Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution (Italian & Italian American Studies)

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Italian and Italian American Studies Stanislao G. Pugliese Hofstra University Series Editor This publishing initiative seeks to bring the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian American history, literature, cinema, and cultural studies to a large audience of specialists, general readers, and students. I&IAS will feature works on modern Italy (Renaissance to the present) and Italian American culture and society by established scholars as well as new voices in the academy. This endeavor will help to shape the evolving fields of Italian and Italian American Studies by reemphasizing the connection between the two. The following editorial board of esteemed senior scholars are advisors to the series editor. REBECCA WEST University of Chicago FRED GARDAPHÉ Stony Brook University ALESSANDRO PORTELLI Università di Roma “La Sapienza”

JOSEPHINE GATTUSO HENDIN New York University PHILIP V. CANNISTRARO† Queens College and the Graduate School, CUNY

Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film edited by Gary P. Cestaro, July 2004 Frank Sinatra: History, Identity, and Italian American Culture edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese, October 2004 The Legacy of Primo Levi edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese, December 2004 Italian Colonialism edited by Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller, July 2005 Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City Borden W. Painter Jr., July 2005 Representing Sacco and Vanzetti edited by Jerome H. Delamater and Mary Anne Trasciatti, September 2005 Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel Nunzio Pernicone, October 2005 Italy in the Age of Pinocchio: Children and Danger in the Liberal Era Carl Ipsen, April 2006 The Empire of Stereotypes: Germaine de Staël and the Idea of Italy Robert Casillo, May 2006 Race and the Nation in Liberal Italy, 1861–1911: Meridionalism, Empire, and Diaspora Aliza S. Wong, October 2006 Women in Italy, 1946–1960: An Interdisciplinary Study edited by Penelope Morris, October 2006 A New Guide to Italian Cinema Carlo Celli and Marga Cottino-Jones, November 2006 Debating Divorce in Italy: Marriage and the Making of Modern Italians, 1860–1974 Mark Seymour, December 2006 Human Nature in Rural Tuscany: An Early Modern History Gregory Hanlon, March 2007 The Missing Italian Nuremberg: Cultural Amnesia and Postwar Politics Michele Battini, September 2007 Assassinations and Murder in Modern Italy: Transformations in Society and Culture edited by Stephen Gundle and Lucia Rinaldi, October 2007 Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution James Martin, December 2008

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Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution

James Martin

piero gobetti and the politics of liberal revolution Copyright © James Martin, 2008. All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN10: 0-230-60274-6 ISBN13: 978-0-230-60274-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Martin, James, 1968– Piero Gobetti and the politics of liberal revolution / James Martin. p. cm.—(Italian & Italian American Studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-230-60274-6 1. Gobetti, Piero, 1901–1926—Political and social views. 2. Italy—Politics and government—1914–1945. 3. Liberalism—Italy—History—20th century. 4. Anti-fascist movements—Italy—History—20th century. 5. Gobetti, Piero, 1901–1926—Influence. I. Title. DG575.G6M37 2009 945.091092–dc22[B]

2008021590

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: December 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Susan


Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1

Liberalism and the Italian Crisis

13

2

Idealism and Renewal

31

3

Liberty and Discipline: Gramsci and the Factory Council Movement

49

4

Liberal Revolution: Toward a New Elite

67

5

Contesting Fascism, Defending Liberalism

89

6

Politicizing Liberalism: Gobetti’s Italian Legacy

111

7

Liberty and Conflict: An “Agonistic” Liberalism

135

Afterword

155

Notes

159

Bibliography

193

Index

203


Acknowledgments

Although it can often feel like solitary confinement, doing research is never an entirely isolated activity. This book owes its existence to numerous kinds of support that I would like to recognize here. I owe a large debt of thanks to a number of individuals and organizations in Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, many of whom provided information, wrote references, read early drafts, and put up with some faltering spoken Italian for longer than might be thought fair. On the Italian side, I would like to express my gratitude to Franca Ranghino, Pietro Polito, and all the staff at the Centro Studi Piero Gobetti in Turin for their generous assistance over several years in making available all kinds of materials by and about Gobetti. Also in Turin and deserving of thanks is the staff of the library at the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi. David Bidusa and the staff of the Bibliotecha Feltrinelli in Milan kindly assisted my inquiries there. I am grateful, too, to Professor Massimo L. Salvadori for some useful suggestions early on in my research. In the United Kingdom and United States, thanks are due to Richard Bellamy, Terrell Carver, David Fisher, Michael Freeden, Richard Grayson, Sonja Grussendorf, Marc Lefebvre, Carl Levy, and Stan Pugliese. I should also like to acknowledge two sources of financial assistance: a research award from the University of London in 2004 and a British Academy Small Research Grant in 2005. The Research Office at Goldsmiths deserves credit, too, for the speedy processing of various applications, as does the staff of Goldsmiths Library for the silent but essential procurement of texts. Early versions of some of the material here were presented at seminars and conferences in Chicago, Manchester, and Nottingham. I am grateful to the participants at these events for their comments. Last, Chris Chappell at Palgrave oversaw the final stages of the book’s production with a welcome, steady hand. My children, Esmé and Luis, remained cheerfully oblivious to this study but they grew up in such remarkable ways during its evolution that they seem an essential part of it. Finally, nothing would have happened at all without the support, criticism, and inestimable courage of Susan Lapworth,

x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

to whom this book is dedicated. She has contributed more than I care to say to in keeping me going and I owe her. Lots. All translations are my own, expect where otherwise stated. I am grateful to Giulio Einaudi editore and Editori Riuniti for permission to quote from the collected works of Gobetti, Gramsci, Togliatti and various others. Images courtesy of Archivo fotografico del Centro studi Piero Gobetti.

Introduction

P

iero Gobetti has been described as “one of the most remarkable figures in twentieth-century Italian culture,” someone who can rightfully be understood as “a political thinker of classic stature.”1 Yet outside of his native Italy, Gobetti is virtually unknown. In America and the rest of Europe, precious little is written of him or of his ideas. Just who, then, was this figure and what accounts for such exuberant praise? A short summary might begin to clarify matters. Gobetti (1901–26) belonged to a generation of European liberals who, in the early decades of the twentieth century, witnessed the grand ideals of the previous century—individual liberty, parliamentary government, and gradual social progress—collapsing in ruins, trampled beneath the advance of the newer, more aggressive programs of communism and fascism. A journalist, editor, and intellectual, Gobetti was himself both an observer and narrator of liberalism’s rapid decline in the wake of the First World War. Unlike an older, more wary generation, however, he hoped to latch on to popular discontent with parliamentary politics and liberal values, not to affirm their redundancy, but to radically renew liberalism and weld it to mass-based politics. Styling himself a “revolutionary liberal,” Gobetti allied his ideas to the advance of the workers’ movement in Italy. For him, liberalism was not simply a narrow doctrine of individual rights, free trade, and parliamentary institutions. Rather, it was an inclusive ethic of liberation based on a struggle against all “transcendent” beliefs and imposed, hierarchical systems. Gobetti thus associated liberalism with revolutionary movements like the Russian Bolsheviks and the factory councils of his hometown, Turin. Gobetti’s “heretical” liberalism, expounded from 1922 in his journal La Rivoluzione Liberale (Liberal Revolution), set him far apart from the predominantly conservative liberals who dominated parliamentary politics in prefascist Italy. By emphasizing the role of social movements and conflict in generating and promoting new experiences of liberty, Gobetti sought to challenge the politics of compromise and elite accommodation that had, in his view, narrowed the appeal of Italian liberalism. His objective was to salvage liberalism from the bourgeois liberals who were increasingly attracted

2 PIERO GOBETTI AND THE POLITICS OF LIBERAL REVOLUTION

to Mussolini’s call for a return to “order.” Young liberals, he argued, needed to recapture the vitality of liberty as an ideal grounded in social reality, not a set of abstract values to be imposed on the world. Only if understood as a kind of “religiosity,” a faith in humanity’s capacity to transform the world and renew its understanding of freedom, he argued, would liberalism survive the disasters then confronting it. Sadly, Gobetti himself did not survive the rise of fascism. He died tragically young, at the age of twenty-five, following a beating by fascist thugs. His career as a public intellectual and critic had lasted a mere seven years. Yet in this time, Gobetti had worked tirelessly to popularize and develop his radical liberal perspective. He had gathered around him an impressive array of talented people. He had created his own publishing house and overseen a variety of books and journals in cultural and historical criticism. Above all, he had played a significant role in stimulating the early antifascist movement in Italy. Later, his writings and activities were recalled as a direct inspiration to many of the communists, liberals, and socialists active in the antifascist Resistance in the 1930s and ‘40s. Key figures in Italian intellectual life, such as the Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci, the postwar political philosopher, Norberto Bobbio, or the writer and artist, Carlo Levi, drew from him a range of insights that later would be central to their own ideas. As one commentator has argued, Gobetti’s “legacy was perhaps the single most important component in the subsequent attempt to renew the liberal tradition in light of the fascist experience.”2 In recent decades, too, Italians have had recourse to Gobetti’s lesson on renewing liberty as the exposure of deeprooted political corruption brought the postwar democratic republic into crisis. Despite the brevity of his career, then, the young torinese remains an inspiration to those seeking to invest their energies in a better, more robust, and transparent political life. A “remarkable figure,” then, certainly in his native country. But a political thinker of “classic” stature? For this accolade, one that invites attention outside the boundaries of his national and historical experience, we need to dig deeper. Such is the purpose of this book. In the remainder of this introduction, I explain how I intend to go about that enterprise. The Politics of Liberal Revolution This book explores the life, thought, and enduring significance of Piero Gobetti. As the title suggests, the book takes as its focus the politics of “liberal revolution”—the heading under which Gobetti presented the arguments that animated him. This focus can be broken down into three fundamental tasks: exegesis, interpretation, and analysis.

INTRODUCTION

3

This volume’s first task is to present Gobetti’s thought in its historical and intellectual environment—the exegesis. Given that Gobetti’s thought is relatively unknown beyond Italy, the immediate context of his ideas, as well as the ideas themselves, need to be set out if he is to be understood at all.3 Gobetti’s liberalism evolved at a time when liberal values were widely disparaged and a fragile parliamentary regime was being overwhelmed. His writing coincides with tremendous social and political upheavals following the First World War: an explosion of industrial militancy and, soon afterwards, the ascendancy of fascism. While contemporary liberals may rest assured that few current democracies are likely to succumb to fascism, for Gobetti and liberals like him, it could not be assumed that liberal values were sufficiently embedded in society to withstand their critics. Thus, his was a liberalism of political struggle, critique, and renewal, not of optimistic speculation or relaxed inquiry. Gobetti charged himself with the task of defending liberalism by redefining it, extending the principle of liberty to engage a society with strong antiliberal tendencies. His arguments were, therefore, those of a militant intellectual, not a legalistic scholar. Furthermore, Gobetti’s revolutionary liberalism was not simply of its time, it was closely directed at his time: at the Italian intellectuals and political figures who dominated it, and at the issues and opportunities that arose in it.4 To understand him, it will be necessary to sketch the central features of the world he inhabited and the figures with whom he struggled: Croce, Salvemini, Gentile, Prezzolini, and Gramsci, for example. While this book is not a complete intellectual biography, with all the detailed historical reconstruction that that label suggests, it does aim to identify and describe the key ideas and events that make Gobetti’s views intelligible.5 In the first instance, then, the title “politics of liberal revolution” directs us to Gobetti’s engagement with historical crisis and the decline of liberal politics in Italy. This volume’s second task is to explain how we are to understand, or interpret, Gobetti’s thought. Gobetti’s self-appointed task was to transform liberalism and open it up to political ideas and movements with which it was typically contrasted, for example, communism. His liberalism is not, therefore, easily classified. Not least, because his explicit aim was, in part, to reclassify it. Indeed, for some readers it may not seem liberal at all. Gobetti belongs, we might say, to that category of entrepreneurial thinkers who seek to rework the “core” concepts of their inherited political values in new and creative ways. Not surprisingly, the thinker himself becomes an ambiguous figure, bearing different and perhaps contradictory ideological accents, and open to a variety of contrasting interpretations.6 The difficulties in classifying Gobetti are visible in his association with, and inspiration


of, liberals, “liberal-socialists,” communists, and others. Consequently, he has been labeled: “liberal,” “revolutionary liberal,” and even “liberal-communist”! Likewise, his association with political figures like Gramsci has led some to completely deny him “genuine” liberal status.7 It is perhaps best, then, not to look for a strictly delineated political philosophy in Gobetti’s work, but instead to evaluate his ideas as an innovation in political ideology. In traversing a wider terrain of thought than a professional philosopher might, Gobetti challenged the parameters of political discourse itself, questioning the “proper” relationship between ideological formations like liberalism and revolutionary socialism. Today, political ideologies are increasingly understood as flexible assemblages of ideas, values, and images of society, rather than as fixed systems of thought based on eternal principles. As Michael Freeden has shown, political ideologies often consist of a range of “core” concepts—such as liberty, equality, or democracy—whose meanings are shaped by further “adjacent” concepts—the market, the working class, or revolution—to which they are invariably attached.8 Conceived that way, we may understand ideologies as complex, constitutively impure discourses “contaminated” by a variety of other “bodies.” Political theorizing might then be understood as a practice that selects and assembles, as well as excludes and disassembles, ideological elements. I think Gobetti can helpfully be understood in Quentin Skinner’s term as an “innovating ideologist,” that is, as someone who wrests “an available moral language to their own ends” while “seeking at the same time to challenge conventional moral beliefs.”9 Gobetti was adamant that he was a liberal and a supporter of the revolutionary workers’ movement. In his view, to be a liberal meant favoring the disruptive desire for emancipation and autonomy, not recoiling from it. This seeming paradox reveals not an uncertainty on Gobetti’s part about his political orientation, but rather a fluidity that lies more generally at the heart of conceptual vocabularies and political ideologies. As we have already suggested, “liberty”— indubitably a key concept in liberal political ideology and philosophy—is open to multiple, contrasting interpretations. Some stress individual or “negative” liberty, while others emphasize a shared, or “positive,” sense of human flourishing. A politics devoted to the cause of liberty is likely to vary according to the wider conceptual associations and practical resonances with which it is pursued. Skinner calls the effort to extend a normative vocabulary “rhetorical redescription” insofar as it transforms the usage of a given vocabulary—in this case, that of liberalism—by extending or retracting the application of key terms, commending things that once might have been condemned and vice versa.10

INTRODUCTION

5

It strikes me that this is a good account of what Gobetti was doing when he sought to extend the language of liberalism, with all its attendant historical associations in Italy, to include the workers’ movement, and also to exclude various elements of the then decaying liberal regime. Of course, “rhetoric” is understood here not in its common, negative sense as manipulative speech that in some way disguises a speaker’s “true” intentions, but rather in the classical, affirmative sense as the effort to persuade an audience by fashioning arguments that might win their adherence and transform their behavior accordingly.11 As I try to show, Gobetti’s task was a distinctively rhetorical one, involving a series of strategies aimed at persuading others that the future of liberalism lay in expanding its meaning beyond the narrow confines within which it had become fatally trapped in postunification Italy. I will sketch the particular strategies that he adopted in the next section, but the rhetorical relationship between Gobetti and his audiences will be a recurring theme throughout the volume. For scholars of political thought, Gobetti’s liberalism may be immediately recognized as being of rather familiar yolk. For, in its general trajectory, it resembles a distinctively continental European tradition of liberalism. Compared with their classic English counterparts, like John Locke and Jeremy Bentham, many European liberals have been uncomfortable with the notion of liberalism as a doctrine of individual rights, based on an empiricist psychology and atomistic social theory.12 Rather, they recognized the manifestly social nature of the individual and sought to reconcile individual liberty with this social nature. Thus, freedom was conceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from unwarranted interference— but more positively, as the realization of certain distinctively human, and social, ends.13 Kant, for example, conceived freedom as rational self-determination, the capacity to live by rules willed by oneself in accordance with reason (and, hence, shared with others), rather than by one’s own personal whims or base desires.14 Likewise, later European liberals sought to conceptualize liberty as a solidaristic creed and not one premised on asocial individuality. Liberalism was not, therefore, a doctrine simply for safeguarding private life—it had a strong public and moral character, too. For European liberal thinkers—and for Gobetti, certainly—the value of liberty could not be separated from the need to install a wider moral order or sense of “faith.” For this reason, European liberalism was often closer to socialism—with its emphasis on mankind’s social character—than was the “classic” English variety.15 But a more solidaristic liberalism also developed in Britain under the “New Liberals” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as in the work of L. T. Hobhouse and T. H. Green.16 Arguably, Gobetti’s emphasis on liberalism as an ethic of liberty echoes the New Liberals’


concerns to expand liberalism as an inclusive ethical framework. Like them, he looked to the rise of socialist movements—but also to the challenge of Marxism, which was greater in Italy than it was in Britain—as evidence of the need for liberals to adjust to new demands for liberty combined with ideas of social justice and the reorganization of systems of production. Just as the New Liberals were influential on the later development of British social democracy, so Gobetti’s liberalism directly inspired the later, Italian tradition of liberal-socialism.17 Yet, as already noted, Gobetti was not a philosopher or a systematic thinker. Although he certainly published a great deal, he died too young to present a fully elaborated political philosophy, if indeed that was ever his intention. His writings consist, to a great extent, of essays or articles on dayto-day political events and figures in Italy, on Italian history and culture, and on revolutionary Russia. As such, they suffer the twin disadvantage of being both too historically situated and—because directed at like-minded intellectuals—often too “specialist” for popular consumption. The interpretive task of this volume, then, is to present the key elements of his ideas—in particular, his political ideas—in such a way as to render their wider resonance and significance clear. Its emphasis, therefore, is rather more on Gobetti’s success in reappropriating the language of liberalism—persuading others to think and act in his terms—and somewhat less on demonstrating the completeness or coherence of a theoretical system. Although, of course, a proper evaluation will rightly require consideration of these issues. As we shall see, Gobetti was more than just an ethical liberal in the mold of the British New Liberals. His claim to be a “revolutionary” liberal set him apart from that tradition and its optimistic, evolutionary tendencies. In the context of the rise of communism, fascism, and the collapse of the liberal state, Gobetti’s support for the revolutionary workers’ movement gave his thought an altogether different ideological accent from what we traditionally expect in a self-proclaimed liberal. This, inevitably, is the result of a rhetorical practice that aims to transform a moral vocabulary and the conceptual associations made within it. In this second respect, then, the “politics of liberal revolution” refers us to Gobetti’s efforts at rhetorical innovation in the ideology of liberalism. This book’s third task is analytical, in this case, to question the contemporary relevance of Gobetti’s ideas. In particular, I am interested in posing the question of how the theme of conflict can be understood in the light of Gobetti’s work. Undoubtedly, Gobetti’s writings were marked by the conflictual context in which they originated—both the material conflict of day-to-day politics and the tensions between interwoven Italian traditions of political realism and liberal idealism. In more settled times, such

