, the Liberal Party being the first in the queue. This tempered support for fascism as a brief necessary evil was Croce’s first public engagement with fascism, but it was followed some time later by a turn to a decidedly antifascist stance. Differently from Croce, Gobetti saw immediately the domestic origins of fascism. Indeed, Croce, who always remained loyal to Italian liberals and liberalism, was very reluctant, throughout his career, to acknowledge that fascism had its roots sunk in Italian soil.25 For Gobetti, those most to blame for fascism, those held most responsible for its emergence and establishment were Italians, the lower middle-

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class masses. He spares them little in his vitriolic attacks. In a letter to Ada, written during his summer holidays in 1919, he speaks of inhaling ‘a stench that emanates from this failed society, this historical association of delinquents peopled by these damned ladies, gentlemen, and young girls at the beach. The new air will blow them away, all of them, if God wills it.’26 Gobetti is extremely harsh, overly so, on the Italian middle classes. They were not half as feckless as Gobetti makes them out to be. His portrait, in fact, fails to account for how a generation of convinced radical antifascists like Gobetti himself, the son of a shopkeeper, could emerge from such middle-class surroundings, which is exactly what many young men and women did. If Italy was saddled with a ‘culture of passivity’ it was evidently not so all-encompassing as to prevent those same middle classes from producing rebellious spirits. Nor could Gobetti have imagined the often private forms taken by antifascism in Italy on which recent scholarship has focused.27 Acquiescence to the regime, for many middle-class Italians, was dictated by the lack of alternatives, rather than blind allegiance to fascist ideology. For many the acronym PNF stood not so much for Partito nazionale fascista as for ‘Per necessità familiari’ (Out of family necessity).28 Still, there is a great deal of value in Gobetti’s approach to fascism. Rather than in his blanket condemnation of the middle classes, it is in what underlies his analysis that we find what makes his approach most worthwhile. The definition of fascism that emerges from Gobetti’s writing is quite broad, certainly far broader than the definition put forward by, say, Roger Griffin.29 But what Gobetti’s definition lacks in precise detail, it makes up for in versatility and in how it acts as a tool with which to see the extent to which the neofascisms of the contemporary world, although different in form, name, and colour, are the product of causes all too similar to those that gave rise to Italian fascism in the early 1920s. Gobetti’s reflection on fascism is underpinned by the conviction that Italian fascism was less a cause than an effect. To treat fascism as an effect of prevailing cultural and political conditions, as Gobetti does, also has other ramifications. Of interest to Gobetti is not so much the specific form taken by the political answers offered by the regime to the middle classes’ cry for help as the conditions that create the sense of crisis that gives rise to the cry itself. Such a demand can, in fact, be satisfied by all manner of answers. The fascism that emerged in Italy in the wake of the First World War was just one set of answers. But at other times and in other places, other answers offered by other political phenomena can

42 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

just as easily be proposed in order to satisfy the demands of the crisisridden middle class. In other words, to treat the fascism in 1920s Italy as an effect of the conditions of the time means to recognize that the real problem to be faced, in Gobetti’s terms, is not so much the answers that are offered to the crisis itself as the constituency out of which that crisis and the demands for solutions are born. This also means giving fascism a much wider definition than one might otherwise give it. If in 1920s Italy the solutions offered by the Fascist regime took on a specific form, on other occasions and in other places those solutions might be different. Fascism, in its widest sense, is not defined by the policies it follows, but by the kind of demands it satisfies. Indeed, the solutions offered at any given time may well come from a political phenomenon that does not go by the name of fascist at all or adopt policies that do not resemble those adopted by Mussolini’s regime. If we follow through the suggestions of Gobetti’s thinking, we see that any regime born out of the fears of the middle classes, even if it chooses to give itself a name other than fascist, and even if it follows policies that are not those put in place in the 1920s and 1930s, is in every way a phenomenon similar to that of the fascism of the 1920s. It is not necessary, for example, to embrace the ideology of the ethical state or pursue an aggressive foreign policy that seeks to subjugate and colonize the subaltern – both of which are characteristics of Italian fascism in the 1920s and 1930s – in order to have something in common, in Gobetti’s terms, with Mussolini’s Fascist regime. All regimes, born of the same mother – middle-class crisis and anxiety, whether that anxiety comes from a perceived Bolshevik-style threat – or in contemporary circumstances, from the fear of immigrants or of being victims of crime – whatever their names, are cousins of fascism. They may be distant cousins, but they are cousins nonetheless.30 The fear, then, that some of Gobetti’s followers harboured was that the sorry state of the Italian middle class would leave Italy always prone to some kind of fascistlike political ideology, unless some deep-seated reform of the nation’s political culture could be effected.31 Gobetti’s antifascism, in fact, aimed less at removing Mussolini as removing the causes that made Mussolini possible, that made him seem like a viable solution to the nation’s ills. Fascism was not a function of the presence of fascists. Rather, it was a function of constituencies within Italian society that demanded and welcomed something like fascism and, unless reformed, would continue to demand and welcome it (or something like it) in the future.32 On the first anniversary of what he calls the ‘fascist experiment,’

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Gobetti notes that the majority of Italians are happy, they have received what they most desired: ‘Mussolini has pacified Italy. They speak of unanimity. The Italians are happy [...] It is not right to think Italy happier and calmer (or: more indifferent and vile) than in the present year of grace.’33 The fear that unless something was done to reform the abject, inert, amorphous masses who willingly and contentedly gave over their freedom to someone like Mussolini, Italy would always be prone to new forms of fascism underlies Carlo Levi’s remark, made in his Christ Stopped at Eboli, about an ‘eternal Italian fascism.’ This was also the concern of many of the militants in the Action Party of the 1940s. Once Mussolini had fallen, they feared, he would be replaced by another form of similar government, ‘an a-Mussolinic fascism,’ a fascism, that is, without Mussolini, bearing another name, but still basically fascist. Playing for high stakes, Gobetti’s project of reforming the middle class is an ambitious one. As has been mentioned previously, and as the quotation above also suggests, the foremost task was to seek to reform what Gobetti sees as endemic to the Italy of his day, what he calls the Italian mentality, that which had had a primary role in the rise of fascism. This is the task to which Gobetti calls his fellow antifascists when he writes: ‘Antifascism takes seriously this pact; recognize that in fascism we must liquidate the most compromising and common vices of the Italian mentality.’34 Gobetti’s ambitious project, then, is first to fight against this mentality and, second, create the conditions that will produce what he calls ‘un nuovo tipo morale’ (a new moral type), a reformed citizen devoid of the defects that have plagued the Italian national character. This is how Gobetti describes such a figure: ‘If the new moral type of Italian is to be born – the Italian who does not seek compromise with the winners, who fights in the light of day not with the complicity of sects or groups [...], who does not fall for collective hallucinations, who feels no need to call heroism his robust moral conscience, who attends impassibly the consequences of his actions, who prefers sacrifice to cunning and dynamism – this is the definitive trial.’35 Or on another occasion: ‘We must prepare a different revolution of our consciences, we must give to Italians a realistic sense and modern ability to take part in political struggle, accustom them to sacrifice and to the intransigence of their ideas.’36 School Reform But how was this to come about in practical terms? This was a question that Gentile had already asked himself, and the answer that he came up

44 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

with both in his pre- and post-Fascist incarnations was also Gobetti’s. In Gentile’s eyes, the Risorgimento and the First World War had been times of struggle and combat in which circumstance created the conditions for the emergence of a sense of unity and purpose. National emergencies, whether concocted or real, are a fertile terrain into which a renewed sense of national pride and purpose can sink roots. But once the struggle is over, the emergency dealt, with and normal life resumes, that collective sense of belonging tends to wane, as it had done after the Risorgimento and as it did after the Great War. What, then, could be done to guarantee that unity of purpose in peacetime? For Gentile, the only answer was and could be education. Gentile had long ruminated on school reform, but was given the opportunity to put his theory into practice in 1922 when he was appointed minster of education by Mussolini, having previously assisted Croce when he had been appointed minister of education by Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti. Gentile had begun work on school reform as early as 1895 and 1896, publishing two articles in the journal Helios.37 In fact, as Gentile himself noted, there was a great deal of continuity between the ideas he elaborated and the measures he advocated in the early years of the century and those he brought into law with the 1923 reform.38 Mussolini called the reform the ‘most fascist of all reforms,’ but given that its bare bones were put together well before the term ‘fascist’ entered anyone’s vocabulary, it might be more accurate to think of the reform as that of a conservative liberal who found in fascism the perfect occasion to bring into legislative life a reform for which he had long called and in which he firmly believed.39 As Patrizia Dogliani has noted, the Gentile reform was far more antipositivist than it is was pro-fascist.40 Monti, a schoolteacher, and one of the people whom Gobetti recruited to contribute regularly to Energie nove and La Rivoluzione liberale, recognized that there were deep continuities between that which passed for Gentile’s fascist reform and that which earlier had been a liberal one.41 In an article published in RL – ’La politica scolastica del fascismo’ – he writes: ‘fascism did not bring up [the school] problem for the first time, what it did, rather, was to exasperate and dramatize it [...] but for all the actions [the regime has taken] it is not difficult to find antecedents in other acts and measures planned or taken in the not so recent past under governments that called themselves liberal. We can say that fascism, as concerns its school policy, has not laid the foundations for a new building, but has only placed the crown and the roof on a building on which work had already started some years ago.’42

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Indeed, much of the reform introduced the kind of measures that Gobetti, who no one can accuse of having fascist sympathies, had advocated in his own writings on education. For example, the reform introduced final examinations at the end of high school that were designed to allow only the most gifted access to higher education and so whittle down the number of students who went on to the higher echelons of education. As Giovanni Genovesi has noted: ‘the other schools are basically relief canals whose function is to make sure that the course of the river [of the gifted] flows unimpeded.’43 For those who did not make the grade there were technical schools. The reform also introduced philosophy as a basic ingredient of the national curriculum, placing responsibility for both it and history on the shoulders of the same teacher, envisaging both as a platform from which to go on to the study of other subjects. In addition, Gentile increased teachers’ pay to attract more talented people into the profession. Not only did this have the effect of bringing men into the school system who previously, on account of the low pay, had worked in other fields, it also had another effect: namely, that of ridding the school of many women teachers. Given the low remuneration, the vast majority of the pre-reform schoolteachers were women. In Gentile’s eyes at least, but he was far more alone in this, given that the cult of virility is a central plank in fascist ideology, the pre-reform Italian school had been feminized, and dangerously so. What the increase in pay aimed to do, in fact, was to make the school a more healthily virile environment and repel what Gentile called the invasion of the school by women, who he believed did not and could not possess the originality of thought nor the strong spiritual vigour needed to be effective teachers of the future ruling class. This is what Gentile wrote on the matter in 1905: ‘The first sign is that the Middle School will be abandoned by men, attracted more by profitable and virile careers, and invaded by the women who now crowd our universities and who, we have to admit this, do not have and never will have either that originality of thought or that firm spiritual vigour that are the higher intellectual and moral forces of humanity and must be the basis of our schools and the highest spirit of our nation.’44 The overall tendency of Gentile’s reform was to bring students into close contact with Italy’s national culture and renew their consciousness of the nation’s humanistic and classical heritage. In practice, this meant giving pride of place in the curriculum not only to philosophy, but also to Italy’s classical culture and to Latin and Greek. Although the aim of the reform was certainly that of building via the school a na-

46 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

tional consciousness in young Italians, Gentile was less crudely nationalistic than one might imagine. His reform, in fact, as Roberto Dainotto has pointed out, also paid attention to local origins and cultures, not only to free Italy from the pernicious influence of foreign thought, but also because Gentile figured the unity of purpose he sought to achieve as a ‘dialectic synthesis of differences’: ‘what is national and “Italian” only exists as specificity rooted in the local.’45 If Gentile’s reform struck more of a balance between national and local interests than at first sight might appear, the same could not be said of any balance between humanistic and non-humanistic subjects. In fact, the reform privileged the humanities, relegating the sciences to subservient status. Indeed, given Gentile’s apprehension of the dangerous limits of positivism, it could hardly have been otherwise. But this did little to meet the needs of young men and women who were about to step into the modern world of technology and industry. Gobetti’s thoughts on school reform are strikingly similar. Underpinning them is his conviction that no worthwhile reform in the political sphere is possible without a prior deep-seated cultural reform. Culture had priority over politics, without change in the former there can be no change in the latter. In this, Gobetti was very much a child of his time. In fact, intellectuals on all sides of the ideological divides in the Italy of the opening decades of the twentieth century were in agreement that cultural reform was paramount. This, of course, had the effect of creating a primary role for those who were the most enthusiastic inhabitants of the realm of culture: namely, the intellectuals themselves, who now took on a leading role in the reform of society. Intellectuals, in Gobetti’s thinking, were to become and to produce the kind of enlightened, modern, entrepreneurial ruling class that Italy urgently needed but had never had. But this was a long-term project: ‘Ruling classes mature as a result of patience: study is also a long-term action. As soon as the crisis will lessen and our prophecy about the rise in modern economic activity in our nation comes true, the presence of well-prepared young men, who will bring to national problems a series of solutions on which they have meditated and a demonstrated common desire, will be a decisive element in Italian life. We have to have the courage to take on this task, knowing that it will take decades.’46 The necessity of a specially trained, prepared, and equipped vanguard group that would lead society forward, exercising its influence from the top down is a central tenet of Gobetti’s picture of a new Italy. There is no question in Gobetti’s mind about this: only by leading from

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the front, only through the example and dynamism of elite groups would there be any hope of instituting any worthwhile reform program that would modernize a nation badly in need of modernization. As his biographer Umberto Morra di Lavriano has observed, Gobetti had no qualms about the elitist nature of his project: ‘What seems to emerge from Gobetti’s every word and his every opinion, is a central tenet: namely, the supreme aristocracy of the intellect, an “elite of the mind” who have the right to prevail, or to put it in Gramsci’s terms, enjoy a natural hegemony over society.’47 Gobetti’s aim, then, is that of creating the ground for a deep-seated and radical reform of almost all things Italian: mentality, character, ruling class, costume. In place of an old Italy, a new, modern nation was to be born. A word or two is due here about Gobetti’s attitude to modernity. On the one hand, he is an enthusiastic modernizer, who knew what modernity means, defining it thus: ‘the modern world accepts immanence against transcendence; liberalism against theocracy; idealism against dogmatism.’48 As Paolo Bagnoli has argued, for Gobetti modernity is synonymous with a thoroughly secular outlook.49 But from another standpoint, his relationship with modernity is ambivalent. Gobetti, to be sure, welcomed and desired modernity, seeing it as the antibody to the feckless middle classes who were the backbone of fascism and admiring those nations like Great Britain and France who appeared to be further down the road of modernity and so less exposed to the risks that threatened Italy. On the other hand, however, there was one vital component of modernity that Gobetti could not stomach: namely, the emergence of the masses, whether middle class or proletarian. Indeed, Gobetti posits the necessity of an aristocratic elite as an antidote to the dangerous and unreliable presence on the modern stage of the sheeplike masses who, he feared, could be easily manipulated by the demagogue or the mirage of the moment. For Gobetti, the masses were problematic and unreliable; they needed to be kept under the thumb of an intellectual and political elite, whose task it is to set the tone and standards that would guide the masses, all the time leading from the front. The breeding ground for such an elite, following Gentile’s lead, was to be the school system. Indeed, some of the first major articles Gobetti wrote for Energie nove deal with what was wrong with the educational system of his day and what needed to be done to fix it. At the centre of his reflection is the question of why and how to ensure that the right people in Italy get the right kind of high-quality education that would

48 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

serve them in their future calling as Italy’s new ruling class. But if there is little doubt about this, there is also no shadow of a doubt about Gobetti’s other primary concern: namely, to make sure that those young Italian men and women who did not qualify for the elite club did not enter the higher echelons of education. Differently from the school of Gobetti’s day, this latter was to be an area that was off-limits to the averagely gifted young men and women of the middle-class masses. Their presence at the higher levels of schools and universities was detrimental, Gobetti maintained, to the interests of the genuinely gifted, would hold them back, lower the level of instruction and inhibit the ability of the school to offer what the gifted needed. Rather than the sophisticated humanistic education that was to be the preserve of the few, for the averagely gifted there were to be other schools that would prepare them for the professions and futures most in line with their (fairly limited, in Gobetti’s eyes) talents. Gobetti’s thoughts on the school system take the form of several, some quite lengthy, articles for Energie nove written between January and March of 1919. The first of the longer pieces is dedicated to the Italian Liceo, the high school, whose primary problem, he writes, is ‘the overcrowding of students’ that ‘represents one of the causes of the great drop in cultural level.’50 The ‘extra’ students who make up the unwelcome crowd attend school not out of a genuine spirit of intellectual curiosity, but because they ‘need to get a job, and get one fast’ (54). Others are at school because ‘that is what mummy, grandma, and daddy want’ (54). Such students are not at school to study, but to pass, even passing with the minimum grade, a 6, ‘the 6 of the beggars,’ notes Gobetti disparagingly (54), in the tone that was to dominate the entirety of his writings on the school system. With such an ‘invasion’ of the school by ‘the uncultivated majority who are not amenable to culture’ ‘an environment of mediocrity and ignorance’ is created that deforms the original aims of institutions of higher learning (54). The remedies Gobetti proposed are hardly original insofar as they bear heavily on Gentile’s proposals. Gobetti argued for the closure of a great number of schools, restrictions on the number of students admitted to higher education through the institution of a national admission test that would, in Gobetti’s words, ‘lead to a fair and systematic elimination of unworthy students – future nullities’ (55); increases in the salaries of teachers so that the profession would attract the best and not, as then, the mediocre. Such a reform would ‘immediately close the road off to the lazy, the future misfits. We will have fewer lawyers, and fewer

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talking heads, but more sobriety and honesty. 80% of the students presently at high school need to be eliminated. Italy needs good workers, more than it needs citizens whose families force them to become lawyers, more than it needs citizens whose hobby is being an intellectual’ (55). In this and other articles of the same period and on the same subject Gobetti is doing little more than aping the ideas and style of Gentile. This, for example, is what Gentile had to say in 1905 about what was wrong with the Italian school system: Modern society is brimming over with doctors who have their degrees framed and hung up on the most prestigious wall of their houses. They carried out their university study in the worst of ways, just as they carried out their secondary education in the worst of ways [...] Do we want to reform the school and perform a service for people like this who are not born to study? They are a mass, a number and have no right to be doctors and lawyers. A rotten state is the state that helps them onto the road of the liberal professions which, as professions, presuppose a scientific culture [...] To the crowds who ruin the classic high school the state must make available not the means to allow them to go to university, but a variety of technical and commercial schools that must never be a prelude to a university education.51

As these last comments make crystal clear, Gentile, imitated in this by Gobetti, had little time for lawyers, but not for the reasons they are often disparaged today. For Gobetti, the aspiring lawyer is the figure of a young person who represents the anthropological type he despised. These are people he labelled ‘money grabbers,’ whom he posits negatively against the positive pole of those who are ‘seekers of the truth’ (57). The ‘money grabber’ attends school and university for the wrong reasons, ‘so that he can have the title of lawyer and make some money’; the seeker of truth, on the other hand, ‘studies law to broaden his knowledge and his mind’ (58). It is the former group and their ‘criminal hypocrisy’ that cannot be tolerated: ‘to such people school should be off-limits. We should not bring it down to their level and their needs’ (58). The new anthropological type who is the object of Gobetti’s tirade was actually quite a recent presence on the social and intellectual scene, a product of the process of modernization that had brought deep changes to Italy and to the way the nation’s intellectual (not to mention urban

50 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

and industrial) life was organized. Indeed, Gobetti’s reservations about the aspiring lawyers who attended school and university are part of a broader reflection he carries out on what he sees as the limits and dangers of the democratization and massification of society that the modern age had ushered in. By the outbreak of the First World War, Italy had become a far more urban, urbane, educated, less illiterate, wealthier, more middle-class nation than it had been fifteen years earlier, at the turn of the new century. If in 1901, 48.7 per cent of the population could be considered functionally illiterate, that figure had dropped back to 37.9 per cent by 1911. The average daily readership of Italy’s leading daily newspaper, Corriere della sera, was 94,000 in 1903, but had risen to 350,000 in 1913, an almost fourfold increase in the space of a decade. Far more people were being educated to far higher levels than at any other time in the history of the nation. As a result, the nature of employment changed. No longer was there a neat split between what might be called the intellectual professions and those of the masses. Now, between the two, there was a whole new field of employment that had come about with the birth of the modern state, of largescale industry and all the bureaucratic and administrative functions that followed in its wake. Rather than manual labour, these were jobs that required mid-level intellectual skills acquired through school and university. In other words, the scope of intellectual work had been radically widened and, in terms of what that work now entailed, its level had been lowered. Intellectuals were no longer only an elite group safely ensconced at the top of the pyramid looking down; rather, they now constituted something of a mass that threatened to topple or at least deform that pyramid. As a practical matter, the needs, hopes, and aspirations of these newly educated young men and women could not easily be met. Educated to expect something from life, certainly something different from the relative drudgery of the working lives of the generation of their parents, many of these young people cultivated pretensions to grandeur – becoming lawyers, for example – which even if modest, could not be met by the job market of the time. The kinds of jobs that were available within the public administration could hardly be called exciting, and soon in the face of unsatisfied expectations, a growing sense of frustration took root in the un- or under-employed intellectual masses. In fact, one of the figures that made its debut in the literature of the time is that of the disgruntled, potentially anarchic office worker.

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Augusto Monti summed up in his usual down to earth tone what the effects of these changes were in who was being educated and how as follows: The humble classes, as we know, for some time now are lifting themselves up. The peasant’s son, the janitor’s son go to school and ‘get,’ according to where they live, a certificate, a licence or a diploma. After which, of this we can be sure, you see that these new hopes of the nation have no intention whatsoever of working in the fields [...] nor of emigrating, but only of working as ‘government clerks.’ Once upon a time, Italy produced wine and exported almost all of it [...] now that the popular classes have come up, the manual worker’s son, having attended school which in Italy (this is the curse) is understood only as a school of culture, is making the claim to have become bourgeois; and, just as all the wine that is produced, on account of the ‘high tenor of life,’ is now happily consumed in the home, so too we have to make arrangements at home for this ‘proletariat become bourgeoisie’ [...] What can you say to these people? What do you want to do with them? For now and for a good while the only thing we can do is keep them at home and allow them to live directly or indirectly at the expense of the state.52

In an article on Monti and Gobetti, Norberto Bobbio writes of how this new demanding middle class ‘served themselves’ of the state rather than ‘serving it.’53 Gobetti had no time at all for this generation, disoriented or not. For him, they were a materialistic band of opportunists, little more than cravers of what they deemed to be prestigious titles, the worst possible legacy of the crude positivism that had lowered the horizons of Italians, seducing them with the promises of material gain, and turning them away from the cultivation of the spirit. Underlying Gobetti’s strong words about the state of the school system is his apprehension that rather too many young Italian men and women are receiving rather too much education for their own good, for the good of the nation, and for the ultimate good of Gobetti and his like. What he is most at pains to point out is that the ultra-talented young people at the top of the pyramid were paying the highest price for the democratization of the school system. It was they who had lost out most. Society, Gobetti argued, would be well served if it made sure that the level of instruction received by its potential and future elite, the nation’s incoming ruling class, was not encumbered or compromised by the presence

52 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

of the less talented masses, who anyway, talented or not, were generally at school for the wrong reasons. Monti taught in the mid-1920s at Turin’s Liceo Massimo D’Azeglio, one of Turin’s most prestigious schools. It was here that he, along with other antifascist-leaning professors like Zino Zini, found before them in their classes a remarkable group of people, many of whom were to leave an indelible mark on Italian history and culture. The list makes impressive reading, and includes Vittorio Foa, Cesare Pavese, Leone Ginzburg, Norberto Bobbio, Giulio Einaudi, and Giancarlo Pajetta. Monti’s take on the limits of the Italian school system was as acerbic as Gobetti’s, but the emphasis he placed on the question gave far more importance to the nature of the curriculum. Monti, as the remarks quoted previously suggest, was far more concerned than Gobetti with the plight of those in the middle and at the bottom of the pyramid, who were as equally badly served as those at the top. Monti’s articles, published in La Rivoluzione liberale between March and April 1923, take as their starting point his bête noir, the notion of ‘general culture’ (coltura generale), which was the basis of the curriculum taught in schools. By this he means an overwhelmingly literary based, humanistic culture, which he disparagingly describes as ‘vague and formless [...] based on a literary mentality [...] divorced from life [...] predominantly pseudo-literary [...] the general culture of the lawyer, the professor, the doctor and so on.’54 Monti’s principal reservation about this kind of curriculum is that it acts as a kind of machine that transforms Italians into something that they are not, into a homogeneous middle-class mass. This is not a curriculum that meets the needs of the average student and does little or nothing to prepare individuals for the real challenges of life, nor will it be of any use to them in the world of work.55 Indeed, suggests Monti, what lies behind this curriculum is a specific and deliberate design to transform radically the Italian people. The Italian school, he writes, turns the peasant, the shepherd, the worker into an unhappy and presumptuous member of the middle classes, into someone who is socially and spiritually a misfit [...] The Italian people [...] who attended directly or indirectly state schools was no longer a people. The peasant from Emilia, the fisherman from Carlofortino, the worker from Turin were no longer either peasants, or fishermen, or workers, and were no longer ‘Emilian,’ or Sardinian, nor from Piedmont, but were ‘Italian citizens,’ that is, a nasty type of person, with a parasitical, ungrateful relationship to the state, a petit bourgeois, I repeat, in the worst sense of the word, not different at all, in

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terms of mentality, from the petit bourgeois with his diploma, his licence, and even his degree. A product of our schools and universities who does not make up our new ‘state’ [...] whose presence is today in Italy the most worrying problem of our public life. 56

A further negative effect of such an intellectual formation is that it encourages a feeling in these newly cultivated young people that their rightful place is not in the countryside where they were born, but in the urban centres. What will come of life outside the urban centres, Monti asks, who will stay behind and teach in the schools? Certainly not those who have been through the course of general culture. Their horizons have been broadened, their expectations increased: ‘Their greater degree of culture has, they say, “civilized” them, and so they can no longer stay among the loutish children of the fields, they need to mix with civilized people, with the city dwellers, to whom thanks to the school of culture they now resemble.’ Monti too took issue with the relegation of science and quantitative reasoning to the second division of intellectual activity: ‘The Gentile reform, by abolishing the maths and science section of technical institutions, has pulled up by its still tender roots the new plant of the modern school. Fascism, in its ineptitude in understanding what is modern, scientific, industrial, “capitalistic,” has erased that which was supposed to be the future of the specific school for the captains of industry and experts in style, and has put in its place a mirror image of the classical high school, to which it has ironically given the title of scientific high school.’ But it was not only with the curriculum that Monti took issue, it was also the way the school reform set even further in stone the already existing class privileges. As well as siphoning off the already privileged and offering them and them only the best, the school reform also had an ideological agenda. Not only did the reform gentrify the children of the masses, turning them into little gentlemen, into replicas of middle-class youth, it also sought to extend bourgeois hegemony to the subaltern classes: According to the Gentile reform, all of the sons and daughters, or almost, of the gentlemen of Italy have found their place in a school that is a comfortable fit for them, while the children of the small-scale businessman, of the educated peasants, of the chosen workers have been – thousands of them – excluded from the state school, which has become for them, and only for them, all at once inhospitable and petty. And for the surviv-

54 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing ing children of these ‘artists’ and ‘maestros’ and ‘peasants,’ who are stubborn enough to want to attend the government school, the fascist state has invented a school that is as far as possible the same as the school of the gentlemen with its Latin like theirs, its philosophy like theirs, Plutarch like theirs, Virgil like theirs, Mr Headmaster like theirs, a school that has succeeded in ‘humanizing’ and ‘making more gentile,’ to ‘turn into gentlemen,’ even the unhewed and wild children of the peasants.57

If Monti saw the Gentile reform as classist, Gobetti thought it more reactionary than fascist.58 His response represented a sea change in his attitude to a philosopher he had, not so many years earlier, greatly admired. Indeed, on numerous occasions between 1918 and at least up to November of 1922, Gobetti had written to Gentile inviting him to contribute articles to Energie nove.59 Yet, when the details of the Gentile reform became public Gobetti vociferously laid out his objections in an article published in La Rivoluzione liberale in May 1923. Entitled ‘La scuola delle padrone, dei servi, dei cortigiani,’ this is a very strange piece indeed.60 Written in a dense, overly elaborate intellectual code, the text would stretch the talents of even the most expert and versatile translator. The gist of the article, however, takes issue with three aspects of the new school system envisaged by the Gentile reform: first, the high school for young women (‘la Scuola delle padrone’), which for Gobetti is little more than a school for potential housewives – ‘the faithful and worthy woman’ – whose task it is to welcome their warrior husbands – the D’Annunzio-like hero – back to the warm hearth after their exertions in battle and prepare them for the next fight; second, the school of slaves (‘la Scuola dei servi’), where the new tamed and docile working class will be formed and ‘transfigured into the humble hero[es] of labour’; and third, the school of sycophants or courtiers (la Scuola dei cortigiani’), where the future obsequious elite of fawning yes-men will be trained. Beyond the content of the article, what is perhaps most striking about it is Gobetti’s almost impenetrable, showy, and pretentious writing style. Here he clearly goes over the top, is too anxious to give expression to some accumulated bile in his belly. It seems that he is trying too hard to settle a score and publicly give vent to his disdain. More than through what the article says, which is standard for Gobetti, albeit expressed in more charged and heated language, it is through its overblown manner that the article belies a deep sense of unease that Gobetti feels as he now comes to terms with the betrayal of a thinker in whom he had invested a great deal of hope and expectation and

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whose praises he had sung. As much at a personal as at an intellectual level, Gobetti now feels cheated by Gentile, betrayed by his turn to fascism. Although Gobetti had already begun to take his distance from Gentile’s philosophy in the early 1920s, what is remarkable about the attack Gobetti launched in La Rivoluzione liberale is its complete lack of a philosophical basis.61 Rather than settling any philosophical accounts, Gobetti accuses Gentile of having dedicated himself to turning philosophy departments into a kind of Job Centre for his young followers, the gentiliani, and takes very strong issue indeed with the way Gentile seemed to have rigged university competitions to ensure that his students got the top jobs, regardless – Gobetti insinuates – of merit. In other words, to use the term current in Italian universities today, Gobetti charges Gentile with having become an unscrupulous barone. But what lies under the attack is the anger felt by Gobetti that Gentile, someone on whom he had felt he could count, whom he had hoped was ‘one of us,’ had let his personal professional standards slip to such an extent that he now behaved like one of the many barons in the Italian universities who had ‘denied the serious nature of teaching’ in favour of creating a sect composed of inferior ‘little men dedicated only to the mafia of securing a job at the university.’62 One of the ironies of Gobetti’s turn away from Gentile, a consequence of which would be to lead him far more closely into Croce’s camp, is that the ideal young Italian who was supposed to be the result of Gentile’s reform matched very well indeed the picture that Gobetti had of himself and of the other members who gathered around Energie nove and Rivoluzione liberale, not to mention the readership to whom these reviews addressed themselves.63 Gentile’s new classical high school was to give Italians something worthwhile to believe in, turn them into new citizens, hard-working, patriotic, aware of their duties, guarantors of a new and better Italy, the Italy that had received its baptism in the trenches of the First World War. The school, then, was to be the breeding ground for a new ruling class that would go beyond the lazy and slow old Italian, who was lukewarm in his political faith because he was lukewarm in his human and religious faith. This Gentilian new man bore a very strong resemblance to the men of the new ruling class that Gobetti had in mind. Private Virtues, Public Virtues As Marco Gervasoni has pointed out, Gobetti’s acerbic article on the Gentile reform marked the end of his interest in the Italian school sys-

56 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

tem as a breeding ground of new moral types. Now Gobetti’s emphasis fell more on the positive formative role that small, almost private groups of like-minded individuals, meeting together for purposes of study and self-elevation could have. The new ruling class, it seemed now to Gobetti, would no longer come out of the school system, and if it did the merit was entirely of the individual, certainly not that of the system. The settings for the preparation and emergence of the young men and women who would don the mantle of the new ruling class moved from the public sphere of the school (and university) to the far more private and semi-private environment of the houses where the small groups of like-minded talented young people Gobetti called upon met together to read, study, and plan their own and their nation’s future. These were the Groups of La Rivoluzione liberale, as Gobetti called one of their manifestations, attended by young men and women who had already displayed their prowess and exceptionality. One of their members was the future literary critic Natalino Sapegno, who Gobetti met as they left an examination room early, both having managed to complete the assigned translation from Greek to Italian in fifteen minutes, neither of them needing to consult a dictionary.64 Not only was the intellectual level high in these groups, so were the ethical standards. Gobetti was absolutely convinced that there could be no drastic change in Italian society unless the people engineering that change were different, and led their lives according to ethical principles that were higher and better than those of the ruling classes who had preceded them (and better too than the vast majority of the population). Speaking, for example, of the Turin workers who had taken over the FIAT car factory in 1919 and who seemed to be at the forefront of a revolutionary movement, Gobetti noted that ‘they will only be serious if they become serious in the intimacy of their being.’65 In his very wide-ranging and complete study of Gobetti, Gervasoni voices his fear that to pay too much attention to Gobetti as an exceptional young man, an example to us all, a ‘master of morality,’ whose ethical standards far outstripped almost everyone else’s is detrimental to and detracts from his political choices and proposals. So prevalent is the tendency of Gobetti studies to praise his ‘extra-political virtues’ that a kind of caricature of not only Gobetti, but also of other antifascist heroes has been created. The end result of such approaches has been to produce tired and dusty stereotypes that have deprived the antifascist legacy of relevance to younger generations in the present day.66 It is undeniable that there has been a strong tendency in the critical

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reception afforded to Gobetti to treat him as a martyr rather than as a thinker, as a moral example to be placed on a pedestal and admired rather than studied as a proponent of ideas. However, to go too far in the other direction and divorce the ethical basis that subtends Gobetti’s politics from the politics themselves, as sometimes seems to emerge from between the lines in Gervasoni’s book, would be to do an injustice to Gobetti. There is, in fact, continuity between the high standards he set himself in his personal life and his activity in the public sphere. For Gobetti, legitimate entry into the public sphere, offering one’s talents in the service of the nation was contingent on having the right credentials and qualifications. And these came, as Gobetti reminds us in the previous quotation about ‘intimacy of being,’ from rigorous personal standards, the starting point of public service. Standards upheld in personal life bestowed credibility on the young men and women who sought inclusion in the elite club frequented by the future ruling class. It was their entrance exam. Gobetti had had occasion to study at the University of Turin with and to be positively influenced by Gaetano Mosca, perhaps the leading figure in the discussion that had been ongoing in Italy for a number of years about the role played by elites in governance.67 The starting point for this discussion, as the following quotation from Mosca makes clear, is the unquestioned assumption that societies are led from the top downwards by organized minorities: ‘In every society, including both those that are hardly developed and that have only just arrived at the threshold of civilization and those that are most sophisticated and strong, two classes of person exist: that of the governors and that of the governed. The former, always the least numerous, carries out all the political functions, monopolizes power, and enjoys the advantages that come with power; the second, the most numerous, is managed and regulated by the former in more or less legal ways, more or less arbitrary and violent ways.’68 It should come as no surprise that Gobetti knew to which of the categories he belonged. Although deeply indebted to Mosca, whom he called ‘a conservative gentleman,’ in his own reflection on the question, Gobetti placed emphasis on the more dynamic, liberal, and democratic elements to the theory. Elites, for example, were not to be self-selecting on the basis of the colour of their blood or their family name. Rather, membership in the elite had to be earned.69 What Gobetti had in mind was thus an elite based on merit: ‘An elite is a choice, by which I mean not that there is someone who chooses, but a historical process that

58 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

makes it clear who are the best. To be chosen implies that there are also those who are not chosen, who are condemned by nature, but participate in the process, they prepare themselves, they try each day, they improve themselves. In this physiological sense the governors must represent the governed. There is no aristocracy where democracy is excluded.’70 It is what such men and women have done in the classroom (passing brilliantly all their exams) and in the private sphere that gives legitimacy to their claim to be the new ruling class. Although, it has to be said, the whole issue of who actually does the choosing – other than the chosen themselves – is completely sidestepped by Gobetti. This is one of the relatively few occasions that Gobetti uses the term ‘democracy’ in a positive sense. The term, in fact, is very much a floating signifier in Gobetti’s lexicon. In its positive sense, as used here, it means something like meritocracy, where the gifts and talents of the gifted and talented are recognized, rewarded, and appreciated. On other occasions, the term takes on positive connotations when it is used to describe parliamentary institutions. In its negative sense, it indicates belief in the false notion that everyone is equal, from which derives a series of negative consequences, the most pernicious of which is a sense of passivity and a refusal to appreciate the role of elites.71 As we have said, the members of the elite club earn their spurs in their private lives. Indeed, the importance Gobetti attributed to the personal sphere cannot be stressed enough. If there were to be a reform of the self, if a new moral type were to emerge, an Italian, that is, devoid of the vices and limits that had, in Gobetti’s eyes, made fascism possible, that type would lead his or her life according to a set of strict and very different moral precepts. This new moral type would be, as we have seen, the nation’s best defence against the ever present threat of fascism. But it would be a moral type that would have its origins in the home, in private life, in private behaviour, in private and individual ethical codes. If, for Gobetti, fascism is unthinkable without the amorphous, passive masses, without their lack of integrity, their intellectual and moral laziness, their inability and unwillingness to take responsibility for their own lives and futures, without their short-termism and limited horizons, antifascism is equally unthinkable in the absence of a style of life that is the utter negation of that of the amorphous masses. Antifascism is, for Gobetti, as much a matter of personal ethics and style as it is a question posed in purely ideological terms. You cannot be a good antifascist if your personal standards are as low as those of the masses; you cannot be a good antifascist if you do not lead a life

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inspired and underpinned by those principles that differentiate you from the masses and which are, therefore, by definition, antifascist. To differentiate oneself from the masses, from the fodder of fascism, was to live one’s life on a daily basis in a style consonant with the highest ethical standards. In this, Gobetti led from the front. Indeed, he set himself very high ethical standards in both his intellectual and private life. And as we can glean from his letters, to which I now turn, he certainly lived up to those high standards, even when the result was a life that was far less comfortable than that of his friends and companions. Indeed, so radically did Gobetti adhere to such guidelines that he appeared to many of his friends and collaborators as a kind of superman, as someone whose standards could never be rivalled. It is, therefore, instructive to see, by way of his letters, just how Gobetti conducted himself in his private life and the extent to which his public stance is an extension of a rigorous personal ethic. A good starting point is to focus on his unquestioning sense of loyalty to the Italian state.72 Gobetti clearly felt that it was the duty of young Italian men and women to dedicate, even sacrifice themselves for the sake of the betterment of the state. The role that Gobetti envisaged for himself was one in which his talents were brought to bear not on the destruction of the state, but on its improvement, on its modernization. For Gobetti, to become a fully functioning member of society and to make his contribution to the civic life was, without a shadow of a doubt, a priority that led him to make personal choices that were very different from those of many of his contemporaries. But it was only through personal, inner integrity, Gobetti never tired of repeating, that a more general change could be achieved. Gobetti’s own life is full of such moments of personal integrity and rigour. As a university student, had he so desired, he could have deferred his military service until after his graduation. Indeed, it was the norm for university students to do this. He did not, however, take up that option, choosing to serve in the military as soon as he was called up and taking his duty as a servant of the state and as a military conscript very seriously indeed. For him, military service was not a waste of time, a period of penance to be dispensed with or perhaps even avoided. It was, rather, a precious experience that would bring discipline to Italian youth and as such was to be welcomed. Indeed, in one of his letters to Ada, he proposes that military service be lengthened to last three years: ‘All the state has as an instrument and form of its own ethical achievement is the army. The

60 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

state’s unity is in the army. I am in favour of a 3-year term for military service, at least three years [...] That way they will have a school of the national spirit [...] We need to abolish the option students have of delaying military service.’73 And in order that they become mentally humble, Gobetti suggested that intellectuals serve twice the length of time others had to.74 Gobetti’s willingness to do his military service is a direct consequence of his loyalty to the state and the duty he felt he owed it. Military service was a formative experience for young Italian men, it gave them much-needed discipline that folded them into the workings of the state. All this was worthwhile, even if it did mean, as Gobetti notes in a letter to Sapegno, that he may be required to turn his rifle on what he calls the ‘rebellious Sardinians.’75 For Gobetti, state and government are two separate entities that do not overlap to any significant extent. One could despise the latter (as Gobetti despised the liberal-led and later fascist governments of his day) and maintain full loyalty to the former on the understanding that the discipline of service in the military would serve well the future servants of the state. In Gobetti’s thinking, to be a fully functioning and productive member of society it was necessary to have fulfilled all one’s obligations to the state as soon as possible, so as to be able to dedicate himself to his appointed task without distractions. Gobetti harbours a deep desire to grow up quickly, to become an adult, to put behind him the formative experiences of growing up, to go beyond as soon as humanly possible the ultimately non-productive distractions of adolescence and youth, and to avoid everything that is not the serious business to which young men and women should dedicate themselves. To serve the state, then, in the best and most productive of ways, one had to be grown up and settled, not only as concerns obligations such as military service, but also in one’s private life. This meant, in Gobetti’s case, marrying early and having children. A fully functioning member of society is one who has completed his military service, is settled in family life, and has taken on the responsibility of being father and husband. Marrying early was, for Gobetti, also a way of disciplining sexual desire and avoiding the temptation, to which we can be sure many of his male companions succumbed, of frequenting the brothels of Turin. Gobetti, in fact, was adamant in wanting to arrive at his wedding day with his virginity intact. As a single man, devoid of the responsibilities that go with adult life, to be distracted by sexual desire was exactly that, a distraction from what Gobetti considered the more pressing business of the day

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to which young Italians were called and to which they should dedicate themselves. It would be unwise to draw too many political considerations from Gobetti’s personal and quite puritan sexual politics, and I am loath to do so. To be sure, however, one can state with certainty that his choices were not determined in any way by religious concerns. What perhaps can be best said about his choice is that it illustrates in the clearest of manners the self-discipline, integrity, and bent to sacrifice that underpins his entire personal and political culture, even to the point of self-denial and deprivation of the pleasures that accompany the penances of youth. As concerns his personal ethical standards, Gobetti was very much in the minority among his friends. Indeed, in a letter to Sapegno he branded those who did not agree with him and who ‘disapprove and smile’ at his choices as having ‘corrupt brains and ignoble morals.’76 This letter, in fact, offers a very complete portrait of Gobetti’s personal ethics and the extent to which he defined himself as being the polar opposite of his fellow youth. For this reason, it is well worth quoting here at length: I feel with respect to myself and to others two duties. First, the privilege of deferring military service, the sole reserve of students, is iniquitous. In the face of an iniquitous law we must do all we can to deny it, but without denying the principle of supreme authority. This is the clearest case. By not accepting the privilege I deny it, obeying the law; and I deny it all the more effectively insofar as I am not led to do so out of selfish motives. In this way I help to moralize and make real society’s law, and if not in others, at least in me. The question then is nothing other than an example of a wider idea of duty. I believe that students are the worst species of do-nothings. At 15 or 16 or 18 years old, a normal man feels the need to look after himself. But if you look at a student, not only does he prefer to sit around all day and, in the best of cases, study as little as possible so as not to tire himself out until he finishes university, but continues that life for 4 or 5 more years, with the excuse that he is ‘accumulating titles,’ and only when he’s 26 does he decide to do his military service, and only after that does he begin to think about organizing his life in order to appease his conscience. In all sincerity, it seems to me that this is disastrous as well as being terribly lazy. Let’s put to one side the degradation of such an irresponsible life. There’s more that needs be said. Like it or not, we have to build a family. Now, the morality of the family and of love, conformation, and concretization of two spirits, has as a condition, which for me

62 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing is absolute, the spiritual and physical virginity of the individuals (and, it goes without saying, without the obscene distinction made by many, by almost all, between female virginity, which is a must, and male virginity, which in the eyes of many it would be ingenuous to keep by saying no to the ‘desired pleasures’). All this leads me to conclude that for our spiritual virginity it is necessary to love only once and make our first love eternal, reserving in the same way our physical virginity for the object of our first love; in such a way that marriage is a celebration, enthusiastic creation made pure. This means that marriage, eternally new and alive, understood as devotion, but also as spiritual concretization, must happen early because it marks the birth of our responsibility and the culmination of our activity. In this sense, as a general rule, doing military service when you are 20 is already late; doing it at 26, which involves waiting to solve the family problem until you are 26 or older is like saying no to living, you could even go so far as to say, definitively.77

Not only did Gobetti recognize that he was radically different in his thinking and behaviour from the vast majority of his companions, he also had a very clear picture of his own superiority over them and what his personal intellectual mission was. ‘We are made to struggle and to win,’ he wrote in an August 1919 letter to Ada, ‘down with sadness, down with crises, down with melancholy: all that lasts but a moment, no longer. Then it is life that must dominate. There are no predetermined ends for us: our end is the present moment, it is the growth of every instant, it is our incessant spiritual activity that dominates us, because it is we who want it that way.’78 No one could accuse Gobetti of hiding his intellectual light under a bushel. At the age of twenty-one, he felt authorized to write: I do not believe I am being immodest if I think that my political studies do not have less value than those of Missiroli or Salvemini; that my literary studies are better than those of Tilgher and Borgese; that some of my journalistic writings are as good as those by Prezzolini or certain things by Missiroli. Now that I am turning to art criticism, in a lateral but no less serious way, I can compete with Venturi and with Soffici, perhaps even do better than them. I have done some work on Greek philosophy and immediately I realized that I was not at all below the level of specialists like Cardini or Tilgher. I am more erudite than Cian and more penetrating than Gentile in my studies of Ornato and Bertini. A new philosophical system suddenly will appear before me. I read a book about the penal code or

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legal procedure and I build a new theory that scares Manfredi or excites him on account of its novelty. The only reason I don’t write for the theatre or write novels is that I would immediately want to write a masterpiece.79

Gobetti was convinced that his own role and intellectual activity were crucial and he and his work would make a difference and leave a mark, both on him as a person in terms of personal growth and in more general terms on Italian political culture as a whole. In another letter to Ada, this time written in July 1920, during one of their many periods of summer separation, he wrote: ‘I work because I believe in the immanence of life and history, because I believe I can achieve in myself the universal law; because I believe that, wanting to improve ourselves and make ourselves genuinely generous in this world we must give up everything that is vague, everything that is too personally interested, too empirical and limited. We must sacrifice ourselves to our task, not uselessly and noisily, but in silence, every day, so that for what it’s worth as soon as we carry it out, as soon as it is expressed it becomes the patrimony of all.’80 Gobetti, as should be clear by now, was an exceptional, ambitious, and energetic young man, one of a kind. As Ada wrote in August 1922: ‘Yours is not a drama of impotence, it is one of exuberance. The 100th part of your talent and your activity would be enough to justify the existence of any man. Your exuberance is 100 times and more that of the others and in this you do not find yourself.’81 An attempt at reassuring Piero, who had earlier written of a personal crisis of confidence and of his impossibility to give her an easy answer to her question, ‘Are you happy?’ Ada’s reply also leads us to another fundamental side of Gobetti’s character: namely, the incessant and hard-hitting self-critique that he put himself through, all part and parcel, a direct by-product of his boundless intellectual curiosity. Indeed, one of Ada’s functions in their relationship that Piero seems to have come to appreciate most is that of a presence who reassures him in his darker moments of inner turmoil, self-doubt, and to use the word he himself often uses, torment. There is a ferment to Gobetti that leads him to put both himself and his intellectual activity constantly into question. The most precious resource of his generation of like-minded intellectuals, he writes to Ada, ‘is the constancy of a restlessness, an unsatiated enquiry, a continual struggle against that which can be sedimented into a past.’82 And in one of his letters to Sapegno he puts the same idea this way: ‘I often feel the irrepressible need to overcome difficult obstacles in which all

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my strength must be brought to bear, all my burning energy used up without end [...] I know that my present torments will be overcome. I am so sure of this that I go so far as to seek torments out, make them more acute in such a way that their solution is all the more fertile. This idealistic butchering is strange, but I feel it is very beneficial.’83 Gobetti’s is a permanently self-questioning attitude that takes nothing for granted, always seeking to go beyond. Putting himself and his beliefs to the test, relentlessly exploring all possible new intellectual avenues, Gobetti was a young man willing to try out a variety of hats. Inevitably, not all of them fitted him perfectly. One of those that did not fit appears to have been in the Nietzschean style. In an episode from his Ginnasio days, which appears in a letter to Ada that also contains a confession of his fear of his own egotistic side, Gobetti tells, with obvious embarrassment and regret, of what was evidently a stage in his development in which he was experimenting with Nietzschean categories. Seeking to imitate the ‘man who has no fear of human limits and is beyond good and evil,’ Gobetti tells of the day he chanced upon his school mate Manfredini, who was limping as a result of a prior fall. ‘To show him that I was above all pity,’ continues Piero, ‘I shoved him down the stairs.’84 Gobetti cannot have been the easiest of people. Many of his friends, in fact, have noted how they were intimidated by his energy and intellectual prowess. Gobetti represented for them an example they felt they could never emulate. Sapegno says as much in a letter in which he refers to a conversation he had with their common friend Carlo Levi about Gobetti. ‘We often spoke of you,’ he writes, ‘of your ordered and profitable, tireless work that we, alas, still limit ourselves to admiring platonically, unable as we are to find the energy necessary to imitate you.’85 Gobetti himself was well aware of how difficult a person he could be and the price this caused him to pay in interpersonal relationships with friends and family members. With these latter, Gobetti shared very little, considering them of a piece with the dreaded amorphous masses. ‘They are where they are: I am where I am. We do not understand each other [...] I cannot avoid being blunt [...] Under this exterior of impassivity of mine I hold within me an infinite sense of pity for everything that is anonymous, for everything that is the reckless martyrdom of personality, for that which does not come to fruition. I believe Dante felt the same trembling when he imagined the vestibule of Hell.’86 With his friends, the situation was much the same. Gobetti, if we give

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credence to the confessions he makes in his letters, was simply too intense for the people he frequented. In a letter to Sapegno he put it this way: ‘I think that my indifference towards many of my companions and their coldness towards me come to a great extent from my disastrously unpleasant character. In my social relationships, I feel it my duty to present myself to others in a way that is as contrary as possible to their tastes and spirit. I mock them and become an ironic observer of their defects and weaknesses. My excessive sincerity causes them to take their distance from me.’87 A lonely young man who had little in common with the men and women of his generation, he believed he was the equal of or even already superior to many of those from the generations that had preceded him. There were, however, in his early years, two people with whom Gobetti did establish meaningful personal relationships: the first was Sapegno, the second Ada. Out of Gobetti’s correspondence with Sapegno, some of which we have already seen, a warmth and intimacy emerges that is almost totally lacking elsewhere (save his letters to Ada). Although we have records of Gobetti’s long correspondence with young intellectuals who wrote for his reviews, especially with Santino Caramella, there is in these letters none of the enthusiasm, warmth, and effusiveness that mark his letters to Sapegno. One can detect almost a sense of relief in Gobetti’s tone as he realizes that he has at last happened upon a kindred spirit, someone with whom he can converse openly, someone who will understand him, someone who, like him, is out of the ordinary: With the intimacy of your words you have finally given me the certainty of something that I had hoped would happen, the achievement of which I had been contemplating and towards which I had been moving with all my strength and extreme joy. And my expectations have been fulfilled, what I foresaw has happened. Our friendship is secure; or at the very least that first meeting of the intimacy of two thoughts has taken place. This augurs well [...] It is best to look at what by now is clear and good: we are friends [...] You have succeeded in going beyond surface impressions; you have trusted in my intimacy and for this I am grateful to you [...] And now can begin between the two of us the serene conversation.88

Gobetti’s letter, however, gives only one side of the story. As the title of Bruno Germano’s article suggests – ‘An Unequal Friendship’ – Gobetti seems to have had greater need of Sapegno than Sapegno of

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Gobetti, a suspicion confirmed by some of the criticism Sapegno hands out to Gobetti in the course of correspondence he had with other interlocutors.89 The other important conversation in Gobetti’s life was with Ada Prospero. Ada was the only woman in Piero’s life; Piero the only man in hers.90 They adored each other. Ada, born in 1902, a year younger than her husband to be, first met Piero when they were both adolescents, both attending the Liceo Gioberti in Turin. Piero was very much the senior partner in the relationship. As Ersilia Alessandrone Perona has noted in a very interesting article, it was in Gobetti’s private life that his more traditional and conservative values became apparent: ‘Faced with changes in stereotypes and gender roles, Gobetti avoided any consideration of the structural transformations of society, seeking refuge in moralistic assessments. Having to choose between the modernization that he argued for on the economic and political front and “modernity” he opted for the traditional bourgeois model.’91 In her letters to Piero, Ada almost always defers to him, asking that he correct what she perceives to be her weaknesses, which she identifies as a frivolous, head-in-theclouds attitude (weaknesses that Piero confirms). If Ada is romantic and tends towards mysticism, Piero is hard-headed, rational. It is clear who is on the right path and who needs correcting. In fact, Piero does a great deal of correcting, rewriting almost from top to bottom an article Ada has written, offering advice on what Ada needs to do. Ada is a willing patient, however, never calling into question the hierarchy on which the relationship is built: ‘The love I feel for you is not something in my life, it is my life, it is the air I breathe, it is the reason I live. In me, there is nothing that is not this love and when you, my darling, take my head between your hands, it seems as if my soul passes, as if by a miracle, inside you: just like this moment when, in thinking of you, I seem to disappear [...] Because yours is the love of a creator and mine that of a creature. It doesn’t seem to me that there is any inferiority on my part, nor superiority on yours. But simply in this difference is the necessary intimate reason of our union.’92 ‘My doctor of the soul,’ as she jokingly writes in another letter, ‘with his blond curly hair and blue eyes, read my letters, and see if you can find what I’ve told you, send me the diagnosis, so that I know what to do to get better.’93 At the best of times, Piero and Ada (or didì as she often calls herself) complement each other, two halves of a whole. I am, writes Ada, your ‘loving opposite’: ‘What would happen if you were too like me and instead of attracting me bit by bit with your calm

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energy, realistically and concretely, you abandoned yourself to vaporous and unreal dreams? And it is good, I think, that I too am different from you, that I am always your crazy joy, your eternal childlike smile. May my hands always be light and tender enough to smooth out the wrinkles on your forehead, my soul always able to quench your thirst for peace.’94 At other times, Piero’s imposing presence makes Ada feel guilty, inadequate, a weight around his neck, to such an extent that she contemplates calling off the relationship: ‘I want you to tell me, Piero, in all sincerity, as you would speak to your Beatrice, if the folly of your girl tires you out, if it distances me from you. If that is so, she will, at whatever cost, know that it is best to leave you.’95 This same fear emerges in another of Ada’s letters: ‘I believed your love was my right, but I had done nothing yet to deserve it. And so struggles and storms came upon me: I saw how little I was, I saw how great you were, and I asked myself anxiously why you loved me so much. I thought it best to take my distance from you. As in so many things, I had been too small and too bad.’ Piero too comes to realize the risks he runs of losing Ada and seeks to reassure her: ‘My baby, you need calm and joy and I only give you torment and anxiety. You end up more anxious than I am. As you know, I am able not to feel suffocated by my inexorable self-critique.’96 Let me give some of the last words of this chapter to Ada. One of her letters to Piero ends thus: My love, it was then that you held me tighter in your arms, more intensely did you show me the depth of your love, keeping me close to you, giving me the confidence to walk on. I finally understood the blessed truth of our love in all its eternity, in all its serene light. I once again gained confidence in myself, I was certain I was and would become worthy of you. In all this I have had to set limits upon myself, understand that I was not and could not be other than a small girl, tender and faithful – but it was in this that I found my strength, this was my path. I loved you and I love you, my darling, with the deep humility of devotion, with proud understanding, with the certainty that you give me and that I give you, infinite, indestructible, eternal. And our love, Piero, is all sun and calm.’97

Thus far I have refrained from using the term most commonly recruited to describe Gobetti’s uncompromising and radical cultural politics, antifascism and personal ethics: intransigence. Outside its immediate Italian context of the second and third decades of the twentieth century both as noun and adjective, intransigence and intransigent

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have little precise meaning. Only when considered as Gobetti’s ethical answer to the despised practice known as transformism do the terms acquire specific meaning. As transformism was seen by Gobetti to be perhaps the crucial cause of the demise of liberalism as a viable and vibrant ideology, it is time now to move on from Gobetti the antifascist to Gobetti the liberal reformer and revolutionary.

3 Of Liberals and Liberalism

There can be no doubting the legitimacy of Gobetti’s liberal credentials. From whatever angle they are approached, they give us a picture of a young intellectual firmly anchored to all the touchstones of liberal thought. As Bobbio has pointed out, in his philosophy Gobetti refuses any notion of transcendence, wholly embracing the secular trilogy of immanentism, historicism, and idealism; in his economic thought, Gobetti stood for a free market approach stripped of all government subsidies, protection, and favouritisms; as far as his constitutional views went, he was for the absolute separation of church and state; and in politics, he advocated a state that valued free enterprise and the fullest exercise of civil rights and political freedom.1 But Gobetti, although a convinced liberal, was also an unlucky one, insofar as he lived at a time when Italian liberalism was in the doldrums, in the throes of a deep ideological crisis. To Gobetti, it seemed that the energy, dynamism, creativity, vision, and openness to a burgeoning future of possibility and progress, which were the proper characteristics of liberalism, had been abandoned and sacrificed, replaced by a squalid and grubby desire to hold onto power for power’s sake, and by almost any means. Italian liberalism, in the immediate post–First World War period, had lost its way and it no longer had anything relevant to say to the new social groups that the modernization of the nation had produced: the lower middle class and the urban proletariat. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Gobetti spoke of an antifascist political culture as a question of style. One could say, in fact, that his critique of Italian liberalism centres on why successive Italian liberal governments were unable to create a liberal style. For Gobetti, style

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had, above all, ethical connotations. It denoted a strict self-discipline, acceptance of the necessity of sacrifice, rooted in the humus of social reality, honesty, and utmost rigour. It was the stuff of which the ‘new moral type’ was to be made. But style, as Gobetti well knew, in the Italy of the early 1920s was the attribute of only a heroic minority, an aristocracy that was out of step with the vast majority of the nation. For Gobetti, the most damning condemnation of the incompetence of the liberal ruling class was that it had utterly failed to bring even the most rudimentary political education to the middle class and proletarian masses. In particular, Italian liberalism had done nothing to foster the talents and potential for growth inherent in the middle classes and had failed to turn them into what, from a liberal perspective, they were supposed to be, the dynamic motor of society. Although Gobetti does not ignore liberal economic policy, what matters for him, and what lies at the heart of his critique, is liberalism’s ethical failure insofar as it has short-changed both the middle and working classes. Liberal policies and practices had been ethical failures, not just economic ones. Protectionism, for example – ‘the ethic of mediocrity of industry’ – had been a bad deal not only economically, but also because it led to corruption and decadence; and the way the working classes had been bought off by way of greater material benefits did nothing for their ‘moral elevation’ and represented for them a humiliation.2 How had this come about? How was it that Italy had failed to develop the kind of middle class, for example, that had made the fortunes of nations like Great Britain and France? His writings on the limits of Italian liberalism, on which Gobetti meditated long and hard, one, take the form of a reflection on what liberalism should be and the beneficial effects, both economic and ethical, it should produce; two, examine why there had never been a genuine liberal political culture in Italy; and three, ask what needed to happen if such a culture were to take root in Italy. In the background of Gobetti’s writings is a picture of the successfully liberal societies he saw in France and Great Britain, where ‘economic individualism’ had brought these nations to the ‘dawn of modernity.’3 Yet, rather than being interested in conducting an accurate and detailed analysis of how liberalism worked in these countries, Gobetti uses these examples in a more self-referential fashion, as levers with which to illustrate everything he believed was wrong with Italy, rather than right with France and Great Britain. Gobetti appears to have had rather an idyllic picture of Great Britain, where the traffic flowed in an orderly manner and where the taxpayer

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happily handed over his money to the state secure in the knowledge that he was contributing to the common good of the whole. Comparing the two nations, and speaking of Italy’s ‘political immaturity,’ Gobetti wrote: ‘[In Italy] the taxpayer has never felt the dignity of taking part in the life of the state […] the Italian taxpayer pays up cursing the state. He has no consciousness of exercising, as he pays, a true and proper sovereign function. The tax taxes him (‘L’imposta gli è imposta’).’4 But differently from some of his contemporaries, such as Armando Cavalli, who had argued, in an article published in La Rivoluzione liberale, for a Protestant reform in Italy, Gobetti knew that a course of action that limited itself to imitating inherited or imported models had little sense.5 Gobetti was far more sophisticated than that. In his writings, and in those of his companions like Giovanni Ansaldo and Mario Missiroli, the invocations of virtuous others, virtuous non-Italies, have more a rhetorical than a referential function. Protestantism and the Lutheran Reformation that was supposed to come with it, and with that, the transformation of the Italian middle classes from parasites to producers (or so the theory went) served the interests of Gobetti and his like as a largely invented positive model with which to intensify his critique of what he saw as the defects of his contemporary Italy and its citizens. Gobetti’s most important virtuous other was France. Close both geographically and culturally to Turin, France was constantly on the horizon of Gobetti’s writings. Yet, its emergence as a positive, virtuous other comes at a fairly late stage.6 Indeed, in his writings published after the Versailles Conference that concluded the First World War, Gobetti is not always tender with France. One of the reasons for this, of course, was the ambiguous way France had treated Italy in the aftermath of the Great War; another contributing factor was Gobetti’s allegiance to the Croce/Gentile school, which was far more philo-German than it was philo-French. However, Gobetti’s response to things French – or better: things Parisian – began to take on a more positive connotation once fascism came to power. In the light of Italy’s woes, France becomes the modern nation par excellence, a nation that had managed, it seemed then, to have avoided all the dangers and pitfalls that had bedevilled Italy and led it into fascism. For Gobetti, France had enough modernity in its DNA, as it were, to ensure that it was inoculated against the possibility of fascism, whatever form it might take. Yet, one cannot help noting that France takes on positive connotations for Gobetti in a very specific context: namely, that of the fascist campaign that vilified and pilloried France as the bad example, as a nation that was antithetical to

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everything the regime stood for. The more the Fascist regime trashed France, the more it became attractive in Gobetti’s eyes, his earlier criticisms giving way to an enthusiastic embrace of this European, modern nation, the standard-bearer of an alternative, modern, inherently – or so it seemed – antifascist culture. France, for Gobetti, I would suggest, becomes something of a necessary fiction, a creature of his need for an exemplary non-Italy to hold up as a model against the real Italy that had, to a great extent, embraced fascism. The cause of the widespread political immaturity that characterized Italian political life and retarded its entry into the modern world was, Gobetti thought, attributable to two absences: that of a genuine conservative party and that of a genuine revolutionary one. In the absence of such reference points, which would have positioned themselves at either end of the political spectrum and exercised a power of attraction over individuals from both poles, Italian political culture had become undisciplined and utopian, ‘the natural land of a demagogic political culture,’ in which ‘messianic expectations’ were the order of the day and where individuals with strong views were forced to ‘snuggle up to radicalism.’ These are not the kind of conditions that create a mature political climate or mature political actors. As we shall see presently in greater detail, Gobetti’s theory of social change and progress is an antagonistic one. Progress comes about as a result of challenges made to the existing order by emerging groups and generations. But for these challenges to be fruitful, the actors in the political struggle must be educated, mature, and responsible. In other words, the task of both revolutionary and conservative parties was that of educating politically those individuals who were attracted to them so that they could be included in a conversation with the established order. Even if it was not a cordial conversation, for the clash of opposites to be productive it was necessary that it be based on a common agreement to enter into debate, on some common language. The claims and challenges emerging groups made had to be feasible in the context of existing conditions and not utopian pie in the sky. Until responsible political actors were part of the scene, which they were not in great numbers according to Gobetti, no productive or fruitful clashes of opposites would ever be possible. What kind of political education is Gobetti thinking about? A conservative party, he writes, had it followed a program of political education, could have brought about a ‘preventive liquidation of the anarchic and radical psychology that was to become dominant among the parvenus of a failed bourgeoisie.’7 Such a party could have promoted the impor-

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tance of public safety, encouraged respect for the law and for tradition so as to create a sense of ‘moral cohesion’ in the nation. It would also have been a champion of thriftiness, and would have made the case for why taxation is necessary. This, however, is not what happened. Liberals failed not only the middle class, but also the working class, being not at all interested in their ‘moral elevation’ and limiting themselves to appeasing workers through concessions to them in the form of material benefits, so encouraging a parasitic and passive attitude that came to a head in the working class’s ‘search for a subsidy’ (953). This meant that the revolutionary party that had never been was denied potential cadres who would have brought their ‘fibre of combattants’ (953) to the struggle. In the end, ‘missing were the two essential nuclei of recruitment for an avant-garde liberal party able to renew political life by continuously supplying new libertarian energies, disciplined around an ethic of autonomy’ (953). What they should have done, and didn’t do, was to create in the workers, or at least in the best of them, an ethic of individualism, and not one of solidarity. By solidarity Gobetti did not mean the care for others less well-off than we are. Rather, for him it is a dangerous indication that at the centre of political life the concept of struggle has been replaced by acquiescence. Struggle can only be fostered by individualism, ‘which is the first base of action […] the first affirmation of a consciousness and of humankind’s civil dignity’ (953). Italian liberals had been guilty of creating an ethic of solidarity that was tantamount to a ‘calculated complicity in the politics of the parasite’ (953). As Meaglia and others have pointed out, Gobetti’s definition of liberalism is vague.8 But the fact that the concept of struggle is so often associated in his writings with liberalism helps us to see that, for Gobetti, a liberal society is one in which the conditions exist for struggle to take place and, just as importantly, it is a society in which individuals are willing to struggle. The ethic of solidarity with which he takes issue did nothing to prepare for a culture of struggle. In Italy, the basic conditions for a liberal political culture were absent: namely, ‘a daring economic life (but one that does not run undue risks); ability to face the unexpected without rigid adherence to systems (deriving strength from that), the nimble and sworn adversary of provincial and nationalist quiescence; ability to stake its claim in the life of the world on the basis of its productiveness and entrepreneurial skills’ (952). Italian liberalism had, then, in Gobetti’s eyes, not lived up to expectations and failed to deliver on its brief. It was deeply flawed and had done little or nothing to foster the moral elevation and spiritual

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growth that were among its highest aspirations. If there was one area in particular in which Italian liberalism had been lacking and which was tantamount to a betrayal of its whole raison d’être it was its reluctance to embrace fully the theory of progress and growth through social antagonism. Progress and renewal are achieved not through conversations between adversaries who come to a compromise that satisfies each partner, but through the clash of opposites, the one challenging and seeking to replace the other, a younger generation revolting against its father figures, an emerging social class contesting the hegemony of the dominating one and usurping it. Struggle ends with winners and losers; if at the end everyone wins there has been no struggle and no renewal. Gobetti’s writings are strewn with a bewildering series of terms to which he generally gives either positive or negative connotations. A useful guide to the long list of negative terms is to see them as indicating everything that is the antithesis of the antagonism, clash, struggle, and war vital to the health of society. This negative list, which is far from complete, would include (in alphabetical order): abstain, acquiesce, calm, collaboration, compromise, democratic, harmony, idyllic, indifference, pacify, parasite, paternal, privilege, protectionism, quiescence, quiet, solidarity, tutelage. A society is healthy and mature, thinks Gobetti, insofar as it refuses to rest on its laurels and understand that any happy, prosperous, and quiet place it reaches is not the end point of struggle, but just another point from which struggle takes off again. For Gobetti, then, a healthy state is not one of quiescence, nor one that is perceived as one’s final resting place. All is struggle, renewal, rejuvenation. Happiness is in movement, not in stasis. All of the negative terms in the list above, in some way or another, inhibit struggle by seeking either to curtail it, bringing it to a premature and happy end (a compromise solution), or to cushion individuals from the cut and thrust of social or economic antagonism. For example, entrepreneurs who do not have to face up to the ravages of the market if they are protected by government policies, certain categories of workers who promise to temper their requests if they are afforded preferential treatment by government policies, or co-operatives that win contracts simply because they belong to the same political area as the party of government do not live, according to Gobetti, in the real world of social, political, and economic forces. And this costs them dearly. In exchange for a little peace they embark on the road towards decline. One of the struggles that most interested Gobetti in the industrial

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city of Turin where he lived was class struggle. When class struggle ends, he wrote, decadence begins. The problem with Italy, he thought, was that there was too little class struggle, too little productive tension between proletarian and bourgeois classes. No one seems to be proletarian or bourgeois in Italy any more, he once complained, everyone is middle class.9 And to be middle class, and happy to be so, means accepting inertia, passivity, lifelessness: ‘an eternal danger of stasis, denial of progress, acquiescence to the past’ (1039). If a society is not characterized by willingness to struggle and an understanding of its importance, then that society can hardly call itself liberal. Absence of struggle, however, is not always or only the result of oppressive practices that limit self-expression, but also when the political culture of the day eschews struggle, deciding instead to solve its problems through compromise and give and take. This was what had happened in Italy, Gobetti thought. One form of struggle, however – class struggle – promised to bring with it radical change, and this is why Gobetti the liberal valued it so much. This made of Gobetti an audacious and revolutionary liberal. In fact, what makes Gobetti so remarkable a figure, as Martin has pointed out, is his ability to locate the ‘libertarian passion,’ as he often calls it, in unusual constituencies and places.10 The workers’ movement is just one such. Although, as we shall see later, Gobetti thought that the workers may not realize it, their participation in class struggle is the fulfilment of a genuinely liberal agenda. The self-emancipation that was at the core of liberal ideals was not confined to the traditional liberal classes, the bourgeoisie, but was also part of the workers’ ethic. Needless to say, many traditional liberals saw this as a heresy and were unwilling to see what Gobetti saw as the productive role played by the workers’ movement in furthering a liberal agenda. Gobetti’s, then, was a liberalism that had taken on a new, previously unheard of form realized by new agents: ‘The revolutionary meaning of the workers’ movement […] consists in its being so vigorously bourgeois, while too many industrialists are incapable of carrying out their tasks as savers and entrepreneurs. The bourgeois system, instead of heading for its sunset, will be renewed by the very critics and pallbearers of the bourgeoisie’ (1041). Intransigence and Trasformismo Gobetti had both a term and a name to describe everything he thought was wrong with the state of Italian liberalism: that term was trasform-

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ismo and the name was Giovanni Giolitti. In the language of Italian political science, trasformismo refers to a practice that is both almost universally abhorred, but also seen as one of the staples of political life and has even been seen by one scholar as the founding flaw of the Italian character.11 The best-known and most-quoted lines of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel Il gattopardo (The Leopard) are those in which the clever Tancredi shows how able a trasformista he is. By the term is meant a practice whereby a government, typically in the person of its prime minister, buys off opponents to its policies by way of compromises, favours, preferential treatment, and often shady deals in order to maintain its grip on power. Ever-changing and temporary majorities are formed, each one good for a specific purpose, in order to push through this or that law. Trasformismo is all about power, and hanging onto power, even when the conditions for holding it no longer exist; it is about buying off segments of the opposition with invitations to take part in the spoils system, thus turning opponents into clients; it is about appeasing the opposition, rather than treating it as a dialectical opposite; it is about sacrificing principles, electoral promises, and the coherency of a program for short-term gain. Italian scholars and commentators have often branded trasformismo as if it were the worst possible sin and as if it were a phenomenon that is peculiar to the Italian way of doing politics. A more sober and distanced view would see it, instead, as a far more transnational practice that is an embedded part of any political system, even when it goes under less tainted names, such as ‘inclusive government,’ ‘reaching across the aisle,’ or ‘bipartisanship.’ Trasformismo, or whatever we choose to call it, is a far more fundamental part of politics as usual all over the world than many an Italian commentator seems to realize. Be that as it may, trasformismo was Gobetti’s bête noir to such an extent that he defined his own political identity and ethic as a reaction to what he saw going on around him. What irritated Gobetti most about trasformismo was that it nullified the difference between parliamentary majority and opposition. It took the edge off political struggle and turned every debate into a race towards compromise, reconciliation, harmony, mediation. As we have seen, this is not the stuff of political life as Gobetti saw it. Indeed, trasformismo – the invention of which is attributed to a series of Liberal governments, starting with that of Agostino Depretis in 1882 and, after him, Francesco Crispi – was an underhanded and unethical practice that removed liberalism from the high ground on which Gobetti had placed it and, stripped of its found-

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ing principle, turned it into a travesty of itself. The Liberal politician with whom he most closely associated trasformismo was Giolitti, an evergreen on the very mobile Italian political scene, whom Gobetti held to be far more responsible than others for the sorry state of affairs into which Italian liberalism had lapsed. During the years of ‘Liberal Italy,’ the sixty-one years between unification in 1861 and the advent of fascism in 1922, Italy had fifty-nine different governments, the shortest lasting just fifteen days (Tommaso Tittoni, 12–25 March 1905), the longest, forty-three months (Giovanni Lanza, 14 December 1869 to 10 July 1873).12 Giolitti had been prime minister of Italy on five occasions between 1892 and 1921, as well as minister for home affairs on six occasions and finance minister once.13 Giolitti’s first stint as prime minister came to an end in 1893 as a result of his government’s inability to guarantee public order in the face of protests in Tuscany and Sicily, where the Fasci siciliani, representing the exploited subaltern classes, had sought to force landowners into offering improved contracts. It was these latter, in fact, who called for the strong-arm tactics that Giolitti’s successor as prime minister, Francesco Crispi, one of the heroes of Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily and who had already held the office of prime minister from July 1887 to February 1891, would put into practice. Giolitti, like his immediate predecessors, governed Italy in a time of social upheaval. With the emergence of a much better organized and bolder proletariat, both in industrial and agricultural areas, Giolitti sought to placate a potentially volatile situation by way of a series of compromise reforms. The opening years of the twentieth century saw, in fact, attempts made by Giolitti to defuse and pre-empt social agitation: for example, he invited the Socialist leader to join him in his government (although the invitation was refused); he passed legislation improving working and living conditions for many of the less well-off sectors of society, including women and children; he allowed the participation of socialist and Catholic co-operatives to compete for public contracts; and he ordered that local prefects show greater tolerance for strikes, as long as they remained peaceful. A lot of good work was certainly done by Giolitti and the ‘Giolitti years,’ as the period in which he dominated Italian politics came to be known, if not years of great cultural and political excitement, were years of relative calm and prosperity. For Croce, there could be no better liberal politician than Giolitti. None of this did anything at all to impress Gobetti. Taking his lead from Salvemini’s L’Unità, his writings on Giolitti make their debut in

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the very first edition of Energie nove, in November 1918. Gobetti had been following with interest the emergence of the movement made up of First World War combatants, young men, mostly officers, who had come out of the war experience with a developed political consciousness, a strong esprit de corps and who were beginning to make their voice heard. Gobetti saw this movement as a potential source of new energy and dynamism, and although he had not been through the same experience they had, he felt very much at one with these men and their demands for change. Writing of the review Volontà (which means ‘will’ or ‘will power’ in Italian), founded by a group of combatant officers, he remarks that this was a creation of ‘young people, real young people […] whose aspirations have been given a concrete form in a program out of which emerges the general impression of a new passion that is being brought to bear on the study of the problems of Italian life. This is life, a heightened sense of national consciousness, a beautiful document testimony to the spiritual force that has come out of the war. This is renewal. We are happy about this and offer our best wishes and applause.’14 Against the background of such potential vitality, Giolitti appeared to Gobetti as a kind of dull and staid father figure intent on reining in the demands for change that were then being made. These, thought Gobetti, were potentially great times, but ones that required a great ruling class headed by a great man to foster that potential and bring it to fruition. But Giolitti was not that man. In fighting Giolitti, Gobetti wrote in an article entitled ‘Traditore o incapace?’ we are fighting the ‘minister of small-time politics dragged irresponsibly out on a day-today basis.’15 Giolitti is the man who failed to understand the demands made by the war thanks to his short-term mentality, and even today does not understand the war and the effects it is having.’ One of these effects is the hope ‘of finding an Italy and a government that welcomes these new demands. Italy must stop its petty and small-scale politics, Italy needs to breathe internally and to be respected externally […] For this immense new task, new men, sufficiently competent to take on the job that is entrusted to them, are necessary.’ The article concludes by calling Giolitti a ‘political nullity,’ which Italy can ill afford, just as it can ill afford ‘incapable imbeciles.’ An earlier description used by Gobett – ‘Minister of the Underworld’ – had been borrowed from the man who had coined the expression, Salvemini, author of a book on Giolitti that bore the same title. Indeed, much of the inspiration for Gobetti’s attack on Giolitti, although couched in far more violent language, comes from

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Salvemini, later to be persecuted for his antifascism and to seek refuge in the United States, where he went on to teach at Harvard. Referring in particular to the Italian south, Salvemini attributed blame to Giolitti for two connected phenomena, both the result of trasformismo: first, the way the practice produced cliques and mafia-like groups who had the inside track on dealings with government; and second, how the revolutionary potential was removed from the agrarian workers’ movement by Giolitti’s politics of appeasement. As he wrote in his Tendenze vecchie e necessità nuove del movimento operaio italiano, by way of offering improved working conditions and pay to certain categories of workers, Giolitti ‘slowly emptied out the avant-garde from the organized workers’ movement and slowly removed any subversive tendencies, gradually hoping to transform them into true and proper organs of political and social conservation […] everything was done to turn the attention of the organized proletarian minorities away from struggles for general reforms that were useful to the entire working class and redirect attention towards the tactic of partial gains that were to the exclusive benefit of the organized minorities.’16 The energetic critique of liberal politicians that Energie nove had inaugurated with Giolitti was continued by La Rivoluzione liberale. Many of the articles published in RL take to task liberal politicians for their inertia, incompetence, and inability to recognize the outlines of a new society that was taking shape. One of Gobetti’s closest friends was Carlo Levi, whose very first article for RL, indeed his very first piece of published writing, was a withering attack on Antonio Salandra, a Liberal who had become prime minister in 1914, taking over after the fall of Giolitti’s fourth government. Invited by Gobetti to write on Salandra, who was born in Puglia, Levi initially refused, citing his ignorance of the Italian south. Gobetti insisted and Levi produced an article whose interest lies not so much in its originality (of which it has little), but as an illustration of the sarcastic tone, bordering at times on the insulting, that the young men and women who contributed to Gobetti’s reviews adopted and as an illustration of what the Gobetti group found lacking in traditional Italian liberals like Salandra. In a style very reminiscent of Gobetti’s own, Levi begins by stating that ‘poverty of ideas and leaden weight are characteristic, as we all know, of almost all the politicians today in sight in our very new Italy […] Antonio Salandra is not better than his times. To the general weakness he adds his own particular brand, but which is nevertheless not without interest. Among the political masks of our day his is a well-

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defined comic one. He appears as if he were the wise professor among the ignorant, the holder of the academic chair among the illiterate, he who knows it all among those deprived of intelligence.’17 These few lines are enough to show the disgust that Levi and the entire Gobetti group had for the liberal ruling class. Salandra’s major flaw is his ineptitude, his intellectual laziness, and the blind and dangerous faith he had in political and cultural models that had long since lost any of the purpose they once served. In Levi’s article one hears the voice of a rather arrogant young man who is convinced he has diagnosed the illness afflicting the Italy of the first twenty years of his century and who knows how to cure the ailment. This is a young man who is sure he is another kind of Italian, sharing little or nothing with a generation that has been rendered redundant by time and history but which, resistant to change, hangs onto power. The main charge Levi brings to Salandra is that he has sought to perpetuate and render eternal a method of government that is tied to a specific moment of history. Salandra’s thought consists in, he writes, ‘an academic, pale and falsifying repetition […] that contents itself with formulas and has no purchase on a rebellious reality that escapes him.’18 From this standpoint, the notion of progress is fatally flawed. For Salandra, change does not represent something new, something unexpected, or ‘a future towards which we move,’ but as ‘a past to defend and, at best, to amend.’ Such a stubborn defence of the codes that guided political, social, and political practice in the past, which have been made second nature by force of habit, not only prevents Salandra from understanding or appreciating novelty when it presents itself in the form of, say, the emergence of new class as a social protagonist – movements that ‘tend to go beyond the yellow schemes of a geriatric political organization’ – but also leads him (and his like) to fear them. For Levi, Salandra is a man of the Risorgimento in an age that has left the Risorgimento behind. In the Risorgimento, writes Levi, Salandra sees ‘the centre not only of our past political life, but also its future, as if it were the predetermined form on which our state’s life must be modelled: the sacred tablets of the law out of which all our norms are born.’19 He is, then, a prisoner of the past, not a forger of a future, concludes Levi, referring to Salandra’s decision to take the nation into the First World War so as to complete the work of the Risorgimento through the territorial gain he hoped Italy would enjoy once the war was over. Gobetti and his group did not confine this kind of critique to liberal politicians. In much the same way, and using much the same kind of

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language, Gobetti extended this mode of attack to Filippo Turati, leader of the Italian Socialist Party. Turati, however, was a socialist who had far too much in common with the practices of traditional liberals for Gobetti’s tastes. Just as liberals had failed in their spiritual mission, so too had Turati’s socialists. Afflicted by a rigidity of thought that was out of step with the new tumultuous and changing times, Turati’s paternalistic attitude had the effect of transforming those he and his party represented, the proletariat, to mere ‘figures […] of beggars, never allowing them to become active participants in the struggle.’20 Government, for Turati, has ‘a function of transcendent utilitarianism, the masses make the most of it in order to gather the advantages they are offered.’21 Turati’s was an ideology of pacification, not one of struggle, and it was based on the pursuit of improved economic conditions for the workers and not on the cultural and political preparation of new actors on the Italian stage. Turati, continued Gobetti, had evidently not read Marx, despite being a socialist. If Marxism meant the ‘creation of a proletarian aristocracy able to promote the rise of the working classes […] none of this had ever penetrated [Turati’s] spirit. Nothing of this had brought to him the realistic experience of a leader of political forces. Turati’s ideology is born at a specific moment of our national history, in an ideal void in which the political atrophies into formulas that tradition dictates, but which reality cannot bear out.’22 Far more interested in pacification than in struggle, Turati was, in Gobetti’s typically strong words, for this reason ‘modern Italy’s most formidable diseducator.’ Gobetti’s fear was not so much Giolitti in person, for all the faults he ascribed to that person, but something more pervasive: namely, giolittismo, the system of government that Giolitti seemed to have perfected, and the ever growing perception that it had become par for the course, the normal way of doing political business in Italy. Even if Giolitti was, he wrote, ‘the most perfect representative of this degradation,’ Gobetti’s opposition would have remained as vocal and cutting even if ‘the head of government was not called Giolitti, if he continued with his systems we would still be against all giolittismo.’23 Behind statements like the above is a fear similar to that felt by leftwingers in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s who despaired of ever seeing the left in power and so were forced to face the prospect of dying under a Christian Democrat government – morire democristiani – (as do perhaps those of the early twenty-first century who fear that they might die berlusconiani). Gobetti’s fear is that he die giolittiano. His perception of this fear grew from what at first sight might seem an unexpected

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source: namely, Mussolini, who Gobetti saw as little more than the heir apparent to a political tradition that had taken Giolitti’s name, but was so deeply rooted in the very fabric of Italian life as to now be ‘politics as usual.’ Benito Mussolini Surprisingly, perhaps, at least to contemporary observers more used to the violent excesses of fascist regimes, Gobetti does not consider Mussolini an extremist and at times seems to take him rather less than seriously. For Gobetti, Mussolini is little more than a new version of Giolitti, the latest in a chain, with the difference that if Giolitti had the dour temperament often associated with people of his home region, Piedmont, Mussolini was the outgoing, expansive, theatrical type typical of his native Romagna. Indeed, especially with the March on Rome, Gobetti saw how Mussolini had used Italy’s theatrical tradition, playing the role of Pulcinella, to his benefit.24 But their similarities far outweighed their differences. What they had in common was that both of them drew on the middle classes for their support, and from the ‘cauldron of the middle classes,’ writes Gobetti, nothing good can come, only fascism or more giolittismo.25 Both were expert trasformisti insofar as they sought agreements with their adversaries. In this, Mussolini is Giolitti’s most loyal pupil: Mussolini ‘has learned trasformismo from Giolitti and is now giving us a romagnolo version of it […] Whatever direction the regime and fascism go in, the greatest theme of our present age will be: Mussolini domesticator [addomesticatore] and diseductaor, ready to put down opposition and give us a pacified Italy full of war-mongering petit bourgeois rhetoric.’26 ‘The reconciliation of opposites,’ he wrote at a later date, ‘is not an act of hypocrisy by the Duce: it is his style.’27 Mussolini was ‘the new Giolitti.’28 Indeed, for Gobetti his worst traits were his resemblance to Giolitti, not his use of violence: ‘We fought Mussolini the corruptor before Mussolini the tyrant; we fought fascism as paternal tutelage before fascism as a dictatorship; we did not insist on complaining about the lack of liberty and about violence, but turned our attention to our polemic with the Italians, those who did not put up resistance, that allowed themselves to be tamed.’29 And on another occasion: ‘Mussolini-ism is a result that is far worse than fascism because it confirms the people’s servility, the weak sense of their own responsibility, the vice of expecting from the Duce, from the tamer, from the deus ex machina their salvation.’30

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As these last comments suggest, the other trait that unites the two is that they both eschewed struggle and thereby reneged on what Gobetti saw as their duty as members of the ruling class to work for the moral elevation of the population (or at least the best, most receptive parts of it). Instead of a culture of struggle, the regime had given its blessing to a continued regime of passivity: the regime ‘asks only of its citizens that they abdicate their dignity and their political rights: there’s a man in Italy who takes care of everything, the others work admiring him, or they enjoy themselves at the feasts or they hide in the libraries.’31 There was a great deal of Giolitti and Turati in Mussolini’s Italy. Gobetti uses the terms addomesticare and diseducare to describe all three: ‘What disgusts us in Mussolini, even more than the violence, is his Giolitti-like instinct to corrupt and diseducate.’32 ‘Diseducator’ had also been the term with which Gobetti had described Turati. Turati was a socialist, Mussolini a fascist, but both of them were giolittian through and through. No matter what ideological language they claimed to speak, what came through was always a giolittian idiom. Italian politics had been normalized, tamed, domesticated, the opposition placated. Political struggle seemed to have been abolished: ‘If we make our way towards an idyllic place and towards pacification, if we are to witness once again the tranquility of the giolittian decade […] we would like to note, even as the new era opens, we do not believe in this peace, which appears to us as the suppression of political struggle.’33 Gobetti’s perception of the extent to which Italy had been normalized became more acute in the aftermath of the April 1924 elections. Mussolini’s men had been present in the Italian parliament since 1921, when thirty-five fascist deputies were elected, thanks to a decision taken by Giolitti that allowed Mussolini’s candidates to join the government list. Stable rule of Italy, however, proved impossible as a succession of weak prime ministers attempted and failed to exercise authority, all this playing into the hands of the fascists who promised order. Support for fascism grew enormously amid the political chaos, and radical fascists began to be seen as a necessary form of defence against equally radical left-wingers. The violence that marked their conduct also gave Mussolini the chance to claim that only he could control them, in return for a slice of the cake of power. Pressure grew in the fall of 1922, as radical fascists – fascists of the first hour, as they came to be known – called for a march on Rome as a prelude to fascism taking power. The march itself was something less than the impressive spectacle it was supposed to be, but it was enough to force the hand of the king and he, in the