INTRODUCTION

7

a concoction might seem out of place. But contemporary philosophers are increasingly drawn to writers of the interwar period, in whose work the contingencies of political and moral life are starkly exposed. While there are many reasons for this, I need only state here that some current philosophers question the notions that liberal values are founded on the incontestable ground of reason or are universally applicable. Instead, the Western world is steadily more conscious that liberal values such as individual freedom, autonomy, self-realization, and so forth are historical and geographical contingencies. Reflection on this issue has led some to argue for a more “agonistic” political theory, one in which conflict between opposed values and beliefs are not so much contained within some overarching “normative consensus,” as they are constitutive of political life itself. However unsystematic and incomplete, Gobetti’s thought presents an early, liberal form of this agonistic argument—comparable with some of his contemporaries who were also reasserting the conflictual dimension of politics, like the conservative jurist, Carl Schmitt. Unlike such conservatives, however, Gobetti’s emphasis on political conflict underscored a pluralist vision of politics, one that saw conflictual dialogue as the lifeblood of modern freedom. It is this that has secured his enduring appeal for contemporary critics of arbitrary restrictions on public choice and decision-making. Without seeking to overstate the commonalities between Gobetti’s context and the current age, I explore how—and investigate to what extent—his conception of liberal revolution may be instructive to “antifoundationalist” thinkers today. In this final sense, then, the “politics of liberal revolution” is an orientation toward the agonistic dimension of Gobetti’s liberalism, a dimension that resonates with contemporary concerns in political theory. Of course, a book such as this can only map the surface of a thinker’s innovations—bringing into focus the ideas and events that open up initial questions, and tracing some of the scholarly footsteps that have already sought to answer them. An initial glance, however, tells us that Gobetti’s enduring influence does not lie in developing a set of carefully formulated resolutions to contemporary social and political problems. Rather, in keeping with this book’s analytical task, I believe that the questions posed by Gobetti’s life and thought are sufficiently illuminating for further reflection of a different variety. My interest in Gobetti and his ideas stems to a great extent from the way he seemed to challenge the conservative, often reactionary, tendency in liberalism. To be sure, his world is not ours today, with its myriad debates on postmodernism, cultural difference, and wars on “terror,” to name just a few of liberalism’s current challenges. Nevertheless, Gobetti’s effort to reinvest liberalism with a sense of “the political”


chimes with the increasingly widespread sense that rational foundationalism is not the answer to the dilemmas of modern liberal democracy. As we shall see, Gobetti’s politics of liberal revolution are undoubtedly problematic from a contemporary perspective, and it is not my intention to propose we follow him in all his choices. But his effort to reformulate liberalism at the moment of its most profound dislocation is, I will suggest, an example of the kind of progressive political reimagining of “liberty” that liberals—and many others—today would be wise to adopt.18 Chapter Outline: Gobetti’s Rhetorical Strategies This book consists of seven chapters, the first five of which concentrate on Gobetti’s ideas in their intellectual and political context. The final two reflect on his thought at a distance from his immediate environment. As we shall see, Gobetti was closely involved in the debates and events of the postwar period (or dopoguerra) in Italy, and so to make sense of his views, we need to interweave exegesis with an ongoing account of the crisis of liberal politics in Italy and the rise of authoritarian reaction. Gobetti’s journalism traced the events of the day and reflected on the leading individuals and political forces in play. There is, as a consequence, no systematic political philosophy to speak of, but instead, a series of intriguing observations and asides, engaging portraits, and scathing polemics that throw up a variety of philosophical commentaries and investigations. The diffuse and dislocated nature of his writings was, doubtless, a result of his youthful enthusiasm—expressing a voracious but unsystematic intellectual inquisitiveness that brought him into fleeting contact with a range of issues and thinkers—but it also mirrored the unstable environment around him. As the first chapter explains, Gobetti’s context was marked by a general ideological disaggregation, whereby old modes of political thought and action were being rapidly supplanted by competing, alternative formations. His self-appointed role in this context, as it so often is for modern intellectuals, was to serve as a bridge between the present and the future. For these reasons, each chapter may be understood as an investigation into one aspect of the ideological environment with which Gobetti was engaged, either directly or as an inspiration to others. I will now outline the chapters in terms of the formation and development of what I will call Gobetti’s “rhetorical strategies.” Chapter 1 takes, as its central theme, the fortunes of Italian liberalism up to the end of the First World War. Gobetti’s thought is best understood if first we appreciate the widespread sense that Italy’s postunification liberal project was now exhausted. In rhetorical terms, we can understand

INTRODUCTION

9

the postwar crisis of 1919–20, in Lloyd Bitzer’s words, as the “situation” or “meaning-context” within which Gobetti’s reasoning makes sense,19 for Gobetti’s cues came originally from thinkers who wanted to replace the liberal regime with a more edifying and unifying politics. My aim here, in particular, is to survey the period leading up to the postwar crisis years when liberal hegemony collapsed. This created an “exigency” (as Bitzer has put it), or generalized problem, to which an intervention was felt by many to be not only necessary but also desirable. I also focus on the ideas of two leading influences on Gobetti’s thought: Gaetano Salvemini and Benedetto Croce. Both exemplified important points of reference in the critique of liberal institutions made by Italians of all political beliefs, one indicating the empirical failings of the Italian state, the other highlighting the need for a forward-looking, spiritual readjustment among Italians. Having set the initial historical and intellectual scene, Chapter 2 turns to Gobetti himself, focusing in particular on his early writings.20 The central theme here is philosophical idealism, a powerful source of new thinking amongst many young intellectuals seeking a national cultural renewal, but one with no predefined political program of its own. Although Gobetti later revised and clarified his beliefs and political commitments, this “early” period shows us how cultural renewal and political reform were, for him, joined together from the start—placing him outside the dominant conservative-liberal ideological systems. Gobetti associated himself with critical strains of thought, such as those of Croce and Salvemini, and began to draw together many of those currents among young intellectuals through his publications, achieving local notoriety as a radical liberal cultural organizer. Rhetorically speaking, this chapter outlines Gobetti’s first foray as a public intellectual seeking his audience. That audience was relatively narrow—“particular” rather than “universal,” as Perelman puts it21—but it provided Gobetti with the basis of what has been called an “ideal auditor.” Gobetti projected an image of what he wanted his audience to become: the educators of a new, liberal ruling class.22 The theme of Chapter 3 is the powerful influence upon Gobetti of the Turin communist movement led by the Sardinian intellectual and political activist, Antonio Gramsci. The crucial event here is the Turin factory occupations of September 1920, an event that proved to Gobetti the vital importance of the workers’ movement in any project of cultural and political renewal. Gramsci’s role in the factory council struggles deeply impressed Gobetti, and decisively aligned him behind the industrial proletariat as the leading social force in a future state. The influence of Gramsci on Gobetti did not extend, however, to finding a new proletarian audience for his views so much as helping him find his argumentative ground. In classical rhetoric, the “invention” of arguments is a fundamental stage


in the preparation of a persuasive discourse. For Gobetti, Gramsci’s vision of the industrial proletariat as a cultural vanguard to replace the bourgeoisie offered a living model of a disciplined and combative ruling classin-waiting. However, Gobetti shared none of Gramsci’s enthusiasm for the factory as a practical example of a new, “organic” state. Indeed, it was the failure of the occupations to issue in full-scale socialist revolution that eventually led Gobetti to formulate his own project of revolutionary liberalism. Yet the proletariat would remain the central agent in Gobetti’s vision of a radical reconstitution of the Italian state. Chapter 4 takes, as its focus, Gobetti’s account of liberalism as a revolutionary project, expounded in the journal he began editing in 1922, Rivoluzione Liberale. Formulated just as the fascist movement23 began to expand its basis of support throughout Italy, and as the liberal governments faltered and invited Mussolini to step in as prime minister, the project of liberal revolution must be understood as an effort to urgently recompose liberal values in order to stimulate wavering liberals. The distinctive rhetorical element here was Gobetti’s argument that the term “liberal” be extended to include the working class, an argument akin to the trope in rhetorical theory known as “paradiastole,” whereby a given term is redefined to embrace ideas once considered opposed to it.24 This device ordered a series of innovative claims in Gobetti’s project: the idea of liberalism as an emancipatory ethic, the failure of Italian liberal politics since the nineteenth century, the centrality of struggle to an efficacious politics, and the desire for a new ruling class drawn, in part, from the elite of the workers’ movement. Such claims aimed to sway liberal supporters away from the prevailing tide of reaction and toward a more progressive alliance with the Left. In making them, Gobetti drew creatively upon authoritative sources in Italian political thought, particularly from the liberal economist, Luigi Einaudi, and the conservative theorist of elites, Gaetano Mosca. The theme of Chapter 5 is Gobetti’s engagement with fascism. It is impossible to fully grasp Gobetti’s project of liberal revolution without taking into account his intransigent hostility toward fascism. For him, fascism revealed the intrinsic failings of the liberal regime—its tendency to compromise and suppress political conflict. As such, fascism stood as the culmination of Italian political tradition—not as its proponents (and some of its opponents) claimed, a departure from it. It represented, as he put it so memorably, the “autobiography of a nation.” This “metonymic” reading of fascism—where one element symbolizes and so connects a whole variety of others25—tallied with his own denunciation of Italy’s liberal politics prior to the rise of Mussolini. Gobetti’s resolute antifascism was novel in the context of many liberals’ willingness to “go along” with fascism in order to weaken the threat of revolutionary socialism. Yet it was precisely

INTRODUCTION

11

this positioning outside mainstream liberalism that condemned Gobetti and his supporters to political impotency, since he was unable to unify liberal opposition. Ultimately, the divisions among antifascist opposition from all quarters permitted Mussolini to step up his authoritarian program. By 1926, parliamentary liberalism was dead. Tragically, so, too, was Piero Gobetti. Chapter 6 has, as its theme, the influence of Gobetti’s thought on later Italian thinkers. Outside the context of the post–First World War, Gobetti’s “political liberalism” was received as a collection of interventions that could be crafted in different ways for different purposes, not as a fully fledged philosophy. In this chapter, I survey the way these interventions were taken up and developed by a selection of notable intellectuals: Gramsci, who picked up on Gobettian themes during his years in prison; the liberal-socialist and antifascist, Carlo Rosselli; founding members of the radical liberal Partito d’Azione (Action Party) like Guido Calogero, who followed Rosselli in expanding liberalism to include socialist aspirations; Benedetto Croce, who had inspired Gobetti and later came to emphasize a similar, but not identical, sense of liberty as a cultural-political ideal; and, finally, the legal scholar and democratic theorist, Norberto Bobbio, who, in post–World War Two Italy, fashioned liberal-socialist goals around a “realist” democratic philosophy. Each of these thinkers, in their own ways, transmitted Gobettian themes to a wider public and helped his ideas to remain in play as a critical inspiration in postfascist Italy. The relevance of Gobetti’s thought to issues in contemporary political theory is the focus of Chapter 7. His association of liberalism with political struggle, I argue, though controversial for contemporary liberals nevertheless expressed a pluralistic objective—that is, to open up politics to conflict amongst social forces. As I have already noted, this objective converges with recent “agonistic” political theories emphasizing conflict over consensus as the defining trait of “the political.” Gobetti’s thought therefore resonates with some of the antifoundationalist dimensions of contemporary political theory and sets the tone for a “combative” democratic theory. But if Gobetti is to be congratulated for his prescience, it nevertheless remains to point out what is lacking in his thought, at least as far as his comparison with contemporary theory is concerned. The absence of a conception of democratic citizenship and Gobetti’s subsequent emphasis on the primacy of elites in mediating politics necessarily limit the appeal of his revolutionary liberalism. Like other thinkers of his generation, Bobbio has pointed out, Gobetti was inspired by the power of social forces, but believed more in the “politics of intellectuals” than in mass political action.26 But in an age more inclined than was his to the principle of democratic equality, this


inclination now seems, inevitably, to render his arguments about liberty rather one-sided and hence less persuasive. Of course, Gobetti’s thought cannot, by itself, be expected to answer all the questions that arise in contemporary democratic theory. Yet his brief, inspirational example is remarkable for its power to help us raise them. In this respect, I will suggest, the politics of liberal revolution retain a vitality today, not as an all-encompassing answer to dilemmas that face Western capitalist democracies, but as a provocation to unsettle us and remind us that the banner of liberty should be wielded neither uncritically nor complacently.