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normal constitutional manner, invited Mussolini, still thirty-nine years old and destined to be Italy’s youngest prime minster, to head a new government. However, rather than with revolution, Mussolini’s government was concerned with reconciliation, and so included a broad sampling of political constituencies, not only fascists, but also liberals, members of the Catholic Popular Party, a Nationalist, members of the armed forces, and Giovanni Gentile. Stability, then, was the order of the day in Mussolini’s government. This also meant keeping in check the violent elements among the fascists, who were incorporated – and thus effectively shackled – by Mussolini into a militia. Mussolini then sought to consolidate his grip on power with the Acerbo Bill of 1923. According to the terms of the bill, any political party that received at least 25 per cent of the vote in a general election would be guaranteed at least 66 per centof the seats in parliament. Mussolini was not alone in wanting this measure. Traditional liberals like Salandra and Giolitti were also enthusiastic about it, seeing it as an effective means of preventing the left from entering parliament in any meaningful way. Indeed, it was the political fight against the left that characterized the 1924 elections, held under the Acerbo Law. During the campaign, Mussolini had announced from the balcony of Piazza Venezia that he would never form any kind of electoral or political alliance with left-wing parties, but would with any other who agreed to ‘march with us for the defeat of the red peril.’ The invitation was, then, made to all political moderates to ‘enter into a large electoral list willing to collaborate with a fascist majority.’ This was the listone, a slate of candidates that included fascists, ex-Nationalists, liberals like Salandra, and Catholics that went on to win over 60 per cent of the vote. This, for Gobetti, was the death knell of liberalism. The only positive note to emerge was that it was now clear who the real adversaries to fascism were and who were not: ‘One advantage that will come from Mussolini’s good-natured face is the support given to him by all the false opponents, all the conservative antifascists […] The opposition that asked fascism to be legal and constitutional has always made us laugh. So much the better, then, if instead of having them among us as false friends, we can now classify them as adversaries.’34 In fact, in the epigraph to the article ‘La settimana,’ Giolitti appears as ‘Giolitti fascista’ on account of the tepid and anemic opposition he put up to the regime and which was tantamount to support.35 What had become clear to Gobetti was that there had always been two kinds of opposition to fascism, a soft one and a hard one. The soft

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one was made up of ‘old democrats and liberals who had been ministers or undersecretaries in the post–First World War period.’36 Theirs was an opposition based on resentment that their places in the corridors of power had been lost; it was not born of ‘a natural repugnance in the face of the winners.’ Members of this group, in which Gobetti numbers Salandra and Giolitti, underestimated fascism and thought they would be able to harness it, rendering it harmless, by ‘dealing with it, collaborating, demanding conditions so that a negotiation could take place.’ But the tactic backfired. Instead of shackling fascism, it ended up by shackling the conservative antifascists, and bestowing on Mussolini a legitimacy he did not previously have. This for Gobetti was the last straw and taught him at least three lessons: first, it was proof that one could no longer count on the old-style traditional liberals – ‘The real problem comes when we attempt to give content to method, to define opposition. The Liberal Party will not be the party of opposition. The Liberal Party has to defend its clients and its privileges […] it enters into discussion only to collaborate’;37 second, that there now existed in Italy no space at all for a liberal politics; and third, that the only genuinely liberal political activity that could be attempted was to withdraw from the world of politics, now dominated more than ever by trasformisti, in order to prepare for a future in which real liberal politics with real liberals would have a role to play. But that was not possible in the present. The kind of fascism that emerged from the April 1924 elections was the kind that Gobetti would rather not have seen. Initially, he had hoped that the emergence of a political and cultural phenomenon like fascism would have a paradoxically salutary effect insofar as it might shock Italians out of a state of complacency. Fascism, as he wrote in 1922 when it came to power, could have been a short, sharp dose of tyranny for those who had only read about it in books.38 The fascism that could be useful for Italy, he wrote on another occasion, was the fascism of the manganello, the club with which the fascist squad members beat up their opponents, here standing as a figure for fascism once its mask of respectability falls away.39 This is why he writes in ‘Elogio della ghigliottina,’ one of his most remembered articles: ‘Still, let’s be sincere once and for all, I waited anxiously for personal persecutions to come about so that from our suffering a spirit could be reborn, so that out of the sacrifice of its priests this people recognized itself […] And we have to hope (with a great deal of scepticism, alas) that tyrants will be tyrants, that reaction is reaction, that there are those who will have the courage to raise the guillotine, and will keep to their positions. One can valorize

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the regime, one can attempt to get from it all possible fruits: we demand a whiplashing that will wake people up, we demand the hangman so that we can see clearly.’40 If there were two antifascisms, the soft one of the conservative liberals and the hard one of Gobetti and his like, there were also two fascisms, the soft one of Mussolini, out to seek compromise and collaboration and the hard one of the likes of Roberto Farinacci. Soft antifascism and soft fascism soon found themselves, as we have seen, consenting bedfellows; but even between a hard antifascist like Gobetti and a hard fascist like Farinacci one can detect a sense of mutual respect. For Gobetti’s theory of progress through struggle, through the clash of opposites to work, it was necessary that both sides put up a good fight. If victory was too easy, lesser fruit would come of it; the greater resistance the opponent put up, the greater the spoils of war. From a war with Mussolini the trasformista only compromise solutions could result; this was not so with Farinacci. Despising him ideologically, Gobetti at least recognized Farinacci’s coherence, his seriousness, his intransigence. Farinacci’s fascism was of a kind that troubled many Italians: ‘Fascism has a serious defect, it is too intransigent, too serious […] It forces you to believe in a political faction and to take responsibility for that belief. The Italians, though, have a proper estimation of their own talent and versatility and smile at the idea of being sincere and honest. Little masters of trasformismo, fertile creators of a variety of personal stories, they know exactly to how great an extent guile and tricks are more practical and accessible than boring intransigence.’41 Farinacci was one such intransigent fascist. Born in the region of Molise, he moved to Cremona as a teenager and became, after his participation in the First World War, what fascists liked to call a local ras (a title that has Ethiopian origins), the boss of a city or province. Farinacci was one of the most brutal of all the ras in Italy and he soon made his name as a hard man, as one of the most vocal ‘fascists of the first hours,’ and as a critical voice within fascism. He distrusted Mussolini’s political manoeuvring in Rome and called for fascism to return to its original purity. Fascism was fascism, he thought, not Mussolini-ism.42 This was the kind of intransigence Gobetti liked and respected, despite the ideological and political chasm that separated him from Farinacci. Of this latter and another intransigent fascist, Gino Baroncini, he wrote: ‘They defend illegitimate personal positions, but they are positions that have been acquired with sacrifice and muscles. Behind these men there are one hundred thousand young people who have not asked fascism to give them a job nor resolve the problem

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of their unemployment, but have brought to it their own exasperated aberration, their repugnance for compromise and opportunism. In this ignorance and in this barbarity, we must respect a sense of dignity and a proof of sacrifice.’43 The key word here is intransigence, the most quoted positive quality that has been attributed to Gobetti by many of his commentators. But we need to be careful about the specific meaning the term has for Gobetti. In his political lexicon, intransigence does not mean to be stubborn, rigid, inflexible, nor does it mean adherence to dogma, as the term is sometimes understood in contemporary usage. Rather, for Gobetti to be intransigent in the Italy of Giolitti, Turati, and Mussolini is to be principled, to hold onto one’s principles and never betray them. Intransigence is everything that trasformismo is not. It is only by considering Gobetti’s use of the term in the light of the widespread trasformismo in Italian political life does it take on any precise meaning. Intransigence is the polemical ethical answer to the corruption of political life brought about by the practice of trasformismo.44 Although Gobetti’s intransigence gave him an ethically sound platform from which to oppose fascism and to mark out his radical difference with the appeasers, it also gave the positions he from time to time adopted a dualistic quality. There is no middle ground for Gobetti, and this led him, as we shall see, both to be overly enthusiastic about social movements that seemed to promise dynamism and to be overly drastic in his condemnation of those he apprehended as enemies of his project of renewal.45 It was on this aspect of Gobetti’s character and intellectual make-up that Montale commented on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Gobetti’s death. He wrote: ‘Gobetti was always in movement, combining an extraordinary intellectual curiosity with the conviction that life can only be explained by life itself and that man is the only forger of his destiny, because between good and evil it is necessary to choose, not wait for the third element to come into play – synthesis – the surprise package that scholars find in the laboratories of history.’46 But what did it actually mean to be an intransigent liberal in the Italy of the early 1920s, and to be someone who wants to have his say in the political life of the nation? As it turns out, Gobetti was left in a space of self-imposed exile that denied him a centrestage role. Gobetti always struggled to come to terms with the fact that politics is discussion, compromise, collaboration, even in the best of circumstances when each side acknowledges the legitimacy of the other. It was even harder, indeed impossible, for him with a Fascist regime in power with which he

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refused to do business and with liberal leaders whose tactic of seeking accommodation with Mussolini he detested. In the present, there was no role for Gobetti, no possibility of practising genuine liberal politics. Gobetti’s place was, then, and in the circumstances could only be, in the future. The best things young enlightened liberals could do was to withdraw from the corrupt melee of political life and work to prepare a better future, not so much for the short term, since Gobetti had rightly seen that the regime had emerged stronger than ever from the 1924 elections, but for the middle to long term. This was not, Gobetti was at pains to point out, an apolitical withdrawal, but a political and politicized one. It was a form of protest against both fascists and liberals, the only option that was left. ‘We are preparing a better educated ruling class, a sharper awareness of political problems,’ he wrote, ‘we are working for the future, for a certain future in which our realism will have meaning.’47 And on other occasions: ‘Our opposition is so intransigent that we refuse to examine [fascism’s] programs and to collaborate with our criticism […] our antitheses are integral: we are working for the future, for another revolution’;48 and this is a ‘struggle that will last decades and must take place with absolute intransigence.’49 What had happened was that the prophecy Gobetti had made in 1923 about the future road liberalism should take had come true: The new liberal critique must differentiate its methods, deny that liberalism represents general interests, identify it with the struggle for the conquest of liberty and with the historical action of the classes that are involved in it. In Italy, where both economic and political conditions are singularly immature, the classes and the people interested in a liberal practice must content themselves with being a minority and with preparing the nation for a better future by way of an organized and combative opposition […] Since liberalism is neither indifference nor abstention we expect that in the future liberals, once they have identified their eternal enemies, will be quick to fight them unrelentlingly.50

Giacomo Matteotti and the Aventine Secession Gobetti had an opportunity to put his politics of intransigence into practice sooner than he could ever have imagined. On 30 May 1924, the Socialist Deputy Giacomo Matteotti made a courageous speech in which he charged that the election of the previous month had been rigged and marked by widespread illegality. The election results, he said, were not

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valid. On 10 June he was kidnapped from outside his house in Rome. His body was found on 16 August in a wood some twenty-five kilometres from the city centre. The killing was obviously political, the removal from the scene of a vociferous, courageous, and committed opponent of the regime, who had also, it has transpired recently, known of and was prepared to go public about a series of shady dealings between Mussolini and a U.S. petroleum company, Sinclair Oil. It is now clear that the order to silence Matteotti came from Mussolini himself, and was carried out by the Fascist Secret Police and the Ceka, its operational arm.51 In any event, the ‘Matteotti Case,’ as it became known, represented a real crisis for the regime, so much so that its very permanence in power was threatened. A few days after his body was found, Gobetti wrote a long, touching, and fulsome homage to Matteotti in La Rivoluzione liberale. The portrait that emerges from these pages is not too dissimilar from the portrait Gobetti could have painted of himself: Matteotti’s antifascism was, he writes, marked by ‘a fundamental ethical incompatibility, an instinctive antithesis, between him’ and the fascists: ‘He felt that to combat fascism effectively on the political terrain, it was important to counter it with examples of dignity and unyielding resistance, to make it a matter of character, intransigence, rigour.’52 Matteotti’s was the first in a series of portraits that appeared in La Rivoluzione liberale in 1924. But instead of the gallery of villains in which Gobetti had placed Giolitti, Turati, and Mussolini, this new gallery was full of heroes.53 To be sure, there had always been heroes in the narrative of Gobetti’s intellectual life, and he had not been coy about singing their praises as exemplary figures. Luigi Einaudi, a professor of economics at Turin University, later to become republican Italy’s second president in 1948, was one such, from whom Gobetti drew heavily both for his anti-protectionist free trade stance and for his theory of progress by way of social and political antagonism. For Einaudi, the state was the ‘dialectical result of single wills operating freely.’54 But operating freely was contingent on the freedom to oppose the status quo shorn of the shackles of predetermined thinking. For Einaudi, ‘order, authority, discipline and dogma are superseded by the myth of struggle, of disorder, of the disunion of spirits […] Order is born of contrast. If no one says you are wrong you no longer know you possess the truth […] The day in which a single ideal of life is victorious, struggle would begin again because it is absurd that humankind contents itself with nothing […] History teaches us of the end of all the states that sought to impose a single ideal of life.’55

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But in the wake of the Matteotti murder, Gobetti seemed even more anxious to add heroes to his portrait gallery. Matteotti himself, of course, was one; another was Giovanni Amendola, a liberal politician who had refused to join Mussolini’s listone and who would suffer a similar fate to Matteotti, dying in April 1926 in Cannes, where he had gone to recover after beatings he received in Rome and in Montecatini at the hands of fascist blackshirts. It was Amendola’s intransigence and intellectual honesty that made him, Gobetti writes, not only ‘diametrically opposite to the figure of Mussolini,’ but also to his peers in the Liberal Party. Were Amendola to have succeeded Mussolini as prime minister, an idea that was floated in the wake of the Matteotti crisis, it would have represented ‘a total antithesis, a struggle between races.’56 Amendola was one of the strongest supporters of the Aventine Secession, the decision taken by a number of antifascist parties in protest at the Matteotti murder to abandon the Italian parliament and set up an alternative parliament in another part of Montecitorio, where the Italian parliament is housed. The secession was called Aventine not because the alternative parliament met on the Aventine Hill, but because it recalled an act of protest carried out by ancient Roman plebeians. The Aventine Secession was intransigence in action and met with Gobetti’s immediate approval. For him, it marked – or initially was supposed to – a turning point in Italian political culture. To Gobetti, it looked as though the Aventine could potentially have the same effect on Italy as the Dreyfus affair had had on France at the end of the nineteenth century, and he compares the one to the other on more than one occasion.57 The Aventine was above all a ‘moral example,’ practical proof that something had changed. No longer was Italian politics the arena of mediation and compromise, now things were far more clear-cut: ‘On the one side, nationalists, clerics, conservatives, the landowners’ and protected industrialists’ lawyers, the leftovers of the old and new parties, the swashbucklers of politics; on the other, the working-class masses and the bourgeoisie who have remained faithful to their ideals of liberty. On the one side, the majority of the five-party government, held together by their complicity with the horrors of fascism; on the other, the opposition groups held together by their shared democratic origins and a shared liberal faith.’58 Gobetti wanted no compromise solution to be the result of the Aventine. This was to be trasformismo on trial, and the verdict was to be a complete defeat of Mussolini, not his rehabilitation cushioned by moderate liberal support. This was always a danger, of course, especially as

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Giolitti had not joined the other parliamentarians in the secession: ‘Mussolini must emerge defeated by a political battle. Only if this condition is met will we be able to replace the government of a domesticator with a government of parties. The opposition must put the entire regime on trial, prevent from resurfacing that which with the advent of fascism is dead, imprison Mussolini, his majority, and his supporters in a single bloc. Committing ourselves to a program like this may mean defeat today, but salvation for the future.’59 Not for the first time, nor for the last, Gobetti’s hopes were misplaced. The Aventine Secession did not bring down Mussolini, nor did it leave much of a dent in his regime. In fact, Mussolini came out of it all the stronger, having secured support from the monarchy, the captains of industry, and the Church. Faced with the choice between a left-wing led government and more of the same, the powers that be took up the second option. Rather than the Aventine Secession being the turning point for antifascism that Gobetti had hoped for, it was a turning point for fascism. The speech Mussolini delivered in parliament on 3 January 1925, not six months after the Matteotti kidnapping, is generally seen as the beginning of a new phase in Italian fascism, the beginning of the regime. Although the parliamentarians involved in the Aventine were part of an intransigent, anti-trasformismo camp, it appeared that some were more intransigent then others, some less anti-trasformisti than others. The rather bitter conclusion to which Gobetti came was that the ‘Aventine had its traitors, the compromisers, people […] who opt for easy solutions. The Aventine was born as a serious event, something like our Dreyfus trial […] While we were serious about our opposition […] others carried out their opposition on a part-time basis […] I refuse and will refuse in order to fight fascism to accept the terrain of plots, sects, and subterfuge.’60 The final lesson was not dissimilar to that which came out of the April elections: now we know who our real friends are, they may be few in number, but we can count on them. Commenting in the aftermath of Mussolini’s 3 January speech, Gobetti sums up the situation: In truth, we at La Rivoluzione liberale had already proclaimed the Aventine (by which I mean non-collaboration) in November 1922. When the parliamentary oppositions accepted our criteria and embraced our line of battle, the only thing we could honestly ask of them was intransigence. The Aventine certainly had any number of faults: scarse practical action and scarce homogeneity, but whether by accident or design its single components followed this intransigent line. In November 1922 we were alone in

92 Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing saying that we would not bargain, we would not collaborate even with our criticism. Everyone else was offering [the regime] conditions like the disbanding of the fascist militias and normalization. They did not refuse to enter into dialogue. In June 1924, though, even the parliamentarians accepted our integral position. Because of this, the Aventine has at least had huge moral repercussions. It is a victory for the character of the Italians […] The old Giolittian and Salandrian political classes have been definitively liquidated, the men of the pre-war period are all finished. Fascism could have achieved this result sooner without its transformist manoeuvres, but now that it has achieved it, we are no less happy than the fascists.61

The article concludes with a reference to a new reality in which Gobetti was to invest heavily, the working classes, and especially the workers in the FIAT car factory in Turin: ‘The only solid reserve is the workers’ movement. The elite of young people that has been formed around the Aventine […] must work loyally for a workers’ united front, even if this task, in the present conditions of depression of the masses, will not give immediate fruits.’62 Gobetti’s liberalism is based on the ongoing emergence of new, burgeoning elites who re-energize a status quo that has the inherent tendency to atrophy and to rest on its laurels. The workers’ movement was one of these new elites. ‘Our liberalism,’ he writes, ‘which we have called revolutionary so as to be clear, is inspired by an inexorable libertarian passion, and sees in reality a clash of forces able to produce ever newer aristocratic leaders provided that the new popular classes reinvigorate the struggle with their desperate desire for elevation […] The state is not the state if it is not struggle.’63 Now that it had become clear to Gobetti that traditional liberalism was no longer able to produce from within itself a new generation that would take upon itself the role and duty of the nation’s ruling class, the source of the dynamism, energy, and creativity, without which liberalism risked extinction, was to be found in the proletariat: ‘We can then count only on the participation of the new forces in the political struggle […] we believe that the workers’ movement left to its own initiative, helped in good faith, will find on its own the ways and the means of struggle. To what end? We have no a priori limit to propose: the result will depend on the maturity and the capacity of the movement. We believe in any case that from workers’ participation in public life the clarity and honesty of politics will have everything to gain.’64 Although the working classes were to become the primary and most controversial source of the political dynamism that was at the very

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core of Gobetti’s liberalism, they were by no means the only alternative source he investigated. Prior, in fact, to discovering the workers, in the wake of their occupation of the FIAT factory, in what became known as the Factory Council Movement, Gobetti had cast his eye over a number of other possible repositories of the new energy that was indispensable to his liberal revolution. Gobetti never stops reminding us of the crisis to which liberalism had become prey. But he also never tired of seeking out, and finding, liberal values in unexpected places. As we shall see, Gobetti’s investigations led him to stumble upon a paradox: liberalism turned out to be alive and well, except when it was practised by traditional Italian liberals. As we have seen, one of the most important of these sources was the group gathered around Salvemini’s L’Unità. Gobetti, however, was to see the limits of Salvemini’s problemismo, his privileging of the particular which, thought Gobetti, did little or nothing, certainly not enough, to foster the more ambitious project of political education he mentioned in a letter to his friend Santino Caramella. In that letter, Gobetti explained that his interest in politics is that of a scholar: ‘I have never aimed at action as such,’ he wrote, ‘but always at political education […] I bring to politics the interest of a man who lives and cannot only be a spectator. But my action is always, in the widest sense, culture, that can be sometimes an act, sometimes a decision.’65 For Gobetti, the politics that underlay Salvemini’s approach was too piecemeal, too fragmentary, and could not be the basis for the kind of broad and wide project of reform of a political culture that he had in mind, which was the brief that La Rivoluzione liberale took upon itself to achieve. Salvemini, in other words, did not go far enough in his analysis of what was at stake in the particular problem he examined: ‘If he knows how to define his political position in a concrete manner,’ wrote Gobetti to Caramella, in a correspondence in which Gobetti revealed his private reservations about Salvemini, ‘he does not have a reflective consciousness of the philosophical bases that accompany it.’66 A few years later, Gobetti went into greater detail about the political and philosophical rift that had separated the two: ‘Salvemini’s work is formidably organic in its spirit. Proof of this is his heroic coherence, a unique example in the last 20 years. But his work has lost some of its unity and has splintered its audaciousness in its separate consideration of various problems. These, however, are not at all separate from the spirit and the method that determined them. The particular solutions that Salvemini came up with could be accepted by Giolitti […] without achieving the hoped for improvement in Italian life.’

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Gobetti goes on to explain why and how his own review differs from Salvemini’s: ‘RL is concerned with problems, but more about the problem of Italian life […] It is […] from an examination of historical reality, from the study of humankind, in tradition, of contemporary forces that we will achieve the education of the new ruling classes. Political realism cannot consist for us in the abstract profession of ideals, nor in a mere technical problemismo. The context of our problemismo is an integral vision of history in the making.’67 But even before La Rivoluzione liberale took its distance from Salvemini’s L’Unità, Gobetti’s Energie nove had already marked out a different terrain. As Gervasoni has noted, ‘EN was not a miniature version of L’Unità,’ containing as it did a good number of non-technical articles on culture, literature, and the arts that were foreign to L’Unità, but which were all an integral part of EN’s ‘pedagogical objective.’68 The issues that caused Salvemini’s and Gobetti’s projects to take different paths, however, should not blind us to the fact that both the one and the other were committed to the same project of cultural and political renewal. It was how this project was to be best achieved that led to their differences, not the validity of the project itself. Although in terms of their respective ages, the relationship between Salvemini and Gobetti was one of father and son, in terms of their political objectives they were very much a two-man team. Both, in fact, were equally anxious to find alternative and new sources for the political and cultural dynamism lacking in the Italy of the post–First World One years. If the unitari were, to some extent at least, one potential source, another that seemed to offer similar credentials were the Italian combatants who had emerged from the trenches of the Great War and had organized themselves into a movement. Salvemini was particularly interested in this movement, at least in its early days. Although he had taken a stand against the Libyan War of 1911, and had left Turati’s Socialist Party as a result, by the time the First World War was in the offing Salvemini had become an interventionist. He did not, however, lobby for Italy to enter the war for the reasons of territiorial gain that had seduced many interventionists, but because he saw the war as an opportunity to bring down the AustroHungarian Empire, which had become a historical anachronism, and initiate a new phase of history in which nations were freed from the yoke of empire. Salvemini enlisted in the army and was sent to the trenches in the Carso in northeast Italy, but was discharged on health grounds. On his return to civilian life immediately after the war, he joined Rinnovamento, one of the movements of the ex-combatants, stood for parliament

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in 1919 as a representative of this group, and was elected. Gobetti, too, in the early days of Energie nove showed similar enthusiasm for what the ex-combatants potentially could contribute to renewing postwar Italy. Monti, always very close to Gobetti in his thought, shared this enthusiasm. Monti saw the movement as an opportunity to educate the masses politically towards responsible and reasonable political positions and to instil in them the liberal spirit: ‘recognition of a victorious Italy’s rights but without nationalistic infatuations; opposition to intervention on the part of the state in commerce, industry, and local life; struggle without quarter against all forms of protectionism that favour privileged groups of workers or bosses.’ For Monti, the part of the ex-combatant movement that was closest to Salvemini ‘could easily be called liberal.’69 Monti wrote these lines in 1923, long after the movement had lost its way, and long after the moderate liberal positions, listed above, had been superseded by far more radical claims, what Gobetti calls ‘messianic expectations,’ that led many of the ex-combatants into the embrace that Mussolini and fascism offered them. After the unitari and the ex-combatants, Gobetti glimpsed a further source of possible dynamism and liberalism in action in the Partito popolare that had been founded in 1919 by Don Luigi Sturzo and that became a significant presence on the Italian political and parliamentary scene. Although the party defined itself as non-confessional, the idea behind it was to give Catholics the opportunity to take part in Italy’s political life. In the context of the separation of church and state that characterized post-unification Italy, and would continue to characterize it until the Lateran Pacts of 1929, signed by Mussolini and the Vatican, Sturzo’s aim was quite controversial. Under fascism, the Partito popolare, against the advice given by Sturzo, assumed a wait-and-see attitude, and in 1922 two of its elected deputies served as ministers in Mussolini’s first government. Gobetti admired Sturzo a great deal and published one of his books, Popolari e fascismo. For Gobetti, Sturzo’s political activity was liberal, more than it was Catholic. It was liberal, he thought, insofar as the foremost effect of any form of politicization of the masses, Catholic or not, was that they attained a degree of autonomy and self-determination. This, for Gobetti, was what liberalism was all about. He wrote: ‘Don Sturzo’s party, despite all its intentions, becomes the first step towards the modern world: the elementary school, the abc of freedom and heresy. These are steps that cannot be rubbed out […] The world of liberty is absolute and inexorable: do not play with fire! The Partito popolare accustoms the spirits to come out, for a

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moment at least […] from the world of the Pope’s sacred intolerance, from the closed world of transcendence and dogma.’70 In sum, the sources where Gobetti found evidence of dynamism were quite eclectic: Salvemini had been a socialist, albeit a fairly renegade one, before forming L’Unità and the unitari; Don Luigi Sturzo was a Catholic (he too a renegade, who was forced to flee Italy under fascism); and the ex-combatants, a good number of whom soon moved on to radical nationalist positions and drifted towards fascism. It is, however, Gobetti’s turn to the working classes as the source of an otherwise missing social dynamism that is by far the most controversial part of his writings, provoking strong and diametrically opposite reactions in his readers and critics. Traditional liberals, especially those with anticommunism coursing through their veins, use Gobetti’s championing of the working classes and, as we shall see presently, the Russian Revolution as essentially liberal in nature as a pretext for denying such a heretic hospitality in the liberal homestead. Left-wing critics, on the other hand, rejoice on reading how Gobetti bestows legitimacy on the workers’ movement by focusing not so much on workers’ adherence to the party line or to pre-confectioned dogma, but on their autonomy, their self-discipline, their sense of sacrifice and dedication to a project, all characteristics that were entirely compatible with what Gobetti maintained was best about liberalism and liberals. If the Stalinism of Communist parties has been one of their greatest obstacles to legitimacy, Gobetti opened the door to greater respectability by showing that underlying the workers’ movement were values and a philosophy about which it was difficult to raise objections. There was, indeed, thought Gobetti, much more to the workers’ movement than immediately met the eye. Gobetti made the workers’ movement, first in its socialist guise and later, after 1921, in its communist version, look good (or at least better than most traditional liberals).71 One critic has gone so far as to suggest that had Gobetti lived longer he would have abandoned his liberal allegiances and thrown in his lot with the Communist Party of Italy, formed in 1921 as a result of a split within the Socialist Party.72 For reasons that will become clear, I very much doubt that Gobetti would have gone in that direction.73 Factory Councils In Turin’s FIAT factories, Gobetti had Italy’s most advanced working classes almost at his doorstep, and so could see what their potential

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was, especially during the biennio rosso (the two red years), the name given to the period of great radicalization of Italian political life immediately after the end of the First World War. With memories of the Russian Revolution fresh in their minds, the Italian workers and peasants felt emboldened, and they embarked on a series of protests, strikes, and occupations (in 1919 alone there were 1,800 strikes). Faced with rapidly rising prices, peasants in Tuscany began a series of protests and occupations of the land; a general strike was proclaimed in June 1919 to protest against the threats made by the Great Powers to the newly born Russian and Hungarian republics; in November of that year, a new proportional representation electoral system had rewarded the two major parties of the masses, with the Socialists gaining 32 per cent of the vote and the Partito popolare, making its electoral debut, 20 per cent. But what impressed Gobetti most about the biennio rosso was the occupation of the factories in the north of Italy. After turning down the request made by the metal mechanics’ trade union – the FIOM (Federazione impiegati operai metallurgici) – for a new contract and better pay, the owners took the decision to lock out the workers and close the factories. The workers’ answer was to occupy the closed factories. By the summer of 1920 more than 300 plants were occupied and 40,000 workers were involved in the movement. In some cases (the ones that most interested Gobetti), but not all, the workers themselves took over the process of production and ran the factories autonomously. This part of the biennio rosso is known as the Factory Council Movement, after the organisms created within factories, based broadly on the Russian soviets and championed by the activists involved in the review L’Ordine nuovo (including future founders of the Communist Party of Italy, Palmiro Togliatti, and Gramsci), during which representatives of the workers took on the task of running the factories. For many of these workers, the occupation of the factories was the first step in a revolutionary process that was supposed to lead to a worker-run state. However, the movement eventually ran out of steam as it did not enjoy the support of the Socialist Party and was faced with a government that would not have hesitated to use force to bring what promised to be a dangerous experiment to an end. Gobetti was most enthusiastic about the Consigli di fabbrica. As he saw it, they encouraged everything that the traditional trade union did not: if the former fostered initiative and autonomy, the latter were paternalistic and produced a parasitical attitude in their members. The trade union, he writes, ‘is an organ of resistance, not of initiative, it tends to give to the worker a consciousness of himself as a salaried

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worker, not that of a producer. The trade union accepts him in his condition of slave and works to elevate him but not renew him […] In the Consiglio the worker feels his full dignity and necessity as an element of modern life, he communicates with experts, with intellectuals, with entrepreneurs, he places at the centre of his aspirations not the thought of what is useful to him, but an ideal of technical progress that allows him to achieve better his abilities and the need for a practical organization that gives him power.’74 As we shall see later, Gobetti saw much the same process at work in the Russian soviets: ‘The importance of the soviet is in its character as organization that rises from below, expressed from the bosom of the working class gathered in the factory able to offer a form of coexistence and collaboration of all the productive elements. This is the direct antithesis of the trade union.’75 The above quotation is from ‘Storia dei comunisti torinesi scritta da un liberale,’ an article Gobetti wrote in March 1922, as a counterpoint to an earlier article, also published in La Rivoluzione liberale in March 1922, in which Giovanni Ansaldo spoke of the working classes in the most miserable and deprecatory terms.76 The elegiac tones that can be detected in this article, which sings the praises of the Consigli di fabbrica, and of the leadership of the Communist Party, become even more evident in two pieces Gobetti wrote for Il lavoro. The first article was written in the wake of the visit that Mussolini had made to Turin at the beginning of November 1922. Turin had been one of the cities that had shown least enthusiasm about Il Duce, and the idea behind the visit was to gauge how much progress Mussolini had made in conquering the hearts and minds of these more reticent Italian citizens. In his article, entitled ‘La città futura,’ a title he borrowed from Gramsci, who had used it in 1917 for one of his publications, a predecessor to L’Ordine nuovo, Gobetti calls Mussolini’s visit his ‘March on Turin’ (having already marched on and conquered Rome). Mussolini, it seems, according to Gobetti’s report, was particularly happy that the FIAT workers he had addressed had listened to him. Next year, Mussolini mused, maybe they will applaud me. But that, interjects Gobetti, was unlikely to happen. The FIAT workers are made of sterner stuff and would never applaud him. Faced with Il Duce, they will remain in silence, ‘isolated like the communist leaders,’ they are ‘heretics. In a deeply painful way they are foreigners, estranged.’ What has made them different is the experience of advanced industrial life that has conferred on them ‘a sense of the dignity of class and of intransigence.’ The six thousand silent workers ‘were those who three years before,

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at the time of the happy and light-hearted strikes that demanded only higher pay, as happened in some parts of Italy, were able to suffer and resist fifteen days for a theoretical and political question, the recognition of the Factory Councils.’ As well as singing the praises of the workers, Gobetti also has good things to say about the FIAT factory, its owner, and the culture that has grown up around it, which had inoculated the city against fascism: it is ‘the foremost Italian model of modern industry, a gigantic industrial plant that is akin to a small capitalist state; the specialization of labour gives the worker an awareness of his own necessity […] in Agnelli’s factories the working class has learned what struggle and intransigence are.’77 Gobetti made his own visit to the FIAT factories not long after Mussolini and the epic-like tones detected in the first article, quoted above, continue here. Turin factory is immediately presented as having non-Italian characteristics. One’s journey to the factory is ‘a Nordic itinerary’ through the fog, ‘without the beautiful Italian sun, without concessions made by the landscape. Heretical climate.’ Although the Valentino, the area where the factory is located, also offers what Gobetti calls ‘Roman consolations,’ by which he means parks and gardens, these distractions are ignored by the FIAT workers. They are intent on reading their newspapers as they go to work, and on their way home there is ‘nothing nature can do to reconcile them with the world.’ There is, in fact, ‘another kind of poetry in their hearts […] Their psychology is dictated by the machine and by factory life.’ It is clear, he goes on, as the guided tour continues, that the workers ‘have the dignity of labour, the habit of sacrifice and toil. Silence, precision, continual presence, a new psychology is being forged.’ On the top of the factory there is a circular racetrack which for Mussolini, or so the guide accompanying Gobetti’s group says, was the joyful high point of his day in Turin. Here there is talk of the speed at which the cars go around the track. Gobetti seems to think that the group has here been taken to a lesser place, a place of play and futurist utopia. It is like, he thinks, being taken back to Italy, indeed to southern Italy: ‘We are in the open air. The kingdom of speed, shows, parties. Life belongs to the most dynamic, to the speediest. Southern fantasies are here satisfied. Marinetti will sing his song of motors; words in liberty and consoling enthusiasm.’ All this is vastly different from what is going on in the factory itself: ‘But below us the ethic of work, the civilization of producers is being prepared.’78 Gobetti’s enthusiasm for the Consigli and for the discipline of the FIAT workers is an exact match of the enthusiasm he had expressed a

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few years earlier about the Russian Revolution. This too was a controversial position for a liberal, even a very young liberal, to take. What was at stake for Gobetti, and the source of his words of praise, was that the Russian Revolution had been, as he saw it, the liberation of a people and their empowerment as agents in the life of their nation. It mattered little to Gobetti in whose or what name the revolution had been fought, what counted was the end result, and that was the emancipation of a previously unemancipated mass. ‘There is a new reality,’ he wrote, ‘Russia. It was not in Marx and not in socialism. The government of Lenin and Trotsky is a de facto government. It is the wish of Russia.’79 And again, as he wrote in his volume on Russia, Paradosso dello spirito russo: the leaders of the Russian Revolution ‘know that ideas cannot be born of isolated brains, that philosophy is born of history, that the great political struggles presuppose awareness of interests, sense of responsibility, economic individualism. They do not intend to educate the people by revealing the truth to them; they work so that the people may understand the conditions of their own freedom, so that they become proletarian and responsible for their own destiny.’80 Or on the role of Trotsky, who ‘longs for a state in which liberty is not proclaimed by law, but is conquered by the citizens […] Compared to legal abstractions […] this is a fertile principle of that liberalism that understands history as a living result (always unforeseeable and transcendent of individuals) of how people operate, how much each person can bring to the solid work of humanity: an industrious effort that cannot be gauged a priori by way of abstract processes, but pragmatically counts insofar as it is achieved […] It is up to the historian to affirm the truth above all political contingencies.’81 But why does a young liberal, albeit a frustrated and disgruntled one, go so overboard about events and figures that seem to have nothing at all to do with liberal political culture? As some of the previous quotations and comments suggest, Gobetti sees in both the Factory Council Movement and the Russian Revolution processes that are essentially liberal in nature insofar as they promote autonomy and discipline, and insofar as they demand sacrifice and creativity, although they are not carried out by agents one would normally associate with liberalism. Lenin, for instance, is, in Gobetti’s thinking, a liberal, even though he may have called himself a communist. So, how can it come about that agents who have identified themselves as communist and act in good faith as such end up advancing an agenda that no liberal could argue with? To answer these questions, we need to turn to another key figure

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in Gobetti’s intellectual and political formation, Georges Sorel and his writings on myth. Georges Sorel Myth and the way in which myth works with history is, in Gobetti’s thought, closely allied to dynamism, autonomy, creativity, and antagonism: myth sets in motion the creative process that brings about change through struggle, while history corrects it, makes it feasible and workable by guiding it towards achievable goals. In all of Gobetti’s writings on the working class and on myth one hears the voice of Sorel. In all probability, Gobetti’s contacts with Sorel’s thought and writings came by way of Croce and Prezzolini, two of his most enthusiastic Italian readers and popularizers of his writings. What Sorel had to say must have been music to Gobetti’s ears, chiming perfectly with the ideas he was developing. Sorel believed, for example, in the innate creative potential of all human beings; he was impatient with all those who believed the pursuit of peace and quiescence was humankind’s appointed task; he was anti-sentimental; he knew the value of intransigence, sacrifice, and will power; he was open to the future. As well as the alternative sources of political dynamism that have already been mentioned, Gobetti also turned to the Italian group most influenced by Sorel, the revolutionary syndicalists. Gobetti’s description of them echoes much of Sorel’s thought. The revolutionary syndicalists, he writes, were: born to overturn schemes, to put down Enlightenment pretensions, to give life to the truth of political struggle, to obtain dedication to praxis from each person […] Syndicalism organizes forces, it leads them to sacrifice, it obliges each person to accept responsibility, it gives to all, without concern for doctrinal abstractions, an elementary sense of dignity: it separates the inert from the active, it crushes inexorably the lazy, it makes us aware of the difference in values, it sharpens the need for an aristocracy and civil heroism, it creates the presuppositions for the new experience of a producers’ moral. Whatever its final myth, its dream of rebirth, syndicalism has its present reality as a creator of values.82

In the last words of the quotation we find a clue as to what Gobetti valued most in Sorel: his theory of myth and the use to which it was put as an instigator of action. In a nation where, thanks to the ineptitude and corruption of the ruling class, social dynamism seemed all but ex-

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tinct, Gobetti found in myth a way of inspiring and generating action. Myth, he wrote, was ‘a spur to action,’ that which got the creative juices flowing, that which sparked action. Although Gobetti did not subscribe to the irrationalism that was at the heart of Sorel’s thinking, nor to the cult of violence that he seemed to advocate, he found in his writings on myth an answer to the question of how to promote action in an environment and political culture, like that of liberal Italy, that did nothing to encourage it.83 As Sorel saw it, myth had been the driving force behind all of the most important movements for change. One of the tasks of the enlightened, modern ruling class is to supply the myths that will inspire individuals to strive for great things. For Gobetti, the fact that the liberal ruling class that had governed Italy had singularly refused to do this was one of its greatest failings. In doing so, the ruling class had condemned to atrophy the nation’s political culture and discouraged any attempt to rejuvenate the political system. As Isaiah Berlin has written, ‘it is in connection with movements of resistance and renewal that [Sorel] develops the theor[y] […] of the social myth.’ The kinds of myth Sorel concerned himself with, Berlin continues, are not beliefs about anything, but beliefs in something – in descent from a common ancestor, in transforming events in a common past, in common traditions, in shared symbols enshrined in a common language, above all in symbols sanctified by religion and history.’84 Myths inspire greatness, push individuals to go beyond themselves and perform extraordinary actions. Myth is the stuff of elites, the stuff of heroes. The myth that drove the revolutionary syndicalists was the myth of the general strike. This, though, was a great deal more than a strike for the rather banal aims of a pay raises and a shorter working week. In order to be inspirational the myth has to set itself a higher target. In fact, what the syndicalist general strike called for was a complete overturn of the capitalist system. In order to be inspirational, myths cannot be manipulative, they have to have some purchase on the reality they seek to influence and, in both Gobetti’s and Sorel’s thinking, myths percolated up from below as an image of the hopes and aspirations of those who produced them.85 Myth, wrote Gobetti, ‘idealizing a concrete situation, is a synthesis of aspirations that express the immanence of progress. It is the development and rationality of history […] in its ability to create an impulse to action.’86 There was, then, reason enough to make Gobetti an avid reader of Sorel’s writings. Among the other points of contact, they also, along with the whole La Rivoluzione liberale group, shared the same opinion

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of Marx. Both for the one and the other, there was a good and useful Marx, to be kept separate from a bad and valueless one. This latter was the deterministic Marx, the positivist Marx who had claimed to have divined the secret laws of history; the good Marx was the ‘volontaristic’ one, who theorized the necessity of the class struggle, the productively antagonistic role that was to be played by the minority that had acquired class consciousness, the aristocratic elite that had emerged from the pack: ‘The ideal of an aristocratic working class, conscious of its own strength, capable of renewing the world, as had flashed out of the lucid historical vision of Sorel and Marx and which, beyond the misleading pseudo-economic constructions is the central plank of their thought, found the concrete soil into which to sink its fertile roots for the development of Italian life.’87 Or as Gobetti puts it in an article published in La Rivoluzione liberale in April, 1924, the Marx that still has something to say is the historian, the Marx who is dead and buried is the economist with ‘his surplus value, his dream of the abolition of the classes and the prophecy of collectivism.’88 Another Marx that pleased Gobetti was the one who set his sights on the limits of the bourgeoisie: ‘The pages in which he criticized the petite bourgeoisie,’ wrote Gobetti, ‘ought to be reprinted: they are a critique of fascism!’89 But whenever Marx’s thought drifted towards predetermined solutions, whenever it negated the actions of the individual, and whenever it seemed to posit some resting place that the final victory would deliver to the victors, Gobetti took his distance. In the same way that ‘intransigence’ acquires its Gobettian meaning as a diametrically opposed answer to trasformismo, so Gobetti opposed volontarismo to determinismo. Like Marx, Gobetti was interested in class struggle and saw in its theorization one of both Marx’s and Sorel’s most important contributions. But unlike Marx, Gobetti was not interested in the end of class struggle. The idea that the class struggle should end with the abolition of classes is, for Gobetti, a nightmare scenario. The struggle is and must be ongoing, successive generations of aristocratic elites engaged in a never-ending struggle for ascendency. There is no final resting place, no definitive end to the struggle, no outcome can be predicted. On the face of it, the theory of myth Gobetti takes over from Sorel would seem to predetermine the outcome of political action. For a myth to be an efficient stimulus to action it must promise some reward, something that political action strives to achieve. It is this desire to have something one does not possess that is the mover of men and women to action. But for Gobetti, what mattered most was that myth acted as a catalyst

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that got the creative process started. Gobetti was far more interested in processes than outcomes, in the beginnings of creative journeys than in their presumed points of arrival. What is important to him is not where myth promises to take those who subscribe to it, but the push it gives towards action. Once action is taken, the path it takes is openended, often very different from the path suggested by the inspiring myth. The impetus to action that the Marxist myth makes possible is useful only insofar as it promotes creative activity, not because what it promises is desirable: ‘the twilight of capitalism,’ he writes, ‘predicted and preached by Marx, is a useful myth, one of the most powerful springs in modern history, but it would be disingenuous to discuss it as if it were a scientific truth or a fact with any basis.’90 In Gobetti’s eyes, myths were ‘fecund illusions,’ or as he wrote on another occasion, ‘illusions that produce results.’91 This is because, at a certain point, history steps in, guiding the process of change towards what in the political, social, economic, and historical circumstances of the day and place was achievable. For example, the kind of aims that the FIAT workers sought to realize were not achievable, they were mere utopian dreams. This is not to say that nothing came of the movement, that nothing was achieved. Far from it: Gobetti was convinced that the experience of running the factories autonomously had given these workers a taste of what it was like to be dynamic entrepreneurs, the prototypes of a new modern and disciplined ruling class. The experience, in other words, although it had set out with other aims, ended up by creating the kind of subjects a revolutionary liberalism dreamed of. Far from being communists, despite what they may have said and despite their red shirts and revolutionary rhetoric, they emerged from the experience as liberal entrepreneurs. This is also exactly what had happened in Russia: ‘The irony of history is that the primary bourgeois interests […] have been created in Russia in the name of Marxism.’92 The same had happened in Turin: ‘The myths of Italian and foreign social democracy, the formulas intellectually deduced from Das Kapital or from other socialist texts (fragile abstractly revolutionary or reformist consequences according to the temperament of who was following them) fell when they came face to face with modern experience’;93 this was ‘a movement that had transcended all its premises.’94 He goes on: This is what history had always done. Revolutionary aims were pared down to meet contingent circumstances, utopias are the stuff of books, history the stuff of reality. Politics always kills intellectual prejudgment.

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Action destroys utopias. Dante, a white Guelph, prior, political activist is the first to demolish his De Monarchia. Mazzini creates Italy, but destroying the republican idea. Lenin governs Russia and gives it a political conscience, but denying his own socialism. This is history, not fantasy: but people don’t realize this. They remain stuck to old schemes […] The Russian Revolution is history, you have to study it, without thinking about fighting it. It is a social phenomenon. Calling Bolshevism the Russian Revolution and identifying Bolshevism with socialism is overly simplistic. In front of you, you have a world in formation, and you seek out the scheme into which you can close it off. But new worlds bring new schemes […] The names you use serve only to understand the past. But revolutions (all of history, in fact) do not look at the past. They create and provide models for new realities. Neither Marx nor Italian nor German socialism will help you understand Lenin and his work. There is a new reality: Russia. And this was not in either Marx or socialism. Lenin’s and Trotsky’s government is a fact. It is the will of Russia […] It is life and not a book.95

And in Turin, the workers, ‘took over the specific inheritance of the bourgeois tradition and set themselves the task not of creating from nothing a new economy, but of continuing the technical progress that had been reached by the industrialists […] The concrete experiences of political action had almost completely liberated the young Turin communists from the baggage of socialist commonplaces and internationalism.’96 All this puts a slightly different gloss on Gobetti’s enthusiasm for communist experiments. As it turns out, his enthusiasm is born of the fact that these experiments, whether in Russia or in Turin, all bore liberal outcomes. Although he heaps praise on the FIAT workers, that praise is always tempered and qualified. One place where such qualifications become visible is in the title of the long article he wrote on the Turin communists, ‘La storia dei comunisti torinesi scritta da un liberale.’ Note that Gobetti’s praise is qualified by the adjective he uses, torinesi, the communists from Turin, not communists in general. As the article continues, a series of further qualifications takes the form of something like a Russian doll: communists are preferable to socialists; Turin communists are preferable to communists in general; the leadership of the Turin communists displayed by Gramsci and Togliatti leaves them head and shoulders above the other Turin communists; and Gramsci head and shoulders above the other communist leaders. The other adjective in the title, liberale, also acts as an indication that what Gobetti

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found to be positive in the actions of the Turin communists had more to do with the kind of liberalism he envisaged (for the reasons explained above) than with the communism in which the communist workers had invested. Elsewhere, Gobetti underscores in the most emphatic of ways that what interested him most about the Turin communists and the leaders of the Russian Revolution was that they were an elite, an aristocratic avant-garde, qualitatively superior to the masses they led. Even when dealing with such political movements, Gobetti remains steadfastly hostile to the idea of the masses: they are to be led, to be educated, to be kept in check, never to be given full rein. Gobetti also makes it clear that the primary reason the movement failed was that outside Turin and outside the elite circles of communist Turin the necessary talent to make the experiment work had been lacking.97 Everywhere in Gobetti’s writing on the communists he respects we find the same kind of expressions and phrases he had earlier used to describe his own group of Turin-based liberal intellectuals: the workers are ‘vigorous workingclass minorities,’ representing ‘the ideal of an aristocratic working class, aware of its own strength [...] an ever growing nucleus of those privy to the secret and to the difficulty of creative work that has produced in the salaried workers an unformulated aristocratic conscience and an idealism that they have translated into a need for power.’ These are ‘heroic figures of dominators (workers, industrialists, entrepreneurs) […] In the face of an Italy that is indifferent to this dynamic and swift process, it would seem that Turin must take on the mantle once again of reconquering the peninsula.’98As Gobetti has quite often been seen to be one of the inspirations behind the so-called Third Way of European politics, the fusion, that is, of the best of the liberal tradition and the best of the socialist/communist tradition, the one correcting the limits and excesses of the other, it is worth dwelling a moment on what is exactly at stake in Gobetti the liberal’s valorization of communism.99 Rather than being a marriage between equal partners, each having equal dignity, in Gobetti’s mind the relationship is structured in such a way that one of the partners comes to the rescue of the other. In this marriage, there is a dominant partner in whose interest the marriage is celebrated. The nature of the rescue is entirely to the benefit of the liberal partner, which emerges from the marriage refreshed and rejuvenated. Gobetti is interested in communism, or following his qualifications, the best of communism, the Turin variety, only insofar as it can be put to use to rescue liberalism and drag it out of its stupor.

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This is but one of a number of difficulties that emerge from Gobetti’s thought. Now is the moment to examine some others. One is Gobetti’s conviction that he knows the secret processes of history that lie beneath experiences like the Russian Revolution and the Factory Council Movement more so even than the people who actually participated in them. Lenin, according to Gobetti, was to all intents and purposes a liberal engaged on a liberal and liberalizing project; so were the FIAT workers. One wonders what they might have thought about this. The problem, however, lies not so much in the liberal credentials of agents who at first glance would seem not to be liberal and who have made their commitment to causes other than liberalism, than in the extremely, indeed overly wide definition Gobetti gives to liberalism. Any event that results in emancipation, the extension of liberty, the acquisition of a political conscience, the furtherance of political education, that fosters responsibility, autonomy, sacrifice, and discipline is, for Gobetti, always already liberal. Gobetti’s definition of liberalism is extremely wide and all-embracing. It is as if he wants to create a reserve in which he can claim that anything happening in history that can be remotely considered in a positive light is immediately an illustration of liberalism in practice. Gobetti could not or would not accept that the values he prized can also be the product and the basis for ideologies other than liberalism. Gobetti certainly saw that the principles, characteristics, and values that underlay, drove, and were produced by the Turin communists had a great deal in common with everything he prized, but he could not bring himself to say that they had anything to do with communism, even that brand of communism as it was practised by the Turin communists. What they were doing was liberal, not communist. Liberalism, in Gobetti’s eyes, had bought up the rights to such values and had no intention of relinquishing them. One contemporary critic who reprimanded Gobetti on this count was Gramsci. The two knew and admired each other. Gobetti’s admiration for Gramsci was immense as the two portraits of him, both fulsome of praise, he wrote confirm.100 ‘We hope,’ wrote Gramsci, ‘that Gobetti can ever more convince himself that if liberalism means development of liberty and workingclass autonomy, if liberalism means growth in the political capacity of individuals, today liberalism, as a concrete historical fact, lives only in international communism.’101 That Gobetti’s reading of the events of Turin and Russia was rather tortuous is also confirmed by the hostile reception it met from his fellow liberals, not just the traditional ones, but also those he considered the

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most enlightened, like Einaudi and Salvemini, neither of whom shared Gobetti’s enthusiasm for the working classes. This is hardly surprising, as it was tantamount to asking liberals, and especially those who were most loyal to the staunch and proud bourgeois tradition from whence they came, to sign their own death certificate and recognize that although liberalism was far from dead it was now being practised by imposters. To counter liberal objections, Gobetti expended a great deal of energy in attempting to convince such liberals that their ideology was not conservative but revolutionary.102 In his article on the Turin communists, for example, he writes: Faced with the grandiose movement of the Factory Councils a liberal cannot take up the merely negationist position of L. Einaudi or of E. Giretti. The liberal has before him one of the most characteristic and clearly autonomist phenomena that has been born in modern Italy. Whoever, leaving behind every party political prejudice, is mindful of the crisis of today, which is a crisis of will, of coherence, of liberty, and who hopes in a revival of the revolutionary movement of the Risorgimento that enters the spirits of the popular masses and brings them to join creatively up with a state, has reason to be able to believe for a moment that the new political force that Italy needs has been born from these aspirations and feelings. The Turin communists had overcome libertarian rhetoric and demagogy and come to terms with concrete things.103

Gobetti’s championing of the cause of the Turin workers also had repercussions on the political role he could have as an intellectual. More than anything, Gobetti valued the fact that the workers’ movement had been born autonomously from within the world of the workers themselves. Not prey to any dogma, following no pre-set models, solving the contingent problems with which they were faced on a daily basis, the workers created for themselves the forms and institutions that suited their needs best. No one had shown them what to do, nor told them how to go about it. The last thing Gobetti wanted to do was to meddle, tamper, or interfere with the autonomously born processes that were emerging from the factory occupations or to be seen as a pontificator, preaching to the masses, telling them what to do. In one of many polemical pieces he wrote, Gobetti offers a rejoinder to both Prezzolini, who had suggested that intellectuals make a strategic withdrawal from social reality, and Monti, who had suggested that intellectuals band together to create schools of excellence, with this picture of what the intel-

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lectual’s role might be. The revolutionary intellectual, writes Gobetti, ‘creates the objective conditions that, once they meet up with the rise of the proletarian classes, have been shown to us by history, so generating the new civilization, the new state.’ But this will not happen, he continues, if we ‘wave the flag for the revolution, acknowledge its presence in a newspaper article or in a speech to the masses.’ He concludes, ‘Our position is so delicate and curious that we are careful not to speak to the masses, fearing that they will receive our words as an enlightened revelation from above that interrupts their autonomous ascent.’104 Not only was the role Gobetti carved out for himself a necessary one, as so few liberals saw in the working classes what Gobetti saw, but it was also the only role possible. The Turin workers did not come from Gobetti’s world and he was a stranger to theirs, as the sense of wonder he experiences as he visits the FIAT factory testifies. Gobetti, then, could not be an active part of that movement in a way that, say, Gramsci could. Gobetti is much more of an observer of social processes than he is an agent in them. Careful to avoid being intrusive, heavyhanded, preachy, his role confines itself to a work of persuasion within the world of traditional liberals. This task, as suggested earlier, is an unenvious one as it amounted to attempting to convince such liberals that they should accept their own obsolescence. The intellectual role that Gobetti cut out for himself was also determined by another concern that is a central part of his liberalism: namely, an anti-deterministic openness to experience that we have already had occasion to observe in his writings on myth. Gobetti drew much of this part of his philosophy from Croce. Gobetti was happy to be thought of as a follower of Croce, especially since he parted company with Gentile, but was none too happy about some of Croce’s other followers, who were guilty as he saw it of having turned Croce’s thought into a rigid system. Such followers, ‘deprived of originality, pedantic, mechanical,’ rather than using ‘his system as an instrument of work, as a starting point,’ ‘have memorized his Aesthetics, and made of it a new Gospel.’105 What attracted Gobetti to Gentile’s philosophy, before he turned away from him, was just this sense of a future that could not be entirely predetermined: ‘Idealism, the greatest conquest of modern philosophical reflection, is not a definitive philosophy, because the thought of man never stops, but is for now the most fecund and vigorous result of all the speculation of the past.’106 Another figure condemned for his blind faith in dogma and doctrine is Mussolini, who for Gobetti, as he says in one the negative portraits in his gallery, is akin to ‘a daring condottiere

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leading soldiers of fortune.’ But his major defect is that he is a prisoner of dogma who is afflicted by tunnel vision. Mussolini lacks the exquisitely modern sense, that of irony; he understands history only through myths; and the critical finesse of creative activity, the principle gift of the great politician, eludes him entirely […] There is nothing religious about him, for he scorns the religious problem as such and cannot bear struggling with doubt; he needs a faith in order not to have to think about it anymore, in order to be the temporal arm of a transcendental idea. He could have succeeded as Duce of something like the Society of Jesus, could have been an enforcer for some pope engaged in the persecution of heretics, with one single notion in his head, to be repeated and driven ‘with the cudgel’s blow’ into ‘refractory skulls’. His articles for Il popolo d’Italia were like that: repetitions of a command, dogmas, and often mere stereotypes of a monotonous pattern.107

For Gobetti, the future is unencumbered, entirely the product of creative individuals working freely, shorn of the shackles of habit, apathy, dogma, superstition, and blind but misplaced faith. In an early number of Energie nove, Gobetti responds to those who had criticized the opening issues of the review for its lack of a specific program. But that, rebuts Gobetti, was a deliberate ploy on his part: ‘we chose not to give [a concrete program], not because we didn’t have one [...] but because the concrete program must be seen step by step in all the questions that we deal with, and not in a hurried and amorphous anticipation.’108 In fact, it was to avoid all charges that his thought might lead to foregone conclusions that in a later article, also published in EN, Gobetti states: ‘To be liberals, we are careful not to theorize liberalism.’109 In later years, some of Gobetti’s followers were to run up against the same kind of question. A case in point is that of the liberal socialist intellectuals like Carlo Levi and Leone Ginzburg who were part of Carlo Rosselli’s Giustizia e libertà (GL) group in the 1930s.110 Both the one and the other were, like Gobetti, reluctant to take on the role of those who have privileged access to the realm of truth. In the text they wrote together, ‘Il concetto di autonomia nel programma di Giustizia e Libertà,’ a manifesto text of GL, they take their distance from any final authority that might be attributed to them: ‘We know very well that we are not bringers of the divine word. We present our theses for what they are worth, not as magic formulas, but as reasonable ways to solve problems.’111

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If from a philosophical and intellectual standpoint such a stance has obvious attractions insofar as it leaves open space for invention, creativity, and flexibility, from the standpoint of a political organism it is not without its problems. Gobetti, whose activity as a militant was limited, did not have to come to terms with this facet of his thought, but those in GL certainly did. Although the GL manifesto that Levi and Ginzburg wrote makes it perfectly clear that at the very centre of GL’s concern is the question of autonomy, exactly what form the autonomy they propose will take is left undefined. Not because of any real vagueness in their thought, but simply because they are convinced that actual forms cannot be worked out until the specific circumstances and the context of the question to be resolved are clear. And that is stuff of the future, not the present. The political downside of postponing to the future actual and detailed policy decisions is a certain vagueness in the nature of those proposals, especially those that sought to adumbrate the form a new non-fascist Italian state would take. Clearly, such a state would guarantee that citizens enjoyed a degree of autonomy much higher than that afforded them by the Fascist regime, but beyond that the proposals made by GL are hardly articulated at all. One part of the manifesto reads thus: ‘Reality will be charged with the task of putting into practice or refuting these indications and proposals […] If much of the detail […] is open to question, where no solution is, a priori, the best, it is nevertheless good that these premature problems are proposed.’112 And in a later article Levi wrote, ‘Seconda lettera dall’Italia,’ he makes similar comments: ‘What organisms of self-government will we have? Parliaments, central committees, local committees, workers’ councils, etc.? Today we cannot make predictions, only express desires.’ ‘In effect, the economic changes proposed by our program with perhaps excessive precision do not have value in and of themselves. Rather, they are indicators of a possible direction’; ‘our program is a program of revolution. It […] does not predetermine an abstract form the state should take.’113 In his only real participation in active politics with the Lega democratica per il rinnovamento della politica nazionale in the spring of 1919, Gobetti too was forced to come to terms with the question of openness in a political, rather than philosophical context. The Lega, as a format, Gobetti tells us in an article entitled ‘Verso una realtà politica concreta’ is preferable to that of the political party insofar as the former deals with ‘live history’ and ‘does not posit general principles from which to deduce practical positions.’114 Gobetti’s concern here, of course, is to take his distance from arriving at the predetermined out-

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comes he fears result from the less nimble and far more ideologically laden form that is the political party, better to ensure the possibility of open outcomes. But how open is the future that Gobetti seeks to protect from being merely a foregone conclusion? We have already seen in his discussion of myth, for example, how history itself reins in the the excesses of utopian thinking (the messianic expectations of which Gobetti speaks disparagingly on countless occasions), bringing radical ideas into line with what is feasible and possible in the light of contingent circumstances. ‘The spirit progresses by successive developments and not by unexpected revelations,’ he writes.115 Indeed, it is contingency that closes down some options, opening up others: ‘The practical and concrete problem is to find the best way to achieve in the world of contingency what we have said, to see what means are the most efficient to promote the development of the spirit and the conquest of responsibility on the part of individuals.’ Prior to the advent of the Lega, this attention to the contingent was lacking: ‘no one had gone down deep enough into the world of contingency […] we constructed concepts that in seeking the universal lost their concreteness.’116 Here already, then, Gobetti’s openness is rather less open than at first sight might appear. A further restraint on the extent to which the future is undetermined is supplied by tradition and history. An organism like the Lega, as nimble as Gobetti wants it to be when compared with a political party, can hardly be said not to have a history and not to be, and boast of being, the continuation of the tradition from whence it comes. The Lega, in fact, is very much the child of its illustrious father figures, La Voce and L’Unità, their experiences representing ‘a patrimony that [we] cannot forget.’117 And this is not to mention the constraints that Gobetti’s own middle-class background and his ideological preferences put on his thinking and vision. All this creates what Gobetti calls ‘a general conception’ of the world underlying the Lega’s proposed solutions to the problems afflicting Italy (but which also certainly underlies Gobetti’s thought). But Gobetti is loath to admit that this acts as a constraint on future action. It does not ‘constitute in any way a first moment of the spirit from which in a deductive manner we discover the rest […] Only in a retrospective vision can we consider the general conception on its own.’118 This is a clear case of having one’s cake and wanting to eat it too; of being proud to be part of a tradition, but wanting at the same time to have the option of freeing oneself from it. Gobetti is far less receptive to openness than he would lead us to believe or, perhaps, wants to admit. The path his openness walks is more

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predictable and mono-directional than some of his rhetoric of openness might suggest and is interested only in liberal outcomes or outcomes that can be recast so as to appear liberal (Factory Councils and Russian Revolution). Gobetti, in fact, loads the dice very much in favour of the kind of affirmations of liberalism that he valued most. When the outcomes of the instances of political dynamism that he investigates take a non-liberal path or cannot be recast as liberal – that is, when the combatants’ movement took a nationalist and fascist turn (or when Gentile did the same thing) – he discards them. Gobetti, then, is less a follower of openness than he is a seeker out of instances of dynamism and selfaffirmation. And once having found such instances, he is quick to append to them the label of liberal. In wanting to have his say in a project of cultural and political renewal, his role is to make the liberal case for such instances and, when necessary, persuade those who are not convinced that there is more to them than meets the eye. Persuasion is a vital component of Gobetti’s project. In the next chapter, we will see how Gobetti acquits himself in his role as persuader of the unconvinced.

4 Writing, Creativity, and the Intellectual

Over the eighty and more years that have elapsed since Gobetti’s death, his critical reception has passed through a series of stages and genres. Not surprisingly, given the circumstances of his death and his charismatic nature, the first of these phases was one of hagiographic commemoration of the intransigent antifascist hero who had met his death at the hands of the regime. Among those who commemorated Gobetti were a number of figures who would go on to gain notoriety, such as literary critics Sapegno, Mario Fubini, and Carlo Levi. In this phase, as can well be imagined, very little is done to submit his thoughts and writing to a rigorous critical examination. Despite that, however, here and there in the commemorations we find a timidly advanced critical note. For example, Carlo Levi, writing of Gobetti’s first published work, his doctoral thesis on Vittorio Alfieri, had occasion to make the following comment: ‘La filosofia politica di Vittorio Alfieri,’ he says, ‘has much more value as an extraordinary profession of faith than as a critical essay, but this is perhaps the reason why it is, in my opinion, one of the most vital things that Gobetti has left us.’ Gioele Solari, a good friend of Croce’s, professor of law at Turin University, and supervisor of Gobetti’s thesis on Alfieri was of the same opinion. In an article in which he reviews the thesis written by his pupil, published in 1923, and so while Gobetti was still alive and in no need of commemoration, he noted that it is not ‘possible to eliminate the suspicion that [Gobetti] is concerned far less with historical truth than he is with turning Alfieri into a demonstration of his philosophical-political belief.’1 At stake for both Levi and Solari is Gobetti’s tendency to reinterpret the past in the light of present needs, thus making of the past, in this case the figure of Alfieri, a kind of illustrious precursor and model for the present. The Alfieri of Gobetti’s

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thesis, they both suggest, is less an accurate and dispassionate reflection on the historical figure of Alfieri the man and his thought than Gobetti’s ideal projection of the image of the kind of intellectual, the new moral and intellectual type of which Italy had great need. In fact, it is undeniable that Alfieri is very much the model on which Gobetti based his own sense of identity as an intellectual. In this way, the text becomes a kind of autobiography avant la lettre, written before the writer’s life has begun in earnest. Others too have noted this tendency in Gobetti’s writing on Alfieri. Writing in 1949, while praising the study his friend had made, Fubini spoke of an ‘autobiographical presupposition’ in Gobetti’s work. The best light in which to view Gobetti’s study of Alfieri, he continued, was not a scientific one. Rather, one had to ‘take into account the aim that [Gobetti] had with this book, which was to clarify and determine his own vocation and to fix, through the study of the past, his judgment on the present.’ However, in doing this, Gobetti ‘mixes himself up with the author he is studying, takes over and integrates his thought, to the point, sometimes, of transposing it.’2 Vittorio Alfieri Alfieri was an author much studied and reflected upon by the members of the Gobetti group. In 1921 Umberto Calosso, who had also written a thesis on Alfieri, published four articles on him in Gramsci’s L’Ordine nuovo, as well as a book in 1924; from 1923 onwards, Fubini published on Alfieri and went on to be one of the major authorities on him; Sapegno too published on Alfieri, not to mention Croce, who in 1923 published an essay on Alfieri.3 It is not difficult to see why Alfieri attracted the attention of so many young and not so young intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. Alfieri was the poet of liberty, a sworn enemy of tyrants, whether in the form of monarchs or popes; he enthused about the liberation movements of his time in France and in the United States, but was equally quick to turn his back on them when they turned sour and went in a direction of which he disapproved. The picture of his end of the eighteenth-century world that emerges from all of Alfieri’s writings – his tragedies, and his tracts La tirannide and Del principe e delle lettere – is fairly stark and straightforward: on the one hand, domination by tyrannical figures who hold sway over the masses aided and abetted by opportunistic courtiers and by an amorphous silent majority who passively give the tyrant their support out of either fear, ineptitude, or laziness; on the other, the few heroic and inevitably tragic figures

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who stand against the tyrant. Alfieri, of course, as a man who lived in a state of ongoing conflict with the social reality that surrounded him, numbered himself as one of the members of this latter group. Alfieri’s heroes bear more than a passing resemblance to the heroes of melodrama, those characters who do not fit into the social reality of their day, stand against it, and put up resistance to it, only to be inevitably defeated. Nevertheless, in defeat they not only retain but enhance the nobility of purpose that sets them out from the rest, the masses that go along blindly and obediently with the rules of the grey mediocrity of a social reality that oppresses them. Alfieri was, writes Gobetti, ‘the most generous example of active intellectual resistance against political oppression, resistance of the individual alone who stands undefeated because he feels he is spiritually on a higher plane than the tyrant.’ 4 Those who put up opposition to the tyrant are possessed of a unique quality, what Alfieri calls a forte sentire. ‘Strong feelings’ does little to effectively render what Alfieri means by forte sentire: it is an absolute refusal to accept the state of affairs in which figures like Alfieri had the misfortune to live; a radical sense of frustration with social reality that gives vent to ‘a boiling up of the heart and mind that never allows [the strong “feeler”] to find peace or place; an unquenchable thirst to excel and for glory; a conviction that what has already been achieved is worth nothing, and what remains to be done is everything.’5 Only by eschewing all contact with the tyrant, his court, and anywhere his power reaches can those blessed (or cursed) with forte sentire preserve their purity and remain uncontaminated by the virus of tyranny. As described by Alfieri, there is something of Harold Bloom’s strong poet in this figure of radical and intransigent opposition. Indeed, the main hero of Alfieri’s narrative of opposition is the writer, the ‘sublime writer,’ as he calls him, whose task it is to use his talents and art to tell the awkward truths that tyrants do not want told and opportunistic intellectuals do not have the courage to tell. But as well as being gifted with the qualities of the strong poet, the sublime writer has to be a free man. It goes without saying that he cannot be a man of the court, in the pay of the tyrant, but neither can he be a writer who responds to the demands and tastes of the reading public. Either way, the writer’s hands are tied, his freedom compromised. Only by enjoying a state of complete liberty, unimpeded by the demands of the market or those of the tyrant, can the writer carry out his mission. What results is a writing that is revolutionary in its intentions, but conservatively arcadic in its actual practice. So distant is Alfieri from

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the social reality of his day and so deeply rooted is his disdain for anything that resembles the masses that his writing is unable to come to grips in any precise terms with the structures that make tyranny possible and what form or shape an oppositional practice might take. Alfieri is no Salvemini, nor is he a Cesare Beccaria, the Enlightenment philosopher from Lombardy who saw the task of the modern intellectual in terms that were radically different from Alfieri’s. Indeed, Alfieri had no time at all for and gives the impression of being utterly bored by the detailed, practical, gradualist reformist politics of the likes of Beccaria and his colleagues who gathered around the Il Caffè review. The fact that these latter put themselves at the service of those in power, offering them what they hoped was good advice and practical tips on how to solve contingent problems was tantamount to heresy for Alfieri. There is, in fact, no politics in Alfieri’s writings, nor is there any faith in a class or group of people who would put any politics into practice. Change, if it is ever to come about, is the result of the unchained energies of a few strong heroes who, even if they work together, steadfastly remain individuals. Not the end product of any political project, change, as Alfieri sees it, happens overnight, suddenly, magically. With little purchase on the details of social and political reality, Alfieri’s writings are limited to the expression of a series of hopes, desires, and exhortations. A measure of the extent to which his writings are bereft of any practical politics is that the only course of action he suggests as a remedy against the tyrant is either his assassination or the suicide of those who fall victim to his tyranny. Yet, to see only the very real limitations and pitfalls of Alfieri’s writings is to underestimate the vital role they and he have played in crucial moments in Italian history. Alfieri, in fact, was a constant point of reference for many Italian intellectuals during the Risorgimento and, as we have seen, during fascism. To understand the reason for this we need to shift the focus of our attention away from the weak side of his writings, their lack of practical application, to their strong side, their visionary and inspirational nature. At the core of Alfieri’s project is the conviction that the impossible, or that which seems impossible, can be made possible by sheer force of will, that to desire something ardently enough will bring it into existence. If liberty is in short supply or in a moribund state the duty and role of the intellectual, the sublime writer, is to bring it to life on the page, create it, perform it one might say, put the idea of it into circulation so that it may exist in more concrete form off the page. Towards the end of his Del principe e delle lettere, in chapter 11, which contains his exhortation to

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free Italy of the barbarians, Alfieri outlines the task of the sublime writer thus: ‘I will finish this chapter with an axiom different from most. It is: virtue is that thing, more than others, that if we greatly praise it, teach it, love it, hope it, desire it then we will make it be; and nothing makes it more impossible than considering it shamefully impossible.’6 Elsewhere in his writings, Alfieri also supplies proof of the power he attributes to the imagination to create a reality that would not otherwise exist. In a letter of condolence written in 1796 to Teresa Regoli-Mocenni, polemicizing against both the French, whom he came to hate with a passion, and Enlightenment intellectuals, whom he thought were far too chained down to the tyranny of prosaic reality, he writes: It avails our imagination and our affections much more to believe that our Mario is with Candido and Gori [two deceased friends], and that they are talking and thinking about us, and that we will see them again than to believe that they are just a fistful of ashes. If such belief is at odds with physics and cold and mathematical evidence, it is still not to be scorned. The first quality of men is to feel, and the sciences teach us not to feel. Long live ignorance and poetry […] Let’s imagine, and believe what we imagine to be true: man lives of love, love makes him a god (god is what I call the man who strongly feels); and I call dogs or French, which is the same, the ice-cold philosophers who are moved by nothing, only that two plus two equals four.7

It was certainly the visionary quality of Alfieri’s writings that underlay Francesco De Sanctis’ comment that Alfieri was ‘an ideal statue of the future Italian,’ as well as for another critic, Giacomo Debenedetti, a correspondent of Gobetti’s in the 1920s, who read Alfieri while in hiding from the Nazis in Tuscany in 1943: ‘Could it not be that for people like us, in such a sorry state on this planet, in such a suffocating age, Alfieri’s first and most decisive invitation comes from the word liberty that roars, thunders, and flies in his pages?’8 In his book La vocazione di Vittorio Alfieri, Debenedetti notes that ‘Alfieri needed his entire destiny to coincide with the vocation of a poet.’9 Alfieri’s life, as he described himself in his autobiography, which reads at times like a Dickens’ novel, is very much a series of literary events: his heroes are from Plutarch; his love affairs from Petrarch; the format of his political writings resembles Machiavelli’s; his life story that of Saint Augustine. Gobetti read and wrote on Alfieri in the years leading up to and into the Fascist regime, using his own company to publish his university

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dissertation in 1923, and dedicating it ‘to my Ada.’10 So influential was the figure of Alfieri to Gobetti that he reproduced one of his mottos – in Greek: Ti moi suvn douvloisi / Che ho a che fare io con gli schiavi? (What have I got to do with the slaves?) – on the front page of La Rivoluzione liberale and, from the end of 1923 onwards, on the cover of the books his publishing company brought out (see figure below)

It is not hard to see why Gobetti found Alfieri such an attractive author. For one thing, Alfieri was from the Piedmont town of Asti, and Gobetti always privileged writers and authors from the home region they shared and whose role in the ‘creation of the new ideal Italian reality’ had been forgotten by scholarship (22). Another is that Gobetti’s writings on Alfieri had the aim of rescuing him from the pit into which he had been relegated by some recent Italian works of criticism. Throughout the fairly short work, Gobetti takes strong issue with a certain Emilio Bertana who had published in 1904 a study on Alfieri.11 Bertana’s opinion of Alfieri, which bore on the inconsistency, abstract nature, and non-feasibility of his political thought, was shared by another critic Gobetti mentions, Vittorio Cian, who again focused on the limits of Alfieri’s politics. But this, argues Gobetti, is the wrong way to read Alfieri. Like Cian and Bertana, who did a disservice to Alfieri, Salvemini had done something similar to another visionary, Giuseppe Mazzini, by an approach according to which ‘utopia is brought to trial by science’ (27). Taking another swipe at Salvemini and showing us why he began to take his distance from Salvemini-style interventions

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in political life, Gobetti notes that the value of both Alfieri and Mazzini is not to be found in their concretismo, the practical solutions they offer to contingent problems (27). Even if Gobetti has to admit that Alfieri’s practical politics is of little value, the question that remains to be answered is why both Alfieri’s and Mazzini’s glory has not yet been extinguished. In Risorgimento senza eroi, the book in which he extols the example of eighteenth-century Piedmont intellectuals, to which I will turn shortly, Gobetti makes it clear that Alfieri is still alive and well as an example to others: ‘Three generations were brought up in Italy on his works; and still today for us he represents the intransigent moral of a free man in a time of slavery.’12 But an answer to the question of why Alfieri remains important centuries after his death will not be forthcoming if the path trodden by Bertana and Cian is followed and one limits oneself to considerations of the feasibility of his proposals, ‘running after facts,’ as positivists like them did, rather than exploring ideas. Indeed, throughout the study Gobetti is at pains to draw his readers away from what he sees as any crude and utilitarian reading of Alfieri (29). He notes, in fact, that like Machiavelli Alfieri is not interested in ‘an art of government,’ but ‘a theory.’ He does not propose the ‘projects of a reformer, but the speculations of a philosopher’ (27). Against such a reading, Gobetti proposes that Alfieri be read in a way that goes beyond the literal. For example, when Alfieri takes issue with the monarchy as a tyrannical institution it is not because he is waving the flag for republicanism, but because he is using that instance of tyranny as a call to arms, as a way of inciting his readers to action (82–3). It is in his role as propagandist of the idea of liberty that his enduring glory lies, not in the minutiae of the solutions he from time to time puts forward. So, to understand and appreciate Alfieri’s value it is important to consider him less as a politician and more as a philosopher. Just as Leopardi, whom Gobetti quotes, saw Alfieri as more of a philosopher than a poet, so Gobetti sees him as more of a philosopher than a politician. It is his role in a developing philosophical tradition that is of interest to Gobetti and out of which Alfieri’s greatness and importance emerges (27). Alfieri, Gobetti argues, is an integral part of an Italian liberal tradition that began with Machiavelli, went on to Vico, through Alfieri, and on to the nineteenth-century Catholic philosopher Vincenzo Gioberti. This is a tradition of liberty that values the individual and the strength of the individual’s will to forge and create his or her own world. Alfieri is all the more important, in Gobetti’s eyes, in that he made the idea of liberty

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possible and sang the praises of the singularity of the strong-minded individual against the background of the intellectual climate in which he lived. This was a time, the late eighteenth century, when, so writes Gobetti, ‘the vitality of the spirit had been reduced to a dead, abstract scheme in the world of post-Cartesian intellectualism […] a century in which when one said system one meant abstraction and generalization of empirical data. Opposing the system to declare the fullness of individual life, irreducible to old formulas was a precious work of speculative renewal’ (28). Gobetti, of course, is guilty of a few overly rhetorical flourishes in the above quotation. The hyperbole, though, is motivated by his need to create an arid background against which to situate Alfieri the dynamic rebel, the renegade, the outsider, the prophet. In an age like this, asks Gobetti, where there is so little space for individual liberties, for the creative strong poets, for the forgers of new worlds, what is an Alfieri and what are like-minded intellectuals to do to spread the alternative word and wave the flag of liberty? Gobetti’s enthusiasm for Alfieri stems to a great extent from the fact that he seems to offer an answer to such questions through writing. It is through the written word that the intellectual can intervene and have a say in the public sphere; it is through writing that the intellectual can gather forces, educate minds, and offer alternatives. But what kind of writing and what kind of writer? To be sure, a writer under the protection of a prince can achieve only elegance of style, mere aesthetic gratification (38). The writing that both Gobetti and Alfieri have in mind is a powerful tool that creates reality, puts ideas into circulation, and makes things happen. This, I think, is what Gobetti means when he associates writing with action. For Alfieri, he says, ‘writing […] is the same as thinking, and thinking is acting’ (37). Once an idea is expressed in writing, once it is put into circulation, if it has any value, and that value is recognized, it takes on an existence of its own. That the writing Gobetti is interested in is that which has an impact in the world becomes clearer a little later when he discusses what Alfieri means by lettere. Among the lovers of letters cited by Alfieri we find Homer and Plato, suggesting that ‘more than of artistic values, [Alfieri] is thinking of philosophical ones that in his activist conception are necessarily translated into norms of action and count insofar as they become part of a social praxis’ (41). Although Gobetti makes extensive mention of Alfieri’s political tracts and from time to time refers to his tragedies and his autobiography, there is one short work by Alfieri that he turns to time and time again:

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namely, La virtù sconosciuta. Gobetti set great store by this text, mentioning in a note that in La virtù sconosciuta is contained Alfieri’s ‘mature thought’ and calling it ‘a tract of ethics, an essay of heroic morals’ (50). The virtue that remains unknown in question is that of Francesco Gori, a close friend of Alfieri’s who passed away unexpectedly. Alfieri thought very highly of Gori and in the course of the work, which takes the form of a dialogue between the two men, he offers to sing the praises of his friend, the unsung hero. At issue in their conversation are a number of questions: what value does virtue have if it remains unknown and so cannot act as an example to others? What role does writing have in making the unknown known and creating the conditions for possible change? At a certain point, Alfieri asks his deceased friend: And if I from your unknown life, from your private and simple habits, promised to draw, without altering the truth, bright examples of strength and loftiness of spirit, of warm-heartedness, of sharp intellect, of masculine and free expression. In other words, to paint a rare mix of the finest civic virtues like those of Rome or Athens, veiled by your loving modesty, and in times that are so contrary to these virtues […] with such writing, would I not be able to incite the curiosity of all men? Would I not be able to silence the evil of the many with proof? Would I not be able to awaken the love and the wonder of such people […] and would they not have doubly felt your virtue and perhaps, as something new and unheard of, would they not have imitated it?14

Gori, however, is unimpressed. What’s the point, he seems to say? What difference would it make, he asks? Commenting on the dialogue, Gobetti sums up the difference between the two participants thus: ‘Gori does not act because he does not have faith; Alfieri, the “untamed, impetuous temperament,” acts because he does not have a faith. The idea does not shine light from without, remaining ungraspable on high, but is born of action’ (92, original emphasis). Alfieri acts in order to create that faith, bring it into being. If Gori gives in to his desperation and pessimism about ever leaving a meaningful mark that may act as a trigger for change, Alfieri, who was no less a pessimist, Gobetti tells us, acts in order to create that which in the present does not exist: namely, an example that may act as a trigger to virtue. If examples of virtue are in short supply, the task of the intellectual is to make that virtue happen by writing it into existence, giving it a life and a public presence that it would not otherwise have had. And the better, the more persuasive the

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writing, the better the chances that what is written will be translated into action. As Alfieri wrote in Del principe e delle lettere: ‘To say things in the highest of manners is, in great part, to do them.’15 Alfieri is an example of what Gobetti calls, in the pages of his volume where he discusses La virtù sconsociuta in most detail, the ‘man of letters as propagandist’ or, a little later, ‘man of letters/man of action’ (letterato attore) (54). Towards the end of the chapter in which this discussion takes place, Gobetti quotes at length from book 3, chapter 4 of Del principe e delle lettere. The passage bears on the duty of those who have the talent to ‘operate and to work for the people in practical acts using their intelligence.’ But if they have not been elected to any office or have been ‘prevented from operating,’ what remains for them to do is ‘with the pen teach others what they have not been able put into practice […] in the face of triumphant vice seated on its throne they bring that virtuous war of truth that alone, showing vice to be what it really is, can happily fight it and in time destroy it. These, in my opinion, are the true, indeed, only writers; and I am of the view that the most perfect of their books are those that most greatly produce such an effect’ (55). Risorgimento Although all of Gobetti’s writings bear Alfierian traces, his most Alfierian book, the one in which he proves to be man of letters/man of action, is Risorgimento senza eroi, which as well as containing portraits of a number of eighteenth-century Piedmont intellectuals, also contains a chapter on Alfieri. The book argues that the Risorgimento had not been a success because it had failed to include or have any relevance for the popular classes: ‘This absence of thinking about the state as a popular state, is the deficiency of all our failed Risorgimento;’16 and ‘building a unity that was a unity of the people remained an unsolved question. The conquest of independence was not felt [by the popular classes] and never entered the intimate life of the nation itself, it was not the laborious and autonomous work of an actively spontaneous formation’ (129). It is surprising to hear Gobetti express concern about the lack of popular participation on the part of the masses in the Risorgimento. Far more interested in elites than the masses, as we have seen, nowhere in his writings do the masses figure at centrestage. But what Gobetti is bemoaning is not so much that the popular masses were excluded as the failure of the Risorgimento intellectuals to supply the kind of

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leadership that would have trickled down to the masses and inspired them to believe in the value and utility of a unified nation. In other words, their failure was that of not having been able to elaborate the necessary inspirational myths that would have instigated action and wider participation. But as always in Gobetti, the conditions for wider participation are created by an enlightened elite. Still, to interpret the Risorgimento in such a manner represents a step away from some of the hagiographic studies that had appeared in the years immediately following unification. These tended to highlight the struggles of the patriots, the sacrifice of martyrs, and the heroic work of the founders of the newly unified nation. Although the protagonists could not have differed more the one from the other, their combined efforts made of them a formidable team that succeeded in establishing the basis and the structures of Italian national unity: a monarchy, a parliamentary democracy, Rome as capital. A first dissenting voice in the historiographical debate was that of Alfredo Oriani who published his La lotta politica in Italia in 1892.17 His study argued that the Risorgimento had been a ‘conquista regia,’ a royal conquest that had allowed the Piedmont monarchy to extend its powers beyond its regional borders over all of Italy. The state that thus emerged, argued Oriani, could only be a compromise between competing factions and could not be strong enough to establish Italy on the world stage as a major player and as a colonial power. Not surprisingly, Oriani’s explanation of what he saw as the Risorgimento’s fundamental flaw became an attractive argument for nationalists and, a little later, for fascists. Indeed, Oriani was to become something of a fascist hero, an intellectual precursor of the regime. In the late 1930s, the regime built four destroyers, known as the Oriani class. All of the destroyers were named after figures who had sung the praises of Italy and Italians. One was named after Oriani himself, the others, offering testimony to the wide cultural sweep the Fascist regime liked to give itself, were named Vittorio Alfieri (the thought of which would not have pleased Gobetti, and even less Alfieri), Giosuè Carducci, and Vincenzo Gioberti (these last three were all sunk in battle during the Second World War). Many fascist studies of the Risorgimento took their clue from Oriani. Seeing the whole process through an entirely Italian lens, these nationalistic analyses of the Risorgimento presented it as an Italian affair that owed little or nothing to foreign influences like the Enlightenment or the French Revolution and everything to the expansionist policies of the House of Savoy, the Italian royal family. They were particularly en-

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thusiastic about Oriani’s diagnosis of Italian weakness, a state of affairs that fascism set out to remedy. Gobetti’s interpretation also owes something to Oriani’s argument, but without its nationalistic underbelly. The same compromises that Oriani had pointed out, for Gobetti meant that the new Italy was only a liberal state by name, the result of a ‘failed revolution.’ That revolution might not have failed, however, if instead of being the Risorgimento of the ‘professionals,’ it had been the Risorgimento of the ‘heretics’ (14). These latter are the subject of Risorgimento senza eroi. This text has not met the kind of critical reception I think it deserves. For example, there is scarcely a mention of the text or the figures he describes in it either in Gervasoni’s otherwise very complete L’intellettuale come eroe or in Anna Maria Lumbelli’s Piero Gobetti: Storico del presente or in Martin’s Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution. This is all the more surprising in the case of Gervasoni’s book, which places Gobetti firmly within the tradition of the politically committed intellectual whose first, foremost, and most urgent task was to ‘create the cultural conditions that would allow Italians to develop a democratic civil conscience.’18 This, it seems to me, is exactly what Gobetti sets out to do in Risorgimento senza eroi. As his title suggests, Gobetti is interested in the non-heroes of the Risorgimento, in the role they did not have, in the role they might have had, and in the role they might still have in the creation of a Piedmont-based liberal school of thought. This, then, is not a hagiographic account of the Risorgimento. Rather, as he writes in his preface, it is a Risorgimento seen ‘contro luce’ (13), in a different light. Central to Gobetti’s thesis is that if the example of the intellectuals he describes and whose thought he analyses in the course of the book had been followed the Risorgimento would have had a better chance of succeeding as a liberal revolution and that a genuine liberal political culture could have been created in Italy. ‘The drama of the Risorgimento,’ he writes, ‘is in the torments of its preparation and in its lack of preparation’ (13). Risorgimento senza eroi is very much a regional book insofar as it privileges Piedmont-born intellectuals or those who were active there. Yet, Gobetti does not have too many positive things to say about the hegemonic culture of his home region over the last century or so. The inhabitants of Piedmont, he writes, are ‘characterized by resignation and mediocrity’; culture ‘had not been enough to wake it up’ (20). But in the margins of the region’s mediocrity, there are a number of figures who deserve a profile higher than the very low one they presently enjoy. It is the flickering heritage of these figures that lies behind the work