1

Liberalism and the Italian Crisis

G

obetti’s public career coincided with the dramatic crisis and collapse of the liberal state in Italy.1 By the end of the First World War (1914–18), Italian liberalism had completely lost its hegemony, dominating neither political values nor the course of events. Within ten years, parliamentary democracy had been crushed by Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, political dissent and organized opposition were outlawed, and a totalitarian state was under construction. Gobetti did not live to see all of these desperate events unfold. But he had remarkable foresight in diagnosing the weaknesses of Italian liberal politics and the illiberal consequences of the fascist quest for power. Unlike many, mostly conservative, liberals who scurried to support Mussolini assuming they could temporarily take advantage of his popularity to restore the prestige of liberal institutions, Gobetti conceived fascism as the consequence of a deeper historical failure of liberalism to fashion Italian political culture around the ideal of liberty. The crisis of the state, in his view, was intrinsically tied to the misfortunes of Italian liberalism. By way of an initial contextualization of Gobetti’s thought, this chapter discusses the difficulties that assailed the liberal state and Italian political culture up to the end of the First World War. It surveys the various criticisms of the regime that emerged prior to the war and that Gobetti himself later took up and refashioned. In particular, we consider the “empirical” critique associated with the independent socialist deputy, Gaetano Salvemini, and the “philosophical” critique initiated by the Neapolitan philosopher, Benedetto Croce. As we shall see, in different ways, both figures underscored the insufficiency of liberal parliamentary politics to cultivate a stable social order. Salvemini developed a powerful analysis of the intrinsically illiberal practices of the state, its unbalanced socioeconomic foundations, and the need for wholesale democratic reform. Croce, on the other

14

PIERO GOBETTI AND THE POLITICS OF LIBERAL REVOLUTION

hand, led a revival in philosophical idealism that aimed to restore a sense of moral purpose or “faith” in human freedom over and above the tawdry character of democratic politics. As we shall see later, in the aftermath of the war, the young Gobetti synthesized these two influences into a politics of radical renewal designed to recast liberalism and reconstitute Italian political culture. The Dilemmas of the Liberal State The political unification of Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century had been imagined by many of its proponents to herald the achievement of national liberty. The new Italian state—forged from the fragments of the peninsula’s various kingdoms and foreign-backed authorities—was to be a modern constitutional order based on the principle of individual liberty and national solidarity. In the view of its celebrated ideologue, Giuseppe Mazzini, the Risorgimento (or resurgence) of Italy was to have been an “integral revolution,” unifying the country both politically and morally, delivering both national self-government and individual liberty. Given the hostility toward unification from the existing political authorities in Italy, as well as from the Catholic Church, Mazzini’s liberal nationalism set out a radical vision to create a whole new civilization united in thought and action. This involved the education of citizens into a modern “people” inspired by a common faith in “humanity,” that is, by a patriotic sense of duty and common purpose within which to frame their new found liberties: “Your Liberty,” Mazzini sermoned to his Italian audience, “will be sacred so long as it develops under the ruling influence of the Idea of Duty and of Faith in the common perfectibility.”2 But “liberal Italy,” as the regime following unification in 1861 is commonly called, was not an unqualified success either for liberals or nationalists of Mazzinian persuasion. Unity was secured, true, but through military opportunism and political compromise (the latter credited to the artful Piedmontese politician, Count Camillo Cavour), not by a mass popular uprising motivated by a reawakened “national spirituality.” To the disappointment of many of its supporters, Mazzini included, the Italian state—a constitutional monarchy, not a republic, with a very restricted democratic franchise—exhibited neither national unity nor a widespread enjoyment of liberty. It has been common in historical commentary to underline the failings of liberal Italy as in some way “preparatory” for the arrival of fascism. This, as more recent critics point out, is certainly to underestimate the very real difficulties the regime faced and perhaps even to understate its often-significant achievements.3 But it is nevertheless true that in key respects—and

LIBERALISM AND THE ITALIAN CRISIS

15

in the minds of many of its erstwhile supporters—Italy’s state and society diverged from what by most standards might be understood as a modern liberal order. It lacked an economy with a strong entrepreneurial middle class; there was little in the way of a robust and independent civil society sustained by liberal values and capable of holding the state to account; and the parliamentary political system persistently oscillated between reaction and elite compromise in order to ward off hostility from the wider public. Far from constructing an apparatus of “public” institutions balanced against an autonomous “private” realm, the liberal state seemed either unduly subservient to particular interests or overbearingly interfering and coercive. Let us consider these dilemmas in more depth. In the mid-nineteenth century (and for many decades thereafter), Italy was an overwhelmingly agricultural economy with a very small agrariancapitalist sector in the North.4 Unification created an expansive, internal free market just as its liberal proponents had expected, removing local customs and tariffs, redistributing church properties, and centralizing the tax system. But older patterns of land ownership and, by consequence, class hierarchies still prevailed. In the North, professional farmers employed waged-labor on irrigated land, but they were heavily reliant on foreign markets to sell their specialized products. In Central Italy, where the climate and soil was less favorable, there existed a “share-cropping” system in which peasants rented a strip of land and returned half its produce to the aristocrat landowner—there was little in the way of capital investment, and the economy was vulnerable to international competition. In the deep South—Italy’s arid, mountainous Mezzogiorno, which included the islands of Sardinia and Sicily—there remained the ancient latifundia, estates owned by absentee landlords, run by local middlemen, and sublet or rented to peasants, or worked upon by day-laborers. Here, peasants typically lived at subsistence level and were brutally exploited by their masters who had little interest in developing the land or improving the wretched lives of their tenants. Capitalist modernization came relatively late to modern Italy. Arguably, it did not properly embed itself until the “economic miracle” of 1950s. Prior to that, Italy’s bourgeoisie remained small, located exclusively in the north of the country and barely able to compete with the stronger capitalist economies of Europe. Faced with intense competition in the 1880s, as well as labor unrest, the North’s protectionist lobby succeeded in persuading parliament to impose a general tariff in addition to a duty on wheat. This sparked a disastrous tariff war with France, hastening the withdrawal of foreign investment and instigating an agricultural crisis that hit the southern peasantry hard. It was not until the late 1890s that a manufacturing economy began to substitute the traditional textile and

16


food industries. However, even this startling economic upsurge—which brought heavy industry such as metal making and chemicals, engineering, and car manufacture into Italy, as well as an industrial proletariat—was heavily reliant on foreign supplies and state financing. The nationalization of the railways in 1905 and state subsidies and contracts for shipbuilding, for example, contributed to an impressive, if localized, industrial “take off.” Yet, as became increasingly obvious, this economic advance left the South sliding, inexorably, into relative decline. These economic circumstances explain, in part, the relative absence of a “modern” independent and entrepreneurial middle class in Italy that might serve as a social basis of support for liberal values.5 With little natural resources, low levels of capital investment, a large class of conservative landlords and rentiers, and state-subsidized industrial expansion, the liberal doctrine of free trade—a doctrine held in earnest by many of the new state’s political class—had little opportunity to genuinely prosper as either a practice or a public philosophy. As one commentator argues, the Italian bourgeoisie lacked an inclusive unifying principle based on a common economic outlook. Instead, Italy’s bourgeois classes remained divided, focused more on their own immediate or sectoral advantage than on a global vision of the world.6 Bourgeois hegemony, as Gramsci later argued, was therefore weak, and crucially dependent upon political compromise with Southern landowners who rejected any progressive, modernizing ideology.7 Likewise, Italian civil society was not infused with a strong sense of independence and free initiative in the classical liberal sense of a society of self-reliant individuals. For the most part, the country’s new citizens were peasants: poor, malnourished, badly housed, uneducated, and illiterate, speaking mostly regional dialect rather than a common language. Family, locality, and sheer survival were their primary concerns, not modern civil and political liberties. The new state was simply a further burden of taxation for this class. Without the official support of the Catholic Church— whose declared hostility toward both the state and to modern liberalism deprived the new order of a powerful source of common sentiment—the wider public often seemed, to many liberals, a hostile and dangerous force and was regarded by the political elite with both fear and contempt. Anxiety about “subversives” and recurrent peasant rioting led to the frequent imposition of authority by a police force unmoved by the concept of civil liberties.8 Brigandage and popular resistance to the authorities continued in the South in the 1860s and ‘70s, as it had done in previous regimes, and was countered with lengthy, costly, and violent military excursions to maintain law and order.9 In the early 1890s, during the tariff war with France, and again in 1898, public disorder in the South (and, in the second


17

instance, in the North, too), as a consequence of the high prices of food, was quelled with violent repression. In these conditions, Italian civil society, such as it was, was hardly characterized by a robust liberal culture in the first decades of the regime. For the most part, “liberalism” was associated with “monarchism,” implying an attachment to the ideal of national unity and the institutions of the new, if beleaguered, state. This was likely to include very conservative individuals as well as those of a more “progressive” nature. Given that most people were illiterate and lacked the franchise, “public opinion” essentially consisted in the views of a restricted social elite. In the state’s early decades, the press had a small circulation and was mostly local rather than national. Newspapers, such as there were, represented the views of the politicians who typically funded (and wrote) them, and were primarily a means to influence other politicians. Informal café society was small and insufficient to effectively mobilize “critical” public opinion.10 Without an economically and culturally autonomous ruling class with a strong, principled attachment to civil and political freedoms, it is perhaps no surprise that the political system that emerged in the wake of Italian unification adequately failed to resemble the image of an effective liberal constitutional order, or at least the image inherited from the models of France and Great Britain. Under the “Albertine” constitution, the monarchy was granted considerable authority over parliament and, in the early years, the Sovereign’s prerogative was frequently asserted, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. As parliament increased its influence in the 1870s, however, its own deficiencies became increasingly obvious. The narrow franchise was slowly extended, but still reached only a small proportion of the country by the end of the century. With no formal political parties to speak of, parliament was dominated, in its early years, more by the intrigues of small elite groupings than by the clash of social interests. The political collapse, in 1876, of the “historic Right” (destra storica), the grouping of broadly conservative deputies who subscribed to the Cavourian tradition of state-building, and its replacement by the more liberal “Left” ushered in a new phase of elite politics. Under the leadership of Agostino Depretis, the practice of “transformism” (trasformismo) became a new art of governmental compromise, involving “buying off ” parliamentary enemies with offers of rewards, and encouraging deputies to abandon principle and switch sides by means of bribes. The parliamentary Left were, in large part, of Southern origin, middle class rather than aristocrats, and more interested than their northern counterparts in furthering the interests of their constituents than postponing such interests for the sake of some more noble enterprise of state-building.11 While the Left were arguably more inclined to reforms (they extended the franchise and funded various

18


public works), they are often associated with a degeneration of parliament into a system of unstable alliances. Deputies were increasingly regarded as corrupt, engaged in fixing elections, and in hoc to local interests that they sought to impress upon government.12 Such practices further encouraged the view that liberal government functioned at a distance from the lives of the majority of its citizens, and did so in the interests of a restricted collection of unscrupulous politicians. On this brief account, the term “liberal Italy” seems something of a misnomer. With neither an economy, a civil society, nor a state that can be said to be unambiguously oriented toward the expansion of individual liberty for all its citizens, we can see why commentators readily trace the origins of fascism to the weaknesses of the antecedent liberal regime. This is so in two senses. First, the public realm of government and parliament was too distant from the experiences of its citizens, frequently imposing order upon society against its manifest will. The classical liberal principle of “government by consent” was never, therefore, satisfactorily established. In the view of the historian Roberto Vivarelli, for example, liberty was “voluntarily sacrificed” by the state when it was confronted with opposition or social unrest.13 This tendency to reaction, he continues, created the conditions for a countertradition of popular discontent and violent revolt, laying the foundations for fascist authoritarianism.14 In a second sense, too, the liberal principle of impartial government was regularly abandoned: the public realm was overly penetrated by the private interests of specific sectors of society, such as industry or the influence of local elites in parliament, selectively “absorbing” some interests while excluding others. Such was the view that many critics of democracy held of the regime following the rise of the historic Left. In the late 1890s, for instance, divisions emerged between conservatives and liberals over the status of parliament in political governance.15 Conservatives, notably Sidney Sonnino, recommended diminishing the role of parliament in public life, returning politics to the prerogative of the Crown.16 Sonnino’s efforts failed, but they revealed the tensions and tendency to antidemocratic reaction within the liberal political class. However we conceive the impact of its dilemmas, liberal Italy was clearly unable to establish a satisfactory “balance” between public and private realms, that is, a stable separation of political institutions and societal interests that would enable them to mutually cooperate within the terms of a broad consensus. Liberalism, the dominant ideology of the political class (but not of the nation), had generated a state but it could not fabricate support for it without contravening its own principles. The unified national “subject” remained a ghostly absence, haunting Italy’s political culture and institutions, a persistently returning reminder of a minimally achieved


19

aspiration.17 Eventually, the precarious interpenetration of public and private realms would collapse under the pressure of postwar discontent. Yet we must not ignore one of the major efforts to reestablish a modern liberal articulation of state and society prior to the First World War: namely, the governments of Giovanni Giolitti. Giolitti and the Politics of Compromise Throughout the 1880s and ‘90s, the Italian state often seemed on the verge of collapse, overwhelmed, as it was, by numerous problems of public disorder and undermined by its own tendency to overreact and worsen the situation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, a new style of politics emerged under the premiership of the wily Piedmontese, Giovanni Giolitti. Sonnino’s recommendation to weaken parliament in favor of a more authoritarian state had eventually been discredited following the Pelloux government’s failure, in 1899, to set in place repressive public order legislation. Liberal deputies had rallied to defend parliament from General Pelloux’s efforts to sidestep their influence and his measures were rejected. Giolitti came to power, soon after, with an alternative, more progressive agenda designed to compromise with, rather than repress, forces of opposition outside the liberal establishment. Although, as we shall see, much maligned by his critics (Gobetti included), Giolitti—who held the premiership regularly between 1903 and 1914—aimed to develop a more modern, liberal democratic politics in which the state remained broadly impartial in relation to sectoral interests.18 Under Giolitti, Italy benefited from years of stable, progressive government and economic growth, paving the way for a form of mass politics that resembled contemporary liberal democracy.19 Giolitti’s objective was to seek compromise with both the socialist and Catholic opposition then beginning to enter politics. The Italian Socialist Party (Partito socialista Italiano, or PSI) had been formed in 1892. Under the leadership of Filippo Turati, the PSI had adopted a radical program broadly based on Marxist principles, taking its cue from the German Social Democratic Party (SPD).20 Marxism was then understood primarily in “positivist” terms, that is, as a scientific doctrine of the economic “laws” of history, predicting the inevitable crisis and collapse of capitalist society and its substitution by socialism. This crude, “vulgarized” version of Marx’s ideas had been promoted by the SPD’s Karl Kautsky and became the popular doctrine of most of Europe’s socialist parties.21 In fact, the PSI was itself a diverse mixture of various currents of antidemocratic revolutionaries, republican democrats, and trade union

20


reformists. Turati’s socialism was itself less Marxist than an “evolutionary” reformism focused on achieving “intermediary” objectives such as universal suffrage and a compulsory workers’ insurance scheme, rather than planning a revolutionary assault.22 At its sixth congress in 1900, the party divided its program into “maximum” and “minimum” demands. While the former envisaged the eventual abolition of private property and the creation of a socialist society, the latter focused the party on its intermediary demands: the vote, nationalization of the railways, an anticolonial policy. For Turati and the reformists, this division seemed rational given the party’s success in the administrative elections in 1898, and then in the general election where the Left, as a whole, increased its seats from sixty-seven to ninety-six.23 Giolitti’s strategy was to legitimize the PSI’s basic concerns and encourage its deputies to move from the margins into the center of parliamentary political life. Under his premiership, the government undertook important social reforms, including welfare measures, and set about ensuring that trade union leaders were officially consulted. Under Giolitti, municipal governments run by socialists took on significant functions in running local services. Importantly, the government largely stayed out of industrial disputes, permitting workers and employers to come to their own agreements (and consequently increasing the number of strikes). In 1903, and again in 1911, Giolitti even invited socialist leaders to enter government. While the offers were declined on both occasions, for reformist socialists with memories of the previous decade, it was evidence of a remarkable turnaround in the style of liberal government. Indeed, in 1912 the government introduced near-universal male suffrage. Giolitti’s “system” also extended to the large, moderate Catholic constituency that was increasingly anxious to participate in government despite the traditional hostility of the church.24 Under Giolitti, Catholic deputies were brought into the parliamentary coalition in return for concessions, and conservative “clerico-moderates” began to support liberal candidates in elections in order to keep out the socialists. Gradually, Catholic voters and, to some extent, the church, came to reconcile themselves to involvement in—if not the principle of—liberal democratic institutions. After the Libyan war of 1911, which split the PSI and led to the overthrow of its reformist leadership by its “revolutionary” wing the following year, Giolitti came to rely heavily on Catholic votes to sustain his majority. For all its inclusivity and modern, reforming zeal, Giolitti’s governments nevertheless failed to win over a sufficiently broad social basis to liberal politics. Giolitti’s objective was to “absorb” and hence neutralize potential parliamentary enemies, not hand them power. He did this primarily by the trusted method of “transformism,” that is, by forging


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compromises between elites such as trade unionists, reformist socialists, and moderate Catholics. While this produced temporary alliances, it failed to win over their supporters to parliamentary politics. Indeed, under Giolitti’s rule, interference in local politics, and particularly in elections, continued unabated. Furthermore, his success in incorporating socialists alarmed the middle classes and the industrial bourgeoisie, as well as liberal deputies. Despite Giolitti’s efforts, state and society—“legal” Italy and “real” Italy—remained largely unreconciled. As the liberal-democrat deputy, Giovanni Amendola, put it in 1910: “Italy as it is today does not please us.” Our ideal of public and private life; our intellectual, moral and political values are not those of the men who today constitute the ruling class; these values remain at a considerably more elevated level.25

Giolittismo soon came to serve as a derogatory term amongst his critics, expressing a widespread public contempt for a style of politics that seemed, ultimately, to satisfy no one. By 1914, the year before Italy entered the Great War, parliamentary support for the Piedmontese prime minister had collapsed and he resigned. More seriously, however, was the rising tide of antigiolittismo (anti-Giolitti-ism) in society at large, that is, the diffuse sense of disgust at liberal parliamentary politics, as such, and the growing tendency, visible on both the Left and Right of the political spectrum, to look for alternative visions of social and political unity to replace the liberal state.26 Before we consider how this anti-giolittismo crystallized into popular opposition to the liberal regime, let us first turn our attentions to two of the key figures of the period whose own critical outlook on liberal Italy would inspire the young Gobetti. Although they represented the contrasting strands of philosophical thought—namely, positivism and idealism— both Salvemini and Croce supplied intellectual ballast for those dissatisfied, both politically and philosophically, with liberal politics.27 Neither was in fact antiliberal (Croce eventually helped found the Italian Liberal Party), but their respective critiques of liberal practices and ideas offered powerful analyses that would serve as important points of reference for those, like Gobetti, who hoped to initiate a radical renewal of Italian public life. Empirical Critique: Gaetano Salvemini Born in the southeastern region of Puglia, Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957) followed a distinctive tradition of meridionalisti (southerners) in dedicating himself to exposing the deep inequalities and severe hardships of