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of one of Gobetti’s true Risorgimento heroes, Camillo Cavour, who, he writes in a more lyrical vein than usual, ‘especially when he is alone, obeys a secret voice of history and a dark destiny of his race that seems to emerge throughout the eighteenth century by way of mysterious unarmed prophets who we come across unexpectedly in the darkness and who give us slivers of light’ (27). As he writes to Ada in a letter of 1920, this largely Piedmont school of thought had been supplanted by another school, the far showier and rhetorically spellbinding one of Gabriele D’Annunzio (a figure we will encounter later in the chapter).19 But as an alternative, there was an untapped potential, Gobetti thought, in the Piedmont of the late eighteenth century when ‘complex demands for modernity characterized social life more clearly than elsewhere […] Attention was given over completely to an economic life that was organized according to liberal principles. The peasants, who are developing a consciousness of themselves as producers, pushed ahead with their revolution […] A critique of the Catholic church also begins.’20 It is with Alberto Radicati that Gobetti begins his series of portraits. Radicati, born in Turin in 1698, was a secular, anti-Catholic (but not anti-religious) free thinker whose boldly stated view that allegiance to the monarch held precedence over allegiance to the Pope initially allowed him to enjoy the hospitality of the court of Vittorio Amedeo II, who was involved in a series of religious disputes. When, however, a Concordat was signed between the court and Pope Benedict XIII, fearful for his life and well-being, Radicati chose the path of voluntary exile in London. During the reign of Vittorio Amedeo II, Gobetti saw with great enthusiasm the beginnings of a possible secular politics. The importance of Radicati is that he attempted to give a doctrinal underbelly to the secular battle then being fought, ‘shouting his protest’ (30). Although he never shies away from criticizing the ingenuous and overly adventurous parts of his thought, Gobetti is attracted to the bizarre and original figure that Radicati was and to the fact that his was a European culture, a forerunner to the Italian Enlightenment: ‘his passion lives in the European atmosphere of free thinking’ (38). Even seasoned Italianists can be forgiven for not being overly familiar with the likes of Alberto Radicati or Count Vasco, two of the disarmed prophets Gobetti includes in Risorgimento senza eroi. But that is just the point: these are neglected, overlooked, undervalued, almost forgotten figures, who could have had a positive role, but alas did not. These ‘exiles […] victims of collective hallucinations’ (13) are:

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• Pietro Giannone – ‘Instead of being burned at the stake, he was condemned to 12 years in the prison that would be his tomb’ (75) • Abbot Denina – ‘A government that considers the Abbot Denina dangerous has lost all faith in the pillars of society’ (79) • Giuseppe Baretti – ‘In the context of Piedmont’s culture and the efforts made by Italy to conquer a sense of European maturity, the portrait of Baretti is essential’ (81) • Count Vasco – ‘the Piedmontese Verri’ (86) • Count Gian Francesco Galeani Napione – ‘the solutions proposed by Napione for the problems of his time are typical of a man from Piedmont who stands far away from metaphysics and romanticism: a good Catholic, he puts the state above religion’ (105) • Santorre Santarosa – ‘his style and thought were defined by a moderate, far-sighted liberalism, conceived as the art of government’ (122) • Luigi Ornato – ‘the most daring representative of the anti-dogmatic polemic’ (133) • Domenico Berti – ‘his anti-dogmatism […] has a significant place in the history of the liberal idea in Italy’ (151) All of the persecuted and misunderstood figures are ‘European Piedmontese’ insofar as they are influenced by events and experiences in France, Austria, and England; they are ‘announcers’ (96) of a new secular liberal culture that encountered great difficulty in setting down roots thanks, largely, to the hostility and influence of the Catholic Church. Many of the figures Gobetti examines in his pre-Risorgimento portrait gallery are anti-Catholic, though not anti-religious: ‘all the secular currents of thought during the Risorgimento oppose Christianity to Catholicism’ (74). If the foundation of a modern state was contingent on the kind of cultural and political conditions that would foster, in Gobetti’s words, ‘the perennial creation of ever-new realities, the autonomous affirmation of independent citizens holding within themselves the beginning of their activity and social authority’ (130), an obvious adversary to such a project would be a hierarchical entity like the Catholic Church, still very much the ‘master of minds’ (131). At a local level, the effective hegemonic role the Church played had been bolstered by the willingness of the Piedmont monarchy, always ‘conciliatory and tender-hearted in the face of questions of good sense’ (17), to agree to reach a series of compromises. The kind of Risorgimento Gobetti had hoped for demanded a ‘spirit of struggle and popular initiative’ (21)

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that did not exist in the Italy of the time. The backward state of the economy, when compared with that of European neighbours, did not allow the circulation of goods and ruling elites that were the basis of the modern secular state and ‘necessary for a bourgeoisie to grow’ (22). For its part, the Church had little interest in encouraging autonomy among the masses, preferring to appease them through a politics of philanthropy, its ‘reactionary socialism,’ as Gobetti calls it, that creates ‘masses of parasites’ (131). In short, ‘in an age in which Europe was preparing the liberal revolution, clericalism and feudalism dreamed of an Italy in check, docile in its numerous courts, under the thumb of the bishop and of good ancient morals’ (70). Gobetti sees himself as very much the heir apparent to the heretical secular currents of thought and thinkers who in the pre-Risorgimento period struggled to emerge from the margins of Italian intellectual life. But one critic who shared next to nothing of Gobetti’s enthusiasm for these new heroes was Adolfo Omodeo, a strenuous defender of the positive role liberals had played in the unification of the nation. His critique centres on Gobetti’s enthusiasm for the figure of the hero and the role he or she could play in the historical process. It was liberals who were the key figures, he maintained, who even though a minority were a minority that worked for the nation as a whole. What Omodeo disliked about Gobetti’s reflections on the Risorgimento was that they downplayed the role of liberals, and played up the potential but unrealized role of heroes. Writing in Leonardo, Omodeo contested Gobetti’s idea that only heroes have a role in moving forward the historical process. Underlying Risorgimento senza eroi, to which we could add Gobetti’s writings on Alfieri, is the ‘satanic, Lucifer-like prejudice that the rebel is more attractive and more worthy than the conservative, [Gobetti displays] a love of the revolution for the sake of revolution […] as if nothing good can be done unless it is explosive; as if the steady continuation of the past and the development in us of its traditions had no worth.’21 Risorgimento senza eroi is a work of persuasion that seeks to make the case to Gobetti’s readers, and perhaps to himself, for the importance and enduring relevance of these figures and their struggle to create the basis for a secular, modern ‘European’ Italy. As a work of persuasion, Risorgimento senza eroi is dependent on writing for its success. The only tool Gobetti can employ in order to bring these figures and their thought out of the relative obscurity into which they have been condemned is the written word. The overall aim of the project is to bring to the public consciousness figures like Radicati, Giannone, and Vasco, all figures

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who would have remained largely unknown and certainly overlooked had it not been for Gobetti’s trawl through eighteenth-century Italian intellectual history. To a great extent, these figures, plucked from relative obscurity, are written into existence by Gobetti to suit the purpose he had in mind: namely, that of creating an alternative intellectual and political tradition on which he and other like-minded enlightened liberal intellectuals in the early decades of the twentieth century could draw and to which they saw themselves as heirs. Largely products of Gobetti’s writing, the value of the figures who make up Gobetti’s portrait galley lies more in the Italy of the 1920s than it did in that of the eighteenth century. It is here, as I anticipated earlier, that we find Gobetti’s greatest debt to Alfieri, the theorist of the political role of writing and the performative power of language. As a writing that has the intent to persuade, Gobetti’s has a great deal in common with the kind of writing associated with manifestoes. The primary aim of manifesto writers is to persuade, make a case.22 Insofar as it is a text, a manifesto is ‘a deliberate manipulation of the public view. Setting out the terms of the faith toward which the listening public is to be swayed, it is a document of ideology, crafted to convince and convert.’23 Even when it deals with the past, as it does in Risorgimento senza eroi, Gobetti’s writing is always essentially future-oriented, creating out of the past the stepping stones that lead up to his own project and give it greater breadth, substance, and legitimacy. Although his eyes are set firmly on the horizon ahead of him, Gobetti wants to be part of a line of thought that although marginal, underappreciated, and overlooked will add fuel to his own project. We are not alone, Gobetti seems to be saying to his followers, even though we sometimes might feel that way; if we cast our nets around we find others who came before us whose examples are there to inspire and encourage us. Indeed, Gobetti spends a great deal of time casting around to find possible kindred spirits. In the previous chapters, we have seen how he looked at a series of candidates from the recent and not so recent past, as well as in his contemporary world to find the kind of dynamism in which he was interested. The sheer number of candidates he takes into consideration, some of whom, futurism and nationalism, for example, are discarded fairly quickly, are indicators both of the great urgency Gobetti had in uncovering kindred spirits and to the fact that, like Alfieri before him, he was very much a desiring subject. There is an aphorism, drawn from a letter Alfieri wrote to Raniero de’ Calzabigi in 1783, that not only amuses Italian schoolchildren when they learn of it, but

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also serves as testimony to the restlessness of Alfieri’s spirit. It is: ‘Volli, sempre volli, fortissimamente volli!’ (I wanted, always wanted, strenuously wanted!) .24 Although he would never have expressed himself in such earthy and carnal terms, Gobetti would certainly have understood what Alfieri meant with this motto and to some extent at least would have recognized himself in it. If it is true, as David Roberts has suggested, that Gobetti is a ‘frustrated liberal,’ it is also true that it is the frustration he felt that fuelled and pushed Gobetti’s desire towards that which seems to add legitimacy and force to his project. Borrowing terminology from the field of literary studies, insofar as he is a desiring subject Gobetti is led towards a performative use of language. In other words, and going back to the comment made by Solari on Gobetti’s graduation thesis, it is the desire to give support and weight to a ‘philosophical-political belief’ that Gobetti creates performatively an Alfieri and the other forgotten heroes of the Risorgimento that illustrate and validate a preformulated thesis. Although what Gobetti writes is factually based, insofar as all the forgotten heroes are real people, his actual writing, put to the service of his ‘philosophical-political belief,’ goes well beyond facts. It is not reality that supports his thesis. Rather, it is his thesis that drives the reality he describes. The crux of Solari’s comment on Gobetti’s thesis is that the Alfieri that emerges from it is a figure that has been created performatively by the thesis’ author and, for this reason, is of little use to scholars of Alfieri. I find myself in agreement with the substance of what Solari says, but with an important qualification: what for Solari is a negative tendency to be condemned in Gobetti’s study is for me an entirely positive one. Solari considers the performative nature of Gobetti’s study of Alfieri to be its greatest defect. There is no sense in reading what Gobetti has to say about Alfieri if you want to know something about Alfieri. Reading Gobetti on Alfieri, you find out more about Gobetti’s hopes, desires, and aspirations than you do about Alfieri’s thought, importance, and relevance. I, on the other hand, believe that what for Solari is Gobetti’s greatest defect is one of his greatest merits. Everything in Gobetti’s writing that feels new, innovative, stimulating, unexpected, challenging is the direct result of his use of performative language. Gobetti’s Alfieri is interesting not, in the first place, because the textual figure he creates resembles Alfieri, but because through his portrait of Alfieri Gobetti gives us a picture of the kind of contemporary intellectual he wanted to exist: namely, the ‘new moral type.’ This does not

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mean, of course, that the early twentieth-century new Italian intellectual was to model himself or herself on an eighteenth-century aristocrat. But what it does mean is that the positive qualities of intransigence, determination, dedication to a cause, willingness to make sacrifices for that cause, and love of liberty in its most radicalized form, that to which Gobetti gives predominance and pride of place in ‘his’ Alfieri, should be components of the new intellectual. As we have already seen in the portrait galleries Gobetti gives us of both great and villainous figures, he understood the function of heroes. They have very much the same inspirational role as myth does. For Gobetti, Alfieri is by far the most important of these. And as with all hero figures, they are products of the pen more than they are products of life. The affinities Gobetti shares with Alfieri are not confined to the personal qualities he extols, but also extend to the terms of his political project. Both for the one and the other, writing, and writing that is to some degree performative, plays a crucial role. For Alfieri, it is the task of the intellectual to bring into existence, to the consciousness of his readers the instances of virtue that are lacking in social reality; for Gobetti, the foremost task of the liberal intellectual is to bring to the consciousness of his readers and followers the liberal principles that seem to have been betrayed by traditional liberals, but which are still at work in unexpected places. As we have seen, when dealing with the past Gobetti found these instances in Piedmont’s eighteenth-century intellectual tradition; in the present, he found such instances, far more controversially, in the Russian Revolution and in the Turin Factory Council Movement. Gobetti’s writings on these two events have earned him, in some quarters, the label of a philo-communist who merits no place in the panoply of true liberals.25 This, it seems to me, is a charge that is wide of the mark and from which Gobetti could easily be absolved if his writings were read in a less strictly referential manner than the way he has usually been read. Typically, Gobetti’s writings on the Russian Revolution and the Factory Council Movement have been read in a manner that has led him to be seen not as an intellectual on a passionate and energetic quest to unearth and star possible alternative sources of political dynamism in order to show how liberalism was, or could be, alive and well. Rather, he has been seen as a kind of Trojan Horse intellectual who opened a door that allowed the Italian communists to enter the arena of Italian political life and bestow legitimacy on an otherwise illegitimate and dangerous ideology. A reading, more informed by Gobetti’s writings on the eighteenth-century Piedmont intellectuals and especially

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Alfieri, puts a different gloss on what is at stake in Gobetti’s interest in the Russian Revolution and the Turin Factory Council Movement. Just as Gobetti delved into the past to recast the Piedmont intellectual tradition as the seedbed of a largely ignored liberal tradition, he delves into the events of his present to recast and reclaim them as being essentially liberal in nature. The whole thrust of Gobetti’s writings on these latter two events is to see them as driven not by communist and socialist principles, no matter what the participants thought, but by liberal ones. Gobetti is hardly interested at all in making communism look good; but he is very interested indeed in making liberal values look good and still very much alive, albeit located in unexpected places. That the events in Russia and Turin were fuelled by liberal values, so goes Gobetti’s reasoning, is a testament to the universality and enduring relevance of liberalism. Wherever there is creativity, dynamism, social antagonism, for Gobetti there is liberalism. Gobetti, in other words, is interested in what was happening in Russia and Turin for what he could make the events mean as illustrations of liberalism in practice rather than in the events themselves. In any case, as we have had occasion to see, Gobetti’s enthusiasm for both events is tempered in a number of ways: by focusing on the elite leadership of what were collective enterprises; and by insisting that myth acts as a spur to action rather than as an image of a predetermined outcome. In addition, Gobetti never tired of repeating that no prefabricated model could be imported willy-nilly into Italy and be expected to work. Gobetti, unlike Gramsci, did not reflect a great deal on language. But here and there, in his study on Alfieri and in a few articles, he does concern himself with the role language plays in politics and the dangers it brings with it. One of his clearest statements comes in a short piece he wrote on a figure who was both diametrically opposed, but also uncomfortably close to Gobetti: Gabriele D’Annunzio. Gabriele D’Annunzio Although Gobetti knew the value and power of language as a means of persuasion, he also was aware that language was a double-edged sword that could be put to service, with equally good effect, by his ideological enemies, one of whom was the poet and aesthete Gabriele D’Annunzio. Gobetti had a rather ambivalent attitude to D’Annunzio. On the one hand, he sees him as a reckless dreamer whose charisma and power to attract followers, all of which came to a head in his oc-

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cupation of Fiume, made of him one of the most prominent precursors of fascism. As well as being a renowned poet, novelist, and playwright, D’Annunzio was a militant intellectual. Disappointed with the failure of post-Risorgimento Italy to deliver a nation that lived up to the grandeur that he was convinced it deserved and was its natural right, D’Annunzio advocated Italy’s participation in the First World War as a step towards regaining that nation’s status among the Great Powers. Equally disappointed with the outcome of the war and with the way in which the Great Powers treated Italy at the Peace Conference, with a group of volunteers D’Annunzio seized the city of Fiume in September 1919 and began a fifteen-month occupation. Fiume, an Italian-speaking port town in what was then Dalmatia, is the Italian name given to the Adriatic coast town of Rijeka, which up until the end of the First World War had been a free port in what is today Croatia, but was in Gobetti’s day under the administration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A business and trade centre, populated by Croats, Hungarians, and Italians, after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the city became a disputed territory to which both Italy and Yugoslavia laid claims for sovereignty. During the Peace Conference, Italy’s demand that Fiume be handed over to Italy was rejected, and this became the spur for D’Annunzio’s occupation and attempt to reverse an injustice. Although Italy did make territorial gains in Trent, South Tyrol, and Istria, this was not enough for the Nationalists, who began to speak of the Great War as a ‘mutilated victory.’ D’Annunzio became the self-styled leader of the occupied city, employing in his public appearances and speeches, which roused his listeners into an irrational frenzy, a symbolism that would later be taken over by someone who was an interested observer of this experiment in theatrical government, Benito Mussolini. Indeed, Mussolini, who regarded D’Annunzio as a dangerous rival liable to steal his thunder, stood aside when the Giolitti government, responding to international pressure, dislodged D’Annunzio from Fiume by force in December 1920. Gobetti was far from impressed by what had gone on in Fiume. As he wrote to Ada in a letter of 1922: ‘the political education that can come to the people from the Fiume adventure is terribly negative.’26 On another occasion, he calls D’Annunzio an ‘ambitious charlatan.’27 On the other hand, Gobetti betrays a kind of grudging admiration for D’Annunzio’s ability as a writer, as if he recognizes, as he did with Farinacci, an able adversary when he sees one. Gobetti’s admiration for D’Annunzio emerges from a short piece entitled ‘Le parole,’ in which he takes issue

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with the writing of a certain fascist called De Vecchi, probably Cesare Maria De Vecchi, capable only of producing chatter: Words are truly a mythical force. But in order that the splendour of the sounds becomes power, it must not remain the swollen affirmation of an abstract symbol. When there is correspondence between words and the thought that they must express, words when they are brought together with human substance truly have the strength to move history, but it is a strength that comes from the thought that supports it. This intimate union is broken in fascist ideology: the mythical force does not emerge, the high-sounding word only has value in and of itself: thought does not count. Fascism has come forth from how difficult it is to think and from how easy it is to talk.28

The piece concludes thus: ‘In Gabriele D’Annunzio, the word – not always – penetrates reality, in its magic apparitions, and moves it deeply.’ And in the same letter he wrote to Ada in which he accuses D’Annunzio of being a negative political example, he also expresses a more ambivalent judgment: ‘As to D’Annunzio,’ he writes, ‘I cannot be as harsh as you perhaps are […] Poetry and rhetoric have come together and cannot be separated. In the end, you are moved.’ D’Annunzio was a poet-warrior who put his impressive array of rhetorical and oratorical skills to the service of a project of national renewal, like so many other Italian intellectuals did in the opening decades of the twentieth century. As Spencer Di Scala has noted, it would be rash to underestimate the effect that the ability and the activity of a determined but fairly small number of committed intellectuals like D’Annunzio had in forming, leading, and changing public opinion in Italy in the run-up to the nation’s entry into the First World War.29 Italy, in fact, in the period leading up to the outbreak of the war had been split between neutralists and interventionists. When war did break out in 1914, Italy declared itself neutral, a position that reflected the general mood of the nation. But that general mood was not the mood of many militant intellectuals, as we have seen. Interventionists tended to be firebrands like the futurists and nationalists who thought a bloodbath would temper the national fibre, but also included more level-headed reformists like Salvemini (who saw the war as a chance to rid the world of anachronistic empires). It is highly likely that Gobetti, though too young to have taken part meaningfully in the debate, would have been an interventionist. Neutralists included exponents of the Italian Socialist Party,

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Catholics, and most Liberal members of parliament. But despite neutralists being the numerical majority, Italy found itself catapulted into the First World War by largely extra-parliamentary forces, intellectuals who seemed to have forced the hand of a recalcitrant government. Indeed, without the high profile and vociferous work of lobbying, pressure, and persuasion, the experience Italy had of the war would have certainly been very different. There are, then, points of contact between what both D’Annunzio and Gobetti were seeking to do as militant intellectuals with their respective projects, although they could not have been more different. As Gobetti saw it, in fact, D’Annunzio’s attempt to make a fantastic dream of national grandeur made true by force of language was ultimately but one more example of just how many Italian intellectuals lived in a never-never land that was the result of an overly fertile literary imagination. For Gobetti, the role that D’Annunzio had carved out for himself in the public sphere was both an occasion and a pernicious danger. D’Annunzio had shown how language could be used effectively as a means of persuasion and propaganda, as a way of forming minds and moving bodies. But Gobetti also saw the extreme fragility that separated out feasible projects of reform (like his, for a liberal revolution) from outlandish ones, like D’Annunzio’s, that sought to restore to Italy a former glory. As far as Gobetti was concerned, such dreams of regained former glory were anachronistic and pie in the sky. Yet, many Italians, intellectuals in the forefront, had fallen for such dreams and had dedicated themselves both to creating the myth of an Italy deserving of grandeur, giving that myth legitimacy, and of acting in the hope of making it come true, as had happened at Fiume. Gobetti reserves two types of criticism for the kind of Italian intellectual he does not want to be: first of all, their sycophantic courtier status at the bidding of whichever prince grants them most favours (in return for the favours the intellectual grants the prince); and second, their tendency to inhabit an ivory tower of irresponsible dreams and expectations. Gobetti often likens this latter state to living in a world of literature. Gobetti was never slow to insult his adversaries, so much so that it occasionally landed him in trouble.30 One of the his most common insults is to call someone libresco (bookish) or concerned with ‘mere literature,’ that is, separated from reality, an inhabitant of an unreal world, divorced from the forces of history, concocted out of literature. Gobetti’s heroes, such as Cavour and Carlo Cattaneo, are far from ‘bookish,’ they have their feet on the ground and their heads out of the clouds.

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In fact, one of his favoured modes of praising those he admired was to emphasize their ability to think concretely, so escaping from the selfreferential maze of the literary. Of Gramsci, for example, but many others could be cited, Gobetti notes that he has been able to achieve a ‘liberation from the rhetoric that is innate in our race and a denial of the instinct for the literary.’31 In Gobetti’s lexicon, terms like ‘bookish,’ ‘merely literature,’ etc. are all code words for a kind of muddle-headedness that distances intellectuals from the real issues and potentialities of political life, so preventing them from being able to have any effective say in civil and political society. Italy, Gobetti was to note, is a ‘rhetorical nation’ that ‘will never manage to free itself of the men of letters whose politics is based on aesthetic figures and flights of lyricism.’32 Indeed, the meter with which Gobetti judges the merits of the many intellectuals he gives us in the portrait gallery of Italian political cultural thought, which make up much of his writings, is the kind of relationship they had with the literary, or to put it better: the ‘merely’ literary, a dangerous arena and one to which Italian intellectuals are fatally attracted. One who avoided this trap was Dante, who according to Gobetti, is a fairly lone example of the ‘denial of the sickness of literature that has kept us oppressed and still oppresses us.’33 Another hero figure is Alfieri, a man of action who turned thought into deed, and who ‘did not limit himself to mere literature’ and ‘was a philosopher and not a mere man of letters,’ a man whose culture ‘is not made of books.’34 Writing of the Risorgimento, whose failure Gobetti characterizes as the result of the nation’s intellectuals’ ‘desperate attempt to become modern while remaining men of letters,’ he praises Cattaneo, who knew that ‘founding a state’ was something other than ‘a task of enthusiastic men of letters.’35 Compared with Mazzini, who believed he could, writes Gobetti, ‘carry out the revolution with propaganda,’ Cattaneo is ‘less spoiled and less cloudy, his figure is, for the non-literaloid Italians the richest in its teachings, his policies can still today be a program.’36 And writing again of another largely overlooked hero of the Risorgimento, Cesare Balbo, Gobetti writes, comparing him with his fellow activists Luigi Ornato, Santorre Santarosa, and Luigi Provana, that he was ‘the least romantic of the friends, the least deluded, the least a poet; in the literary environment in which the others were formed [Balbo] must have seemed an anachronism: the dissent was harsh, as is always the case between dreamers and practical people.’37 A further example is the case of Adolfo Balliano, a figure who had attempted to make the shift from the literary to the political field. Gobetti notes how ‘he brings

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with him methods and systems of a literary mentality.’ This ‘method may work well in the writing of an essay by De Sanctis, but in politics it doesn’t work. There is no place in politics for aesthetic visions: one forgets the terms of reality, one gets lost […] Balliano’s little smiles when faced with electoral reform and bureaucracy and the school question […] show these poetic visions that come to dominate the field of the contingent.’38 Seduced by attractive but impossible pictures of what Italy could be, intellectuals had generally shown themselves to be incapable of understanding the real nature of the historical conditions prevailing in Italy and, as a consequence, incapable of elaborating workable solutions to the contingent problems faced by the nation. What for Gobetti were pipe dreams of, say, a regained imperial grandeur, along the lines of Ancient Rome, had led the nation to imagine a future that was at many removes from what was actually feasible and, indeed, desirable. But far more damaging is the fact that the false images of what Italy could be, produced by intellectuals like D’Annunzio and others who assumed a public role, were taken on board by fascism. Gobetti is perfectly serious when he sees in the advent of fascism the consequence of the pipe dreams that Italy’s literary culture had put into circulation. One of Gobetti’s more pungent remarks about D’Annunzio’s adventure in Fiume, another example of literary dreams getting in the way of political reality, was that ‘it is not a political fact. It is the fifth book of his Laudi,’ to which he added: ‘Of a people made up of Dannunzians one cannot expect a spirit of sacrifice.’39 D’Annunzio, however, was not the only intellectual who had prepared what Gobetti considered a fertile terrain into which fascism could sink its roots. Another person who had been a fiery advocate of Italy’s participation in the First World War (Mussolini was to recall the ‘radiant days of May’ as the date and event that marked the inception of fascism) was Enrico Corradini, leader of the Associazione nazionalista italiana. Corradini was a militant intellectual and novelist, publishing La Patria lontana in 1910 and La Guerra lontana in 1911. At the beginning of the century, he founded, along with Papini, Prezzolini, and Vilfredo Pareto the review Il Regno, and he became a vociferous advocate of Italy’s war with Turkey in 1911 that led to the conquest of Libya, which he saw as a first step that would create Italy as a colonial power. Not surprisingly, he was also enthusiastic about Italy’s participation in the First World War, seeing it as a way for Italy to establish itself on the world stage as something more than the ‘proletarian nation’ that had

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been undeservedly ill treated by the great powers of France and Great Britain. It was through colonialism and imperial conquest that those nations that had been relegated to the lower echelons of power would reaffirm themselves and reach the status that is proper to them. For Gobetti, the nationalists’ agenda was unrealistic in practical terms and damaging insofar as it did nothing for the political and cultural health of the nation. This movement, he wrote, ‘is a caprice of students and professors, an “infantile sickness” that will end up in fascism. [Nationalism] began with poetry (Carducci and D’Annunzio) […] its first prophets […] were poets (Corradini, Papini, Borgese) dreamers of expansion and action.’40 Comparing Corradini’s review unfavourably with Salvemini’s L’Unità, Gobetti goes on to say that it had at first ‘seemed that Il Regno could be the soul of an elite that imposed on Italy its spirit and order. But nationalism was born with the fatal taboo of rhetoric and it was soon to reveal, with Corradini, a lack of realism’ that led to the Libya campaign, something that was ‘absolutely useless for the renewal of the state,’ and to the First World War, which for Corradini meant only a ‘generic imperialism.’41 Another precursor figure, once again a militant intellectual and writer who thought he had the recipe to solve Italy’s crisis was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of the futurist movement. There is a direct line connecting Marinetti and Mussolini, writes Gobetti: Marinetti’s art is all a preparation for the March on Rome. Mussolini has succeeded because Marinetti’s experience opened up the way for Mussolini […] From Corso Venezia in Milan Marinetti proclaimed the cult of speed and progress, of sport, of courage, of war, sole hygiene of the world. This was the psychology of the first head of the first fascist revolution […] Precursor of postwar man, of the thug who beats up his adversaries, of those squalid figures […] who preach violence because they are afraid of solitude and of having to come to terms with themselves. Their masks and their scowl hide their nudity. We all have in mind the most solemn and terrible incarnations of the classic figures of fascism. But it is to Marinetti that we must turn to find their genesis.42

Some of Gobetti’s collaborators on La Rivoluzione liberale also saw clearly how D’Annunzio’s seductive charms had led many young Italians, once Mussolini had taken over his mantle, towards fascism. Sapegno, for example, reviewing a book on Fiume, wrote of ‘the exalted, unreal atmosphere, full of wandering palpitations, violent exaspera-

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tion, revolutionary signs, drunk with a fictive and rhetorical grandeur’ that surrounded the Fiume expedition.43 Monti wrote of the influence that D’Annunzio had had on the ex-combatants movement, ‘an index of Italian political immaturity insofar as it replaced a discussion of a social question with a sentimental discussion on gratitude and recrimination. It was a product of the hatred of parasitical and swashbuckling classes against workers; it was the continuation of a nationalist, D’Annunzian and warmongering mentality that speculated on unemployment rather than accepting the humble duty of work; it was the first example of fascist psychology and doctrine.’44 Giuseppe Antonio Borgese Emerging from these excerpts is a line of analysis that sees fascism as a cultural phenomenon as much as it is an economic or class-based one. Among the antifascist intellectuals who have given thought to the origins of fascism in this way, no one has taken this line of enquiry further than Giuseppe Antonio Borgese (known as G.A. Borgese). He is a remarkable figure. Drawn to D’Annunzio in his formative years and a fervent advocate of Italy’s participation in the First World War, Borgese came to realize how Italy’s dreams of grandeur, with which he had initially been very much taken, were what had led Italy down the path to fascism. Borgese was a versatile intellectual: he was a journalist, and one of Corriere della sera’s most prestigious names, as well as a novelist and a university professor. As a journalist based in Milan, he had occasion to observe the birth of fascism there and to observe Mussolini at close quarters. Indeed, on one occasion Mussolini sought Borgese out to quiz him on policy matters. On another occasion, Borgese appealed to Mussolini for help after his lectures at the local university were interrupted by fascist supporters who objected to his antifascist sympathies. In response, Mussolini immediately put pen to paper, demanding that the local fascist hierarchy bring an end to the protest. Like many liberal-minded intellectuals in the early years of fascism, Borgese did not take an outright public stance against the regime, nor did he sign the ‘Manifesto of antifascist intellectuals,’ organized by Benedetto Croce after the Matteotti murder (neither did Gobetti). He preferred, it would seem, a wait-and-see attitude. By the beginning of the 1930s, though, he was sufficiently disgusted with what he saw around him that he emigrated to the United States, where he lived for almost twenty years, taking up U.S. citizenship and teaching at Smith

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College (where another prominent Italian antifascist, Carlo Levi, was also offered a teaching position, but which he did not take up) and at the University of Chicago.45 There, as well as divorcing his wife and marrying Thomas Mann’s daughter, he became involved in Common Cause, a project to establish a world governing body.46 Borgese is mentioned on a couple of occasions in La Rivoluzione liberale as a respected journalist, and once, far less approvingly, as a nationalist. On another occasion, a paragraph he had written in 1911 was included as an epigraph to an article: ‘Nationalism will be able to live as long as it becomes a party; that is, as long as it positions itself clearly with respect to the clerical question, the proletarian question, the southern question, and so on. Not only nature, but also history is repulsed by a void; and the desire for a great and powerful Italy, for a national conscience, for feelings of dignity is a wonderful source of operatic inspiration, but is very little, practically nothing, in terms of political action.’47 The paragraph is well chosen as it sums up neatly the argument that Borgese was to flesh out some twenty-five years later, while he was in the United States, with Goliath: The March of Fascism. Written in an English that is both snobbish and witty, this is a wide-ranging and very ambitious text that sees fascism as the natural result of Italy’s centurieslong obsession with regaining the glory of the Roman Empire. So besotted has Italian culture been with Rome, and with the delusions of grandeur its ghost conjures up, fascism’s claim to found a new Rome in the Italy of the twentieth century had its antecedent, argues Borgese, in an intellectual class long desirous of such promises. Although Borgese does not mention Gobetti by name, limiting himself to noting that numerous antifascist intellectuals fell victim to the regime, his analysis of the cultural origins of fascism owes a great deal to Gobetti’s view that fascism was the autobiography of the nation. In Goliath, Borgese follows two paths: one, the actual path Italian history took from the Middle Ages onward that had culminated in fascism; and two, the safer, more modest, less adventurous path Italian history could have taken, but didn’t. The former, the dangerous path, has been trodden by those who pursue the utopia of making Italy a new Rome. In their ranks, they number almost the entire panoply of Italian culture, beginning with Dante. He is a crucial figure for Borgese insofar as he was the progenitor of the idea that the Italian nation should model itself on Rome. Whether Dante was the creator of this myth or, more modestly, an interpreter and eloquent mouthpiece for desires and aspirations that had already taken on some kind of inchoate form is not clear from

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Borgese’s book. But what is clear is that with Dante was established a tradition that, in Borgese’s view, could only lead to trouble. ‘Italy,’ he writes, ‘was not the creation of kings and warriors; she was the creature of a poet, Dante […] a dreamer, a poet, and a man whose real life had been a total failure.’48 It was Dante, of whom Borgese clearly does not have a high opinion, who established in the Italian consciousness what he calls an ‘unreasonable utopia’: ‘the resurrection of ancient times, and the revival of the Roman Empire […] From a certain point on, the Roman universal idea and the complaint about the vanished glory of the past became the positive impulses of the leading classes. Dante drove these into the Italian mind. For all his greatness, and with all his greatness, he distorted the soul of his people, urging it to dislike whatever it might have had and to love a goal which nature and history reproved’ (24). The other path from which Dante diverted Italy with his dreams of regained glory, the ‘reasonable utopia’ was one for which those Italians like Cattaneo during the Risorgimento and the Giustizia e libertà group during fascism were enthusiastic: namely, a nation based on a federation of autonomous or semi-autonomous regions. The historical experience on which they and Borgese drew was that of the medieval northern communes who had banded together to defeat Frederick Barbarossa a century before Dante, a victory that today’s Lega nord (Northern League), in the pursuit of entirely different and far less noble reasons, has recast as a tribute to the innate superiority of northern Italians and their desire to protect their own interests. In the experience of the citystates, writes Borgese, ‘the real Italy of the new ages had shown her stupendous readiness for a spontaneous and creative life’ (16). But Dante, and generations of other Italian intellectuals from Petrarch to Cola Di Rienzo to Machiavelli, largely ignored the more modest achievements of the city-states, preferring to yearn for the greatness of Rome: it was in the imagination of these poet intellectuals turned politicians that ‘the Italian nation was born: a phantom. Incapable of rising to a real life for itself, this phantom, however, was mighty enough to block henceforth the road to a living Italy of modern times. It had what phantoms may have and poets may give: a speech and a myth. Its substance was a craving for the absolute in a political and social emptiness, an unavoidable, tragic destiny’ (25). With very few exceptions, Italian intellectuals built on and cemented even further the presumption that Italy’s destiny was to regain its former glory. One exception to this rule was the Risorgimento literary

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critic Francesco de Sanctis, author of The History of Italian Literature, who, Borgese reminds us, ‘did not care for world empire and world primacy. The wish with which he closed his book, namely, that Italy might soon be again among the foremost creative forces of Europe, is quite permissible and honourable, and does not include any concession to the eagerness of nationalistic pride’ (87–8). But the intellectual who, horrifying de Sanctis, took Dante’s lesson to its extreme was D’Annunzio, to whom Borgese dedicates a good part of Goliath. In recent years, studies on D’Annunzio have sought to rehabilitate him and see him as something other than a mere stepping-stone to fascism. It is highly likely that books like Borgese’s, and the way they treat D’Annunzio, have had a role in making that rehabilitation necessary.49 Although Borgese nowhere states that D’Annunzio was a fascist, he makes it perfectly clear that without him a figure like Mussolini could never have emerged.50 Italy’s desire for greatness came to a head, as we have seen, prior to, during, and in the aftermath of the First World War. D’Annunzio was in the forefront in all these phases, as a powerful voice in the call to go to war; as a member of a cavalry regiment during the war – although Borgese notes disparagingly that in trench warfare the cavalry had precious little to do (112); and as leader of the Fiume expedition. Greatness was a feature of D’Annunzio’s novels and poems of the early years of the twentieth century. He sang the praises of great civilizations, great events, and powerful, larger-than-life super figures. Some are fictional, as in his novels, but often based on D’Annunzio himself; at other times, they are historical figures, like Garibaldi, to whom D’Annunzio dedicated an epic song. D’Annunzio also knew the value of continuity and made one of his most inflammatory pro-war speeches at Quarto, near Genoa, the small port from which Garibaldi had set sail in 1860 for Sicily. Fiume, ‘an autocratic, oratorical republic, startlingly new’ (157), was full of symbolism, much of which would be inherited by Mussolini and incorporated into the liturgy of fascism: the gesture of the raised right arm; the chant ‘Eya! Eya! Alalà’; black shirts; castor oil as a form of punishment; the March on Fiume as a precursor to the March on Rome. But if the symbolism he had created lived on under fascism, D’Annunzio himself took a back seat. Fascism and the March on Rome, says Borgese at his wittiest, for D’Annunzio were not so much a question of politics as ‘from a literary point of view […] sheer plagiarism. However, the successes of his ideas and plans, if not of his personality, were for the frustrated author royalties of a sort’ (291).

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Borgese’s snobbery probably rivalled that of D’Annunzio’s, and it is no surprise to learn that early in his adult life he had been a follower of the poet-warrior. For a while, Borgese was potentially part of that group of young intellectuals, attracted by D’Annunzio, who would find their way into fascism. At his most snobbish, this is how he describes them: ‘journalists with low salaries and go-betweens from ministerial antechambers to parliamentary lobbies, who had not gone through the classical high school, an unavoidable stage of middle and superior education for the upper classes in Italy’ (151–2). These ‘barbarians’ found ‘the glitter of D’Annunzio’s style, like that of Venetian glass, and its redundance, stuffed with reminiscences of Greece and Rome, swelling with pseudo-biblical and pseudo-mystical perorations and finally spiced with a most curious terminology, both excremental and sexual’ to be ‘highly intoxicating. While learning by heart the poet’s prophecies and diatribes they experienced a spiritual advancement and a class promotion’ (152). On another occasion, turning his back on theories of fascism that privilege economic questions, Borgese writes: Coincidences, if any, can be traced only between fascism and the petty bourgeoisie: young civilians who had laboured their way through the classical high school, then to stop for lack either of money or of endurance at the threshold of the university, or who even had snatched a university degree without coming therefore nearer to a tolerable standard of living or to a decent culture; young veterans who had been drafted into the army before having learned a trade, and who now were felt too old to start a normal life. Many of these had managed in some way to remember more vividly the advantages of military life – the regular salary, the songs, the jolly companionship, the stars on the sleeves, the guns at the belt, the feeling of power – than its tortures and horrors; and while the great majority of those who had gone through all the ordeal of war disliked and even opposed fascism until their organizations were forced to surrender, nothing was better for those tantalized beginners than the promise of future good times and glory. Undoubtedly, fascism recruited its mass of manoeuvres from the so-called class of the petty bourgeoisie […] a border-zone inhabited by people with white collars and grey consciences […] who mimic the colours and manners of the bourgeoisie, striving to ‘pass’ unnoticed […] It is a social outgrowth longing to outgrow itself, a smoke or foam, whose effect is only to blur the outline of history, instantly to vanish in the emptiness of its endeavour. Rather than an objective entity the petty bourgeoisie is a state of mind. (216–17)51

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Gobetti worried about such people. He feared that as a disgruntled mass they would be easy prey to whoever sought to manipulate them for political purposes, which is, in fact, exactly what happened, with groups of young people gravitating towards the extreme options offered by the political activists of the day, from the revolutionary syndacalists on the left, to the futurists, nationalists, D’Annunzians, and last but not least, a few years later, the fascists, on the right. As was mentioned earlier, the constituency of newly educated young people, in fact, did not fit at all easily into any of the more traditional political subcultures available to them at the time. The Liberals were considered too traditional, too stick in the mud, too wary of the way modernity was going; the Socialists were also seen as being out of step with the new times, the new needs and desires of a new generation. It was, then, in the cracks between these two subcultures that this rather disoriented generation fell, and it was to their needs and frustrations that new constituencies catered. One youngish man who found himself in a similar situation was a certain Filippo Rubè, protagonist of Rubè, Borgese’s semi-autobiographical 1921 novel set in the years preceding, during, and immediately after the First World War. Armed with a fairly high level of education and an overly inflated opinion of his own worth, Rubè leaves his native Sicily, as had Borgese, to work for a lawyer in Rome. A fervent advocate of Italy’s entry into the Great War, he enlists only to discover once he is close to the line of fire that war terrifies him. He is wounded, lightly enough not to run the risk of dying, but seriously enough to be able to claim to be a war hero on his return to civil society. He believes, in fact, that now the nation owes him a living: It was enough to wait for the end of the war and then stick out your hand. Everything would come to him by right. In him, as happened with many other wounded combatants, a disposition of the spirit was developing according to which it seemed that the hospital was a still point, a blank space between the chapter of giving and suffering and the chapter of receiving and enjoying. Who would pay the debt? The fatherland, society, nature, God? It didn’t matter. Someone would.52

However, the expected riches and recognition do not materialize, and Rubè spends most of the novel travelling to France and up and down Italy by train in search of a state of well-being and security that he never finds, nor deserves. On his travels, he finds himself in Bolo-

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gna, wandering aimlessly the backstreets of the city when he happens upon a socialist political demonstration. Even though he has a previously declared preference for the emerging blackshirts and their cult of violence, to which he is mightily attracted, he picks up the scent of the socialist demonstration: ‘Any spectacle of violence in that moment would have pleased him’ (384). He is catapulted into the demonstration and called on to shout socialist slogans. Someone puts a red flag in his hand; someone else a black flag in his other hand. This is how he meets his death, knocked down by a cavalry charge attempting to quell the potential riot. He dies a martyr, but confusion arises as to which side can legitimately claim him, the Bolsheviks, as a result of the red flag and what they claim has been Rubè’s on-the-spot conversion to their cause; or the other faction, the still militant ex-combatants. The novel’s conclusion is contrived, to say the least. But it does serve as a clear illustration of the ambiguity of the subversion that had taken root among sectors of the frustrated petty bourgeoisie and how that frustration had led it in a series of contradictory and hardly predictable directions. Giuseppe Prezzolini La Voce was the mouthpiece of these un- and under-represented constituencies in Italian society. The group of Florentine and Florencebased intellectuals who animated the review also set themselves the task of educating and modernizing the newly emerging petit bourgeois masses. For Gobetti, the experience and example of La Voce was fundamental. Fundamental too was his relationship with Prezzolini, one of the founders of La Voce, and with whom Gobetti was to have an intense, cantankerous but frank and honest relationship. The difference in age between Gobetti and Prezzolini, who was born close to twenty years before Gobetti, in 1882, did not mean that their relationship was one of father to son. Rather, Prezzolini treated Gobetti almost as an equal, valuing and respecting the work he did. Prezzolini used Gobetti often as his contact person in Turin, seeking out information on the Turin-based communists and once sending Gobetti to interview the actress Eleanora Duse.53 Author of such texts as Codice della vita italiana and ‘Caratteri: l’imperfetto italiano,’ Prezzolini had been unrelenting in a withering critique of the Italian national character. Undoubtedly, Gobetti learned a great deal about the art of polemicizing from Prezzolini.54 Up to the coming to power of fascism, Gobetti’s praise for La Voce is fulsome, his admiration for Prezzolini and the La Voce project immense.

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After that, a much more critical tone can be heard. Gobetti first met Prezzolini in May 1919 at a meeting in Florence of the readers of Salvemini’s L’Unità. In a letter to Ada, he writes that ‘Prezzolini is the most intelligent editor we have in Italy.’55 In an article written in the summer of 1920, he speaks of him as ‘a complete man [...] a philosopher and man of letters because he is an organizer.’56 His praise of La Voce, which Prezzolini edited from 1909 to 1915, is equally glowing: ‘Renewal has come completely from within, from a few good and determined men who began by renewing themselves by means of moral and spiritual labour […] The field for the unfolding of these energies has been the two journals that are dearest to our spirits, La Voce and L’Unità. It is here that we must find all the concrete work that has led to the present results.’57 And in the 1920 article referred to, he posits the ‘militant idealism’ of La Voce against ‘D’Annunzian superficiality and the empty indifference of the positivists.’58 La Voce led the way in the attempt to create a serious, non-literary political culture. As Gobetti wrote in Gramsci’s L’Ordine nuovo: ‘Around La Voce, the most important review that has appeared in our times for the training of Italians, were gathered our most independent thinkers and our most serious readers: not to build a lasting edifice, but to carry out the task of everyday criticism and revision, accustoming spirits to honesty and to the severity of work […] Between 1909 and 1915, so great was our practical diseducation that only a movement […] that gathered all the new moral energies, without splitting them up, could be effective in the moralization of our literary customs. Prezzolini was the man of this generation.’59 The mutual admiration the one felt for the other was to be put to the test when fascism came to power. At issue was something very basic: what was to be the role of the intellectual in the emergency that was fascism? Prezzolini and Gobetti held incompatible positions, the former arguing as he had always done that intellectuals had too much to lose by engaging in political (rather than cultural action); the latter arguing that the nation had too much to lose if intellectuals did not put themselves in the front line of politics. For Gobetti, the truth emerges through front-line struggle and political action; for Prezzolini, insofar as politics is about power, it cannot respect truth and so intellectuals who pride themselves on being guardians of the truth should have no truck with politics, at least the politics of the party: ‘An intellectual cannot join a party because political parties set themselves practical aims and to reach them every means is justified, including falsity, rhetoric, hyperbole, repetition, etc.’60

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For Prezzolini, the role of the intellectual was that of an unofficial adviser to the political class. Intellectuals were to outline the direction social policy was to take, but leave it to politicians to put those ideas into practice. Prezzolini was as interested in political action as was Gobetti, but drew back from actual personal commitment to politics. If ideas were strong enough, ‘had matured through meditation and with study,’ they would make their own way in the world. Action was already an intrinsic part of an idea, and was not something that had ‘to be stuck on to it’ in a second phase: ‘to act it is necessary to think and study, the rest comes on its own.’ The appropriate entity for the actualization of ideas was the political party, ‘for which a mentality different from that which is habitual for men of study and thought is required.’ One of the consequences of this stance was that Prezzolini was not a visceral opponent of fascism insofar as he saw how the Fascist regime had put into practice some of the ideas for which the La Voce group of intellectuals had argued. Gentile’s school reform was one example; in the pre-fascist period, another was Sidney Sonnino’s decision to take Italy into the First World War (as La Voce had wanted), as was Giolitti’s passing of the law that extended suffrage (again as La Voce had wanted).61 For Prezzolini, it mattered little whether liberals or fascists enacted the ideas the intellectuals had elaborated. The important fact was that the measures were taken. Indeed, the recognition of the strength of the idea and the necessity of its urgent actualization meant that even political parties who were ideologically at the antipodes from each other could agree to put that same idea into practice. In Prezzolini’s thinking, a strong and good idea transcends the ideological: ‘The greatest victory of the idea is in this: that it imposes itself even on those who are distant from us, those who are opposite to us.’ 62 Although he despised the violence and methods of fascism, Prezzolini never denied that some of the measures it took were positive and were to be applauded: ‘Today, it seems to me that we have two options: either we go into history by working with this movement that is called fascism, putting up with the horror of the way it does business, the vulgarity of its people, the coarseness of its ideas. All this to feel we are alive and protagonists in something powerful. Or stay on the edge of things and prepare the new generation that will come in twenty or twenty-five years, or better, small nuclei from that generation. To be sure, it is not very pleasant.’63 In September 1921, Prezzolini wrote an article for La Rivoluzione liberale entitled ‘Per una società degli apoti.’ Surveying what he saw as the rather dismal national scene, Prezzolini proposed that the best course

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of action for the young intellectual of the day was to withdraw from the front lines of society in order to prepare better for the future. Given the limits of the Italian national character, fascism was here to stay, he thought, and intellectuals would do well to prepare themselves for the long haul, the slow, patient task of re-education that was to take place away from the minefield of the present. In Prezzolini’s eyes, such a withdrawal was not tantamount to a renunciation of any political role for the intellectual. Rather, it was to preserve that which the intellectual could best offer to society and which, in the present climate, would only be misunderstood and misconstrued. ‘Today,’ he wrote, ‘everything is accepted by the crowd; false documents, the most ridiculous legends, primitive superstitions are taken on board without any reflection, eyes closed, and proposed as a material and spiritual remedy.’ This was no climate for the intellectual in which to operate. What were needed were private, closed-in spaces within which intellectuals could gather, ruminate, and prepare the future. One of these was, in fact, RL. ‘Your review,’ he wrote, ‘is a refuge where one is allowed to speak of the things that are closest to our hearts and confess a little, knowing that we will be understood even when certain things are only hinted at, because we are conversing with intelligent people.’ There is nothing wrong, he went on, if ‘a small group takes its distance from society to look and judge; and claim to rule or lead only in its own space, that of the spirit.’ In such a space, far away from the ‘tumult that would swallow us up,’ it would be possible to ‘clarify our ideas, bring out our values, save, above and beyond the struggles [of contemporary politics] an ideal patrimony, so that it may return and be productive in the future.’ It is not with the masses, nor with their elected representatives that the intellectual must deal, but with the elites within Italian political life, the only constituency that could do justice to the intellectuals’ input: ‘Our politics cannot be parliamentary or party political, but must reach out to the aristocracy of all the parties.’64 For Gobetti, withdrawal was not an option, not even a withdrawal that promised a return to society in a purer and less compromised form. Prezzolini’s underlying fear is that too great a contact with the corridors of power will necessarily corrupt and sully both intellectuals themselves and their ideas. Gobetti’s fear, on the other hand, is that any separation of the intellectual from civil society will mean taking up residence in an ivory tower, an arcadic place of literary self-satisfaction that will do nothing to prepare intellectuals for the pressing social tasks that are at hand. Gobetti’s initial measured, lukewarm response gave

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little clue to the vehemence with which he was to respond in a note to the article in question in the same number of La Rivoluzione liberale. It would appear that only subsequently did Gobetti realize the full implications of Prezzolini’s suggestion. Whatever the actual scenario was, it is undeniable that in the weeks and months that followed Gobetti returned to the question of what intellectuals were to do in the face of fascism. Although not always mentioned in the articles Gobetti wrote on this topic, Prezzolini is never far from his thought. In these articles, Gobetti laid out in the most unequivocal terms the necessity, urgency, but also the difficulty of the task he delegates to intellectuals. In the first place, short-term positive results are ruled out: ‘We feel the almost insuperable difficulties with which the very new tyranny opposes our work. We have always known that we were working for the long term, almost alone, in the midst of a people who are lost in a country that is not yet a nation. Today we must continue our work without thinking of deadlines, without hope.’65 Gobetti was under no illusions that those tasks were of the utmost difficulty. Indeed, at times he casts the role that the antifascist intellectual is to play as something of a moral crusade: ‘For the tragedy to be perfect, we need people willing to sacrifice themselves, to follow, with arid love, an ethical ideal.’66 To do nothing, to be apolitical, to withdraw from the tumult is, for Gobetti, not so much a course of action that would guarantee and preserve the unsullied, uncompromised nature of the intellectual’s integrity, as a retreat from the front line. It is here that the intellectual has the moral duty to fight, no matter the odds. Not to commit oneself is to be complicit with and an accomplice of the regime. In a pointed rejoinder to Prezzolini, Gobetti writes in March 1924: All politicians, all fighters. Either in the court of the new masters or in opposition. Those in the middle are not independent, nor disinterested. The sceptics play the game of the regime. It demands of its citizens only to abdicate their dignity and their rights: there is a man in Italy who thinks of everything, the others work admiring and enjoying themselves at the feasts or hide in the libraries […] We are preparing a more sophisticated ruling class, a sharper awareness of political problems, we are working for the future, for a certain future in which our realism will have a sense and will be accompanied by a tone of Italian life […] This is not yet our Italy. But only because ours is already inside us and we oppose that today to Mussolini’s Italy. Opposition without illusions and without optimism: but those who are sceptical in another way, those who profess themselves apolitical,

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are not only men of letters or rectors, but also a deserter, an accomplice of the regime.67

The differences between Gobetti and Prezzolini can be summarized thus: for Prezzolini, if one observes reality clearly from a position untrammelled by ideology or close-quarters involvement in the struggle for power that is politics one can see what fascism really is: namely, a stage in the history of Italy made inevitable by the limitations and defects of Italian political culture and the political immaturity of the middle classes. Fascism was destined to last a long time (Prezzolini’s prediction of twenty-five years turned out to be very accurate) and in the short term there was little repair work that could be done, save to realize that some of the policies and measures that intellectuals like Gobetti and Prezzolini had argued for were now being put into practice. Gobetti, according to Prezzolini, was unable to see what he saw so clearly. Gobetti had become a prisoner of his intransigence and of his ideology of antifascism and his principled objection to everything fascism did and stood for. Gobetti was blinkered into seeing an Italy that did not exist. In particular, his confidence in the redemptive power of the Italian working class was entirely misplaced. Prezzolini, and Borgese with him, had no confidence at all that the working-class masses, even their most advanced elite sections, could have any positive function. If Gobetti saw an Italy where the working classes could have the positive role he assigned them, that was a product of his own desires and ideology, his own ivory tower. Although Gobetti agreed with Prezzolini’s diagnosis of fascism as an inevitable and long-term phenomenon, he did not agree at all with the course of action Prezzolini suggested. For Gobetti, the times had changed and with them the role of the intellectual also had to change. The kind of political role the La Voce group had carved out for itself was no longer feasible or appropriate. Intellectuals like Prezzolini had produced ‘beautiful, fertile and ingenuous dreams’ that had once acted as ‘illusions that led to results’ (in the same way that myth does), but which today are ‘useless, the sign of an unhealthy anxiety.’68 What Gobetti now saw in Prezzolini was an unrealistic side that in the La Voce experience had once been counter-balanced by the sense of realism that characterized its collaborators. What Prezzolini seems not to understand, writes Gobetti, is that the intellectual in his or her traditional guise in the Italy of the early 1920s has no role to play. Present-day intellectuals have to realize that ‘they are unemployed, in an abstract,

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fragmentary, immoral, humanistic position that defines the intellectual in Italy’ and which has been one of the reasons why so many intellectuals have sought refuge in nationalism or fascism.69 One of Gobetti’s fears, it seems, is that Prezzolini too, like Gentile, before him, will end up fascist. Gobetti’s new picture of the intellectual’s role in civil society owes very little to that of his antecedents around La Voce. They are two modes of intellectual being, a ‘we’ (the Gobettians) and a ‘you’ (the antiquated vociani). The irony, of course, is that both Gobetti and Prezzolini level at each other the same charge: that of not seeing the reality of fascist Italy for what it is. For Gobetti, Prezzolini is too far removed, too unwilling to engage in political action to be able to see where possible opposition to fascism and the foundation of a genuinely liberal Italy could come from. His aloofness means that he is unaware of the hidden pockets of dynamism still present in the Italian body politic. For Prezzolini, Gobetti is too close to reality, too much a slave to his ethically driven antifascist ideology to see fascism for what it really is. ‘Look,’ he writes in a letter to Gobetti, ‘don’t let your passion for politics end up by taking over and killing in RL your ability to understand […] You are too sure of yourself by far and you will have to open yourself [acconciarti] to different opinions.’70 In the subsequent years, Prezzolini defended his own decision not to take an explicit stand against fascism as being the result of his greater ability to see reality for what it was: ‘Gobetti had a dose of intellectual pride in what he did. And a certain youthful presumptiveness that my ex-friend Calosso called character, which he compared with my lack of character, but that is nothing other than the recognition of reality, or the bowing down before a fait accompli, something that is of value in and of itself, existence against non-existence.’71 In any case, too close or too far removed, too involved or too aloof, intellectuals never seem to get it right. Wherever they stand, they inhabit a false world, made up of words and books. Indeed, in the exchanges between Gobetti and Prezzolini, literary references abound. If Gobetti sees himself as a realist, he sees Prezzolini as an incurable romantic, a ‘mere’ writer, subject to literary nostalgia and to the rhetoric and the literature of the ‘intellectualoid.’ By the time fascism had come to power, Gobetti had convinced himself that Prezzolini had radically changed his political stance (something that Prezzolini vehemently denied). If before he had been in the forefront of the cultural war against D’Annunzio and the influence of Dannunzianism, now he had become

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little more than a courtier.72 Looking back on the experience of La Voce, Gobetti now dismissed the group of intellectuals who animated the review as poligrafi, mere writers, with little or no purchase on reality.73 The years 1910 to 1915, the La Voce years, were characterized by ‘intentions that went far beyond what could be realized’ (107). Underscoring the rift that Gobetti thought existed between the world as imagined by the La Voce group of intellectuals and reality itself is his rather acid comment that there was a ‘great deal of Lemmonio Boreo’ in the review.74 This is a reference to the novel of the same name written by Ardengo Soffici and published in 1911 (and republished in 1912 by the La Voce publishing house). Soffici, in fact, was part of the La Voce group and designed the review’s logo. In disagreement with Prezzolini’s editorial policies, he broke away from La Voce in 1913 and founded, along with another dissident, Papini, the review Lacerba, to which futurists like Marinetti, Luciano Folgore, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Corrado Govoni contributed. Soffici’s novel purports to be an account of the sense of disappointment felt by its author on his return to Italy after having spent several years in France.75 Expecting to find a vibrant, energetic nation propelled forward by its illustrious culture and history, he finds instead a nation in a deep state of crisis and depression, a scenario he describes in his novel. The book itself is an entirely literary event. Lemmonio Boreo, the name Soffici chooses for his alter ego, is a character borrowed from the autobiography of his fellow Tuscan, the Renaissance artist, Benvenuto Cellini, begun in 1558, abandoned in 1562, but which was published posthumously. The fascination of Cellini’s autobiography lies not in its adherence to fact, but in its status as fiction. It is an almost entirely unreliable account of his life, a work permeated more by fiction and make-believe than by facts. Soffici’s Lemmonio Boreo borrows more than a name from Cellini’s autobiography. Just as Cellini’s text reads like a picaresque novel, so does Soffici’s equally unreliable narrative. In the course of Lemmonio Boreo’s seventeen cantos (as the chapters are called), the protagonist wanders the countryside happening upon characters and adventures. Struck by the debased state of Italian culture and by the way the subaltern classes are exploited, he decides to take upon himself the task of rejuvenating the moribund nation. After a few violent exchanges with the individuals he meets, he realizes that he needs some muscle to help him in his task and recruits Zaccagna (a prototype of a fascist squadrista). Force, however, is not enough so Lemmonio also recruits Spillo, an ex-lawyer who supplies the cunning and deceitful-

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ness that is needed to bring the quest to fruition. Although they do not share their political ideals, the band of three infiltrate a group of anarchists and join them as they disturb a speech being delivered by a socialist politician. Throughout the novel, Soffici gives vent to what in Italian is called his qualunquismo, in other words, his firmly held scepticism about politics in general and his view that all politicians are inept and motivated purely by self-interest. As the novel goes on, the three companions seek revenge for Italy’s diminished international status by beating up three arrogant tourists, an Englishman, a German, and a Frenchman. The novel ends with a cathartic fire out of which emerges a newly purged Lemmonio. It is not difficult to see what Gobetti found wanting in such a novel. Its diagnosis of Italy’s ills was superficial, the remedies it suggested were populist and demagogic, its valorization of violence as a means of righting wrongs made of it a text that offered comfort to many a budding fascist. In fact, there was no politics in this book, only dreams and wishful thinking. But this, Gobetti notes, is a tendency that characterized part of the La Voce group. At this point in his relationship with these important precursor figures, Gobetti is far less interested in singing their praises for the contribution they had made to the nation’s cultural renewal than in pointing out how some of the La Voce group leaned towards futurism and, as a result, fascism. Soffici and Papini, in fact, did become fascists. Indeed, Soffici’s novel, says Gobetti, had become ‘with perfect coherence, the Iliad of fascism.’ It was this component of La Voce that had degenerated into the ‘intellectual futurism’ that ‘before the war was the forerunner of fascism’ (107). Prezzolini, however, was the best of the group. Although victim to ‘his irreparably literary instincts,’ he managed to elaborate ‘a realistic teaching that forced his vague dreams of artist and prophet into rational expression.’ However, under fascism his limits had now become apparent. Unsure of himself, he had become a kind of intellectual gadfly drawn to various cultural, literary, and political experiences, but without ever fully understanding them. He was prey to ‘ideas he accepted superficially more out of a practical necessity than out of a conceptual reflection.’76 The accuracy of Gobetti’s portrait matters less than the terms in which his attack on Prezzolini is couched, he is a man out of touch with reality. This was exactly the charge that Prezzolini levelled at Gobetti. In a diary entry that dates from just after his first meeting with Gobetti, he writes: ‘Gobetti is an energy, a great moral force, but his position

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has an intellectualistic and bookish character. He is in a hurry to read and it seems to me that he judges things from his readings more than from a judgment on men.’77 Prezzolini was to remain of this opinion for the entirety of the time he knew Gobetti and even included this last quotation in a ‘Testimonianza’ he wrote on Gobetti in 1950.78 In 1923, in a brief passage from his La Coltura italiana, Prezzolini writes of Gobetti in a similar vein: ‘He has specialized in contemporary theatre and publishes robust, rigid, intransigent reviews in which he insists on his theoretical conception. And drawing on his knowledge of the language he has produced studies on Russian literature. The program to find in every author or actor an idea leads him to find ideas even where there aren’t any.’79 Incidentally, the charge of bookishness, sometimes taking the form of a charge that Gobetti is unrealistic, emerges from the writings of a good number of Gobetti’ critics, including Bobbio, who labels Risorgimento senza eroi ‘an imaginary history.’80 I doubt whether Gobetti had occasion to read Prezzolini’s diary, but I am equally sure that Prezzolini did not keep his opinion on Gobetti’s limitations a secret in the course of their many conversations and epistolary exchanges. Gobetti must have been devastated by the charge of bookishness – it was everything that the Gobettian intellectual was not supposed to be. For his part, Prezzolini did not take kindly to the charges of betrayal that were levelled at him by some of Gobetti’s collaborators, most notably by Giovanni Ansaldo. Nevertheless, despite fundamental differences, the friendship between the two endured. It is a tribute to both that their friendship and the admiration the one felt for the other were not compromised by the very real differences of opinion about fascism that separated them. As Prezzolini wrote in a letter in which he complains about the way Ansaldo has been treating him in the press and asks Gobetti whether he is in the camp of Ansaldo or not, ‘You cannot be friends with people you do not respect. You are intransigent in politics; allow me to be intransigent in something more important for me: in friendship.’81 Prezzolini remained a true friend to Gobetti despite their differences. To use a trite phrase, Prezzolini was always there when Gobetti needed him, especially in the last days of his life in January 1926. Concluding a letter he wrote to Ada, Gobetti’s widow, in March 1926, he writes: ‘I feel a great deal of sadness that I did not see how badly ill he was. In those days, he showed the admiration he felt for me […] His affection and regard are a dear and precious gift, but I cannot find any peace after having lost him. He was so close to me that I feel as if I could have

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saved him. It is an illusion, I know, but when one has been alongside someone like him, so full of faith, it seems impossible that a fountain as rich as he was is no more.’82 Prezzolini was quick to point out what he saw as the limitations of Gobetti’s thought and what he saw as its tendency to take leave of reality and see what was not there. He failed, however, to understand that seeing what is not there, or not there yet, is a fundamental part of the creative and one could almost say visionary role that Gobetti carves out for the militant intellectual. Although always grounded in real conditions, Gobetti’s writing goes beyond the reality he saw before him to create an image of how the world and in particular Italy might be otherwise. Gobetti is, of course, keenly aware of what is wrong with the Italy of his day, but he is just as keenly aware of what needs to be done to set it aright. He is, then, borrowing language from an article on Frederic Jameson by Hayden White, interested not only in ‘what hurts us,’ but also in seeking its cure.83 To be sure, Gobetti was aware of the fine line along which his writing runs, and always at pains to underline the groundedness, the historicity of what he has to say. His greatest nightmare is that his writing slip into the realm of the fantastic, the unreal, and so come to resemble all too closely the writing of so many Italian intellectuals who had taken such leave of reality that what they had to say was rendered ineffectual and, to use one of Gobetti’s pejorative terms, literary. Without a doubt, there are parts of Gobetti’s writings – on Alfieri, on the Russian Revolution, and on the Factory Council Movement – that have strained credulity and provoked a great deal of perplexity and controversy. It is Gobetti’s fear of being overly literary that goes a long way towards explaining his very ambivalent attitude towards literature. Neither of the reviews he edited, for example, can be called literary. Gobetti seems to feel that the questions that the reviews are called on to address are of such urgency that to dabble in the literary is a luxury he can ill afford. ‘Never has a youth been condemned to a stricter and more closed austerity,’ he writes hyperbolically in 1923, ‘We have been forced to abandon literature to become knights and almost representatives of civility and tradition.’84 Even the literary review – Il Baretti – that Gobetti founded after he was forced by the regime to discontinue his editorial activity and abandon La Rivoluzione liberale was careful to steer a course away from the dangerous rocks inhabited by ‘writers who are accustomed to the excesses of futurism and Dannunzian medievalism.’85 Although Il Baretti was a literary review, politics was always present, albeit in the

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allusive manner that became necessary to elude the clutches of fascist censorship. Writing in the introduction to his collection of essays on liberalism, La Rivoluzione liberale, Gobetti speaks of the ‘task and desire for spiritual formation’ that animated RL. He goes on to say: ‘In this sense, and without paradox, although we had banned literature, RL could seem like a review of poetry.’86 In equating poetry with the kind of cultural activity to which he dedicated his brief life, Gobetti gives it the widest of definitions. But even in this wide sense, what he means by poetry sits well with the etymological root of the word, as that which is said anew. Poetry, he seems to be telling us, is not the sole preserve of strictly literary activity. Yet, more than Gobetti recognized or was willing to admit, the literary is a far greater friend to his construction of a new world than he imagined it to be or was willing to acknowledge.

5 Gobetti after Gobetti

Gobetti left behind him a much contested legacy. Since his death in 1926, a bewildering number of protagonists from a wide variety of ideological backgrounds have laid claim to his name, his thought, and his example, in the hope of bestowing prestige and legitimacy on their own political projects. The list of potential suitors that Marco Gervasoni mentions in the last chapter of his L’intellettuale come eroe, includes liberal-socialists, communists, Catholics, and even, most recently, reconstructed ex-fascists. For the most part, Gobetti’s admirers, and there are many of them, have taken an ‘à la carte’ approach to his thought and writings, selecting those parts that chime with their positions and glossing over those parts that do not. Typically, admirers with left-wing sympathies have focused on the revolutionary part of Gobetti’s revolutionary liberalism, those with more centrist and moderate sympathies shift the bulk of their attention to his liberalism, putting its revolutionary characteristics aside. Left-wing admirers of Gobetti, like Gramsci, see value in Gobetti insofar as he succeeded in bringing over to the communist camp a number of liberal intellectuals through his sympathetic portrayal of the Factory Council Movement; other communists, like Giorgio Amendola, son of the liberal politician Giovanni Amendola, another illustrious victim of Fascist violence, go further and see in Gobetti the exemplary intellectual itinerary of a young liberal who saw the light and gradually made his way towards full commitment to the communist cause. Although his untimely death prevented the full development of Gobetti’s political journey, it is highly likely, so the narrative goes, that he would have finally made that commitment.1 More recent left-wing appropriations of Gobetti, especially since the

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collapse of the Berlin Wall and the consequent appearance of new political entities in Italy, have seen in his identification of the liberal values that lay at the heart of communist activity a precious legitimating aid in their attempts to project a more reassuring, less threatening, and less anti-system image of themselves. In the wake of the demise of some of the twentieth-century’s dominant ideologies, when the choice voters are faced with is now between various forms and varieties of liberalism, Gobetti has proven to be a valuable asset to the post-communist centre-left. If in the 1920s, Gobetti called on the best of socialist and communist energies to rescue a moribund Italian liberalism, more recently the tables have been turned. In the 1990s and early twenty-first century, Italian left-wing parties have called on the best of the liberal tradition, which they identified in Gobetti, to breathe new life into an ideology that was reeling after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In the 1930s, communists and liberals contested Gobetti’s legacy. The liberal group that was most closely associated with his thought, and claimed his legacy, was Carlo Rosselli’s Giustizia e libertà (GL). GL attempted to forge an alliance between the best that socialism and the best that liberalism had to offer. Insofar as socialism did not content itself with mere material gain for the working classes in the form of higher pay and better conditions, but aspired equally to attaining an ever greater degree of freedom and autonomy, it was also liberal. Socialism, as Rosselli saw it, was not a predetermined outcome, but had to be achieved through the actions of individuals acting autonomously. This was the basis of the synthesis of liberalism and socialism that Rosselli sought to effect. Just as Gobetti had seen liberal principles underlying the activity of the Turin communists, so Rosselli saw those same liberal principles at the heart of socialism. But herein lies the difference between Rosselli and Gobetti, for the former was resolutely anticommunist, opposed to communism’s idolatry of the state and its top-tobottom approach, so much so that he incurred the great and wholly unjustified wrath of the communists, and one in particular, the previously mentioned Giorgio Amendola. Indeed, Rosselli and Amendola engaged in a mighty struggle for the right to don Gobetti’s mantle. In the light of his opposition to communism, Amendola accused Rosselli of being little more than an unreconstructed traditional liberal, of the kind that had opened the door to fascism; Rosselli’s rejoinder underlined how any true claimant for Gobetti’s legacy, like GL, would need to understand the value of self-emancipation and turn swiftly away from any imposed doctrine or party line dictated from above.2

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Giustizia e libertà was a political grouping, not too dissimilar in basic structure from the group Salvemini had created, but neither GL nor the unitari were political parties. The first (and only) political party that laid claim to Gobetti’s legacy was the short-lived Partito d’azione, which was active in the final years of the Second World War and during its immediate aftermath. The Action Party’s appropriation of Gobetti too was less than unequivocal. If, on the one hand, Augusto Monti, who as we have seen was a long-time collaborator of Gobetti’s, made the case that the Action Party need simply to follow Gobetti’s directives, other militants took a rather more piecemeal approach, unsurprising in a party that although the source of genuine innovation was crisscrossed by factions and so failed to present a coherent image of itself to the Italian electorate.3 Despite the factions, the Action Party, as heir apparent to Gobetti, did find common ground in elaborating the same kind of synthesis of liberalism and socialism as its other parent figure – Giustizia e libertà – had attempted. Aldo Capitini and Guido Calogero were the theorists of what became known as ‘liberal-socialism,’ but this time infused with a Christian spirit largely absent in both Gobetti’s and Rosselli’s writings.4 All of these appropriations inevitably fall short of fully embracing the breadth of Gobetti’s thought: intellectuals like Rosselli could not take on board Gobetti’s enthusiasm and admiration for the Turin communists, something that later liberal appropriators of Gobetti conveniently also forgot; the synthesis of liberalism and socialism attempted by GL and the Action Party would have horrified Gobetti, always far more interested in progress through the clash and struggle of opposites than in the dissolution of differences through synthesis; communist valorizations of Gobetti ignore that he always remained a loyal liberal, albeit a dissenting one. The same à la carte approach to Gobetti was also adopted by the libertarian Radical Party, attracted to Gobetti as a non-communist opponent of fascism, and whom they claimed as one of their own, blithely ignoring the fact that Gobetti, although many things, was never remotely a libertarian.5 The same approach was adopted by Mario Bernardi Guardi who published a series of articles likening Gobetti to Sorel, which attracted the attention of Il secolo d’Italia, the newspaper of the post-fascist Alleanza nazionale. Prior to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, this party had been known as the Movimento sociale italiano, a party that made no secret of its fascist roots. The thrust of Bernardi Guardi’s articles was to claim that Gobetti, although never a fascist, through his interest in Gentile, did look towards ‘right-wing culture,’ in the manner

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of Prezzolini. The articles, though, are probably best read for what they claim Gobetti was not: if Gobetti could be redrafted as an intellectual who was attracted by right-wing culture, he could not simultaneously be seen as a precursor of the Action Party, dismissed by Bernardi Guardi as a mere ‘party of the intelligentsia.’6 What drives the articles, then, is the desire to contest the claim made by the centre-left that Gobetti was one of their own, this time by reclaiming Gobetti for the right. So much for Gobetti’s admirers. But he also had his opponents, many of whom come from an ideological area that was very close to Gobetti, liberalism. There is a bitter irony to the fact that ex-fascists should seek to appropriate Gobetti, the intransigent antifascist; but there is an equally bitter irony in the fact that a number of contemporary liberals have been exceedingly vociferous in denying Gobetti any liberal credentials. What is it that turns late twentieth and early twenty-first century liberals against Gobetti? In their mind, Gobetti’s worst sin was to have made Italian communists look good, a cardinal sin for the Italian liberals of the post-communist era, a betrayal of everything a genuine liberal should stand for.7 If ex-fascists have sought to unhitch Gobetti from the centre-left by reclaiming him for the right, some contemporary liberals have sought to achieve the same aim, but by treading a different path, that of dismissing him entirely. In actual fact, both the post-fascist enthusiasm for and the contemporary liberal dismissal of Gobetti are part and parcel of a wider project aimed at delegitimating the credentials of the contemporary Italian centre-left. If the centre-left seeks to appropriate Gobetti in support of its own version of a liberal political project, the centre-right seeks to contest Gobetti’s usefulness to a liberal project by recasting him as antithetical to liberalism, thereby pulling the liberal carpet out from under the centre-left’s feet. Gobetti’s legacy is alive and well, but judging by the vast and contradictory array of his admirers, who still outnumber his adversaries, it is alive and well for all the wrong reasons. Still, Gobetti’s legacy has proved to be extremely appetizing for a host of political constituencies. It is not hard to see why. Gobetti was a liberal, but a revolutionary one; a non-communist, but a non-communist who admired communists and, as has been hypothesized by Amendola’s narrative, may have eventually converted to the cause; he was an antifascist martyr whose death can be directly attributed to the consequences of the beatings he received at the hands of Fascist thugs; he was morally upstanding, energetic, charismatic, and intransigent. His was a legacy that was too good to be wasted.

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Although we can dismiss many of the appropriations we have examined as opportunistic, we cannot fail to note that Gobetti’s own thought leaves itself open to such treatment. Indeed, to have met a response from such a variegated span could hardly be otherwise for a thinker who, coming from one ideological background, took strides towards the opposite ideological pole, so opening the door to unlikely admirers like the post-fascists and even the leghisti of the Northern League, who somehow spy in Gobetti a progenitor of a tax revolt policy.8 In addition, there are other reasons why Gobetti’s thought, when it comes into contact with politics, political parties, and political activity seems to have little practical application. First of all, Gobetti’s ethic of intransigence and his absolute refusal to compromise, even as a polemical response to the trasformismo that was rife in his day, is not the stuff of party politics and does not stand up well to the test of parliamentary life, forging policies, and making laws.9 Second, the role that Gobetti assigns to myth as that which gets the political process started actually leaves little room for the intellectual to manoeuvre in. Once a process has started, the immense value that Gobetti places on self-emancipation and autonomous action has the effect of denying a substantive role to any actor who is not directly involved in the process itself. Gobetti, for example, did not want to get involved in the Factory Council Movement so as not to appear as a kind of high priest pontificating on the direction in which the workers immediately involved should go. Nor did he think that his task as an intellectual was that of supplying the myths that motivated and inspired political actors, and spurred on their action. Myths bubbled up from below in the form of hopes, desires, and aspirations of those involved in the political action, or at the very least they chose from among the available myths those that best suited their hopes, desires, and aspirations. Myths were not concocted and then imposed by intellectuals like Gobetti. But what was of paramount importance to Gobetti was that the direction of political dynamism be open-ended, unimpeded by the prevarication of non-protagonists like himself. The role the intellectual had, then, was limited to observation and note-taking of the processes in progress and to the divulgation to a wider public of their import and value. Gobetti knew that he did not belong in the workplace where the nitty-gritty of the dynamic processes that interested him was taking place. Third, as Martin has noted, Gobetti’s reliance on the vanguard activity of elite groups, although perfectly in line with the thinking of the opening decades of the twentieth century, is out of step with the sensibilities of the contemporary world and seems

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outdated.10 Similarly, the fact that the elite class of intellectuals Gobetti wrote for and about were liberal-leaning and typically middle class also attracted far less attention than Gramsci’s far less elitist elaboration of the organic intellectual who was far more closely allied to the working class and its interests. But if we shift focus away from parties and political groups and onto the young men and women who were Gobetti’s readership we find that his impact is far greater. One of these young men, who read Gobetti after his death, was Luigi Meneghello, author of the novel I piccoli maestri. Meneghello helps us to see how one of the most long-lasting legacies that Gobetti passed on to his followers was that the foremost duty of young and intelligent Italian men and women was to turn their talents to the benefit of the nation as a whole by participating in the workings of the state, either as teachers or administrators. Meneghello took this lesson to heart. Indeed, so closely does the path trodden by the characters of his semi-autobiographical I piccoli maestri (translated as The Outlaws, but literally ‘The young teachers’) follow that of Gobetti that an alternative title for the novel might well have been I piccoli gobettiani. Gobetti is actually mentioned at a crucial juncture in the novel, when Meneghello explains why, in choosing to commit himself to the antifascist Resistance, he became part of what he calls Italy’s only worthwhile political tradition, to which he had been introduced by his own maestro Antonio Giuriolo. This, he writes, is the only tradition ‘one could call Italian without blushing with embarrassment. Antonio was an Italian in a way in which no one else we knew was. Close to him, we felt that we too were part of that tradition. We were only able to repeat a few names: Salvemini, Gobetti, Rosselli, Gramsci, but it was the virtue of the matter that overook us. We were novices, apprentice Italians. Basically, this was why we were in the mountains [fighting the fascists]; we were outlaws for Rosselli, Salvemini, Gobetti, Gramsci; for Toni Giuriolo. Now everything seemed simple and clear.’11 I piccoli maestri, begins at the moment Meneghello and some of his fellows enlist in the Alpini regiment of the Italian army in the early 1940s and undergo a course of officer training. Born in the early 1920s and schooled in the years of the Fascist regime, Meneghello had had some involvement with official institutions of the fascist state, like the army, and had published articles in the fascist-sponsored press. In the early 1940s, however, thanks to his contacts with Giuriolo, he began the turn towards an antifascist stance that would take him into active combat as a member of the Resistance. But underlying this decision is the imperative Meneghello felt to serve

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his nation, to put his talents in the service of Italy. It is this that leads him to decide to commit himself to the army, less out of any real enthusiasm about serving in an institution that was formally part of the Fascist regime than out of the conviction that the training he would receive would prepare him for a more personal project: namely, to become the more fully rounded person he needed to be in order to take up the call he had heeded to become part of the nation’s new and improved postwar ruling class. Surveying the scene as he first encounters the environment of the officer training course, the novel’s central character Gigi speaks of: ‘the cream of Italy, not only trainee officers, but Alpini, the elite of an elite. Could these people be the bases of the Italian ruling class?’12 The same concern emerges a second time in the novel, this time after 8 September, with Gigi now a member of the antifascist Resistance movement. As Italy is about to be liberated at the end of the war, Gigi speaks of how he and his comrades ‘studied for Italy, literally. We studied for the inexistent great ruling class that was supposed to emerge after the war. Supposed to emerge.’13 The fact that Meneghello repeats ‘supposed to emerge’ is a none too subtle hint that the project was rather more theoretical than practical. Meneghello seems to realize that although it is the duty of young men and women of his generation to put their talents to the service of a nation that was about to emerge from the nightmare of more than twenty years of fascism, their training, education, and abilities were all ill-suited to the task at hand. Meneghello acknowledges that the elitist, humanistically trained intellectual is unable to perform worthwhile service to the nation in any practical form. But not only does he acknowledge this, he aims to do something about it by seeking out the practical training his high school and university education had not given him. The irony, of course, is that the education system that had so ill-prepared Meneghello to be an active part of Italian society was the one based on the same Gentile reform that Gobetti himself had lobbied for. Meneghello’s practical training comes by way of his experience in the Officer Training Corps, in the journey he makes on foot through the dishevelled Italy of the days that followed the armistice in September 1943, and his experience in the antifascist Resistance movement. Meneghello and his group of friends were a highly educated, brilliant elite, well-read, independent thinkers, who all sailed through high school and university with the highest of grades, the products of the best a humanistic education can offer. And Gigi, to be sure, does not give us much opportunity to forget how brilliant a young man he is. On

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the one hand, this background serves him well once he joins up with the Resistance forces as his ability as a public speaker and dexterity with words immediately make of him a leader, albeit a reluctant one (but not really). On the other hand, however, Gigi is always acutely aware of the limitations such an education places on him insofar as it offers inadequate preparation for the rigours of the real world outside the academy. Like Gobetti, he is acutely aware of and concerned about the bookish self-referential nature of the world of Italian high school and university education, which had the effect of enclosing Italy’s youth in a static world that bore little or no relation to the social and political reality beyond the borders of the academy. At school, one did not inhabit the universe of things, he states in his book Fiori italiani about the education system in fascist Italy: ‘in general we were not nourished with things, but with words about things’ (258). And even those words were not the words of everyday conversation. One was taught, he says, again in Fiori italiani, to speak the language of poetry, which was ‘the real centre of the education that was imparted to us’ (257). Indeed, alongside the polemic about the education system Meneghello carries out an equally vitriolic polemic about the Italian language. Although his speaking like ‘a book’ confers on Gigi a certain prestige that elevates him to the level of leader of his partisan group – on account of his eloquence – elsewhere Meneghello is at pains to stress the huge gap that exists between the humanistic Italian he was taught in his formative years and the world of things. In this context, and to make up for the shortcomings of lingua, dialect and low register Italian take on a vital, almost cleansing role. In fact, as Menghello’s career as an author was to develop dialect and terms derived from dialect were to play an evergreater role in his writings. In I piccoli maestri there is one amusing and thoroughly vulgar episode that illustrates this. Asked by one of his Resistance comrades to define what fascism is, Gigi struggles to come up with a definition that would be worthy of Salvemini, the antifascist intellectual who, as we have seen, had studied in detail the fascist phenomenon – ‘I was searching for a formula like the one Salvemini would give’ (73). Yet, his attempts at finding the right academic formula are interrupted by another member of his partisan band whose own definition of fascism and fascists – ‘Rotti in c***’ (which I will refrain from translating) – seems far closer to the essence than anything Salvemini or Gigi could ever come up with. At other times, Meneghello is equally ironic, and less vulgar, about the way the education system had failed him. This

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is how he describes, for example, what his entry into the world of the academy had brought him: ‘he had all the numbers, a burning faith in the dignity and efficacy of burning faith, a strong ability to become passionate about that which was not a concrete fact, a vivid sense of the problems that one can invent about things that we are not allowed to treat as problems, and a great love for conceptual schemes that have nothing to do with what we are really doing’ (348). Gigi is very much aware of the extent to which his perception of the world is literary or bookish, no matter that the written words he has grown up with are the best the world of letters has to offer. Compared with the gritty reality of everyday life in the Resistance, and especially when he and his comrades come face to face with the terrible poverty they encounter for the first time in their lives in rural parts of the Veneto, their world of words seems infinitely poor, inadequate, false, even dangerous. As a member of a partisan band, Gigi is very much out of his element, he is a man of letters in a world where action counts. The contrast between the two worlds at times takes on a comic, ironic tone, giving rise to some of the novel’s more memorable quotes. On one occasion, speaking of the first acts of sabotage undertaken by the group of young Resistance fighters from Vicenza, of which Gigi is one, we read: ‘Our acts of sabotage were modest, almost invisible; but our slogans were enormous. Our propensity for literature always came to the fore; the slogans we wrote were ingenious, too much so’ (35). In fact, in one sense the novel can be seen as a kind of journey undertaken by Gigi in the course of which he seeks to leave behind him his literary formation, or at least to supplement it with the first-hand experience of the reality of Italy that, first, his participation in the fascist officer training and, then, fighting in the Second World War offered. The final pages of the novel, however, leave room for doubt that Gigi has actually succeeded in jettisoning his literary and intellectual self. In the wake of liberation, an English officer who has just entered a newly liberated Padua is so impressed by Gigi’s bilingual eloquence that he asks him: ‘You a poet?’ to which Gigi, seeking to emphasize his newly acquired practical skills, and in the hope of having created for himself a new self, replies – in English – that he is: ‘Just a f****** bandit’ (227) (the asterisks do not appear in the original). Yet the fact that the English officer sees in Gigi more the identikit of a poet than that of a bandit leaves us in some doubt as to the extent to which the experience of life in the Resistance has actually transformed him. Gigi would love to be considered a bandit, in fact, the title of the English translation of the novel

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is The Outlaws.14 Still more would he like to be considered a f***ing bandit, but he clearly remains very much a poet. It is in the context of desiring to be what he is not that Gigi’s sincere admiration for the communist members of the Resistance and for the peasantry emerges. Against any rhetorical tendencies, Gigi is struck by the practical downto-earthness the communists and peasants alike display in the course of their daily tasks. Insofar as he was a liberal with sympathies for communist workers, Gobetti did not find any easy home in the Italy of his day. Nor did Meneghello. Although for very different reasons, both Meneghello and Gobetti emigrated, the latter to Paris because he was forced to, and from where he hoped to launch a European cultural review; the former to Great Britain, because he wanted to, and from where he hoped to return one day bringing with him his newly developed talents. As he wrote in a diary entry of 12 February 1967, now republished in Le carte: ‘With what spirit did I leave Italy twenty years ago? I left it in order to come back modern. I didn’t think for any Italian that it would be honest to leave one’s country and scrounge comfort and civilization overseas, over the Channel. But it was right and patriotic that I should go and get a little civil mentality and bring it back to Italy […] I wanted to study Freud […] study Darwin with people who did not tell me that it was all already in St Thomas […] to be among people who understood the word “quantify.’”15 Both the one and the other, then, went in search of environments they hoped would be more amenable to their political and intellectual projects. Underlying both emigrations is the question of belonging, where the intellectual belongs, to whom does he or she owe allegiance? It is with this question that both Gobetti in the 1920s and Meneghello in the 1940s grapple. What occasions their sense of non-belonging, and the dilemma that faces them, is that they both identify as agents of change and dynamism a group – the communists – to which for reasons of class and upbringing they could not, or chose not to belong. This was a question that would also engage intellectuals in the 1950s. In the immediate post–Second World War years, however, many leftleaning intellectuals believed they had found a home, exactly where Gobetti and Meneghello could not: namely, in an allegiance with the working classes. Intellectuals thus found a role for themselves by virtue of their identification with the revolutionary struggles of the workers. The time seemed ripe for revolution and it was with the protagonists of the revolution that was soon to be that intellectuals wanted to stand, putting their talents to the service of the revolutionary workers, so

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gaining relevance and viability as agents in the struggle and in the ongoing emancipation of the working classes. Intellectuals, then, lined themselves up with the interests and demands of the working class, becoming their mouthpiece. The honeymoon between intellectuals and workers was, however, not to last. From the immediate post–Second World War years to the 1950s and beyond, the material conditions of the working classes improved tremendously. Whether in the form of conquests won through struggle and industrial action or through legislative measures that were ever more the result of the social democratic policies pursued by many Western European governments (and also the Kennedy administration in the United States), the working classes enjoyed better working conditions and better pay, and consequently greater affluence and greater access to the developing consumerist society. As time passed, the social democratic policies had the effect of blunting the edge of what might originally have been many of the workers’ revolutionary aspirations. It became more and more apparent that more and more of the potentially revolutionary workers were, in fact, content enough with what society had passed down to them and with the glimpse of the affluence they had been afforded, to abandon any revolutionary dreams they might have had. It turned out, then, that the revolutionary intellectuals, who had allied themselves to the workers’ struggles, were far more revolutionary than the workers themselves. What was the left-leaning intellectual to do now that the revolution no longer looked to be on the cards, at least at home? The responses to this question were varied: some decided to seek out the revolution elsewhere, in those places where they thought it could still happen, far away from Western Europe and the United States, or if in the West, in those pockets of resistance located in the margins of society. Intellectuals now gazed at, wrote about, and often travelled to, places where there seemed still to be revolutionary potential: to Africa, Vietnam, China, Palestine, Ireland. Closer to home, some Italian intellectuals found (and wrote about) hotbeds of potential revolutionary activity in the south and in the student movements. Another path taken was to shift attention away from structural elements like class and the economy onto those super-structural elements like language and culture that formed consciousness and shaped perception and on which it was now deemed necessary to act if a new more revolutionary consciousness was to be developed, and was thus political work, and political work that could be carried out without being directly involved with the workers’ themselves.16

168

Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing

Much of this is very familiar Gobetti territory: the identification of alternative hotbeds of revolutionary dynamism as a polemical response to the moribund local reality; the promotion of those instances through persuasive writing; the attempt to shape a new consciousness through cultural rather than economic activity; the conviction that cultural practices are political and are the prelude to change; the narration of alternative histories with new exemplary heroes and villains. Familiar too is the realization that intellectuals were forced more and more to be concerned with realities and protagonists with whom they shared relatively little. This was Gobetti’s case. What separated him from the instances of revolutionary potential he identified was his class. A further separation came about from his desire not to interfere in autonomous, self-regulating processes. In other environments and times, that which separates intellectuals from the agents of political dynamism could just as easily be geographical, ethnic, racial, or structured in terms of gender. Gobetti grapples with the question of the form the intellectual’s commitment to politics can best and most effectively take, a question that has not gone away and is far from having been fully answered. Still, the book that tells the story of intellectuals, culture, and politics is immensely rich, especially its Italian version. Along with the chapters by Croce, Prezzolini, Gentile, and Gramsci, to name just a few, it contains a fundamental chapter written by Gobetti that not only ranks him alongside the great names of twentieth-century Italian intellectual history, but also gives us ample reason to read him in the twenty-first.