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the southern Italian peasantry.28 His meridionalismo entailed a federalist democratic politics from which perspective he denounced the practices of transformism and the structural dominance of northern interests that it supported. Only a wholesale reformation of the Italian state, he argued, could genuinely extend liberty to the subjugated peasantry who made up its vast majority. Originally a member of the PSI, Salvemini left its ranks in 1910, disenchanted with both its reformist and revolutionary wings. Neither, in his view, seriously grasped the central socioeconomic problems facing Italy nor offered a strategy for their resolution. For Salvemini, the “Southern Question” (questione meridionale) was the fundamental problem that socialists were yet to understand. Their focus was primarily on the industrial North and its proletariat, and their knowledge of the South was typically simplistic and often racist.29 As we have noted, Turati’s socialism was guided by an evolutionary outlook that identified industrialization with progress. The problems of the “backward,” undeveloped South barely figured in this schema. But, Salvemini argued, the economic and social underdevelopment of the South, its semi-feudal relations dominated by absent landlords (the latifondi), and their oppression of the majority of peasants was utterly central to wider national politics.30 Unification in the previous century was founded upon a union of interests between the northern bourgeoisie and southern landowners, the latter supporting unity on condition that the peasantry remained under their control. As a consequence, both economic development and political freedom for the peasantry was ruled out. Furthermore, Giolitti’s supposedly progressive governments were based on forging compromises with the industrialists and unions in the North. In the South, however, lay Giolitti’s parliamentary support base with its powerful, but conservative, landowning electorate—this ruled out any extension of reform, and hence, any development of the peasantry into an autonomous social class. Northern economic and social advance therefore was—and continued to be—secured through southern underdevelopment. Moreover, the government’s protectionist policies and the duty on grain ensured the southern peasantry paid the price for the success of northern industry. The widespread poverty, illiteracy, lack of education, and intermittent rebelliousness of the Southern population were, complained Salvemini, all consequences of this politically sustained dependency.31 Salvemini formulated an independent democratic politics through his paper, L’Unitá (1911–20), winning widespread respect for his sturdy, moral honesty, and distinctively “empirical” style of critique, that is, his deliberate focus on concrete problems and issues (or problemismo). In this, he was deeply influenced by a positivist tradition he encountered as a student and,


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later, as professor of history at the University of Florence.32 Although not a philosophical proponent of positivism, his empirical critique cut through much of the verbal obscurity in political life, especially the abstractions of the PSI’s crude Marxism, and this earned him a powerful reputation as a straight-speaking critic of liberal politics. The centralizing liberal state, he argued, was “obliged to base itself on corrupt and fictitious parliamentary majorities, representing only a minimal part of the population, who from day to day sell their adhesion to the anti-constitutional policy and, in exchange, obtain duties on grain, protective tariffs, the rewards of the mercantile navy, immunity for banking crimes, etc.”33 This was the sickness of a state that had fallen under the control of a “handful of profiteers and parasites,” forced to dish out “bloody repression to defend itself from the malcontents” who could not participate in the dishonorable trade-offs between executive and parliament. Thus, Salvemini routinely and bitterly castigated Giolitti’s government for its corrupt electoral practices in the South—famously labeling him the “minister of the underworld”34—and promoted, amongst other things, an antiprotectionist campaign, school reform, and the extension of the suffrage.35 Salvemini’s critique of Giolitti and giolittismo placed him outside “official” party politics and appealed to a wide range of radical opinion. Essentially a social democrat, his exposé of the liberal state’s inadequacies nevertheless appealed strongly to antiliberals such as syndicalists and revolutionaries who, unlike the PSI leadership, opposed protectionism and the forging of parliamentary compromises to sustain a “parasitic” bourgeoisie.36 In the view of the syndicalist, Arturo Labriola, for instance, liberal parliamentarism served only to absorb the working class into the defense of a backward, underdeveloped capitalism.37 When the PSI was taken over by its revolutionary “maximalist” wing in 1912, its leadership even endorsed Salvemini’s views and invited him to take up editorship of its key newspaper, Avanti! (Salvemini declined the offer and the job went to the rising star, Benito Mussolini). But, in general, Salvemini’s politics were too intransigent to be effective in a directly party political context. Viewing the world often in simple, dichotomous terms, he succeeded, however, in exercising a morally critical, rather than effectively political, influence, thus contributing to an intensifying dissatisfaction with parliamentary politics.38 Philosophical Critique: Benedetto Croce If Salvemini exposed the empirical failings of the liberal state, Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), on the other hand, undertook a more self-consciously “spiritual” task. The philosopher, resident in Naples, exercised an enormous influence over intellectual life for almost half a century—a virtual

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“hegemony” of his own, as one scholar has put it.39 Rejecting positivism for, in his view, its reduction of human activity to crude facts and law-like regularities, Croce spearheaded an idealist philosophical revival from the turn of the century onwards, endorsing free, creative subjectivity as the font of human progress. In a world without transcendent values, he argued, mankind can avoid a sense of futility, or nihilism, only by relinquishing the search for “ultimate truth” and trusting in its own ceaseless capacity to create the world. This outlook, he hoped, would serve as a modern secular religion, a framework of meaning and value that would reconcile individuals to their circumstances: “Religion,” he claimed, “is born from the need for orientation around reality and life, from the need for a concept of life and reality. Without religion, or without this orientation, one cannot live, or one lives unhappily with a perplexed and divided mind.”40 For Croce, there was only history—that is, mankind’s thought and activity—nothing else behind it, no deeper truth “determining” it in some way. This historical condition, he argued, should not cause us to despair, but was itself a profound truth that could steady our nerves and console us. Croce followed a distinctively humanist tradition in Italian philosophy.41 Humanism defined itself against the dogmas of the Catholic Church and emphasized mankind’s capacity to create knowledge of its own historical activities, as opposed to the transcendent truths, or dogmas, of religion. In renouncing “universal” reason, the humanist tradition retained a pre-Enlightenment realism in relation to political affairs, conscious of the ebb and flow—the corsi e ricorsi, as Vico put it—of circumstance and opportunity, remaining wary of the “speculative,” rationalist idea of historical progress.42 This historicizing mode of thought later shaped the neoHegelian revival in the mid-nineteenth century. Hegel’s philosophy had been utilized to justify the underlying rationality of the liberal state, conceived not in the manner of a “social contract,” but as the outcome of an historical process of spiritual maturation. This way, the authoritarian and conservative policies adopted in the first decades after unification were presented as legitimate, in touch more with an unfolding rationality than with abstract, universal precepts. But Croce’s idealism had a more critical orientation than the nineteenthcentury Hegelians. In the early years of the twentieth century, he became the enfant terrible of the Italian cultural scene. Not a professional academic, but a self-taught philosopher and literary critic, Croce developed his own distinctive brand of “historicist” idealism.43 In keeping with the humanist tradition, he rejected as “metaphysical” all claims to knowledge from an ahistorical standpoint. This included, in particular, the positivist tradition in the social sciences that sought out objective and universal laws of society. Marxism, too, suffered the same fault when it claimed to have found the


25

fundamental determinants of historical change. For a while, Croce had been sympathetic to Marx’s historical materialism but had eventually rejected it for its economic determinism.44 Only as an inspiring ideal, he claimed, and not as a science of history could Marxian socialism have any genuine value. Following Hegel, he argued that human knowledge was fundamentally historical, that is, bound up with the development of human consciousness in relation to concrete historical circumstances. There was no escaping the historical character of spirit: human thought could not take up a transcendent standpoint “outside” of historical circumstances. This historicist position, however, did not leave mankind bereft of any philosophical foundation. On the contrary, he claimed, history was itself the self-making of humanity, the undetermined, accumulative accretion of conscious subjects reacting to their circumstances and creating new ideas, concepts, and values to deal with them. In his Aesthetic of 1902, Croce set out an inspirational vision of a creative, artistic human spirit.45 Rather than constraining individuals, history was a dialectical process of thought and practice, a constant interaction of subjects with their environment. Contra Hegel, who had ended up “speculatively” unifying the historical process, Croce set out a dialectic of “distinct” aspects of human activities. This helped him argue for a more pluralistic approach, one that did not lead, inexorably, to the nation-state and an “end” to history, but to a history that constantly evolved through spontaneous human activity. With this romantic outlook, Croce supplied a generation of aesthetes and artists with a confirmation of the validity of their actions and the primacy of art and expression over reason.46 It also set him against those who sought to capture this creativity in concepts that were not themselves sufficiently historical, a criticism he practiced himself in the journal he coedited with fellow idealist and philosopher Giovanni Gentile, La Critica. Croce’s vision of a self-creating humanity was not itself intended as a political philosophy. It did, nevertheless, have implications for how politics was to be conceived and served, as Bobbio says, an overtly “civil function.”47 For Croce, politics belonged to the practical, utilitarian sphere of human spirit. It was not in itself a moral activity and ought not, therefore, to be mistaken with ethics. This indeed had been the error of the Italian Hegelians who had confused politics and ethics in their view of the liberal state. But ethics belonged to a distinct sphere of human spirit, and hence, politics was not properly conceived if thought about in moral terms. On the contrary, like Machiavelli in The Prince, Croce endorsed a view of politics as one of instrumental calculation and force—while the state might act in light of moral ideals, it was in itself essentially amoral. This view, then, was critical of political ideologies such as socialism that sought to make the state a site of claims to social justice. But Croce also railed against bourgeois

26


politics that exhorted abstract ideals such as “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” These were not, in his view, genuinely meaningful values but “psuedoconcepts,” falsely proclaiming as universal what were only historical, and hence transient, ideals. He opposed himself to what he called the “Masonic mentality” that agitated to make such principles a guide in politics. Indeed, Croce rejected parliamentary democracy as such. Democracy, in his view, simply encouraged sectoral interests to impose their own specific programs on the rest of the nation.48 Such efforts, however, could not substitute for the deeper human need for a sense of meaning and value, or faith. Party programs, he argued, should not be confused with faith: Programs are not faith, nor can they bring it about. Because faith is something firm and absolute, and programs are contingent and changeable. Faith must dominate any event, and programs must adapt themselves to events. . . . The relationship between programs and faith is such that the latter precedes the former and generates them. And when it is absent, there is no point trying to substitute it with grandiose programs; just as a building without foundations cannot be kept up by architectural flourishes and decorations.49

Political parties and their ideologies had, at least in Croce’s view, undermined the public’s sense of underlying unity and common purpose. Abstractions, particularly those of scientific socialism, but also of bourgeois utilitarianism, had invested people’s hopes in material things and produced a widespread “social atomism.”50 The “universal” need for religiosity, he argued, could be satisfied neither by democratic politics nor by positivist science. It was best served by an idealist philosophy that grounded human choices in history. We cannot know whether our choices were ultimately the right ones, but we can rest assured they will contribute to the wider development of human spirit. Only through a serious and committed grounding of ourselves and our lives in the historical problems we confront individually could we find ultimate meaning in our existence. This austere “facing-up” to the world we inherit and make by ourselves, without any metaphysical guarantee, Croce thought, could itself serve as Italy’s long-desired secular faith. Later, after the rise of fascism, Croce would revise his views into a more solid defense of liberalism as a “religion of liberty.”51 Prior to fascism, however, he remained reluctant to endorse any political doctrine as such. Consequently, his critique of democracy and political parties, and his historicist idealism and aesthetic subjectivism inspired a form of intellectual counterculture directed against modern political life in Italy. For many of those influenced by Croce’s ideas, the grand ideals of the


27

Risorgimento had been betrayed by the narrow vision and petty intrigues of the bourgeois political class. Croce’s noble vision of an independent, self-disciplined, and self-creating humanity were put into pale comparison by the vulgar mediocrity of parliamentary politics, with its sectoral interests vying for advantage. In cultural reviews such as Giovanni Papini’s Leonardo and Giuseppe Prezzolini’s La Voce, both based in Florence, this discontent was expressed in an antibourgeois, antisocialist radicalism, calling for Italian intellectuals to escape the narrow, demeaning categories of class and party, and to act as the vanguard of a national cultural reawakening.52 Thus, La Voce renounced any party alignment in favor of critical cultural politics.53 It attracted contributions from a variety of intellectuals of all persuasions, Croce and Salvemini included, many of whom felt the Italian bourgeoisie was unable to properly lead society. Instead, it was felt, bourgeois society was maintained by the banality of corrupt government administration and by a decadent artistic culture obsessed with the past. For Prezzolini—a peculiar, modernist aesthete who endorsed both syndicalism and nonterritorial or “cultural” nationalism54—Croce’s idealist philosophy had prepared the way for a more heroic and assertive national culture, underscoring the essential freedom of mankind to radically create anew its own environment.55 While Croce had preached a moderate historicist idealism, however, Prezzolini emphasized an active idealism in which history was to be made and remade: “There is only renewal.”56 Croce himself did not endorse the rather Nietzschean extension of his arguments by the vociani into a wholesale revolt against rationalism.57 But his tremendous influence on Italian culture prior to fascism is owed, in no small part, to the resonance it had with a growing aesthetic reaction against liberal Italy that itself fed into a nationalism and, eventually, fascism.58 From War to Crisis Despite their differences of emphasis, both Salvemini and Croce exposed the unsteady foundations of liberal politics in Italy. The image of the liberal state and society they projected was one of practical and cultural incompletion. In spite of their own laudable intentions, as central figures in intellectual life, their views fed into a more widespread, fervid dissatisfaction with liberal politics and a longing for something more inclusive politically and more satisfying spiritually. This dissatisfaction greatly intensified and spread to wider social constituencies as a consequence of Italy’s entrance into the First World War in 1915. It was that event, above all else, that sounded the death knell for Italian liberalism and its institutions.

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The Italian government originally prevaricated over which side to take were it to enter the war—that of the “Central Powers” of Germany and Austria-Hungary or the Entente, comprising Britain, France, and Russia. The ensuing “interventionist crisis” of 1914–15 deeply divided Italian society.59 A good part of the establishment was in favor of intervention but could not decide which side would bring greater territorial gains. Giolitti and his supporters in parliament, however, urged neutrality. Most of the Italian public was not in favor at all: the PSI was opposed to war on principle, but adopted the indecisive policy “neither to support nor sabotage” it. Most Catholics were opposed. Croce, for his part, bowed out of the debate to permit amoral politics to do its work.60 But conservative nationalists and revolutionaries, including the socialist firebrand Benito Mussolini, conceived war as an opportunity to revive the nation, perhaps even trigger full-scale revolution. Like the radical aesthetes of the Futurist movement, Mussolini was inclined to see war as an act of “purification,” cleansing the nation of its ignoble past and restoring a sense of pride and value. Already prepared in the prewar years by the cultural dissatisfaction at the liberal state, the prospect of war marked, for Mussolini (as it did for others), a fundamental moment of breach with the past, a potentially regenerative source for the incomplete state. For proclaiming his “revolutionary interventionism,” Mussolini lost his editorship of Avanti! and was thrown out of the PSI. Yet neutrality was, for many interventionists, a clear expression of the moral cowardliness that reflected the degenerative state of Italian society. “Democratic interventionists,” on the other hand, whose principal spokesman was Salvemini, saw the possibility of more progressive benefits such as social reform and greater democracy across Europe. Subduing the German Empire, in their view, could only advance the cause of democracy, restoring territorial integrity to “incomplete” nations such as Italy, and full autonomy to others. It might even assist the formation of a new ruling class to replace the gray old men of parliament. Thus, Salvemini sent a message of congratulations to Mussolini for his courageous conversion to intervention!61 Although their motives often starkly differed, the interventionist movement brought with it a new style of populist, mass politics, momentarily uniting elements of Left and Right in a new and ambiguous ideological mélange, focused on the piazzas and sometimes lapsing into violence.62 This was a strange and unstable ideological mixture that would later feed into the fascist movement. For now, however, interventionists of all stripes were ultimately united in the view that war was an occasion to oppose the bland politics of giolittismo.63 In May 1915, after secretly signing the Treaty of London, Italy joined the war on the side of the Entente.


29

Instead of unifying the nation, however, participation in the war exacerbated Italy’s already vulnerable situation. Northern industry expanded rapidly, and beyond all expectation, on the basis of enormous armaments contracts; but military discipline, high inflation, and food deprivations for workers created deep resentment, particularly at the enormous profits made by industrialists. Furthermore, censorship and prohibition of strikes severely limited the burgeoning industrial working class’s ability to express its discontent. In the army itself, harsh discipline, key military losses (such as the humiliating defeat at Caporetto in October 1917), and heavy losses of life lowered morale and generated an intense expectation for change amongst returning former servicemen. War veterans resented the socialists for their antimilitarism and enjoyment of an “easy” civilian life while they fought, and nationalists somehow blamed them for military losses. Even wartime politics proved unreliable, with two changes of government following key military defeats in 1916 and 1917. The war turned out to be a defining event for Italy, as it was for much of Europe. Although on the winning side, Italy emerged in November 1918 utterly exhausted and with a deeply restless population, eager in contrasting ways for change and inclined to new forms of politics to achieve it. Divisions over intervention had been barely suppressed during the conflict and returned with a vengeance in its aftermath, overwhelming the traditional ideologies of Left and Right. One historian refers to the situation in Italy as a “permanent state of crisis.”64 Another highlights the similarities between the effects of the war and those of the French Revolution of 1789: there persisted a widespread sense of the end of a civilization, the collapse of an old order, creating an extremely fertile ground for new, often opposed images of social and political renewal.65 As Hobsbawm points out, the war had destabilized much of Europe, destroyed the balance of “great powers” prior to 1914, brutalized their populations, and above all, as part of the “strange democratisation of war,” brought “the people” into public life in a manner hitherto unimagined, generating an unwieldy eagerness to dispense with previous political solutions.66 As Gramsci later put it: “If the dominant class has lost its consensus, that is, is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant,’ exercising pure coercive force, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, they no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”67 In Italy’s dopoguerra (postwar period), the “morbid symptoms” would accumulate out of all control. The government’s authority was almost entirely spent as prewar parliamentary loyalties broke down and social forces outside parliament engaged in a “widespread refusal of law.” Public

30


opinion had indeed “turned against the Liberal ruling class.”68 Nationalists, both of conservative and more radical hues, held out high expectations for territorial gains in the peace settlement, particularly in Dalmatia, voicing a concern that war veterans have their sacrifices honored with greater national prestige. But workers, socialists, and a radicalized rural peasantry were now inspired by the Russian revolution of 1917, seeking greater control over their working conditions and an end to wartime austerities. The Russian revolution was never strictly a “national” event: it was announced as the opening salvo of world proletarian revolution.69 In the two years following its advent, revolutionary movements spread throughout the world, sparking off dramatic uprisings in Germany and Bulgaria in 1918 and Hungary in 1919. As they learned of these unfolding events, workers and peasants in Italy grew optimistic that the tide of history was with them. Italy’s middle classes, on the other hand, grew increasingly apprehensive at the rise of left-wing militancy, as did landowners in the countryside, threatened by socialist leagues. Along with industrialists—already disillusioned with Giolitti’s policy of compromise with the trade unions—they saw the expansion of working class politics as a threat to their own values and interests. At the end of the war, none of these constituencies had any faith left in parliamentary politics. Fascism was not yet a force to be reckoned with, but postwar Italy was already characterized by a deepening ideological disaggregation, with revolutionaries and reactionaries from all quarters jostling for extra-parliamentary support.70 Liberal institutions and values, once entrenched behind the structures of an impermeable state, had been opened up to mass politics under Giolitti. But the state now proved wholly inadequate in the task of containing its opposed forces. The war had exposed the anachronism of parliament as the basis of political settlements. Elite compromises could not satisfy the principled positions of mass parties and movements, most of whom hoped to replace liberalism altogether. Anti-giolittismo, once the preserve of exasperated intellectuals and cynical ideologues, was now crystallizing into a palpable desire amongst the public for an entirely new relationship between the state and the people. It was into this context of heightened social and political antagonism and the relentless demise of liberal institutions and values that Piero Gobetti made his entrance. And it is to his perception of events that we turn next.

2

Idealism and Renewal

G

obetti’s career as a public intellectual spanned an improbably short seven years: from late 1918, when he began editing his own cultural review, until his premature death in early 1926. Yet, in that short space of time, which overlapped with his university education, he worked tirelessly as a political commentator and cultural critic, organizing numerous campaigns and associating with a variety of political and philosophical currents. As one commentator has put it, Gobetti was the “boy-wonder of Turin” in the tumultuous years following the end of the First World War.1 With a sharp mind and an engaging personality, he was soon attracting other young intellectuals like himself in search of a project of cultural and political renewal. In this chapter, I survey the early formation of the young Gobetti, in particular, his activities up until 1920 when he suddenly abandoned his editorial work and set about developing his own distinctive brand of liberal critique. It may seem strange to treat the work of a teenager as the extent of his “early period.” Yet in a brief and intensely active life as Gobetti’s, such an approach is reasonable, at least in relative terms. Gobetti matured quickly within a context that was itself rapidly intensifying—as events changed so, inevitably, did he. As we shall see, in this early period, Gobetti initially took up the call for political reform and cultural renewal associated with the iconic figures of Salvemini and Croce, respectively. As for others of his generation, Salvemini’s empirical critique cut through the verbiage of normal political life and helped Gobetti position himself outside the strictures of party affiliation. Philosophical idealism, on the other hand, underscored an urgent need for “spiritual” transformation in Italy, one led by “militant” intellectuals conscious of their civil function. While Gobetti’s political affiliations, at this time, were still fluid, it is this anticipation of renewal through political critique and philosophical idealism that later informed his revolutionary liberalism.


For one biographer, the enduring significance of Gobetti’s early period lies in its instigation of a new politics of the intellectual: one that used a public platform to engage political issues without succumbing to doctrinaire party politics.2 Rather than a detached observer of cultural life, separated from politics, the intellectual, in Gobetti’s example, was charged with revitalizing the nation by bringing together culture and politics, mixing theoretical reflection with day-to-day issues of state. This image of the intellectual’s “mission,” which he shared with a number of other thinkers, was undoubtedly borne of the great disruption brought by the war, which had collapsed the notional separation of public and private. As Italian liberalism was pulled apart under the centrifugal forces of an ever-deepening social and political crisis, Gobetti’s early years afforded him an opportunity to establish an audience of radical intellectuals and liberals attentive to the possibilities for remaking liberal Italy. A Turinese Education Piero Gobetti was born on June 19, 1901, and raised in the subalpine city of Turin, the united Italian kingdom’s first capital and the traditional seat of its the Savoyard royalty. An orderly, aristocratic city of grand palazzi, baroque architecture, and ornate arcades, located in the northwestern region of Piedmont, Turin was the Italian city closest to France and was materially influenced by the French Revolution. The city was invaded in 1800 by Napoleon, who tore down the city walls and reconstructed its urban center. Later, after the 1848 revolutions, Piedmont was given a new constitution with relatively liberal freedoms, such as freedom of the press and a parliament. Turin then became the leading city of the Risorgimento under the premiership of the moderate liberal, Cavour.3 It was to the grand historical tradition of Piedmontese political liberalism and its cultural and scientific innovations that the young Gobetti was doubtless exposed as a boy. Raised the only child of a petty-bourgeois family that ran a grocer’s shop in the city, Gobetti progressed successfully through his early schooling during the final years of Giolitti’s rule. An exceptionally gifted and intellectually mature child, he joined the prestigious University of Turin in 1919, the same year that Europe’s Great War ended. Turin’s university had long been dominated by a positivist spirit, yet, as Gobetti later argued, this was underscored by a progressive desire to forge a national culture: “even this positivism of ours was romantic, optimistic.”4 The university was thus known for the strong sense of intellectual leadership and the civic responsibilities of its members, particularly

IDEALISM AND RENEWAL

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the Faculty of Law into which Gobetti entered.5 The law faculty, which according to Gobetti had exercised an “organic” influence over Turinese culture,6 included the influential legal professors Gioele Solari and Francesco Ruffini, and the university was host to other key intellectuals in Italian political life, such as the free-market economist, Luigi Einaudi, and the political scientist, Gaetano Mosca.7 These individuals were not merely ivory tower professors, but noted figures in the relatively restricted world of Italian public life. The university thus attracted students from all over the country. Antonio Gramsci, the young Sardinian with whom Gobetti was soon to become acquainted, had come to Turin to study linguistics in 1911 (although he never completed his degree, leaving to take up a career in political journalism in 1913). Palmiro Togliatti, later the shrewd leader of the Italian communist party, graduated in law in 1915. Alessandro Passerin d’Entrèves, who was later to earn renown as a political philosopher, was one of Gobetti’s classmates.8 Turin was thus regarded, by many of its inhabitants, as the “laboratory” of Italian national life, and the university as a breeding ground for many of its leading figures.9 But Turin was not merely a university town. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, it had also become one of Italy’s foremost industrial centers, along with Genoa and Milan—together forming the famous “industrial triangle” of northern Italian capitalism. The car manufacturer Fiat had been founded in 1899, and its manufacturing plant had grown considerably during the war. So, too, had the Ansaldo steelworks and other related industries. Turin was therefore home to a recent and rapidly expanded industrial proletariat: in 1918, there were twice as many industrial workers as there had been five years earlier, accounting for almost onethird of the population of the city.10 The presence of the factories and its workers could hardly have failed to impact upon young intellectuals in the university. Turin had become Italy’s first “proletarian city,” Gramsci later noted: “Turin is like one great factory: its working population is of one single kind and is powerfully unified by industrial production.”11 Here, industry and intellect sat side by side, generating new visions of a modern social and political order. Indeed the workers’ struggles could not be ignored: in 1917, during the difficult years of wartime discipline and rationing, nearly fifty people had been killed in rioting over bread shortages.12 Just as the young Gobetti was joining the university, the working classes of his native city were beginning to assert themselves after years of unresolved grievances. It would not be long before Gobetti, too, was caught up in their struggles, coming to see them as the social basis of a renewed political order.


Energie Nove Gobetti began writing and publishing in November 1918 when, at the age of seventeen, he and some school friends launched the bimonthly review, Energie Nove (New Energies).13 The review followed a similar vein of postwar publications calling for cultural renewal and exhorting a need to reconnect political and ethical life in a new, morally inspiring vision. As we noted in the previous chapter, for many Italians, the war’s end signaled the exhaustion of parliamentary politics. Long despised for its elitism, corruption, and failure to win the support of the vast majority of the country, liberal politics now seemed utterly anachronistic. Despite government concessions such as further electoral reform (full universal male suffrage in 1918 and proportional representation in 1919), the Italian dopoguerra was characterized by a pervasive atmosphere of anti-giolittismo and a dizzying, intense thirst for change. The aftermath of the war was experienced by large sectors of the public of all social classes as the moment in which a new civilizational struggle would be unleashed. The presence of returning combatants especially helped manifest a novel, aggressive sensibility brought by the experience of the trenches. Former soldiers across Europe, claims Hobsbawm, brought home with them “a sense of incommunicable and savage superiority” over those who had not participated in the war.14 In Italy, this sensibility was often violently intolerant of the niceties of “bourgeois” parliamentary politics, and was deeply hostile to the idea of “settling back” into prewar habits. Not yet defined within any clear ideological parameters, combattentismo (combatantism) soon set the tone for a postwar politics exasperated with liberal moderation.15 Intellectuals and other public figures from across the political spectrum clamored to define and lead this expectation, dismissing party politics as ineffectual and calling for a deeper, “spiritual” transformation of public life that would invest it with greater inclusivity and vitality. For its part, Energie Nove’s first issue, appearing just as the armistice was signed, appealed directly to “young people” to participate in the formation of a new spirituality.16 The review was explicitly directed at university students, of whom many had been recruited into the military and now returned to finish their studies. Prior to its first publication, the young editor eagerly badgered friends, acquaintances, and even his schoolteachers to take up a subscription and to contribute articles. In a letter of October 1918, he anticipated a “review of literature, philosophy, social questions . . . written by young people and directed especially at young people to arouse movements of ideas and to divulge thoughts.”17 This imagery of youth and renewal pervade Gobetti’s new publication. “We would like to bring the fresh air of spirituality into today’s narrow-minded culture,” he claimed in


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his opening article “Rinnovamento” (“Renewal”) of November 1.18 “The future needs young people,” he declared elsewhere in support of student cultural groups: “Energie Nove is ready to support and to fight.”19 This combative spirit, which echoed the growing desire for change at the end of the war, found its antithesis in any passive withdrawal: “Apathy: it is the enemy of all youthful and serious initiatives; it is the mark of our degeneration, the weapon of the weak and cowardly against the strong. For the time being, we have mastered suspicion and indifference. Energie Nove will live. It is inevitable, because we will it so.”20 A voluntaristic ethos, then, urging “seriousness” and willpower over pessimism and the “nullity” of “ignorance and cowardliness.” The young Gobetti’s Nietzschean affectations were further reflected in a haughty disdain for the wider public: “Naturally, the great public has understood nothing of this, because to understand it was necessary to think; and thinking has become a heresy, as it was in the time of the Inquisition.”21 As a self-styled “heretic” in struggle with the mass’s already “prepared schemes,” Gobetti took up the combative gesture with a young intellectual’s desire to be seen as if on the outside of common opinion and normal politics. Refusing to align with any political party, Gobetti declared Energie Nove’s “natural mistrust towards the rhetoric of general principles and abstract questions” and its “love of clear positions and practical questions.”22 In this preference for practical questions over party doctrine and academic abstractions, Gobetti had some definite points of reference. He identified Energie Nove explicitly with the inspiration of Croce and Prezzolini and the idealist critique they had made of Giolittian Italy. In a letter to Croce himself, he indicated: “the basis of our action would be the same militant idealism that animated . . . La Voce.”23 Of Croce, he would also write: “Without doubt [he] is the man who has worked more than any other for the good of our culture, and also I believe him to be the most genial and most Italian philosopher after Vico.”24 Gobetti was bold enough to contact Croce and meet him on occasion, but he would maintain a closer, longer relationship with Prezzolini, whose work in La Voce he always admired and, in some respects, emulated.25 In a key article of May 1919, “La Nostra Fede” (Our Faith), Gobetti presented the project of the review precisely in terms of the formation of a new religiosity. Denouncing the parliamentary parties for their “vast and imprecise formulae,” for representing egoistic and not common interests, successful only in ensuring the “triumph of personal interests with the complete absence of ideals,” Gobetti diagnosed what he saw as the “misadventures of Italian public life” in “the absence of sincerity and clarity,” a condition of moral decline expressed perfectly in giolittismo.26 Political values, he claimed, were out of step with the needs of everyday life. The


remedy to this unhappy condition, he declared, was “a healthy rethinking of ideas,” “an anxious and accurate process of clarification of principles,” “a perfect awareness of the relations that exist between the necessities of life and the ideal principles that transcend them.”27 Rejecting party doctrine in favor of a new spiritual disposition, however, was not intended to be an easy option, for it required not merely the renunciation of the parties’ “mental schemes,” but “an entire moral upheaval.”28 At the basis of this idealist revision of thought and action was a distinctly Crocean message, the absolute immanence and dynamic, selfcreating force of human spirit: “To be ourselves at every moment, to realize entirely our possibility for action for ourselves and for others in each instance, to feel the exultant and intoxicating pulse of life . . . this is the joy and the meaning of being, the divinity of time, which is a progress in which all obstacles die.”29 For Gobetti, as for so many others influenced by Croce (who, despite the city’s famed preference for positivism, was singularly influential in Turin),30 idealism set itself against all “revealed truths,” especially those of political parties, and substitutes for them “the truth that is conquered day by day with the work of each person.”31 Everyday life, in all its concrete particularity, was understood as bound up with a spiritual potential that transcended it. But to grasp this spirituality meant adopting a “profound passion” that challenged apathy and indifference: “Honesty consists in having ideas, and believing them and making them the center and purpose of oneself. Apathy is the negation of humanity, abasement of oneself, absence of ideality.”32 Absorbing this rather pious message, for Gobetti, was not simply a matter of private, personal salvation. It was, he insisted, the only way modern politics could be done. Gobetti’s language may seem somewhat esoteric, but it reflected the pervasive idealist culture at the time, according to which spiritual renewal was a vital precondition for wider political transformation. Two years earlier, in 1917, the twenty-six-year-old Antonio Gramsci had published his own socialist version of the neoidealist message in his single issue, La Cittá futura (City of the Future).33 He, too, had addressed himself to “youth,” railed against attitudes of “indifference,” and exhorted the need for revolutionaries to invest daily life with a sense of immanent moral purpose and “discipline.”34 Renouncing positivism, along with all other simplistic political recipes that removed moral agency from practical life, Gramsci had also exalted the necessity of cultural and moral transformation in any genuine political change. What kind of politics, then, did Gobetti support at this stage? Certainly, he was no socialist. Indeed, the early Gobetti adopted a similar disdain for reformist socialism and revolutionary Marxism, as did his intellectual mentors, regarding them as essentially deterministic doctrines with little


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immediate import for a project of renewal.35 Instead, his liberal orientation pushed him toward a radical political reformism, and in this he was heavily influenced by Salvemini. Like many young intellectuals without an official party of their own, Gobetti was attracted to Salvemini’s battles against the liberal regime, claiming, in a letter of January 1919, that L’Unità was “the only paper of competent and honest people in Italy.”36 Although overtly aimed at a range of literary and cultural topics, Energie Nove helped publicize Salvemini’s campaigns and devoted issues to shared concerns such as school reform37 and the international situation, endorsing his democratic interventionism and the prospects of an international order founded on Wilson’s “League of Nations”38 (see Figure 2.1). Naturally, like Salvemini, it projected a deeply critical attitude toward the liberal political elite and toward Giolitti, in particular.39

Figure 2.1

The first issue of Energie Nove, November 1918.