Notes

1 Piero Gobetti: Turin and Beyond 1 Piero Gobetti, L’Editore ideale, ed. Franco Antonicelli (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1966), 25–6: ‘My future was their dominant thought. […] They were committed to making money not only to have an easier life, but also to be able to hold their heads high, thus allowing themselves and allowing me a dignified life.’ 2 Gobetti, ‘Racconto interrotto,’ Il Ponte (Mar. 1956): 411. 3 See Mario Costa Cardol, Ingovernabili da Torino: I tormentati esordi dell’Unità d’Italia (Milan: Mursia, 1989), 294. 4 Mario Grandinetti, ‘Giornali e giornalisti,’ in Torino, città viva. Da capitale a metropoli, 1880–1980 (Turin: Centro studi piemontesi [Ca dë studi piemontèis]: 1980), 114. 5 See Cristina della Colletta, World’s Fairs Italian Style: The Great Expositions in Turin and Their Narratives, 1860–1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). 6 Roberto Sacchetti, ‘La Mecca d’Italia,’ in Torino (Turin: Roux e Favale, 1880), ed. Vittorio Bersezio and Edmondo De Amicis, 187–203. 7 Vittorio Bersezio, ‘Torino,’ in Torino, 24. 8 Carlo Anfosso, ‘Torino industriale,’ in Torino, 791. 9 Lombroso was Turin-born and taught at the local university; Ferri was born near Mantua, in Lombardy. 10 Edmondo De Amicis, Cuore, libro per i ragazzi (Milan: Treves, 1886). 11 See Mary Gibson, Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology (Westport: Praeger, 2002). 12 Zino Zini, Pagine di vita torinese. Note dal diario (1894–1937), ed. Giancarlo Bergami (Turin: Centro studi piemontesi [Ca dë studi piemontèis], 1981),

170 Notes to pages 11–19

13 14 15

16

17

18

19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29

26–7. (Diary entry dated 21 Apr. 1901), and ‘Appunti di vita torinese,’ in Pagine di vita Torinese. Note dal diario (1894–1937), 56. Gobetti, Letter from Piero to Lionello Fiumi, 22 Oct. 1918, in Carteggio, 1918–1922, ed. Ersilia Alessandrone Perona (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 54. See Marco Gervasoni, L’Intellettuale come eroe. Piero Gobetti e le culture del Novecento (Milan: RCS Libri, 2000), 42. Gobetti, ‘Intermezzo,’ EN 2:12 (12 Feb. 1920); now in Opere complete di Piero Gobetti, vol. I, Scritti politici (hereafter SP), ed. Paolo Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), 181. (2nd ed., 1997). For a detailed study of the Florentine reviews, see Walter Adamson, AvantGarde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Giovanni Papini, ‘Discorso di Roma,’ Lacerba 5 (1913: 140–6); also in Romano Luperini, ed., La crisi degli intellettuali nell’età giolittiana (Messina and Florence: D’Anna Editore, 1978), 122–8. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. See Frank Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 163–4. Camicia nera was not the only film that highlighted the recovery of the Pontine Marshes as a tangible sign of how fascism had modernized Italy. Others were: Dall’acquitrino alle giornate di Littorio, made by the Istituto Luce, and Sole made by Alessandro Blasetti. Gobetti, Letter to Ada Prospero, 5 Nov. 1918, in Nella tua breve esistenza. Lettere 1918–1926, ed. Ersilia Alessandrone Perona (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), 5. Gobetti, ‘Rinnovamento,’ EN 1:1 (1–15 Nov. 1918); SP, 5. See Gervasoni, L’intellettuale come, 37. Gobetti, ‘Manifesto,’ RL 1:1 (12 Feb. 1922); SP, 227–40. The first quotation is from Gobetti, Letter to Santino Caramella, 25 Jan. 1919, in Piero Gobetti: Carteggio, 27; the second, Gobetti, ‘Storia dei comunisti torinesi scritta da un liberale,’ RL 1:7 (26 Mar. 1922); SP, 278–95. Gobetti, Letter from Piero to Ada Prospero, 16 Apr. 1919, Nella tua breve esistenza, 27. Ibid., 19–20 Apr. 1919, 40–3. Gobetti, Letter from Piero to Benedetto Croce, date unknown, but before 27 Nov. 1918, Carteggio, 1918–1922, 5–6. Ibid. Gobetti, ‘Rinnovamento,’ EN 1:1 (1–15 Nov. 1918); SP, 5. For example, ‘realize entirely our potential for action for ourselves and others in each instance […] the joy and the meaning of being, the divinity of time, which is a progress in which all obstacles die,’ in ‘La nostra fede,’ EN 2:1 (5 May 1919); SP, 77.

Notes to pages 19–26

171

30 See Mario Isnenghi, ‘Cinque modi di andare alla guerra,’ in Novecento italiano. Gli anni cruciali che hanno dato il volto all’Italia di oggi (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2008), 33–62. 31 Gobetti, EN 2:12 (12 Feb. 1920); SP, 181–2. 32 Gobetti, Opere complete, vol. III, Scritti di critica teatrale, intro. Giorgio Guazzotti (Turin: Einaudi, 1974). 33 SP, 120. 34 Gobetti, note to article by Guido Mazzali, ‘Come combattere il fascismo,’ RL 3:32 (2 Sept. 1924); SP, 763–5. 35 Quoted in Gobetti, Dizionario delle idee, ed. Sergio Bucchi (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1997), XXXVI. 36 Quoted in Gobetti, Dizionario delle idee, XXXVI. 37 Gobetti, Letter from Piero to Luigi Emery, 10 Sept. 1925, quoted in Alessandrone Perona, ‘La cultura francese nelle riviste e nelle iniziative culturali di Piero Gobetti,’ in Piero Gobetti e la Francia (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985), 133–4. 38 Gobetti, Letter to Prezzolini, 25 Dec. 1925, in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 150. 39 Eugenio Montale, Ossi di seppia (Turin: Piero Gobetti Editore, 1925). 40 Gobetti, ‘Croce e i pagliacci della cultura,’ EN 1:4 (1–15 Jan. 1919); SP, 46. 41 Norberto Bobbio, ‘Ritratto di Piero Gobetti,’ in Italia fedele. Il mondo di Gobetti (Florence: Passigli Editore, 1986), 17. See also Anna Maria Lumbelli, Piero Gobetti, `Storico del presente’ (Turin: Deputazione subalpina di storia patria, 1967), 42. 42 Giancarlo Bergami, ‘Gobetti e i critici liberali di ieri e di oggi,’ in Cent’anni. Piero Gobetti nella storia d’Italia, ed. Valentina Pazé (Milan: Centro Studi Gobetti and Franco Angeli, 2004), 119. 43 See Gobetti, Carteggio 1918–1922, 120–1, and ‘Storia dei comunisti torinesi scritta da un liberale,’ RL 1:6 (26 Mar. 1922); SP, 278–95. 44 James Martin, Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and ‘Piero Gobetti and the Rhetoric of Liberal Anti-Fascism,’ History of the Human Sciences 20:4 (2007): 107–27. 45 A number of scholars have paid far more attention than Gobetti could to fascism’s modernizing agenda. See esp. Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (New York: Praeger, 2003). 46 Gobetti, ‘Manifesto,’ RL 1:1 (12 Feb. 1922): 1; SP, 227. 47 Filippo Burzio, ‘Politica e storia (Polemica sul Manifesto),’ RL 1:3 (25 Feb. 1922). 48 Gobetti, note to ‘Politica e storia (Polemica sul Manifesto),’ RL 1:3 (25 Feb. 1922), original emphasis; SP, 252.

172 Notes to pages 27–34 49 See Gervasoni, L’intellettuale come eroe, 170–3, for his comments on Gobetti’s use of the adjective ‘young.’ 50 Gobetti, ‘Manifesto,’ RL 1:1 (12 Feb. 1922); SP, 237. 51 Guglielmo Alberti, Fatti personali (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), 3–4. 52 Gobetti, Carteggio 1918–1922, LXIX. 53 Gobetti, Letter to Ada, 14 Sept. 1918, in Nella tua breve esistenza, 392. 54 Bobbio, ‘Gobetti e Croce,’ Italia fedele: il mondo di Gobetti, 71. 2 Fascism and Antifascism 1 Guido Quazza, Resistenza e storia d’Italia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976), and La Resistenza italiana. Appunti e documenti (Turin: Giappichelli, 1966). For De Luna, see Donne in Oggetto: L’antifascismo nella società Italiana 1922–1939 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995), and Fascismo e antifascismo. Le idee, le identità, ed. De Luna and Marco Revelli (Scandicci and Florence: Nuova Italia, 1995). 2 Piero Gobetti, ‘Elogio della ghigliottina,’ RL 1:34 (23 Nov. 1922); also in Opere complete di Piero Gobetti, vol. I, Scritti politici (hereafter SP), ed. Paolo Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), 432. (2nd ed., 1997). 3 Augusto Monti, ‘Due fascismi,’ RL 1:15 (28 May 1922), original emphasis. 4 See James Martin, ‘Italian Liberal Socialism: Anti-fascism and the Third Way,’ Journal of Political ideologies 7:3 (2002): 335. 5 Ibid., 336. See also Edmond Jacobitti, Revolutionary Humanism and Historicism in Modern Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). 6 Gobetti, ‘Politica e storia [II],’ RL 1:3 (25 Feb. 1922); SP, 253–4. 7 Gobetti, ‘Le elezioni,’ RL 3:7 (12 Feb. 1924); SP, 585–90. 8 See Jared Becker, ‘“What We Are Not”: Montale’s Anti-fascism Revisited,’ Italica 60:4 (1983): 331–9. For more on the collections of poetry Gobetti published, see Enrico Formica, ‘I poeti di Gobetti,’ Mezzosecolo 6 (1985–86): 95–122. 9 Gobetti, ‘Il calderone piccolo-borghese,’ in ‘Uomini e idee,’ RL 3:9 (26 Feb. 1924); SP, 610–19. 10 No one expressed this more acutely than Gabriele D’Annunzio in his laments for the passing of a golden aesthetic age, under threat by the what he terms the vulgar new barbarian masses, in his novels Il piacere and Le vergini delle rocce. 11 Gobetti, ‘Giovanni Gentile,’ L’Ordine nuovo (10 Feb. 1921): 3. 12 Gentile, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, ed. and trans. A. James Gregor (New Brunswick and London, 2002), 5, of Gentile, Origini e dottrina del fascismo (Rome: Libreria del Littorio, 1929). Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the body of the text.

Notes to pages 37–41

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13 Richard Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory: Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University press, 1987), 106. 14 Gentile, I profeti del Risorgimento italiano, 3rd ed. (Florence: Sansoni, 1944), originally published in 1923, quoted in Roberto Dainotto, ‘“Tramonto” and “Risorgimento”: Gentile’s Dialectics and the Prophecy of Nationhood,’ in Making and Remaking Italy. The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001), 245. 15 See Gentile, ‘Diritto e politica,’ Archivio di studi corporativi 1 (1930): 1–14, now in Fondamenti della filosofia del diritto, 3rd ed., revised and enlarged (Florence: Sansoni, 1937), 129, quoted in Norberto Bobbio, Ideological Profile of Twentieth-Century Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 128: ‘Every individual acts politically, is a Statesman, and holds the State in his heart; he is the State. Everyone in his own manner, but everyone nonetheless joining together in a common State, in virtue of the universality that is inherent to his very personhood […] the State for that reason is not inter homines but in interiore homine.’ 16 Gervasoni, L’Intellettuale come eroe, 392. 17 Gobetti, ‘Elogio della ghigliottina’ RL 1:34 (23 Nov. 1922); SP, 434. 18 Gobetti, On Liberal Revolution, ed. and intro. Nadia Urbinati, trans. William McCuaig, foreword by Norberto Bobbio (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). ‘Elogio della ghigliottina’ (In praise of the guillotine) at 212–15. 19 Ibid., 213. 20 La Redazione, ‘Questioni di tattica,’ RL 1:34 (23 Nov. 1922); SP, 429. 21 Gobetti, ‘Elogio della ghigliottina’ RL 1:34 (23 Nov. 1922); SP, 434. 22 Gobetti, ‘Esperienza liberale [V],’ RL 1:15 (28 May 1922); SP, 354. 23 Gobetti, signed La Rivoluzione Liberale, ‘Postilla’ to ‘Noi e le opposizioni,’ RL 3:17 (22 Apr. 1924); SP, 641. 24 Gobetti, ‘Questioni di tattica,’ RL 1:34 (23 Nov. 1922); SP, 430. 25 For more on Croce’s theory, espoused in the immediate post–Second World War period, that fascism could be understood as a parenthesis in Italian history, an invasion, or a virus infecting an otherwise healthy body, see David Ward, Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943–46. Benedetto Croce and the Liberals, Carlo Levi and the ‘Actionists’ (New York and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996). 26 Piero and Ada Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza. Lettere, 1918–1926, ed. Ersilia Alessandrone Perona (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), and Gobetti, Letter from Piero to Ada, 27 July 1919, Carteggio, 1918–1922, ed. Alessandrone Perona (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 54.

174 Notes to pages 41–2 27 See, in particular, Luisa Passerini, Torino operaia e fascismo (Rome and Bari: Laterza: 1984), published in English as Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class, trans. Robert Lumley and Jude Bloomfield (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Giovanni De Luna, Donne in oggetto. L’antifascismo nella società italiana 1922–1943 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995). 28 Quoted in Giampaolo Dossena, La zia era assatanata (Milan: Rizzoli, 1990), 2. Dossena also gives other versions of the PNF acronym: ‘As Luigi Lanfranconi (1882–1938) used to say, it meant, “Per Non Faticare” [So as not to work] or “Per Necessità familiari” [Out of family necessity].’ In addition, Lanfranconi goes on, PNF was said to stand for the initials of the three days a year in which Italians don’t work: Pasqua (Easter), Natale (Christmas), and Ferragosto (August Bank Holiday). A Trieste version of PNF, again according to Lanfranconi, was Povero nostro Franz, a reference to the Hapsburg Emperor Franz Joseph. 29 See Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: St Martin’s Press, 1991) for the definition of fascism as ‘a palingenetic and populist form of ultranationalism.’ 30 Robert Paxton concludes his chapter ‘Comparisons and Differences’ in The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, ed. R.J.B. Bosworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) thus: ‘So we have not heard the last of fascism – perhaps of the word, but not of the thing’ (565). 31 For an argument along these lines, see Paolo Flores D’Arcais, ‘Gobetti, liberale del futuro,’ in Gobetti, La Rivoluzione liberale, new ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1995). 32 It should come as no surprise that as I write and review this chapter I have in mind contemporary Italy, particularly the two populist and so-called anti-political parties which have regularly been part of the centre-right coalition governments headed by Silvio Berlusconi: namely, Forza Italia! (Come On, Italy!), which has now been renamed as the Popolo della libertà (PdL) and the Lega nord (Northern League). I have no doubt at all that the support these parties have and the consensus they enjoy is born of the same middle-class frustration that led many in the early 1920s to see in fascism a saviour and a solution to its own and the nation’s crisis. Although different from fascism in their policies, they are nonetheless late twentieth and early twenty first century effects of the same root cause. I am not alone in thinking this. This is what Donald Sassoon writes in a review of Alexander Stille’s The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi (New York: Penguin, 2006): ‘The phenomenon of Italy’s small and medium size enter-

Notes to pages 43–44

33

34 35 36 37

175

prises […] is at the root of Italy’s past success and of its present political and economic predicament. The petty bourgeoisie is naturally “neo-liberal,” but in a very particular sense: it does not want an efficient minimalist state, for this would wipe them out. They want things to remain as they are: a terrible bureaucracy that is so universally hated and so obviously absurd that it is reasonable for everyone to do everything possible to by-pass it. Berlusconi is the expression of this petty bourgeoisie. He thinks like them. He acts like them. He does, almost instinctively, what they do. He has the same taste, the same sense of humour. The only difference between him and them is that he has more money,’ in ‘Povera Italia,’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies 12:3 (Sept. 2007): 345. Gobetti’s fascism has a great deal in common with the ‘urfascism’ described by Umberto Eco in the article, ‘Eternal Fascism,’ New York Review of Books (22 June 1995): 12–15, also in Utne Reader (Nov.–Dec. 1995): 57–9; and in Five Moral Pieces, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Harcourt, 2001). Towards the end of the article, Eco writes: ‘It would be easy for us if someone would look out onto the world’s stage and say: “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to march through the streets of Italy once more!” Alas life is not so simple. Ur-Fascism can still return to the most innocent of guises. Our duty is to unmask it and to point the finger at each of its new forms – every day and in every part of the world.’ See also the remarks made by Giovanni De Luna and Marco Revelli, co-authors of Fascismo/ Antifascismo, in an interview given to Simonetta Fiori, pubished in La Repubblica on 7 March 1995, under the title ‘Imbroglio a Destra.’ De Luna states: ‘Had the protagonsists of the Italian left read Gobetti with greater attention and his interpretation of fascism as “revelation,” they would not have fallen from the clouds when Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party came along.’ And in answer to the question, ‘Are you saying that fascism is a germ that has not been neutralized in the Italian organism?’ Revelli says: ‘There is no doubt about that. Fascism is and remains one of the possible forms of national identity, made possible by a lack of democratic culture. It is a possible “temptation” rooted in our national history, and ready to reemerge like an underground river in difficult moments.’ Gobetti, ‘Commemorazione,’ first published in RL 2:33 (30 Oct. 1923); SP, 532–3. See also ‘Due tattiche,’ RL 3:26 (24 June 1924); SP, 733, where Gobetti refers to the consensus Mussolini and the fascist regime enjoyed and that was threatened by the Matteotti assassination. Gobetti, ‘Moderatucoli,’ Conscientia 3:41 (11 Oct. 1924): 4; SP, 785. Gobetti, ‘Dell’esilio,’ RL 4:26 (28 June 1925); SP, 853. Gobetti, ‘La successione,’ RL 3:46 (10 Dec.1924); SP, 801–4. Gentile, ‘Insegnamento della letteratura italiana,’ in Gentile, Frammenti

176 Notes to pages 44–52

38 39

40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54

di estetica e di teoria della Storia, vol. 1 (Florence: Le Lettere, 1992), 250, and ‘Educazione classica,’ in Helios 2 (15 June and 1 July 1896): 18–19, also in Gentile, Che cos’è il fascismo (Florence: Le Lettere, 1925), 123–4. Gentile, ‘La marcia su Roma,’ L’idea nazionale 13 (28 Oct. 1923). See Giovanni Genovesi, Storia della scuola in Italia dal 700 a oggi (Bari and Rome: Laterza, 1998), 125 (2nd ed., 2004): ‘Mussolini had called the Gentile reform ‘the most fascist of all reforms,’ so proving that that he was the first not to have understood its spirit.’ See Patrizia Dogliani, Il fascismo degli italiani: Una storia sociale (Turin: UTET, 2009), 187. For more on Monti and Gobetti, see Norberto Bobbio, ‘Monti e Gobetti,’ Italia fedele. Il mondo di Gobetti (Florence: Passigli, 1986), 135–52. Monti, ‘La politica scolastica del fascismo. Pregiudizio liberale,’ RL 2:38 (4 Dec. 1923). Monti wrote other articles on fascist school policy: ‘La politica scolastica del fascismo. II,’ RL 2:39 (11 Dec. 1923), and ‘La politica scolastica del fascismo. III,’ RL 2:40 (18 Dec. 1923). Genovesi, Storia della scuola, 126. Gentile, Il problema scolastico del dopoguerra (Ricciardi: Naples, 1919), 8. Dainotto, ‘Tramonto’ and ‘Risorgimento,’ 249. Gobetti, ‘Consigli all’opposizione,’ RL 3:24 (10 June 1924); SP, 696–8: Umberto Morra di Laviano, Vita di Piero Gobetti (Turin: UTET, 1984), 96. Paolo Bagnoli, Il metodo della libertà: Piero Gobetti fra Eresia e Rivoluzione (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2003), 43. Gobetti, ‘Domenico Giuliotti,’ in La nostra scuola (1921); also in Scritti storici, letterari e filosofici, ed. Paolo Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), 542. Gobetti, ‘Il problema della scuola media [I]: Il Liceo,’ EN 1:9 (1–15 Mar. 1919); SP, 54. Further page references to this article will appear parenthetically in the body of the text. Giovanni Gentile, ‘La riforma della scuola media,’ in Scuola e filosofia (Palermo: Senari, 1908), 201–2. Monti, ‘Note sulla burocrazia: l’utopia dei pochi e ben pagati,’ RL 1:8 (9 Apr. 1922). Bobbio, ‘Monti e Gobetti,’ 139. Monti, the quotations are drawn from the following articles he wrote for RL: ‘Lettere scolastiche. I. Scuola libera e riforma scolastica,’ RL 2:6 (15 Mar 1923); ‘Lettere scolastiche. II. Dalla scuola dell’ “orator” alla scuola del “citoyen.”’ RL 2:7 (25 Mar. 1923); ‘Lettere scolastiche. III. La scuola dei padroni e la scuola dei servi,’ RL 2:8 (3 Apr. 1923); ‘Lettere scolastiche. IV. Esiodo, il maestro del villaggio,’ RL 2:10 (17 Apr. 1923); ‘Lettere scolastiche. V. La scuola del popolo,’ RL 2:11 (24 Apr. 1923).

Notes to pages 52–9

177

55 See Emilio Papa, in Fascismo e cultura (Marsilio: Padua, 1974), 178–9, who sums up the Gentile reform thus: ‘Few schools, but good ones; few teachers, but an elite. This is the point of departure of the near-sighted pedagogy of Gentile. An aristocratic cultural stance far away from imagining the needs of mass and consumer society, and typical of a certain liberalism and neo-idealism that stretched from Croce to Gentile and on to Codignola.’ 56 Monti, ‘La politica scolastica del fascismo. III,’ RL 2:40 (18 Dec. 1923). 57 Ibid. 58 See Gervasoni, L’Intellettuale come eroe, 115. 59 Gobetti wrote the following letters to Gentile, now collected in Piero Gobetti. Carteggio 1918–1922, ed. Ersilia Alessandrone Perona (Turin: Einaudi, 2003): 9 Nov. 1918, 4; 17 Feb. 1919, 33–4; 1 Apr. 1919, 46; 3 June 1919, 58; 11 Oct 1919, 76; 7 July 1920, 127; 6 July 1921, 213; 2 Feb. 1922, 267. 60 Gobetti (but signed ***), ‘La scuola delle padrone, dei servi e dei cortegiani,’ RL 2:13 (8 May 1923); SP, 495–7. 61 See Piero and Ada Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza, 547–51 and 567–71. 62 Gobetti, ‘Al nostro posto,’ RL 1:32 (2 Nov. 1922); SP, 419. 63 For a detailed analysis of Gobetti’s readership, see Niamh Cullen, ‘The Intellectual Community of La Rivoluzione Liberale,’ Modern Italy 14:1 (2009): 19–38. 64 See Natalino Sapegno, Racconto interrotto: Piero Gobetti nel racconto degli amici (Turin: Centro Studi Piero Gobetti, 1992), 21–2. 65 Letter from Piero to Ada, 13 Sept. 1920, Piero and Ada Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza, 385. 66 Gervasoni, L’Intellettuale come eroe, 409–64. 67 See Gobetti, ‘Un conservatore galantuomo,’ RL 3:18 (18 Apr. 1924); SP, 656: ‘Mosca’s theory of the ruling class is truly one of those ideas that open up to research vast avenues of thought.’ 68 Gaetano Mosca, Elementi di scienza politica (Turin: Bocca, 1923), 56. On another occasion, Mosca summarized his theory of elites thus: ‘The individuals who compose [the organized minority] are separate from the mass of the governed on account of certain qualities, which give them a certain, material, intellectual and moral superiority.’ 69 Paolo Bagnoli, L’elitismo democratico in Italia: Gobetti, Dorso, Burzio, Rosselli in Studi sull’elitismo (Milan: Giuffré, 2001), 5–186. 70 Gobetti, ‘Un conservatore galantuomo.’ 71 See Pietro Meaglia, ‘Gobetti e il liberalismo,’ Mezzosecolo 4 (1980–82): 209– 14. 72 Piero and Ada Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza, and Gobetti, Carteggio, 1918–1922.

178 Notes to pages 60–7 73 Letter from Piero to Ada, 9 Sept 1921, Piero and Ada Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza, 501. 74 See Santino Caramella, ‘Piero Gobetti,’ Il lavoro (18 Feb. 1926): 1. 75 Letter from Gobetti to Natalino Sapegno, 3 Sept. 1920, Gobetti, Carteggio, 1918–1922, 161. 76 Letter from Gobetti to Natalino Sapegno, 9 Sept. 1920, ibid., 157. 77 Ibid., 157–9. 78 Letter from Piero to Ada, 3 Sept. 1919, Piero and Ada Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza, 132. 79 Letter from Piero to Ada, 3 Aug. 1922, ibid., 534. 80 Letter from Piero to Ada, 22 July 1920, ibid., 224. 81 Letter from Ada to Piero, 6 Aug. 1922, ibid., 545 . 82 Letter from Piero to Ada, 13 Aug. 1922, ibid., 578. 83 Gobetti, Letter from Gobetti to Sapegno, 16 Aug. 1920, Carteggio, 1918– 1922, 142. 84 Letter from Piero to Ada, 8 Aug. 1920, Piero and Ada Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza, 289. 85 Gobetti, Letter from Sapegno to Gobetti, 3 Sept. 1920, Carteggio, 1918–1922, 151. 86 Letter from Piero to Ada, 29 Aug. 1922, Piero and Ada Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza, 601. 87 Letter from Gobetti to Sapegno, 28 July 1920, Gobetti, Carteggio, 1918– 1922, 137. 88 Ibid. 89 See Bruno Germano, ‘Gobetti e Sapegno: Un’amicizia disuguale,’ Mezzosecolo 14 (2001–02): 103–18. See also Sapegno’s letters, Le più forti amicizie. Carteggio 1918–1930, ed. Germano (Turin: Aragno Editore, 2005), and, on his relationship with Gobetti, Sapegno, ‘L’insegnamento di Piero Gobetti,’ Rinascita (1946) 3: 57–63. 90 However, in 1937 Ada married for a second time, to Ettore Marchesini, who worked for the Italian State Radio Company, the Ente Italiano Audizioni Radiofoniche (EIAR). 91 Ersilia Alessandrone Perona, ‘L’uomo Gobetti e la sua formazione,’ in Cent’anni. Piero Gobetti nella storia d’Italia, ed. Valentina Pazé (Milan: Franco Angeli and Centro Studi Piero Gobetti, 2004), 32. 92 Letter from Ada to Piero, 7 Aug. 1922, Piero and Ada Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza, 553–4. 93 Letter from Ada to Piero, 24 July 1920, ibid., 233. 94 Letter from Ada to Piero, 25 July 1920, ibid., 240. 95 Letter from Ada to Piero, 8 Aug. 1922, ibid., 557.

Notes to pages 67–76

179

96 Letter from Piero to Ada, 15 Aug. 1922, ibid., 549. 97 Letter from Ada to Piero, 6 Aug. 1920, ibid., 278–9. 3 Gobetti: Of Liberals and Liberalism 1 Norberto Bobbio, ‘Ritratto di Piero Gobetti,’ in L’Italia fedele. Il mondo di Gobetti (Florence: Passigli, 1987), 15–18, and ‘Temi gobettiani,’ 54–5. 2 The first quotation is from Gobetti, La Rivoluzione liberale, in SP, 1024; the second from 953. 3 Gobetti, La rivoluzione liberale in SP, 952. Further references to this work will appear parenthetically in the main body of the text. 4 Gobetti, ‘Fallimento o rivoluzione?’ RL 1:23 (30 July 1922); SP, 394. See also in the same article: ‘The commune conclium regni poi Parliamentum was born in England not as a parliamentary institution, not as a theatre of political struggle but as a practical instrument that aimed at preventing the dilapidations that damaged the barons. These latter understood they were taxpayers, they felt they were part of the state, a political class, so much so that they placed a true and proper bilateral contract on the king that was the fundamentum libertatis Angliae insofar as it consolidated the economic life of the nation independently from political interference.’ 5 See Armando Cavalli, ‘La riforma in Italia,’ RL 2:38 (4 Dec. 1923), and an unsigned article that is traceable to Gobetti, ‘Nota a A. Cavalli,’ in the same issue of RL. See also Gobetti, ‘Elogio della ghigliottina,’ RL 1:34 (23 Nov. 1922); SP, 432: ‘Our polemic against the Italians does not take as its starting point any adhesion to a supposed foreign maturity; nor from faith in Protestant or free trade attitudes.’ 6 See Marco Gervasoni, L’intellettuale come eroe. Piero Gobetti e le culture del novecento, 350–71, and Paolo Bagnoli, ‘Piero Gobetti e la Francia,’ Rosselli, Gobetti e la rivoluzione democratica. Uomini e idee tra liberalismo e socialismo (Scandicci: Nuova Italia, 1996), 113–26. 7 Gobetti, La Rivoluzione liberale, in SP, 951. Further references appear parenthetically in the main body of the text. 8 Piero Meaglia, ‘Gobetti e il liberalismo,’ Mezzosecolo 4 (1980–82): 209–14. 9 Gobetti, ‘Elogio della ghigliottina,’ RL 1:34; SP, 431–4. 10 James Martin, ‘Italian Liberal Socialism: Anti-fascism and the Third Way,’ Journal of Political Ideologies 7:3 (2002): 335–6. 11 See Giulio Bollati, L’italiano: Il carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzione, originally published in Storia italiana, vol. III (Turin: Einaudi, 1972), republished as a separate volume under the same title by Einaudi in 1983. For a polemical answer to Bollati’s text, see Silvana Patriarca, ‘National

180

12

13

14 15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Notes to pages 77–82 Identity or National Character? New Vocabularies and Old Paradigms,’ in Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento, ed. A.R. Ascoli and K. von Henneberg (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001), 299–320. Alexander De Grand, The Hunchback’s Tailor: Giovanni Giolitti and Liberal Italy from the Challenge of Mass Politics to the Rise of Fascism, 1882–1922 (Westport: Greenwood, 2001). Giolitti first came to power on15 May 1892, his government falling on 15 Dec. 1893. His second stint in power lasted from 3 Sept. 1903 to 12 Mar. 1905; his third from 29 May 1906 to 11 Dec. 1909; his fourth from 30 Mar. 1911 to 21 Mar. 1914; and his fifth and last from 15 June 1920 to 4 July 1921. Gobetti, ‘Volontà,’ EN 1:1 (1–15 Nov. 1918); SP, 16; original emphasis. Gobetti, ‘Traditore o incapace?’ EN 1:3 (1–15 Nov. 1918); SP, 28–9. A further article on Giolitti, of the same tone and content, is ‘Giolitti, giolittismo e antigiolittismo,’ EN 2:5 (5 July 1919); SP, 125–8. Gaetano Salvemini, Tendenze vecchie e necessità nuove del movimento operaio italiano (Bologna: Cappelli, 1922), quoted in Ubaldo Fomentini, ‘La crisi del collaborazionismo,’ RL 1:33 (9 Nov. 1922). Carlo Levi, ‘Antonio Salandra,’ RL 1:25 (27 Aug. 1922), also in Scritti politici, ed. David Bidussa (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), 3. Ibid. Ibid. Gobetti, review of Filippo Turati, Le vie maestre del socialismo, ed. Rodolfo Mondolfo (Bologna: Cappelli, 1921), RL 1:8 (9 Sept. 1922). Gobetti, ‘Il collaborazionismo di Missiroli,’ RL (19 Feb. 1922); SP, 251. Gobetti, ‘Motivi di storia italiana: Il Partito socialista,’ RL 2:26 (11 Sept. 1923). Gobetti, ‘Giolitti, giolittismo e antigiolittismo,’ EN 2:5 (5 July 1919); SP, 127–8. Gobetti, ‘Delizie indigene,’ RL (2 Nov. 1922); SP, 420: ‘Mussolini understands that in Naples Pulcinella is far from being an anachronism.’ Gobetti, ‘Il calderone piccolo-borghese,’ in ‘Uomini e idee,’ RL 3:9 (26 Feb. 1924); SP, 610–19. Gobetti, ‘“Postilla” to “Congiure e opposizione,”’ RL 2:15 (22 May 1923); SP, 500–1. Gobetti, ‘Addomesticati e ribelli,’ RL 3:19 (6 May 1924); SP, 659–63. Gobetti, ‘Dopo le elezioni,’ RL 3:16 (15 Apr. 1924); SP, 635–9. Gobetti, ‘“Postilla” to “Noi e le opposizioni,”’ RL 3:17 (22 Apr. 1924); SP, 641–4.

Notes to pages 82–8

181

30 Gobetti, La rivoluzione liberale. Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia, ed. Ersilia Alessandrone Perona (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 176. 31 Gobetti, ‘Guerra agli apolitici,’ RL 3:10 (4 Mar. 1924); SP, 625–6. 32 Gobetti, ‘La libertà,’ RL (Feb. 19th, 1924); SP, 606. 33 Gobetti, ‘Dopo le elezioni,’ RL 3:16 (15 Apr. 1924); SP, 635–9. 34 Ibid. 35 Gobetti, ‘La settimana,’ RL 3:44 (25 Nov. 1924); SP, 793–800. 36 Gobetti, ‘Noi e le opposizioni,’ RL 3:17 (22 Apr. 1924); SP, 641–4. 37 Gobetti, ‘“Postilla” to “Congiure e opposizione,”’ RL 2:15 (22 May 1923); SP, 500–1. 38 Gobetti, ‘Questioni di tattica,’ RL 1:34 (23 Nov. 1922); SP, 429–31: ‘If the people are badly educated and do not have any sense of liberty even Mussolini can be useful, not to balance the books […] but to teach those who have only read about it in books, in a concrete manner, what tyranny is.’ 39 Gobetti (signed p.g.), ‘Commento quotidiano. Elogio di Farinacci,’ RL (9 Oct. 1923); SP, 526–7. 40 Gobetti, ‘Elogio della ghigliottina,’ RL 1:34 (23 Nov. 1922); SP, 431. 41 Gobetti, ‘Commento quotidiano. Elogio di Farinacci.’ 42 Farinacci is quoted by Gobetti in ibid. as saying: ‘A current made up of opportunists and profiteers is aiming to create Mussolinism around the Duce to isolate him from fascism.’ 43 Gobetti, ‘Commento quotidiano. Elogio di Farinacci.’ 44 See Franco Sbarberi, ‘Quale conflitto per quale libertà,’ in Cent’Anni. Piero Gobetti nella storia d’Italia, ed. Valentina Pazé (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004), 243. 45 See Raffaele Coladipietro, ‘Piero Gobetti: Polemista politico,’ Il Mulino (Nov. 1956): 784: ‘This is the basic limit of the political Gobetti of these months [Nov., Dec. 1922]: his intransigence has value only insofar as it is “against” something, not in the “name” of something. He denies a reality; he does not make an assertion of value, or make an assertion of denial (resistance).’ For other negative comments on Gobetti’s intransigence see Alberto Asor Rosa, Storia d’Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 1443: ‘[Gobetti’s] moralism, for example, often appears more as a limit than as a stimulus.’ 46 Eugenio Montale, ‘Gobetti,’ Corriere della Sera (16 Feb. 1951). Montale goes on: ‘Piero was a flower that had not yet completely come to bloom, but for someone like him it is almost shameful to ask what he would have become today. He was the man who was sought after in vain by a lost generation, the man who we stubbornly seek out in the deepest parts of ourselves.’ 47 Gobetti, ‘Guerra agli apolitici,’ RL 3:10 (4 Mar. 1924); SP, 625–6. 48 Gobetti, ‘Questioni di tattica,’ RL 1:34 (23 Nov. 1922); SP, 432.

182

Notes to pages 88–92

49 Gobetti, ‘Il fronte unico,’ RL 4:23 (7 June 1925); SP, 840–2. 50 Gobetti, ‘Il liberalismo in Italia,’ RL 2:14 (15 May 1923); SP, 498. 51 The perpetrators of the kidnapping and murder were identified as Amerigo Dumini, Albino Volpi, Giuseppe Viola, Augusto Malacria, and Amleto Poveromo, who had all been recruited by Giovanni Marinelli, head of the Fascist Secret Police. Matteotti was singled out, of course, after the speech he made in the Italian parliament, but more recently Mauro Canali has suggested that another reason might lie in the fact that Matteotti had discovered that Mussolini (as well as other fascists and members of the Italian royal family) had taken bribes from a U.S. oil company, Sinclair Oil, in exchange for the right to drill on Italian soil. According to Canali, the order to kill Matteotti came directly from Mussolini. See Mauro Canali, Il delitto Matteotti (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004). See also Canali, ‘The Matteotti Murder and the Origins of Mussolini’s Totalitarian Fascist Regime in Italy,’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies 14:2 (June 2009): 143–67. 52 Gobetti, ‘Giacomo Matteotti: Intransigent “Subversive,”’ in Gobetti, On Liberal Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 37. The original Italian is in RL 3:27 (1 July 1924); SP, 735–52. See also: Gobetti, ‘Matteotti,’ RL 3:25 (17 June 1924): ‘We were immediately at one about antifascism. For him too, it was instinctive. In his wrinkled serious forehead, in his steady and thoughtful eyes, in his lips that gave voice to a cutting irony I saw the real style of an opponent.’ 53 In addition to Matteotti and Amendola, the gallery of heroes contains a portrait of Edoardo Giretti, an example of Piedmont’s enlightened and advanced capitalist culture. See Gobetti, ‘Un nemico della plutocrazia,’ RL 4:22 (31 May 1925); SP, 834–9: ‘An example of triumphant individualism for whom the personal initiative of today guarantees the collective liberty of tomorrow’ (SP, 839). 54 Gobetti, ‘Il liberalismo di L. Einaudi,’ RL 1:10 (23 Apr. 1922); SP, 322–4. 55 Ibid. 56 Gobetti, ‘Amendola,’ RL 4:22 (31 May 1925); SP, 832–3. See Gervasoni, L’intellettuale come eroe, 304–5, for how Gobetti ‘borrowed’ material from the manuscript of Aldo Parini for his portrait of Matteotti. 57 Gobetti, ‘Processo al trasformismo,’ RL 3:39 (21 Oct. 1924); SP, 786–9. 58 Comitato Centrale dei Gruppi di Rivoluzione liberale, ‘Saluto all’altro parlamento,’ RL 3:42 (11 Nov. 1924); SP, 792. 59 Gobetti, ‘Due tattiche,’ RL 3:26 (24 May 1924); SP, 732–4. 60 Gobetti, ‘Lettera a Parigi,’ RL 4:37 (18 Oct. 1925); SP, 896–9. 61 Gobetti, ‘Bilancio,’ RL 4:21 (24 May 1925); SP, 826–9. 62 Ibid.

Notes to pages 92–100

183

63 Gobetti, ‘Revisione liberale,’ RL (19 June 1923); SP, 513–15. 64 Gobetti, ‘Due tattiche.’ 65 Gobetti, Letter to Santino Caramella, 8 Aug. 1920, in Piero Gobetti: Carteggio, 140. 66 Ibid., 11 Nov. 1919, 85. 67 Gobetti (signed ‘Antiguelfo’), ‘Esperienza liberale,’ RL 1:18 (18 June 1922); SP, 378–80. 68 Gervasoni, L’intellettuale come eroe, 37. 69 Augusto Monti, ‘Il liberalismo e le masse. 2,’ RL 2:9 (10 Apr. 1923). 70 Gobetti, ‘Popolari e Reazione,’ in ‘Esperienza liberale,’ RL 1:9 (16 Apr. 1922); SP, 317–19. 71 See Ilaria Favretto, ‘The Italian Left in Search of Ideas: The Rediscovery of the Political Ideas of the Action Party,’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies 7:3 (2002): 392–415, esp. 400–9. 72 Paolo Spriano, Gramsci e Gobetti. Introduzione alla vita e alle opere (Turin: Einaudi, 1977). 73 For an argument diametrically opposed to the one this study is making – that Gobetti was a liberal through and through, albeit a revolutionary one – see Giuseppe Bedeschi, ‘Gobetti finto liberale,’ Liberal 7 (1995), 65–7 and ‘Piero Gobetti, un liberale inesistente,’ Nuova storia contemporanea 1 (1998): 137–40. 74 Gobetti (signed ‘Il Critico’), ‘Storia dei communisti italiani scritta da un liberale,’ RL 1:6 (26 Mar. 1922); SP, 278–95. The quotation is from 287–8. And in a letter to Ada Prospero, written in Sept. 1920, he speaks thus of what is happening in the FIAT factory: ‘Here, we are in the middle of a revolution. I am following with admiration the efforts of the workers who are really building a new world […] I seem to be seeing that bit by bit the terms of the greatest battle of the century are being defined and prepared. My place must be on the side of whoever has a greater sense of religiosity and will to sacrifice. The revolution today appears in all its religious character,’ Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza. Lettere 1919–1926, 375–6. 75 Gobetti, ‘Criteri di metodo per la storia della rivoluzione russa. Il Soviet,’ Rivista di Milano (20 Feb. 1921); Scritti storici,letterari e filosofici, ed. Paolo Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), 409–14. 76 Giovanni Ansaldo, ‘In margine al processo di Torino,’ RL (26 Mar. 1922). 77 Gobetti, ‘La città futura,’ Il Lavoro (3 Nov. 1923); SP, 551–3. 78 Gobetti, ‘Visita alla FIAT,’ Il Lavoro (15 Dec. 1923); SP, 553–6. 79 Gobetti, ‘Frammenti di estetismo politico. Postilla,’ EN 2:10 (30 Nov. 1919); SP, 235. 80 Gobetti, SSLF, 309.