In early 1919, Gobetti headed the Turin section of the “Friends of L’Unitá Action Groups,” established to promote a number of related causes such as electoral reform, votes for women, and Italy’s membership in the League of Nations.40 In April of that same year, he and other supporters of L’Unitá attended a congress in Florence, renaming the group “The Democratic League for the Renewal of National Politics.” There, the evidently energetic and highly capable eighteen-year-old received an invitation from the great Salvemini himself to take over the editorship of L’Unitá—an offer, nevertheless, that he declined.41 Back in Turin, however, throughout the remainder of 1919, Gobetti extended his support for the Democratic League and its program of reforms.42 “Diciannovismo” Salvemini’s democratic reformism, however, was not an effective political force and struggled to impress itself upon a volatile, rapidly intensifying situation.43 Postwar political life in Italy was steadily fragmenting into antagonistic camps with new or reinvigorated political parties ready to supplant liberal reformism. The so-called spirit of diciannovismo (1919-ism) indicated, as Seton-Watson claims, “a revolutionary yearning for change and a utopian faith in a better world to be born.”44 This thirst for change, expressed initially in combattentismo, was born of war and the mass constituencies brought into being by it. Let us consider the three central movements it comprised: the nationalists, the Catholics, and the socialists. The Italian government had gone to the Versailles peace conference in early 1919 with an ambitious list of territories they wished to be granted, moving well beyond the terms of the Treaty of London to include the Croation port of Fiume. The U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, made clear his objections, based on the principle of autonomy for “oppressed nations.” Italy’s “extra” demands, in his view, contradicted this principle and they were publicly rejected. For nationalists, the rebuff was an affront and it helped generate a deep resentment amongst the interventionists, fanning a sense of national injustice and a disgust at the weakness of the liberal political elite. For “democratic interventionists,” such as Salvemini, it was a disaster and undermined the claim that the war would produce a just democratic settlement for Italy.45 For nationalists and revolutionary interventionists, however, it reinforced their view that the larger Western powers were happy to belittle Italy and deny her equal status as a nation-state. Nationalists had been a small, but persistent and powerful, voice on the right of national politics for some years.46 The war, however, and the interventionist crisis that preceded it, had succeeded in polarizing Italian


39

society and legitimizing nationalism as a political platform for more than just cultural conservatives. Benito Mussolini, now editor of the “patriotic,” socialist Il Popolo d’Italia, had already begun, in 1918, to extend his appeal to returning former combatants. This constituency had been brought together in the trenches and, he argued, shared similar ideals of patriotism, sacrifice, and the demand for national renewal. In November 1919, at Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan, Mussolini founded the fascist movement, the Fasci italiani di combattimento (Italian Combat Groups), with a program combining nationalist “heroic” rhetoric with radical demands such as female suffrage, land for peasants, and institutional reform.47 Although, for the time being, the movement remained relatively small and limited largely to Milan, it appealed effectively to former combatants and, with them, it organized violent protests against the PSI.48 Mussolini positioned himself both as an enemy of the socialist party and its Bolshevik ideals, and yet, as a “revolutionary” on the side of syndicalists and trade unionists. Sharply contrasting, ideologically speaking, with Mussolini’s fascists— but nevertheless hostile to the liberal elite—was the new Catholic party, the Italian Popular Party (Partito populare italiano or PPI) also formed in 1919.49 Led by the priest Don Luigi Sturzo, the PPI aimed to give organized and independent political form to Catholics and Catholic deputies who were now openly opposed to the politics of giolittismo. Adopting a reforming agenda including land reform for peasants, institutional decentralization, and greater freedom for Catholic schools, the PPI was independent of the Catholic Church but motivated by Christian principles. Though open to wide variation in their interpretation, these principles emphasized an “organic” order based on the institutions of the family, church, work, and local government. The presence of the PPI indicated the degree to which the church now felt confident enough for Catholics to participate in mass politics, and the party soon developed a large following both in and outside of parliament. Finally, there were the socialists. The PSI had emerged from the war with a renewed revolutionary spirit. Having elected its revolutionary current to the leadership in 1918, the PSI enthused publicly for revolution and hailed the example of the Russian Bolsheviks, although little yet was genuinely known of the “Soviet” system. But, as newly converted communists like Amadeo Bordiga and Gramsci soon realized, revolutionary rhetoric was not, in any way, matched with a serious sense of how to go about doing revolution. Instead, the PSI leadership chose to posture, declining to cooperate with other parties and, perhaps unwisely, turning away former combatants from joining the party on the grounds of their interventionism.50 Nevertheless, throughout 1919, Italian workers and peasants were increasingly protesting and striking as postwar conditions threatened increased


hardships: in February, northern metal workers won an eight-hour day with no reduction in wages; in June, there were riots in Emilia against high food prices spreading throughout the country; in July, a general strike was declared, though it was not followed completely.51 Throughout cities, towns, and the countryside, people agitated for land, wages, and food. None of these agitations were nationally directed, and the trade unions and PSI did not fully support them all, nor was the latter able to exert any discipline over them. Nevertheless, for socialists, as for the nationalists and Catholics, the center of gravity had shifted from parliament to organized mass movements. In the presence of these ascendent movements, Salvemini’s democratic reformism seemed noble, in principle, but without a mass following and hence rather detached from actual events. Ordine Nuovo, for instance—the Turinese radical socialist paper set up by Gramsci and Togliatti, among others, in 1919—referred to Salvemini’s activities as “a species of professorial jacobinism,” a high-minded and academic, but fundamentally abstract, critique “ridiculously far from any reality.”52 For the ordinovisti (as the editors were called), political renewal ought to be conceived as a concrete, rather than purely theoretical, action, one realized through an actual historical subject and not simply as a matter of principle. It was an argument that Gobetti eventually would find convincing as the situation in Italy unraveled. By 1919, too, the idealist impulse had moved on. Croce’s influence had been steadily outstripped over the years by more radical philosophical currents, such as that of Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), whom Gobetti began to read closely in the summer of that year. Like Croce, with whom he collaborated for many years on La Critica, Gentile’s philosophy emphasized the role of subjects in constituting the world, investing practical action with meaning and value, rather than passively accepting the world as given or predetermined. But for him, the logic of idealism led to the view that thought itself created reality—“actualizing” it—so breaking down any artificial barrier between subject and object, and vastly enhancing the significance of moral ideals, insofar as they shape reality rather than merely “correspond” or “conform” to it. This radical humanist argument was set out in his Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro (General Theory of Spirit as a Pure Act) of 1916.53 Reality, for Gentile, was, fundamentally, a product of human consciousness (or “Spirit”), realizing itself through the very act of thought, rather than a separate, inert world that the mind “received.” Thought did not passively reflect reality—it actively constituted it in the process of defining it. That meant that behind all knowledge of supposedly external truths lay the “pure act” of thought that defined and redefined objective reality from


41

within consciousness. In this act, a basic moral imperative for free self-realization was continually given form: a radical freedom meant consciousness determines itself, denying any transcendent reality. All truth was thus immanent to “Spirit” and therefore a creation of its will.54 Unlike Croce—who had refused to invest politics and the state with any substantial ethical significance, instead preferring to regard theory and practice as eternally separated—Gentile’s “Actual Idealism” (or “Actualism”) aimed to unite theory and practice, that is, to demonstrate that thought and reality were inseparable and, hence, could be harmonized in civil life.55 Thus, Gentile gave the state a central role in concretizing human spirituality. The state—in his terms, the “ethical state”—was the explicit expression of the implicit unity of will that his philosophy had disclosed. It gave form to the moral purpose immanent to human experience, that is, the desire to recognize the world as a free objectification of human thought. As such, it expressed more than just a “contract” between individuals: in his terms, the state was not an arrangement between individuals (inter homines) at all, but an impulse within the individual (in interiore homine).56 It symbolized, in a Hegelian sense, an immanent will to freedom.57 An ardent patriot, Gentile had strongly supported the war, seeing it, like others did, as generative of this sense of underlying purpose and, hence, a vital opportunity to realize Italians’ longed-for ethical unity, offering them a chance to show moral responsibility and discipline.58 This was a view he expounded in his popular wartime and postwar essays.59 It also underscored his views on education, which Gobetti himself endorsed, for, like many idealists, Gentile saw spiritual regeneration as an essentially educational process—one in which human subjects learn self-mastery through the acquisition of a common cultural patrimony.60 In the heady days of postwar radicalism, the notion of unifying theory and practice, giving concrete and unified ethical expression to an immanent common will, a spirituality akin to religion, resonated powerfully across various radical currents. In a review in Ordine Nuovo in May 1919, Palmiro Togliatti referred to Gentile as “today the most eminent and heeded teacher of the Italian philosophical school,”61 highlighting the relevance of his ideas in understanding how a socialist state could be generated through the disciplined will of the proletariat. As we shall see in the next chapter, these ideas would be influential in the factory council theory of Gramsci.62 The idea, effectively expressed by Gentile, of a disciplined moral community emerging to form a new state out of the chaos of war appealed greatly to all those young intellectuals looking to transform crisis into renewal. The question yet to be resolved in 1919 was where exactly this self-educating moral will, this new state, would emerge.63


The editors of Ordine Nuovo, eager to identify the new moral community with the workers’ movement, looked rather disdainfully upon the young Gobetti for his overstated, messianic piety. In a scathing critique of the liberal’s exuberant language and imagery, Togliatti mocked Gobetti for using “a system of semi-obscure expressions, words that are meant to be profound and mysterious. What is this bad habit of not being able to say four clear phrases . . . without disturbing all the gods and idols of the idealist heaven? What is this raising at any trifle the entire arsenal of the Spirit, the Absolute and the Ideal and so on?”64 Despite his desire to focus on “practical questions,” Gobetti and his review, for Togliatti, were just too abstract and aloof, without any anchor in real political organization—a position typical, he thought, of “cultural parasites” like Prezzolini. Gobetti publicly dismissed the criticism, though it was, no doubt, stinging.65 It was true, of course, that Gobetti’s idealist language, drawn, as it was, from the aesthetes like Prezzolini and Papini as much as from Croce, indulged an air of radical subjectivism and aristocratic snobbery, greatly overestimating the power of ideas without referencing any obvious social constituency.66 Although he later patched up his friendship with the editors of Ordine Nuovo, this was not the first time that he would be criticized for expressing views without any clear political implication. The 1919 Elections Politics continued to polarize into the latter half of 1919. In September, the poet and nationalist figurehead Gabriele D’Annunzio led an expedition of a thousand troops to “seize” the border town of Fiume, giving practical expression to a widespread feeling of dissatisfaction with territorial gains after the war, and heightening the sense of an unresolved national crisis.67 The Nitti government, which had taken over from Orlando in June, had been constantly criticized by nationalists for appeasing socialists throughout the year. Now, interventionists of all orientations openly supported, or at least expressed sympathy for, D’Annunzio’s coup.68 For many, particularly Mussolini, the maverick poet gave voice to a desire for national justice betrayed by the liberal government in Versailles. Although the occupation was eventually dissolved in 1920, and D’Annunzio dismissed by his supporters as a dilettante, the event itself underscored the popularity of mass action in the name of the nationalist cause. The first real political test of diciannovismo came in the general elections of November. These were held on a new system of proportional representation that undermined the usual liberal strategy of intervening to swing the outcome in favor of a government-favored candidate. Proportional


43

representation was expected to send such elite practices packing and—it was hoped by the PPI, its loudest defenders, as well as by nationalists— usher in a new age of mass party politics. The socialists, now led by its “maximalist” or revolutionary wing, declared, prior to the election, their adherence to the Third International Workers’ Movement founded by Lenin and their refusal to collaborate with the “bourgeois” state. For his part, Gobetti urged support for candidates broadly in keeping with the League, and he castigated the professedly monarchist and anti-Bolshevik group of “national-liberals” (which included, among its signatories, Einaudi and Mosca) for their “political aestheticism,” purportedly “aping” the League’s demands for democratic renewal, yet without any genuine substance. The socialists’ gains, he argued further, portended Italy’s ruin.69 The election results saw a large and surprising increase in votes, and consequently, parliamentary deputies, for both the socialists and the PPI. The public mood was clearly for reform, though obviously not for revolution.70 The socialists picked up more than one hundred extra seats; the Catholics, an extra seventy-one.71 Nationalists did remarkably badly, with Mussolini’s fascists securing no deputies at all. Importantly, though, the old liberals were now in the minority and could not govern without the support either of the socialists or the Catholics. The old liberal style of parliamentary maneuvers was no longer possible: Nitti, again the prime minister, would have to negotiate with Catholics, for the socialists were intent on noncooperation. Liberal politics, then, appeared to be in a desperately weakened position. With this political vulnerability came a wider concern about the continued validity of liberalism as a doctrine of “universal” values. Exactly what did liberalism stand for as a philosophy and where should liberals place their hopes as its electoral base diminished in the face of larger, massbased movements with an eye on radically transforming liberal institutions? These questions were expressed in a variety of discussions amongst intellectuals as to the proper nature of liberalism and the political direction it ought to take, particularly in relation to the evident advances of Marxist socialism. In 1919, for example, Mario Missiroli—intellectual, editor of the Bolognese newspaper, Il Resto del Carlino, and a radical influenced by Sorel— argued that liberalism be understood as a set of “ideal principles” and not identified with a liberal party, as such.72 Italian political liberalism, in Missiroli’s view, had lost its potential to undertake radical reform to promote liberty.73 The socialist party, he argued, was now the inheritor of liberalism’s radical function inasmuch as it sought to conquer liberty for the working masses.


Missiroli’s argument, though bound up with his own peculiar intellectual evolution (which led him to fascism), nevertheless spoke to an audience conscious of the exhaustion of the liberal political class and the uncertain future of liberal values. Giovanni Gentile, for example, complained that Missiroli’s use of the term “liberal” was unclear, making it difficult to discern what was distinctive about either liberals or socialists. However, he agreed that the term liberal should not be reduced either to individualism or to bourgeois interests. Rather than divest liberalism of any specificity, though, Gentile argued that liberalism “is the conception of the state as liberty and of liberty as the state.”74 That is, liberalism was a statist ideology, a conception of moral freedom inherent within all individuals and classes, represented as a universal community. Liberalism therefore encompassed socialists as much as liberals or nationalists insofar as the state symbolized the human spirit aware of its own fundamental freedom.75 The liberal state therefore resolved all interests into itself. Thus, Gentile still regarded himself a liberal in the conservative mold of the historical Right. The true danger to liberalism, in his view, was certainly not socialism, but giolittismo, in its use of the state for cynical compromises between partial interests.76 But for some younger liberals, Missiroli was substantially correct. The historian Guido De Ruggiero (1888–1948), for example, praised the journalist’s argument saying: “To me Missiroli’s conception appears one of the more notable attempts to insert the socialist mentality into our liberal conscience.”77 He, too, despaired at Italy’s failed liberal politics and urged liberals to approach socialism more positively. Although strongly hostile to Bolshevism, he also balked at laissez faire economics and advised consideration of those forms of collectivism promoted by the trade unions in the name of what he termed “a liberalism that has not stiffened into a sterile defense of dated institutions, but open to all the influences able to promote the free differentiation of life, against any servitude, either bourgeois or proletarian.”78 There was still life yet in the liberal cause, he argued, if liberals could adapt themselves to new circumstances. By contrast, Togliatti, communist coeditor of Ordine Nuovo, in a lengthy review, dismissed Missiroli’s efforts to rope socialism into the liberal cause.79 “Liberty” was once an ideal to be conquered by the bourgeoisie’s struggles against feudal autocracy, he argued. But since the nineteenth century, the concept had transformed into a defense of bourgeois interests. Only socialist revolutionaries, he continued, carried the banner for liberty, aware that it was a goal to be conquered through class struggle, rather than a concept to be “handed down” outside of concrete circumstances. So was liberalism dead or was it still alive in the form of the ideal of a unified state? Was its flame being passed on to socialism and, if so, to what extent would it remain a distinctively liberal project or a socialist one?


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Missiroli’s intervention had provoked a variety of telling responses: most endorsed the need to separate liberal principles from the political class that bore its name. But in so doing, the very character of freedom as a motivating ideal was brought into dispute. Exactly how was liberty to be conceived and where did its future lie? Gobetti had only begun to work out his own distinctive answer to these questions. For him, it seemed to consist neither in extending liberalism to reformist socialism nor replacing it altogether with revolutionary socialism. “In order to be liberals,” he claimed, “we refrain from theorizing liberalism.”80 Any future for liberalism, he suggested, lay not in grand philosophizing but in history itself, particularly in the example of the Russian revolution. In an article of July 1919, he expressed agreement with nonsocialist critics of the new Soviet republic that “the Marxist experiment in Russia has certainly failed; the old objections of the liberal economy are more firm than ever against all the advocates of statism.”81 If socialist collectivism could not argue with liberal economics, nevertheless, a political lesson remained to be learned: “The Russian revolution is not only a socialist experiment. There the basis of a new state is being cast.”82 Lenin and Trotsky were not just Bolsheviks, he continued, they were “men of action who have aroused a people and from it were recreating a spirit.” For Gobetti, the Bolsheviks’ overthrow of the tsarist regime incarnated a desire for liberty and self-rule—it was an exemplary act of political leadership by an audacious elite. And he went on to make this startling claim of Lenin and Trotsky’s accomplishment: “Basically, it is the negation of socialism and an affirmation and exaltation of liberalism.”83 A liberal state, he continued, “is neither the bourgeois state nor the proletarian state”; indeed, the new state in Russia was, for Gobetti, not an administrative structure at all, but more profoundly, a “formation of political consciousness”: “Tsarism and the Tsarist mentality are dead. Russia is elevating itself to the level of the civilization of the western peoples.”84 In his rather idealized view, the Bolsheviks’ act of emancipation was fundamentally liberal. That is, they had generated a sense of spiritual unity in the very process of liberating the people. In this, he affirmed later, they had generated a “liberal and anti-socialist state” because it was “anti-abstract,” that is, not created according to an external formula or a doctrine, but through a living reality.85 The state, he argued, was therefore not to be conceived as a contract between individuals, but as an expression of a nation’s consciousness and organization, the reflection of a deeper “spiritual force of common action.”86 This idealist emphasis on spirit was reminiscent of Gentile’s Actualism but, quite unlike him, was extended to the example of Russian Bolsheviks.87 Although he did not fully articulate his


view, liberalism appeared, to Gobetti, to be bound up with the spirit of emancipation exemplified by the Russian revolution. Yet Gobetti was not advocating revolution. Italy was not like tsarist Russia, he pointed out, and there was therefore no reason for it to go through a destructive crisis in order “to conquer what we already possess”— namely, a state.88 At the end of 1919, Gobetti still appeared convinced that renewal implied developing a new “national culture,” and he continued to expound a vague desire for “spiritual communion” based on what he called a “historical consciousness,” rather than specifying any determinate political direction.89 Gobetti’s “Intermezzo” At first glance, Gobetti’s early work in Energie Nove may seem relatively immature and, to a great extent, derivative of the views of those he admired: Salvemini, Prezzolini, and Croce. As a form of politics, the review lacked the focus and coherence that would have been necessary to make a greater impression on the situation in Turin and elsewhere. It certainly heralded a new, vibrant, intellectual culture, but it seemed to speak exclusively to students and other middle class intellectuals. It debated political issues of the day, such as school reform, but it lacked an integral vision of a postGiolittian politics. Nevertheless, although it made a small impression, the review introduced Gobetti to the job of editing and commenting on ideas and events, it also provided a focus for his interests in Russian literature (an interest he shared closely with his girlfriend, later his wife, Ada Prospero), and it put him in contact with a variety of established, as well as disaffected, intellectuals eager to promote their views in the fervid atmosphere of the dopoguerra. In this respect, Gobetti had started to form an audience of likeminded individuals open to the critical, idealist demand for renewal, and receptive to the idea of an intellectual engagement with public life as itself a form of politics. In retrospect, we can see that sharing these presuppositions was vitally important for his generating a platform to develop his revolutionary liberalism. We might say, then, that Gobetti—still a student at this time—had begun to establish a reputation, earning himself a degree of authority that attracted to him a variety of other talents. By most accounts, he was an amiable, hard working individual with a ceaseless appetite for intellectual work. One friend, the future writer and artist Carlo Levi (later famed for his book, Christ Stopped at Eboli, written after enforced “internal exile” under the fascists), has provided an illuminating portrait of the effect of


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Energie Nove on him and its young editor at this time. Having got hold of a copy of the review as a youth in Turin, he was fascinated by its contents: “I seemed to find there, expressed in explicit, prominent words, and made communicable and clear, all the ineffable vagueness that was in me, all my indeterminate energy (so new that I didn’t know it existed), all the diffuse and unconscious potency of my early adolescence. . . . In this small review, that need, that indeterminate impulse seemed to determine itself in every line. From mute spur and impulse it became words, arguments and reason.”90 Levi immediately felt inspired to write to Gobetti. In reply, the editor invited him to visit at his parent’s home. I thought that the editor of a review was an old man, or at least one of those I then considered old, a man of at least twenty years, full of those mysterious powers of culture and knowledge to which I hadn’t even for a moment come face-to-face. My heart thumped when I climbed the four flights of stone stairs to the right of the entrance hall, on the side of Mr Prospero’s fruit shop. I rang the bell with extreme hesitation and at once a tall, skinny boy with a great head of untidy, chestnut-blonde hair came to open it, a pair of metal glasses on his pointed nose with very lively, penetrating eyes behind the lenses. I wanted to ask him if Mr Piero Gobetti, who I thought must have been his father, was at home. But, I believe, from my face he understood my doubts and said at once: ‘I’m Gobetti. You must be the one who wrote to me. Are you Levi?’

According to Levi, at this meeting, Gobetti “interrogated” him endlessly about his thoughts. A friendship ensued and Levi remained deeply influenced by Gobetti long after the latter’s death.91 A similarly strong impression was also made on Barbara Allason, too, an English teacher of languages and associate of Gobetti’s throughout his career (and later, an active antifascist). She recalled meeting the enigmatic eighteen-year-old: “I can still see him, tall and very slender with blonde curly hair, those eyes protected by lenses for shortsightedness and which always smiled; his lips, too, smiled very often.”92 “Around Energie Nove,” she continued, “he had gathered a group of very young people like himself which he made part of his faith, his enthusiasms, his ardor, since he was already a true spiritual guide for young people.” Yet another image of an intensely interested, precocious young man is provided by Prezzolini, some twenty years his elder, who, at last, met Gobetti alongside Gramsci while attending a conference in Turin in 1921. In his diary, Prezzolini noted: “He’s an energy, Gobetti, a great moral force, but his position has an intellectualistic and bookish character. He hurries and is enthusiastic to read, but it seems to me that he judges things more from reading than from wisdom.”93


Gobetti’s youth, intelligence, and frenetic activity, then, were both a source of attraction and evidence of a mercurial character, a young man not entirely settled into his intellectual journey. This lack of clear direction was eventually made clear in early 1920. Throughout the previous December, Gobetti had seemed prepared to continue his editorship of Energie Nove, and had even sketched out several plans for its development into a larger and more thematically comprehensive review.94 However, in February 1920, he interrupted these plans, calling for an intermezzo, or suspension, in the review’s publication, which, in fact, was never recommenced.95 Gobetti declared his desire to rethink his activities, elsewhere vowing to continue supporting Salvemini and other cultural activities in Turin.96 But in a private letter, he confessed he had undergone an “intimate crisis.”97 The reformist politics he had been pursuing, he later admitted, seemed overly fragmented and lacking in intellectual vision.98 Over the course of the next two years, Gobetti’s theoretical and political focus shifted dramatically as Italy’s crisis deepened and revolutionary upsurges spread throughout the industrial North and amongst the provincial, rural towns of the center. Events forced Gobetti to refocus his militant idealism onto the renewal of liberalism as a radical, emancipatory outlook, responsive to concrete social and political struggles. In 1923, he openly reflected on the reasons for his decision to cease publication: In 1920 I interrupted Energie Nove because I felt the need for a major meditation and I was thinking about an absolutely new political elaboration, the outlines of which in fact appeared to me in September at the time of the factory occupations. I credit my renewal of the Salveminian experience, on the one hand, to the Turin communist movement (alive with a concrete Marxist spirit), and on the other, to the studies of the Risorgimento and the Russian revolution I had been carrying out at that time.99

For the historian Paolo Spriano, 1920 represents “the great turning point for Gobetti,” involving both his absorption into the factory council conflicts in Turin and the preparation, eventually, for his new publication, La Rivoluzione Liberale.100 It is to the first of these events that the next chapter turns.

3

Liberty and Discipline Gramsci and the Factory Council Movement

T

he occupation of the factories by the Turin metalworkers in September 1920 represented the culmination of postwar working class unrest. The occupations, the final episode of the now fabled biennio rosso (two red years) of 1919–20, had a decisive impact on Gobetti, bringing him into proximity with a genuinely spontaneous working class politics and focusing his aspiration for renewal on a concrete historical subject. The occupations were defended theoretically by Ordine Nuovo and, in particular, by its twenty-nine-year-old communist coeditor, Antonio Gramsci, who, in its pages, outlined a theory of workplace democracy that envisaged the factories as the basis of a new workers’ state. Gobetti’s acquaintance with Gramsci and Ordine Nuovo’s project opened up a whole new horizon of possibilities, expanding his understanding of radical politics and encouraging him to transform his liberalism into what he understood as a revolutionary doctrine. Although Gobetti was profoundly influenced by the occupations and by Gramsci’s ideas about the factory councils, that influence served primarily to reinforce his own emergent reading of liberalism as an emancipatory doctrine in touch with “real” history. Gobetti never became a communist, but instead took from the Russian Revolution and Turin’s “council communism” exemplars of the combined practical and spiritual desire for selfdetermination that he believed Italy historically lacked. From hereon in, Gobetti repeatedly underscored his view that any political transformation had to be undertaken with the industrial working class as its leading social agency. This was not because he had converted to socialism or Marxism, nor indeed because he had an intimate commitment to, or knowledge of, the industrial proletariat. Rather, as he was to make clear, he believed the proletariat represented the basis of a new ruling class rooted in Italy’s history, one able to replenish the idea of freedom, to unify the various disparate


classes of the peninsula, and thus to reconstitute the Italian state. While Gobetti never endorsed the “organic” image of the workers’ state envisaged by Gramsci, he accepted the Sorelian idea that class struggle issued a unifying “myth” that would transform the workers into the vanguard of a new order. Paradoxically, then, the workers’ struggles and the factory council vision served to deepen Gobetti’s liberalism. The Factory Occupations and Ordine Nuovo The occupation of the factories in 1920 originated, strictly speaking, in the metalworkers’ wage dispute that had been in negotiation since May.1 That dispute, however, gave vent to a momentum that had been building since the end of the war, and that had already found expression in a tenday strike in Turin in April. As a whole, the trade union movement was in radical mood, resentful of the enormous war profits made by industrialists while workers were kept under military discipline, and now, in the worsening economic situation of the dopoguerra, concerned that wages were being outstripped by the higher cost of living brought by inflation. As noted in the previous chapter, trade union membership had increased massively as the heavy industries expanded to meet war time demand. The elections of November 1919 had already demonstrated the Left’s growing power. The unions were, therefore, confident of their new strength and feverishly eager to test it in disputes. The unions were not the only ones in intransigent mood. Industrialists, too, were reluctant to cede concessions to the unions. The expansion of industry in the war had created greater confidence amongst industries and an eagerness to maintain high profitability. After the war, a number of them sought to take over banks to sustain this expansion; for example, the Perrone group took over the Banca Commerciale Italiana in 1920, and other industries followed suit. The industrialists were also wary at the postwar governments’ evident reluctance to intervene in disputes, so as to encourage, or force, striking workers back to work. A new mood of aggression prevailed among a number of firms in response to the radicalism of the unions and what seemed to them as excessive sympathy toward the Left by the government—now once again under the premiership of the aged Giolitti. Thus, the metalworkers’ union, FIOM,2 and the industrialists, organized as AMMA,3 were not able to come to an agreement in the summer of 1920. In August, the union declared its intention to obstruct production, an action short of a strike. In the case of any lockouts by the management, as had occurred in April, the factories were to be occupied. Despite

LIBERTY AND DISCIPLINE

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government encouragement of conciliation, the industrialists decided to go ahead with lockouts on September 1, and the workers duly responded with occupations. Inside a week, metal-processing factories across Italy, from the densest industrial areas in Turin, Milan, and Genoa through to Rome, Naples, and Palermo were being occupied by workers. Factories, foundries, and shipyards across Italy were all affected: Itala, Fiat Centro, Ansaldo, Westinghouse, and so on. In Turin, the center of the dispute, nearly one hundred thousand workers were involved.4 Red flags were hung around workplaces and “communist kitchens” served up daily meals for unpaid workers. Overall, it was a largely peaceful and, in the beginning, a strangely euphoric event. Nevertheless, the workers placed armed guards at the factory gates to keep vigil in case of forced eviction by the army. What is notable about the occupations, however, especially in Turin, where the workers were well-organized and dedicated, was the agreement to carry on working while occupying the factories. To do this, it was necessary to impose order on the situation: this was undertaken in many instances by the “factory councils” (consigli di fabbrica), formerly factory-based grievance committees with members elected democratically by the workforce. “The factory councils,” argues Spriano, “were the disciplined core of this whole complex of activity in the workers’ management.”5 The councils undertook the role of disciplining the workforce and organizing continued production. Strict moral behavior was expected and absentee workers were even threatened with dismissal. In some cases, factory prisons were created to confine thieves caught taking advantage of the absence of managers.6 While production levels remained low, even some skilled technicians (who were not part of the dispute) continued to work under the management of the occupiers. Thus, the dispute took on the character not of a standard economic strike, where workers entrusted to their union leaders the power of negotiation, but something more practical and political involving the workers themselves as direct participants. The revolutionary potential of the factory occupations and the factory council organization had already become the focus of the editors of Ordine Nuovo: Gramsci, Togliatti, Umberto Terracini, and Angelo Tasca. For over a year, they had been closely involved in presenting the councils as a basis for a revolutionary politics based on the direct participation of the workers. All former students of the University of Turin, they had originally set out in May 1919 to create a socialist cultural review, developing a cultural politics for socialists in a rather Crocean vein—haughty and not a little pedantic— not dissimilar to Gramsci’s single issue La Cittá futura of 1917. Very soon, however, Gramsci led what he called an “editorial coup d’état,” transforming the paper, in June 1919, into a platform for debates concerning workers’ control of production as the basis of a new proletarian state.7 The young


editors soon found concrete focus for their otherwise “vague passion for a vague proletarian culture” (as Gramsci dismissed it),8 latching on to the internal commissions as evidence of a worker-led revolutionary movement to match the “Soviet” system underway in Russia. In Ordine Nuovo, they published numerous articles on the factory as the basis of a new state, invited workers to comment on its validity, and reprinted the work of other conciliar theories, such as Daniel de Leon, leader of the “Industrial Workers of the World” (IWW).9 For the ordinovisti, the factory council idea placed the Italian proletariat directly inside what they understood as an inescapable current of revolutionary fervor then exploding across postwar Europe. It was, they believed, the Italian response to the challenge made by the Russian Bolsheviks to found a new proletarian state. What was the factory council idea? In essence, the factory councils were viewed as organs for the workers’ democratic control of production. While there was no single version of this idea—for Ordine Nuovo published a variety of different views—there were a number of central features that Gramsci, the leading theorist of the factory council vision, set out through 1919 and 1920.10 What fascinated Gramsci was how the council movement simultaneously conjoined “economic” and “political” aspects of workers lives, that is, they envisaged the workers being organized democratically within the sphere of production, involving them in the collective life of the factory not just as paid employees but as equals and as decision makers. Sovereignty, argued Gramsci, “must be a function of production,” not of a separate state apparatus.11 Gramsci’s views contrasted with the division of labor traditionally accepted by the trade union movement and reformist socialists, which remained content to keep economic and political spheres apart. By bringing workers into collective decision making over the management of production, the “bourgeois” separation of “private” and “public” was collapsed.12 The factory council was thus a model for uniting state and society, authority and liberty, joining citizens together in their daily practice rather than merely “abstractly,” as Marx himself had argued of bourgeois democracy. In the factory, the “false freedom” of the passive citizen was replaced with the genuine freedom of the active “producer.”13 The common good of factory production was here not separated off as it was in the bourgeois state from the individual’s everyday life, practical tasks, and interactions with his or her fellow producers. Gramsci envisaged the factory-state generating a new kind of “communist psychology, constantly leavened by revolutionary enthusiasm” and “by the iron discipline of work.”14 This was a vision of an organic community of self-governing citizens—a whole new state to replace that of Italy’s failed bourgeoisie:


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The factory council is the model of the proletarian state. All the problems inherent to the organization of the proletarian state are inherent to the organization of the council. In the one as in the other, the concept of citizen declines and is replaced by the concept of comrade. Collaboration in effective and useful production develops solidarity and multiplies bonds of affection and fraternity. Everyone is indispensable, everyone is at his post, and everyone has a function and a post . . . Workers’ solidarity . . . is contained in the joyous awareness of being an organic whole, a homogenous and compact system which, through useful work and the disinterested production of social wealth, affirms its sovereignty and realizes its power and its freedom to create history.15