184

Notes to pages 100–6

81 Gobetti, ‘Trotzki,’ in Il Resto del Carlino (5 Apr. 1921): 3; SP, 206–10. 82 Gobetti, La Rivoluzione liberale. Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia, ed. Ersilia Alessandrone Perona (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), new ed., 122. 83 See Piero Polito, ‘Gobetti e Sorel,’ Mezzosecolo 6 (1985–86): 29–62; and Paolo Bagnoli, ‘Suggestioni soreliane in Piero Gobetti e Carlo Rosselli,’ in Il metodo della libertà (Reggio Emilia: Edizioni Diabasis, 2003), 80–8, originally published in Georges Sorel nella crisi del liberalismo europeo, eds. P. Pastori and G. Cavallari (Camerino: Università degli Studi di Camerino, 2001), 241–8. 84 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Georges Sorel,’ Against the Current. Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy, intro. Roger Hausheer (London: Hogarth, 1979), 317. 85 See David Roberts, ‘How Not to Think about Fascism and Ideology, Intellectual Antecedents and Historical Meaning,’ Journal of Contemporary History 35:2 (2000): 185–11, esp. 192. 86 Gobetti, ‘La crisi rivoluzionaria dell’Ottocento in Italia,’ SSLF, 165. 87 Gobetti, ‘Storia dei communisti italiani scritta da un liberale,’ RL 1:7 (2 Apr. 1922); SP, 280. 88 Gobetti, ‘L’ora di Marx,’ RL 3:16 (15 Apr. 1924); SP, 640–1, also in La libertà (15 Apr. 1924). In English, in On Liberal Revolution, 23. 89 Ibid. 90 Gobetti, ‘Crisi morale e crisi politica,’ RL 1:2 (19 Feb. 1922); SP, 245. 91 Gobetti, ‘Per una società degli apoti [II],’ RL 1:31 (25 Oct. 1922); SP, 411. 92 Gobetti, ‘Il problema della civiltà russa,’ L’Ora (23 Nov. 1923); SSLF, 421–5. 93 Gobetti, ‘Storia dei comunisti italiani scritta da un liberale,’ RL 1:6 (26 Mar. 1922); SP, 280. 94 Gobetti, ‘La rivoluzione italiana: Discorso ai collaboratori di Energie nove,’ L’Educazione nazionale (30 Nov. 1920): 1. 95 Gobetti, ‘Frammenti di estetismo politico (postilla),’ EN 2:10 (30 Nov. 1919); SP 164–78. Or as he writes in ‘Esperimenti di socialismo,’ EN (25 July 1919); SP, 138–53: ‘Their first aims and programs destroyed by history, [Lenin and Trotsky] renewed themselves completely with the people.’ Or again, a propos of the League of Nations whose feasibility is contingent on it being ‘susceptible […] to concrete life in the practical world,’ Gobetti, ‘La Società delle Nazioni,’ EN 1:5 (1–15 Jan. 1919); SP, 36–42. 96 Gobetti, ‘Storia dei comunisti italiani scritta da un liberale.’ 97 Gobetti, ‘Guerra e pace,’ L’Ora (3 Jan. 1925); SSLF, 602–6, and ‘Storia dei comunisti italiani scritta da un liberale,’ SP, 282. 98 Ibid. 99 See Martin, ‘Italian Liberal Socialism: Anti-fascism and the Third Way.’

Notes to pages 107–15

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100 Gobetti, ‘Storia dei comunisti italiani scritta da un liberale,’ and ‘Uomini e idee [X]. Gramsci,’ RL 3:17 (22 Apr. 1924); SP, 644–7; also in On Liberal Revolution, 19–22. 101 Antonio Gramsci, in Scritti 1915–21, Nuovi contributi, and in Sergio Caprioglio, Quaderni del corpo (1968) 1: 160. Gramsci was also to write that Gobetti ‘was not a communist and probably would never have become one.’ Gramsci, La questione meridionale (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1957), 37. 102 Gobetti, ‘Liberali e conservatori,’ RL 1:6 (26 Mar. 1922); SP, 277. 103 Gobetti, ‘Storia dei comunisti italiani scritta da un liberale,’ SP, 289. 104 Gobetti, ‘Per una società degli apoti [II],’ RL 1:31 (25 Oct. 1922); SP, 414. 105 Gobetti, ‘B. Croce e i pagliacci della cultura, ’ EN 1:2 (15–30 Nov. 1918); SP, 17–21. 106 Gobetti, SSLF, 678. 107 Gobetti, ‘Mussolini,’ in La Rivoluzione liberale, 173. Also in On Liberal Revolution, 58–9. 108 Gobetti, ‘Commenti e giustificazioni,’ EN 1:4 (15–31 Dec. 1918); SP, 30–5. 109 Gobetti, ‘Frammenti di estetismo politico,’ EN 2:10 (30 Nov. 1919); SP, 164–78. 110 For a detailed description and analysis of Rosselli’s thought and political activity, see Stanislao Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 111 Carlo Levi and Leone Ginzburg, ‘Il concetto di autonomia nel programma di Giustizia e Libertà,’ in Levi, Scritti politici, ed. David Bidussa (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), 75. 112 Ibid., 73. 113 Levi, ‘Seconda lettera dall’Italia,’ in Scritti politici, 59–61. 114 Gobetti, ‘Verso una realtà politica concreta,’ EN 2:2 (20 May 1919); SP, 109. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. 4 Writing, Creativity, and the Intellectual 1 Gioele Solari, ‘La filosofia politica di Vittorio Alfieri di Piero Gobetti,’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 82:2 (1923): 382. 2 Mario Fubini, Ritratto dell’Alfieri e altri studi alfieriani (Florence: Nuova Italia, 1967), 251–2. 3 Umberto Calosso, ‘La “libertà” di Vittorio Alfieri,’ L’Ordine nuovo 1: 316 (13 Nov. 1921): 3; ‘Il “Panegirico” e la `Virtù sconosciuta’ di Vittorio

186 Notes to pages 116–25

4 5 6 7

8 9 10

11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18

Alfieri,’ L’Ordine nuovo 1:323 (20 Nov. 1921): 3; ‘Alfieri e la Rivoluzione francese,’ L’Ordine nuovo 1:336 (4 Dec. 1921): 3; ‘Un Chisciotte ed il suo Pancia,’ L’Ordine nuovo 1:340 (8 Dec. 1921); 3; and the book L’Anarchia di Vittorio Alfieri. Discorso critico sulla tragedia alfieriana (Bari: Laterza, 1924); Mario Fubini, Vittorio Alfieri (Il pensiero-La tragedia) (Florence: Sansoni, 1937). In a more critical vein, Natalino Sapegno published an important study of Alfieri in 1949: ‘Alfieri politico,’ Rinascita 5:3 (1949): 365–82. I have relied on Angelo Fabrizi, Che ho a che fare io con gli schiavi? Gobetti e Alfieri (Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2007) for the above information and other information on Gobetti’s debt to and interest in Alfieri. Gobetti, Risorgimento senza eroi. Studi sul pensiero piemontese nel Risorgimento (Turin: Edizioni del Baretti, 1926), 92. Vittorio Alfieri, Del principe e delle lettere, in Opere, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Mursia, 1965), 1007. Ibid., 1018. Alfieri, Letter to Teresa Rigoli-Mocenni, 10 Dec. 1796, Epistolario, ed. Lanfranco Caretti (Asti: Centro nazionale di studi alfieriani: 1981), 197–8 vol. II, quoted in Letteratura, letterature, ed. Guido Armellini and Adriano Colombo, vol, 2, Dal tardo cinquecento al primo ottocento (Bologna: Zanichelli, 2007), 417. Giacomo Debenedetti, La Vocazione di Vittorio Alfieri (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1977). Ibid., 27. Gobetti, La filosofia politica di Vittorio Alfieri (Turin: Piero Gobetti Editore, 1923). Further references will appear parenthetically in the main body of the text. Emilio Bertana, Vittorio Alfieri studiato nel pensiero, nella vita e nell’arte (Turin: Loescher, 1904). Gobetti, Risorgimento senza eroi. Studi sul pensiero piemontese nel Risorgimento (Turin: Edizioni del Baretti, 1926), 92. Further references will appear parenthetically in the main body of the text. See ibid., 94–5: ‘those who ask [Alfieri] to put forward plans for a future state or to decide among various constitutional forms prove only that they have not understood his historical position.’ Alfieri, Opere, 1029. Alfieri, Del principe e delle lettere, in Opere, 1014. Gobetti, Risorgimento senza eroi, 126. Further references will appear parenthetically in the main body of the text. Alfredo Oriani, La lotta politica in Italia. Origini della lotta attuale. 467–1887 (Turin and Rome: L. Roux, 1892) Gervasoni, L’intellettuale come eroe, 14.

Notes to pages 126–38

187

19 Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza (3 Aug. 1920), 267. 20 Gobetti, ‘Manifesto,’ in RL 1:1 (12 Feb. 1922); SP, 227–40. 21 See Adolfo Omodeo, Difesa del Risorgimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1951), 440–50; and review of Risorgimento senza eroi in Leonardo 2:12 (20 Dec. 1926): 325–6. 22 For the rhetorical strategies that inform Gobetti’s writing, see James Martin, ‘Piero Gobetti and the Rhetoric of Liberal Anti-fascism,’ History of the Human Sciences 20 (2007): 107–27. 23 Mary Ann Caws, ed., ‘The Poetics of the Manifesto: Nowness and Newness,’ in Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), ix. 24 Alfieri, Risposta dell’autore alla lettera di Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, 1783. 25 See Giuseppe Bedeschi, ‘Gramsci e Gobetti, i gioielli di Giovanni Gentile,’ Nuova storia contemporanea 2 (2004): 15; ‘Piero Gobetti ovvero l’elogio del manganello,’ Nuova storia contemporanea 2 (2001): 21; ‘Il “socialismo liberale,” utopia sterile e inattuale,’ Nuova storia contemporanea 3 (1999): 19–25; ‘Piero Gobetti, un liberale inesistente,’ Nuova storia contemporanea 1 (1998): 137–40; ‘Gobetti finto liberale,’ Liberal 7 (1995): 65–7, and Liberalismo vero e falso (Rome: Biblioteca di Nuova Storia Contemporanea, 2008). In addition, see Ernesto Galli Della Loggia, ‘La democrazia immaginaria. L’azionismo e l’ideologia italiana,’ Il Mulino 2 (Mar.–Apr. 1993): 255–70. 26 Gobetti, Letter to Ada, 17 Sept. 1919, Nella tua breve esistenza, 162. 27 Gobetti, ‘[Note IV],’ EN 1:6 (15–31 Jan. 1919); SP, 52. 28 Gobetti, ‘[Le parole],’ RL 1:15 (28 May 1922): 56; SP, 366; original emphasis. 29 Spencer M. Di Scala, Italy: From Revolution to Republic. 1700 to the Present (Boulder: Westview, 1995), 199–200. 30 Especially when he called a wounded First World War veteran, Carlo Delcroix, a ‘moral abortion.’ See Gobetti, ‘Come combattere il fascismo,’ RL 3:32 (2 Sept. 1924); SP, 763–5. Benedetto Croce came to Gobetti’s aid to help extinguish the furor that sprang up after the publication of this article. 31 Gobetti, ‘Uomini e idee. Gramsci,’ RL 3:17 (22 Apr. 1924); SP 644–7. 32 Gobetti, ‘Giolitti, golittismo e antigiolittismo,’ EN 2:5 (5 July 1919): 93–5. 33 Gobetti, SSLF, 491. 34 Gobetti, Risorgimento senza eroi, 75, 54, 86, respectively. 35 Gobetti, La Rivoluzione Liberale, ed. Perona Alessandrone, 9 and 21, respectively. 36 Gobetti, ibid., 21, and Gobetti, Risorgimento senza eroi, 180. 37 Gobetti, Risorgimento senza eroi, 273. 38 Gobetti, ‘La marina mercantile,’ EN 2:86 (30 Sept. 1919); SP, 154. 39 Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza. 40 Gobetti, ‘Il nazionalismo italiano,’ RL 1:27 (20 Sept. 1922).

188

Notes to pages 138–45

41 Ibid. 42 Gobetti, ‘Gentile usurpatore,’ in ‘Uomini e idée,’ RL 3:9 (26 Feb. 1924); SP, 610–19, in part reprinted in Gobetti, ‘Marinetti, il precursore,’ Il Lavoro (31 Jan. 1924); SP, 579–82. 43 Sapegno, review of Leone Kochnitzky, La quinta stagione o i centauri di Fiume. In: ‘Le bal des ardents,’ RL 2:6 (15 Mar. 1923). 44 Monti, ‘Ultima polemica sui combattenti,’ RL 2:18 (12 June 1923). The anonymous writer Gildrig also warned of the pernicious influence D’Annunzio had had: ‘First it’ll be D’Annunzio’s motion that will work on young people. Most of the Legionnaires in Fiume were young people who had not taken part in WWI, but who wanted to wear a military uniform and ribbons, put on a helmet, carry a gun, do something, perhaps just being on guard duty at the Command Centre and inebriate themselves with D’Annunzio’s words. Throughout the period of D’Annunzio’s occupation, the very youngest were the most ready and willing and proactive. Once D’Annunzio fell, they returned to the Italian cities and told their friends about their adventure. These people were to be the angriest components of fascism, the torment, the fever of life, the frustration that tortured them was to make them brutal, bloody, blind.’ Gildrig, ‘Le generazioni del manganello,’ RL 2:30 (9 Oct. 1923). 45 For Borgese’s relationship with fascism see Fernando Mezzetti, Borgese e il fascismo (Palermo, 1978). 46 I have gleaned many of the details of Borgese’s life from Luciano Parisi, Borgese (Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 2000). 47 ‘Antologia,’ RL 1:27 (20 Sept. 1922). 48 G.A. Borgese, Goliath: The March of Fascism (New York: Viking, 1937), 7 and 13. Further references will appear parenthetically in the main body of the text. 49 See in particular, Paolo Valesio, Gabriele D’Annunzio: The Dark Flame, trans. Marilyn Migiel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 50 D’Annunzio, however, did join the fascist L’Accademia d’Italia. See Marinella Ferrarotto, L’Accademia d’Italia: Intelletuali e potere durante il fascismo (Naples: Liguori, 1977). 51 I have removed a racist remark from this quotation. 52 G.A. Borgese, Rubè (Milan: Mondadori, 2005), 128. Further references will appear parenthetically in the main body of the text. 53 Prezzolini, Letter to Gobetti, 22 March 1921, in Carteggio, 202; also in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 17–24, and Letter from Prezzolini to Gobetti, 23 Mar. 1921, in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 37–8, and for Gobetti’s answer (Letter to Prezzolini, 1 Apr. 1921), and for the report he wrote, 39–42.

Notes to pages 145–52

189

54 Prezzolini, Codice della vita italiana (Rome: La Voce Editore, 1921), and ‘Caratteri: l’imperfetto italiano,’ La Voce 3 (9 Mar. 1910): 137–49. 55 Gobetti, Letter to Ada, 17 April 1919, Nella tua breve esistenza, 31. 56 Gobetti, ‘Prezzolini,’ Poesia ed Arte 3:8 (Aug. 1920): 168–72; also in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ ed. Prezzolini (Florence: Sansoni, 1971), 25–31. 57 Gobetti, ‘Verso una realtà politica concreta,’ EN 2:2 (20 May 1919). 58 Gobetti, ‘Prezzolini,’ Poesia ed Arte; also in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 30. 59 Gobetti (signed p.g.), ‘Giuseppe Prezzolini,’ in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 34–6. 60 Prezzolini, ‘Testimonianza,’ in L’italiano inutile (Milan: Longanesei, 1954), 188–93, and in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 166–71. 61 Prezzolini, Letter to Gobetti, 30 Nov. 1922, in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 88. See also Prezzolini, Letter to Gobetti, 5 Jan. 1923, in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 94: ‘The case of fascism convinces me more and more. Fascism realizes many of our ideas [...] How can you expect me to attack fascism?’ 62 Prezzolini, ‘Azione politica,’ RL 1:4 (4 May 1922). 63 Prezzolini, Letter to Gobetti, 26 Dec. 1922, in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 92. Had he been alive in the late 1990s, Prezzolini, as did a number of other frustrated liberals, would almost certainly have thrown in his lot with Silvio Berlusconi’s then newly formed Forza Italia! party. Like Prezzolini, in fact, those intellectuals who aligned themselves with Berlusconi saw his coming to power, despite reservations they may and certainly did have about his person, as a chance to enact the liberal agenda that had been pushed to the margins, at least in their opinion, by the so-called hegemony that Catholic and left-wing political subcultures had exercised over post–Second World War Italy. 64 Prezzolini, ‘Per una società degli apoti [I],’ RL 1:28 (28 Sept. 1922); SP, 409–14. 65 Gobetti, ‘La tirannide,’ RL 1:33 (9 Nov. 1922); SP, 428. 66 Gobetti, ‘Per una società degli apoti [II],’ RL 1:31 (25 Oct. 1922); SP, 412. 67 Gobetti (p.g.), ‘Guerra agli apoti,’ RL 3:10 (4 Mar. 1924); SP, 626; original emphasis. 68 Gobetti, ‘Difendere la Rivoluzione,’ RL 1: 31 (25 Oct. 1922); SP, 411 Gobetti 15; also in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 72. 69 Gobetti, ‘Difendere la Rivoluzione.’ 70 Prezzolini, Letter to Gobetti, 25 May 1923, in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 103. 71 Prezzolini, ‘Testimonianza’; also in Prezzolini, L’italiano inutile (Milan: Longanesei, 1954), 188–93, and in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 166–71. 72 See Gobetti, ‘Prezzolini,’ Poesia ed arte 3:8 (Aug. 1920): 168–72, and in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 30: Prezzolini’s La Voce ‘has been the victory of militant idealism over Dannunzian superficiality.’

190 Notes to pages 152–9 73 Gobetti, ‘Su La Voce,’ RL 2:24 (28 Aug. 1923): ‘The generation of La Voce, unexpressed romantics, has given us its type in the polygraph.’ 74 Gobetti, ‘Difendere la Rivoluzione.’ 75 Ardengo Soffici, Lemmonio Boreo (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1921). 76 Gobetti, ‘Anime religiose,’ L’Ora di Palermo (17–18 Oct. 1923), reprinted in Coscientia 3:8 (23 Feb. 1924); also in SP, 205–17. 77 Prezzolini, ‘Diario Prezzolini, 4 Mar. 1921,’ in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 37. 78 Prezzolini, ‘Testimonianza,’ 171. 79 Prezzolini, La Coltura italiana, quoted in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 118–19. 80 Norberto Bobbio, ‘Gozzano e Gobetti,’ in L’Italia fedele (Florence: Passigli, 1986), 79. See also in the same essay, his comments on Gobetti’s ‘exclusively scholastic and bookish training’ when he was editor of EN, 76. See also the comments by A. Tino, Luigi Einaudi, and Max Ascoli on Gobetti’s lack of realism, reported by Gervasoni, L’Intellettuale come eroe, 417. Montale also had occasion to note that Gobetti ‘spoke like a printed book.’ See review of Ersilia Alessandrone Perona, ed., Carteggio Montale-Gobetti (Milan: Mezzosecolo and Editore Franco Angeli, 1998), by Arturo Colombo, in Corriere della sera (17 Aug. 1998), available online at http://archiviostorico. corriere.it/1998/agosto/17/Che_battibecchi_tra_Gobetti_Montale_co_0_ 9808175308.shtml. 81 Prezzolini, Letter to Gobetti, 24 Mar. 1924, in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 128. 82 Prezzolini, Letter to Ada Gobetti, 9 Mar. 1926, in Gobetti e ‘La Voce,’ 159. 83 Hayden White, ‘Getting Out of History,’ Diacritics 12:3 (1982): 11. 84 Gobetti, ‘Le risorse dell’eresia,’ RL 2:24 (28 Aug. 1923); SP, 518. 85 Gobetti, ‘Illuminismo,’ Il Baretti 1:1 (Jan. 1925): 1. 86 Gobetti, ‘Introduzione,’ La Rivoluzione liberale. Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia, ed. Alessandrone Perona (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), 5. 5 Gobetti after Gobetti 1 See James Martin, Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution, for an excellent overview of Gramsci’s reading of Gobetti, 112–20; and Gervasoni, L’Intellettuale come eroe, 421–8, for Amendola’s and other communist intellectuals’ appropriation of Gobetti. 2 See Martin, Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution, 120–6, and Gervasoni, L’Intellettuale come eroe, 421–39. 3 See Augusto Monti, Realtà del partito d’Azione (Turin: Einaudi, 1945); Ward, Antifascisms; and Giovanni De Luna, Storia del Partito d’Azione 1942–47 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1997), 2nd ed. 4 See Aldo Capitini, Liberalsocialismo (Rome: Edizioni E/O, 1996), and Gian

Notes to pages 159–66

5

6

7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

191

Biagio Furiozzi, ed. Aldo Capitini tra socialismo e liberalismo (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001). See Cesare Medail, ‘Padri nobili: La grande corsa verso Gobetti, liberale conteso dai Poli,’ in Corriere della sera (8 Feb. 2001); available online at http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/2001/febbraio/08/grande_corsa_verso_ Gobetti_liberale_co_0_0102087028.shtml. See Mario Bernardi Guardi, ‘Gobetti, Sorel, La Rivoluzione liberale,’ in Il conciliatore (15 Sept. 1971): 353–5; ‘Sorel e Gobetti,’ La Torre (Jan.–Feb. 1974): 15–17; ‘Piero Gobetti: L’antirivoluzionario liberale,’ in Il Secolo d’Italia (8 Jan. 1995); ‘Piero Gobetti tra Prezzolini e Salvemini,’ Il Secolo d’Italia (7 Feb. 1995); ‘Il Gobetti ipotetico,’ Il Secolo d’Italia (25 Feb. 1995). See Giuseppe Bedeschi, ‘Gobetti, finto liberale,’ Liberale 7 (1995): 65–7, and by the same author, ‘Piero Gobetti, un liberale inesistente,’ Nuova storia contemporanea 4:1 (1998): 137–40; ‘Gramsci e Gobetti, i gioielli di Giovanni Gentile,’ Nuova storia contemporanea 8:2 (2004): 19; ‘Piero Gobetti ovvero l’elogio del manganello,’ Nuova storia contemporanea (2001): 21; ‘Il “socialismo liberale,” utopia sterile e inattuale,’ Nuova storia contemporanea 3 (1999): 19–25; and the volume Liberalismo vero e falso (Rome: Biblioteca di Nuova Storia Contemporanea, 2008). For a full account of Gobetti’s most recent reception, see ed. Angela Graziano, ‘Piero Gobetti, una polemica attuale,’ in Gobetti, La filosofia politica di Vittorio Alfieri, ed. Graziano (Cagliari: Demos editore, 1998), 37–44. See Medail, ‘Padri nobili: La grande corsa verso Gobetti, liberale conteso dai Poli.’ Valeri, Nino, ‘Piero Gobetti,’ in Figure del pensiero e dell’azione liberale in Italia, in Quaderni della Radio 34 (1954): 82–8. Turin: ERI. Martin, Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution, 135–53. Luigi Meneghello, I piccoli maestri, in Opere, ed. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo (Milan: Rizzoli, 1997), 81. For more on the question of the new ruling class that was to emerge after the Resistance see Meneghello’s novel Bau-Sète, in Opere, 383–560. See also Ernestina Pellegrini, Luigi Meneghello (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2002), esp. 96–104, and Ward, ‘L’otto settembre e dintorni: Luigi Meneghello’s “I piccoli maestri,”’ in Prospettive italiane. Prosa e critica degli italianisti del Nord America (Milan: Greco and Greco, 2006), Special Issue of Nuova prosa 44: 111–26. Meneghello, The Outlaws, trans. Raleigh Trevelyan (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 10. Ibid., 211. In Meneghello, The Outlaws. Meneghello, Le carte, 3 vols. (Milan: Rizzoli, 1999), vol. I, Gli anni sessanta;

192 Notes to pages 167–8 vol. II, Gli anni settanta; vol. III, Gli anni ottanta. The quotation is from vol. I, 327–8. 16 See, e.g., Umberto Eco, The Open Work (London: Hutchison Radius, 1989), 238–9. For this part of my argument, I am indebted to Sam Rohdie, The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 117–74.

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Index

Acerbo Bill, 1923, 84 Action Party (Partito d’Azione), 43, 159, 160 Actualism, 33 Adamson, Walter, 170n16 Agnelli, Giovanni, 32, 99 Alberti, Guglielmo, 27, 172n51 Alfieri, Vittorio, 20, 25, 27, 28, 114–23, 124, 128, 129, 130, 132, 136, 155, 185n1, 185–6n3, 186nn5, 7, 13–15, 187n24 Amendola, Giorgio, 157, 158, 160, 190n1 Amendola, Giovanni, 90, 157, 182nn53 and 56 Anfosso, Carlo, 7, 169n8 Ansaldo, Giovanni, 71, 98, 154, 183n76 Antonicelli, Franco, 169n1 Armellini, Guido, 186n7 Ascoli, Albert Russell, 173n14, 180n11 Ascoli, Max, 190n79 Asor Rosa, Alberto, 181n45 Aventine Seccession, 90–2 Bagnoli, Paolo, 47, 176n48, 177n69, 184n83

Balbo, Cesare, 136 Balliano, Adolfo, 136–7 Barbarossa, Frederick, 141 Il Baretti, 21, 155 Baretti, Giuseppe, 21, 127 Baroncini, Gino, 86 Beccaria, Cesare, 117 Becker, Jared, 172n8 Bedeschi, Giuseppe, 183n73, 187n25, 191n7 Bellamy, Richard, 36, 173n13 Benedict XIII, Pope, 126 Bergami, Giancarlo, 24, 169n12, 171n42 Berlin, Sir Isaiah, 102, 184n84 Berlin Wall, collapse of, 158 Berlusconi, Silvio, 81, 174n32, 189n62 Bernardi Guardi, Mario, 159–60, 191n6 Bersezio, Vittorio, 7, 169nn6–7 Bertana, Emilio, 119, 120, 186n11 Berti, Domenico, 127 Bertini, Giovanni Maria, 62 Bidussa, David, 180n17, 185n111 Bloomfield, Jude, 174n27 Bobbio, Norberto, 24, 27, 51, 52,

204

Index

69, 154, 171n41, 173nn15 and 18, 176nn41 and 53, 179n1, 189n79 Boccioni, Umberto, 152 Bollati, Giulio, 179n11 Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, 62, 138, 139–45, 188nn44–5, 47, and 51 Bosworth, Richard J.B., 174n30 Bottero, Giovanni, 6 Botto, Francesco Domenico, 6 Bucchi, Sergio, 171n35 Burzio, Filippo, 26, 171n47 Calogero, Guido, 159 Calosso, Umberto, 115, 151, 185–6n3 Canali, Mauro, 182n51 Capitini, Aldo, 159, 190n4 Caporetto, Battle of, 37 Caramella, Santino, 93, 170n23, 177n74, 183n65 Cardini, Franco, 62 Carducci, Giosuè, 124, 138 Carrà, Carlo, 152 Cattaneo, Carlo, 135, 136, 141 Cavalli, Armando, 71, 179n5 Cavour, Camillo, 126, 135 Caws, Mary Ann, 187n23 Cellini, Benvenuto, 152 Christian Democratic Party (Partito della Democrazia cristiana), 81 Cian, Vittorio, 62, 119, 120 Cochrante, Lydia, 173n15 Coladietro, Raffaele, 181n45 Colombo, Adriano, 186n7 Colombo, Arturo, 190n79 Combatants’ Movement, 95, 96 Come on, Italy (Forza Italia), 174n32, 189n62 Corradini, Enrico, 13, 14, 137, 138 Cosmo, Umberto, 3 Costa Cardol, Mario, 169n3 Crispi, Francesco, 76, 77

Croce, Benedetto, 12, 14, 18, 19, 23, 24, 28, 33, 44, 55, 77, 101, 109, 115, 139, 168, 170n26, 173n25, 177n55, 185n105, 187n30; and fascism, 40; and Idealism, 19, 30 Cullen, Niamh, 177n63 Cuore, 8–9 Dainotto, Roberto, 46, 173n14, 176n45 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 14, 19, 28, 126–35, 137, 138, 139, 142–3, 146, 151, 172n10, 188nn43, 48, and 49, 189n71 Dante, Aligheri, 105, 136, 140–1 De Amicis, Edmondo, 7, 8–9, 169nn6 and 10 De’ Calzabigi, Raniero, 129 De Grand, Alexander, 180n12 De Luna, Giovanni, 29, 172n1, 174n27, 175n32, 190n3 De Sanctis, Francesco, 118, 136, 142 De Vecchi, Cesare Maria, 134 Debenedetti, Giacomo, 118, 186n8 Delcroix, Carlo, 187n30 Della Colletta, Cristina, 169n5 Denina, Abbot, 127 Depretis, Agostino, 76 Di Rienzo, Cola, 141 Di Scala, Spencer, 134, 187n29 Dogliani, Patrizia, 44, 176n40 Dossena, 174n28 Dreyfus Affair, 90, 91 Dumini, Amerigo, 182n51 Duse, Eleanora, 145 Eco, Umberto, 175n32, 192n16 Einaudi, Luigi, 18, 52, 89, 108, 182n54, 190n79 Emery, Luigi, 171n37 European Great Powers, 13–14

Index Fabrizi, Angelo, 185–6n3 Factory Council Movement, 22, 25, 56, 75, 92, 96–100, 113, 131, 132, 155, 157, 161 Farinacci, Roberto, 28, 86–7, 133, 181n42 Fasci siciliani, 77 Fascism, 14, and modernization, 14–15 Favretto, Ilaria, 183n71 Ferrarotto, Marinella, 188n49 Ferrero, Pietro, 15 Ferri, Enrico, 8, 169n9 FIAT, 11, 32, 56, 92–3, 99, 105, 109, 183n74 FIOM (Federazione impiegati operai metallurgici), 97 Fiori, Simonetta, 175n32 First World War, 13, 14, 16, 19, 36–7, 41, 44, 50, 55, 69, 71, 80, 94, 96, 133, 134, 135, 137, 142, 144, 147 Fiume, occupation of, 133, 135, 137, 139, 142 Fiumi, Lionello, 11, 170n13 Florence, as capital, 5–6, 12 Flores D’Arcais, Paolo, 174n30 Foa, Vittorio, 52 Folgore, Luciano, 152 Fomentini, Ubaldo, 180n16 Formica, Enrico, 172n8 Forzano, Giovacchino, and Camicia nera, 14–15 La Frusta letteraria, 21 Fubini, Mario, 114, 115, 185n2, 185–6n3 Furiozzi, Gian Biagio, 190n4 Galeani Napione, Count Gian Francesco, 127 Galli Della Loggia, Enrico, 187n25 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 5, 77, 142

205

Gazzetta del Popolo, 6 Gazzetta di Torino, 6 General Election, November 1919, 19 General Election, April 1924, 83, 88 Genovesi, Giovanni, 45, 176nn39 and 43 Gentile, Emilio, 171n45 Gentile, Giovanni, 18, 19, 28, 30, 33–7, 38, 48, 49, 53, 54, 84, 85, 109, 113, 150, 168, 172n12, 173nn14–15, 175n37, 176nn38–9, 44, and 51, 177nn55 and 59, 187n25, 188n41, 191n7; and Actualism, 37; and First World War, 36–7, 44; and Positivism, 44; and school reform, 43–6, 49 Germano, Bruno, 65, 178n89 Gervasoni, Marco, 38, 55, 56, 57, 128, 157, 170nn14 and 21, 172n49, 177nn58 and 66, 179n6, 182n56, 183n68, 186n18, 190nn79 and 1–2 Gianduia, 7 Giacometta, wife of Gianduia, 7 Giannone, Pietro, 127, 128 Gibson, Mary, 196n11 Ginnasio Balbo, 3 Ginzburg, Leone, 52, 110–11, 185n111 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 34, 120, 124 Giolitti, Giovanni, 17, 18, 24, 44, 76–9, 81,82, 83, 84, 87, 89, 91, 133, 180nn13 and 15, 187n32 Giretti, Edmondo, 182n53 Giuliano, Balbino, 3, 16 Giuriolo, Antonio, 162 Gobetti, Angela, 3 Gobetti, Giovanni, 3 Gobetti, Piero, early life, 3–4; and Alfieri, 114–23; and antifascism, 15, 20–2, 28, 29–68, 84–5; and autonomy, 30; and Aventine Secession, 90–2; and Catholic Church, 127–8;

206

Index

and change through struggle, 26–7, 72, 73, 74, 83, 92; and Combatants’ Movement, 95; and communists, 105–7, 109; and D’Annunzio, 132–5; and democracy, 58; and elites, 47–8, 57–8; and Energie nove, 11, 16–17, 18–20, 22, 24; and existential antifascism, 29–30; and Factory Council Movement, 75, 92–3, 96–100, 131, 132, 157, 161; and fascism, 15, 20–2, 31, 38–43; and First World War, 16; and France, 70, 71–2; and the future, 25–7, 31; and Gentile, 34, 54–5; and Giustizia e libertà, 158–9; and Gramsci, 24; and Great Britain, 70–1; and intransigence, 27, 67, 87–8; and liberalism, 25, 30–1, 69–113; and Marx, 102–4; and the middle classes, 32, 38–43; and military service, 59–60, 61–2; and modernity, 47–8; and Mussolini, 82–6; and myth, 101–4, 161; and openness, 111; and personal ethics, 59–68; and political legacy, 157–68; and Protestant Reform, 32, 71; and revolutionary liberalism, 20, 93; and Risorgimento, 123–9; and Risorgimento senza eroi, 120, 123, 125–8, 129; and La Rivoluzione liberale, 20–2, 26; and role of intellectuals, 166–8; and the ruling class, 46–7; and Russian Revolution, 25, 96, 98, 100, 106–7, 131, 132; and sarcasm, 24; and school reform, 44–52; and self-emancipation, 30; and Sorel, 101–4; and the state, 59–60; and Sturzo, 95; and style, 69–70; and trasformismo, 75–88, 90–1; and Turati, 81, 83; and Turin, 11; and writing, 22, 27, 129–39

Gobetti, Paolo, 22 Gori, Francesco, 122 Govoni, Corrado, 152 Gramsci, Antonio, 8, 11, 12, 15, 20, 24, 47, 97, 98, 105, 109, 115, 132, 136, 157, 161, 162, 168, 185nn100–1, 187nn25 and 31, 190nn1 and 7 Grandinetti, Mario, 169n4 Graziano, Angela, 191n7 Gregor, A. James, 172n10 Griffin, Roger, 41, 174n29 Guazzotti, Giorgio, 171n32 Hardy, Henry, 184n84 Hausheer, Roger, 184n84 Homer, 121 House of Savoy, 4 L’Idea nazionale, 13 Idealism, 15–16, 18–19, 30, 34–5 Intransigence, 87–8, 90 Isnenghi, Mario, 171n30 Italian Communist Party (Partito comunista italiano), 32, 96 Italian Liberal Party (Partito liberale italiano), 12, 40, 85, 90 Italian Socialist Party (Partito socialista italiano), 13, 17, 32, 81, 94, 97, 134 Italian Social Movement (Movimento sociale italiano), 159 Italy, cultural crisis of early twentieth century, 12–14, 33, 50; and colonialism, 13; and First World War, 13, 14; and Italietta, 14 Jacobitti, Edmond, 172n5 Jameson, Frederic, 155 Justice and Liberty (Giustizia e libertà), 110–11, 185n111

Index Kochnitzky, Leone, 188n42 Lanfranconi, Luigi, 174n28 Lenin, 25, 100, 105 Leopardi, Giacomo, 120 Levi, Carlo, 29, 43, 64, 79–80, 110–11, 114, 140, 180n17, 185n111, 185n113 Liceo Gioberti, 3, 16, 66 Liceo Massimo D’Azeglio, 52 Lombroso, Cesa re, 8, 169n9; and criminal anthropology, 9–10, 11 Lumbelli, Anna Maria, 128, 171n41 Lumley, Robert, 174n27 Luperini, Romano, 170n17 Machiavelli, Nicolò, 120, 141 Malachria, Augusto, 182n51 Mann, Thomas, 140 Manzoni, Alessandro, 5 March on Rome, 83–4 Marchesini, Ettore, 178n90 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 14, 138, 153, 188n41 Martin, James, 24, 75, 128, 161, 171n44, 172n4, 179n10, 184n99, 187n22, 190n1, 190n2, 191n10 Marx, Karl, 25, 102–4, 105, 184n88 Matteotti, Giacomo, 15, 21, 28, 88–90, 175n33, 182nn51–3; and Aventine Succession, 90–2 Mazzali, Guido, 171n34 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 34, 105, 119–20, 136 McCuaig, William, 173n18 McEwen, Alistair, 175n32 Meaglia, Piero, 73, 177n71, 179n8 Medail, Cesare, 191n5, 191n8 Meneghello, Luigi, 162–6, 191nn11 and 14–15 Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, 191n11

207

Messina, Earthquake of 1908, 17 Migiel, Marilyn, 188n48 Missiroli, Mario, 62, 71 Mole Antonelliana, Turin, 7 Mondolfo, Rodolfo, 180n20 Montale, Eugenio, 22, 32, 87, 171n38, 181n46, 190n79 Monti, Augusto, 30, 44, 95, 108, 139, 159, 172n3, 176nn41–2, 52, 54, and 56, 183n69, 188n43, 190n3; and school reform, 51–4 Morra di Lavriano, Umberto, 47, 176n47 Mosca, Gaetano, 57, 177nn67–8 Museo del Risorgimento, Turin, 6 Mussolini, Benito, 12, 14, 20, 21, 22, 28, 38, 39, 40, 42–3, 44, 82–6, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 98, 99, 109–10, 133, 137, 138, 139, 142, 175n33, 176n39, 181n38, 185n107 Myth, 101–4 Naples, 12 National Alliance (Alleanza nazionale), 159 Nitti, Federico, 22 Northern League (Lega nord), 161, 174n32 Omodeo, Adolfo, 128, 187n21 L’Ordine nuovo, 11, 20 Oriani, Alfredo, 124–5, 186n17 Ornato, Luigi, 62, 127, 136 Pajetta, Giancarlo, 52 Papa, Emilio, 177n55 Papini, Giovanni, 12, 13, 14, 19, 137, 138, 152, 153, 170n17 Pareto, Vilfredo, 137 Parini, Aldo, 182n56

208

Index

Parisi, Luciano, 188n45 Passerini, Luisa, 174n27 Patriarca, Silvana, 179n11 Pavese, Cesare, 52 Paxton, Robert, 174n30 Pazé, Valentina, 171n42, 178n91, 181n44 Pellegrini, Ernestina, 191n11 People of Liberty (Popolo della libertà), 174n32 Père-Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, 22 Perona, Ersilia Alessandrone, 66, 170n13, 171n37, 173n26, 177n59, 178n91, 181n30, 184n82, 187n35, 190n79, 190n85 Plato, 121 Polito, Piero, 184n83 Pontine Marshes, 14 Popular Party (Partito popolare), 95–6, 97 Positivism, 8, 10–12, 16, 35–6 Poveromo, Amleto, 182n51 Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 4, 12, 18, 19, 22, 62, 101, 108, 137, 145–55, 168, 171n38, 188n52, 189n53, 55, 57–63, and 69–71, 190nn76–8 and 80–1, 191n6 Prospero (Gobetti), Ada, 16, 18, 20, 27, 59, 61, 63, 64, 66–8, 133, 134, 146, 154, 170nn19 and 24, 172n53, 173n26, 177nn61, 65, and 72–3, 178nn78–82, 84, 86, 90, and 92–5, 179nn96–7, 183n74, 187n26, 189n54, 190n81 Provana, Luigi, 136 Pugliese, Stanislao, 185n110 Quazza, Guido, 29, 172n1 Radical Party (Partito radicale), 159 Radicati, Alberto, 126, 128

Il Regno, 13, 137, 138 Regoli-Mocenni, Teresa, 118 Revelli, Marco, 172n1, 175n32 Risorgimento, 123–9 Roberts, David, 130, 184n85 Rohdie, Sam, 192n16 Rome, as capital, 4–5 Rosmini, Antonio, 34 Rosselli, Carlo, 158, 159, 162, 184n83, 185n110 Russian Revolution, 25, 96, 97, 98, 100, 106–7, 113, 131, 132, 155 Sacchetti, Roberto, 7, 169n6 Salandra, Antonio, 79–80, 84, 85, 180n17 Salvemini, Gaetano, 4, 14, 19, 23, 24, 28, 62, 93–5, 96, 108, 117, 119, 134, 138, 146, 159, 162, 164, 180n16, 191n6; and Giolitti, 77, 78–9; and Lega democratica per il rinnovamento della politica italiana, 17–18; and problemismo, 17 Santarosa, Santorre, 127, 136 Sapegno, Natalino, 56, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65–6, 114, 115, 138, 177n64, 178nn75–6, 83, 85, 87, and 89, 185– 6n3, 188n42 Sassoon, Donald, 174n32 Sbarbari, Franco, 181n44 Scuola Elementare Pacchiotti, 3 Sinclair Oil, 89 Snowden, Frank, 170n18 Soffici, Ardengo, 62, 152–3, 190n74 Solari, Gioele, 20, 114, 130, 185n1 Sonnino, Sidney, 147 Sorel, Georges, 101–4, 159, 184nn83– 4, 191n6 Spriano, Paolo, 170n15, 172n2, 176n49, 183nn72 and 75 Stille, Alexander, 174n32

Index

209

Tilgher, Adriano, 62 Togliatti, Palmiro, 97, 105 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, 76 Trasformismo, 75–88, 90–1 Trevelyan, Raleigh, 191n12 Trotsky, 25, 100 Turati, Filippo, 81, 83, 87, 89, 94, 180n20 Turin, 71, 75, 96, 98, 105; and industrial culture, 12; and post-unification history, 4–8, 10–12; and positivist legacy, 8; and period after First World War, 11, 29

Valesio, Paolo, 188n48 Vasco, Count, 126, 127, 128 Venturi, Franco, 62 Versailles Peace Conference, 19, 71, 133 Villari, Pasquale, 17 Viola, Giuseppe, 182n51 Vittorio Amedeo II, 126 Vittorio Emanuele II, 4, 6 Vittorio Veneto, Battle of, 37 La Voce, 4, 13, 18, 19, 20, 36, 112, 145– 7, 150, 151, 152, 153 Volpi, Albino, 182n51 Von Henneberg, Krystyna, 173n14, 180n11

L’Unità, 4, 17, 18, 19, 20, 112, 138, 146 Urbinati, Nadia, 173n18

Ward, David, 173n25, 190n3, 191n11 White, Hayden, 155, 190n82

Valeri, Nino, 191n9

Zini, Zino, 10, 11, 52, 169n12

Sturzo, Don Luigi, 95, 96