For Ordine Nuovo, the factory council offered the prospect of an entirely different kind of revolution from the vague, messianic fantasies common in the socialist movement. Here was a revolutionary praxis actually gestating within the concrete existence of the industrial proletariat, not an abstract utopia fashioned from without by the middle class “professors” who populated the socialist leadership. For the young editors, all well-versed in the idealist language of Croce, and especially in Sorel’s vision of socialism as the creation of a whole new civilization (as we will see later), the factory council contained, within it, living proof of the unity of thought and action recently theorized by Gentile. The workers own “spontaneous” activity was itself the seed of a new moral order, disciplined and self-directed, generated through the collective will of the proletariat toward the formation of a new state form. Unlike the anarchists, who rejected the very idea of the state, and traditional syndicalism that remained attached to the trade union as a source of revolutionary consciousness, the factory council, it was argued, presented the possibility of a genuinely new state whose unifying effects would emerge “immanently” to the self-activity of the workers, rather than through “external” leadership.16 Gramsci and Ordine Nuovo’s idea was not only the product of a long gestation within the revolutionary and syndicalist Left, which promoted the idea of workers creating their own autonomous institutions, but also of the Russian Revolution. Gramsci’s reading of the Bolshevik’s lesson was that revolution was an act of moral will, not the mechanical effect of economic laws as predicted by positivist Marxists, and that will had to be directed at the creation of a new state.17 The Russian experience presented the European workers’ movement with a choice: either work within the parameters of the bourgeois state, with all the divisions and limitations on workers’ control that implied, or develop a new state form altogether. Indeed, for Gramsci, there was more than a little convergence between conditions in Russia and in Italy: a weak state, strong remnants of a feudal


class, a minority workers’ movement less integrated into bourgeois democracy than other western states. Like Russia, Italy was one of the weak links in the “imperialist chain.”18 Already in 1918, Gramsci had developed his own distinctive reading of Marx and Marxism, placing the accent on the role of subjective will and moral commitment rather than economic “laws.” This humanist interpretation, drawn from Italian philosophers such as Croce, Gentile, and Antonio Labriola, as well as from Sorel, saw Marx as “a master of spiritual and moral life, not a shepherd wielding a crook.”19 Marx’s lesson, in this reading, was one of how to respond to the opportunities thrown up by history, not a science of history. The emphasis here was on the will, not in the sense of an arbitrary choice but in the sense of the “individuation by a class” in achieving “a political life independent from that of the other class, and a solid and disciplined organization.”20 The Russian revolutionaries had shown the way—now the Italian proletariat needed to take up the opportunity opened by the war. The factory council idea was novel and intriguing, playing up the idea of Turin’s working class as the vanguard of a new order, and it even attracted commendation from both Sorel and Lenin. But not everyone was in agreement with its vision or the analysis that supported it. The Turinese socialist section was not entirely convinced, and the wider socialist party, for all its revolutionary bombast, resisted the idea that the councils were themselves revolutionary organs. The factory council idea dispensed too easily, in their view, with the traditional institutions built by the workers themselves. On the other hand, Amadeo Bordiga, the charismatic and intransigent revolutionary from Naples whose own journal, Il Soviet, also understood the Russian Revolution as the moment for a decisive rupture with the bourgeois order, dismissed Ordine Nuovo’s arguments.21 The factory council was not organized along the same territorial lines as the Soviets since it was based on the structure of industrial plants. Nor was it sufficiently motivated to make the break with capitalism. That required the leadership of a party, as Lenin himself had shown. Outside of Turin, there was little national support for Ordine Nuovo’s factory council idea. By the summer of 1920, Ordine Nuovo itself was beginning to fracture. Earlier, in April, a ten-day strike over the status of the factory councils in Turin had failed to extend to the rest of the country, painfully revealing the group’s weak support. The PSI’s lack of interest was then decisive in underscoring for the ordinovisti the need to renew the party.22 Paradoxically, this brought them closer to Bordiga’s position, with whom they collaborated to organize a communist grouping within the party. But Gramsci and Tasca had a public falling out in July over the relationship between the councils and the trade unions, with Tasca inclined to integrate them more closely


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and Gramsci insistent that they remain fundamentally different entities and be autonomous from each other.23 By the time of the September occupations, then, Ordine Nuovo had already decided that the factory councils could not function as effective revolutionary organs without the additional support of a revolutionary party, and clearly its own idea of what kind of institutions they were was not fully agreed upon. Thus, Gramsci was not optimistic that the occupations in September would succeed. Already, he was acutely aware that unless the PSI take up some kind of leadership over industrial unrest, the result would be right-wing reaction amongst the already intransigent industrialists and the increasingly weary middle classes: “The current phase of the class struggle in Italy is the phase that precedes: either the conquest of political power on the part of the revolutionary proletariat . . . or a tremendous reaction on the part of the propertied classes and the governing caste.”24 In the end, events would prove him right. Gobetti and Gramsci Setting aside the question of their immediate success, there is no doubt that Gobetti was impressed by the factory occupations and by Ordine Nuovo’s role as theoretical guide. In a letter to Ada of September 7, 1920, he revealed his excitement: Here we are in the full flow of revolution. I am following with sympathy the efforts of the workers who really are constructing a new order. I don’t feel the urge to follow them in their work, at least just now. But, little by little, it seems to me that the greatest battle of the century is being clarified and imposed. Then my place will be with those who have most religiosity and spirit of sacrifice. Today the revolution is posed in all its religious character. Certainly, the hour is difficult even for the workers. By now, at least in Turin, they have liquidated the organizers and the old abstractionist and corrupt leaders, and they are doing things themselves.25

The reference to “religiosity” and “spirit of sacrifice” clearly reveals the idealist frame through which Gobetti saw events. But these remarks also disclose his hesitation and intentional distance. Gobetti was not a socialist nor integrated into the world of the industrial workers. His fascination with the occupations lay in their quest for autonomy and the moral discipline this implied—the “religious character” of the revolutionaries—not their capacity to realize socialist aims as such. Yet even this reading of the situation represented a significant turn around from his earlier, more critical views on socialism; now, the workers (but, notably, not its traditional


leaders) were viewed as constructing a whole “new order” in the very spirit of the militant idealism he himself had promoted. Gobetti had begun to look outside his immediate circle of students to the wider class structure of Turinese and Italian life. This overlap of Gobetti’s idealism with the ambitions of Turin’s working class is due, in no small part, to the influence of Gramsci. The Sardinian’s distinctive articulation of proletarian self-liberation resonated powerfully with Gobetti, as the latter’s later writings made clear.26 Although the two stemmed from essentially two different political worlds, Gobetti and Gramsci already shared many of the same intellectual points of reference.27 Before considering how they diverged, let us first summarize some of the evident commonalities. In terms of personal biography, Gobetti and Gramsci were well acquainted in the relatively small world of Turinese radical journalism. Despite the early spat by the ordinovisti against Energie Nove, Gramsci had nevertheless republished an article in Gobetti’s review.28 While there is no sign of a very close or intimate friendship, Gobetti began to be drawn to the offices of Ordine Nuovo in 1920, and in January 1921, he became the paper’s theater critic. Gobetti was deeply impressed by the enigmatic Gramsci, who combined intellectual brilliance and physical deformity (he was a hunchback who suffered from persistent health problems) with a personality that could be both painfully shy and bitingly critical. In a letter to Prezzolini of June 1920, Gobetti offered a sketch of the young communist, describing him, in his early years, as “a solitary person,” and pointing out that “even today he continues to work silently and without being well known”: “He was and is animated by a great moral fervor, a little scornful and pessimistic such that to speak to him for the first time reveals a skeptical vision of life. . . . In the evenings he brought together by himself workers who weren’t able to study and he was bringing them closer to culture and above all to sincerity, to morality: all this disinterestedly, continuously, obscurely.”29 Gobetti’s portrait of the “ferocious” Gramsci, driven to criticize even his friends by an “insatiable need for sincerity,” suggests, at face value, a student’s fascination for a stern teacher, a role model for the young, radical editor. But Gobetti continued to write in this vein long after the factory occupations, referring to Gramsci as the “formidable polemicist” whose style was “fierce, pressing, calmly destructive,”30 and later: the brain that has “overwhelmed the body. A dominant head on sick limbs constructed according to the logical relations of a great redeeming utopia.”31 Gobetti clearly knew of Gramsci’s personal development, too: the hardships he endured as an impoverished student from the South, the influence of Croce and Salvemini on him, and his distinctive formulation of Marxism that separated him from the wider tradition in Italy. Much of


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what we know of the young Gramsci today was, therefore, first made public by Gobetti, who gladly claimed to be “very friendly” with him.32 However, Gramsci’s appeal was not simply his seriousness and intelligence. For Gobetti, Gramsci’s brilliance lay in his break with the Italian socialist tradition, in recognizing, early on, the “anti-bureaucratic requirements of the Italian revolution” and the pressing need for a new state in Italy. The factory council idea promoted by the Turinese communists affirmed “local free initiative” against trade union bureaucracy, tackling “concrete problems” without the “anarchical and demagogic phraseology” typical of the revolutionary utopias.33 The “concrete experiences of political action,” he argued, “had almost completely freed the young Turinese communists from the baggage of the commonplaces of socialism and internationalism.” Ordine Nuovo’s “heroic experiment” was “one of the noblest efforts ever made to give an ideal foundation to the life of the nation.”34 This generous enthusiasm even led Gobetti, in another letter to Prezzolini in 1921, to raise the possibility of him republishing Gramsci’s factory council ideas in a single volume, although the project did not go any further.35 Gramsci, on the other hand, who was ten years older and a much more experienced journalist and political activist, closely integrated into the life of the socialist party and the workers movement, wrote little of Gobetti, and then, only after the latter’s death, noting the significance of the young liberal’s interest in the workers’ movement and the importance for the communist party to win over intellectuals like him. In 1925, in the course of an internal party polemic, Bordiga attacked Gramsci’s association with noncommunist intellectuals. Gramsci rejected this sectarian criticism, saying: “Gobetti’s attitude interests us because it signifies that a certain number of intellectuals are more to the Left than the maximalists themselves and would not find it completely alien to collaborate with the revolutionary proletariat.”36 Again in 1926, as we shall note in Chapter 6, not long after Gobetti’s death, in a noted essay on the “Southern Problem” and the political function of intellectuals, Gramsci returned to this point, highlighting Gobetti in particular as someone who uniquely sought to expand the concept of liberty to encompass the experiences of the workers’ movement.37 Beyond these explicit references, however, there was no direct political cooperation between Gramsci and Gobetti, and the direction of influence, certainly in 1920, seems to have flowed primarily from the former to the latter.38 If there is little evidence of more than an acquaintanceship between the two, their obvious affinity nevertheless reflected remarkable parallels in intellectual biography. Both Gramsci and Gobetti were intellectually rooted in the same idealist revival initiated by Croce and directed toward more radical ambitions by writers on La Voce. Consequently, both shared


a sense that political change could not be separated from spiritual and, concomitantly, educational change. During the war, as Gobetti previously noted, Gramsci had been involved in workers’ education, viewing proletarian self-emancipation as a process of collective self-awareness and moral self-discipline. For Gobetti, too, the aspiration to forge a renewed political culture was premised on a similar view of culture as the acquisition of moral discipline. As we have already indicated, he, too, pursued this interest in articles on educational reform in Energie Nove. As a student, Gramsci, like Gobetti, had been influenced by Salvemini’s critique of the liberal state, his focus on the deepening problem of the South, and its subordination to industry in the North, and hence the need for combined political and economic reform, particularly the removal of protectionist barriers to free trade. A southerner himself, such arguments reinforced an acute and direct awareness of the structural inequalities of the Italian state. In his 1922 commentary on the Turin communists, Gobetti highlighted Gramsci’s “political realism learnt at the most fertile political school that Italy ever had at the end of the century: Gaetano Salvemini’s L’Unitá.”39 We have already noted the sense of exhaustion of Salvemini’s agenda in Gramsci’s writings, which, after 1918, began to focus on the idea of a proletarian state. Nevertheless, this common critical motivation underscored a shared belief that cultural and spiritual changes were inseparable from institutional and structural change. Up until 1920, Gobetti had remained on the reformist, rather than revolutionary, side of this debate, adamant that revolutionary action was unnecessary in developed countries like Germany and Italy.40 Following the factory council debates and the Turin occupations, Gobetti, too, began to be attracted to the idea of the workers as the vanguard of a new political order, although he was never convinced that a socialist economic system was viable. Perhaps the theme that loomed largest in both their horizons was the Russian Revolution, an event they both viewed in highly idealist, libertarian terms. Gramsci, as we noted, had conceived it as evidence of the power of a subjective force directed toward the formation of a new state. For him—and for the rest of his political and intellectual life—that revolution was the most fundamental point of reference, a turning point in world history that posed a challenge no socialist could avoid: how to establish a new proletarian order in the wake of the decline of bourgeois society. The Russian Revolution demonstrated that the workers’ political struggle was aimed at conquering freedom on their own terms. “To him,” said Gobetti of Gramsci, “Lenin seemed like a heroic will to revolution: the ideal reasons that formed the Bolshevik myth . . . were not to constitute the model of an Italian revolution but to stimulate a free initiative operating from the


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bottom up.”41 Thus, the factory council was, as Gramsci put it himself, a new formation of freedom. Gobetti, too, recognized the Russian Revolution as a defining moment in social and political modernity.42 He had, for some time, been interested in Russian literature, and later translated a number of literary works with Ada and, in 1921, organized a conference on Russian thought.43 After his death, his articles on Russia and its intellectuals were republished in a single volume, Paradosso dello spirito russo (Paradox of the Russian Spirit), where the parallels he saw between Italy and Russia were clear.44 As we saw in the last chapter, the Bolsheviks’ overthrow of the tsarist regime, for him, incarnated a desire for liberty and self-rule. It was not so much a socialist experiment, but “the negation of socialism and an affirmation and exaltation of liberalism.”45 For both Gobetti and Gramsci, then, this idealized, emancipatory vision of the Bolshevik Revolution enabled them to conceive that event as an historical rupture of immense significance for the expression and expansion of freedom. The Young Sorelians Gobetti’s emerging view of liberalism as an emancipatory doctrine, an active exercise of freedom rather than a doctrine of civil and political rights, would later be the central philosophical thread of his review, Rivoluzione Liberale (to be examined in the next chapter). For now, however, we may note the similarities it had with Gramsci’s “libertarian” socialism during 1919–20. For both, the autonomous self-management of factories by the workers underscored an emancipatory thrust given form in the historical example of the Russian Revolution. This thrust cut across the traditional ideological divisions of reformist socialism and maximalist revolutionism, firmly placing emphasis on the proletariat as a self-conscious and disciplined moral force. This outlook is widely associated with the work of the French syndicalist Georges Sorel, whose influential Reflections on Violence of 1908 argued for the idea of “myth” as a psychological motivation to the working class’s participation in revolutionary action.46 Rejecting the positivist account of Marxism, Sorel had argued that a true revolutionary socialism depended upon the proletariat itself actively producing a “catastrophic” break with the bourgeois order, not being led by a party to compromise with it in parliamentary reformism. This break was made manifest through acts of “violence,” which, he believed, would generate unifying sentiments of war.47 For Sorel, the myth was generated in the experience of the general strike conceived not as an instrumental technique of forcing concessions


over various demands, but as a symbolic unity that prefigured a rupture with the capitalist order. “Strikes,” he argued, “have engendered in the proletariat the noblest, the deepest and the most moving sentiments that they possess.”48 Thus, the general strike was an event beyond any rational goals as such, and for Sorel, its value lay exclusively in the present, the extent to which it furnished a vision that mobilized workers to act, regardless of how realistic it might be as a “tactic.”49 By way of Croce—who endorsed and popularized Sorel’s ideas as similar revisions to Marxism as his own—as well as through his close engagement with Italian socialists, his impact in Italy was extensive in the early decades of the century, particularly among revolutionary syndicalists.50 Gramsci and Gobetti were both deeply inspired by this Sorelian view, and it explains, in part, the close association of liberty and discipline found in both of their writings at this time.51 Sorel, who was himself influenced by Proudhon, was a strong moralist. His conception of “revolutionary violence” and myth was never an exaltation of mindless brutality, but an appeal for spiritual commitment and self-discipline beyond purely “material” interest.52 The proletarian revolution, he argued, represented the “noble side” of war. That is, it evinced a sense of moral superiority over normal conditions of life, a “sentiment of glory” for a higher cause, and a desire to “submit to the test” of a great battle where its strength will be tried.53 Rather than motivated by petty gain or small-minded vengeance, the general strike, “awakens in the depth of the soul a sentiment of the sublime proportionate to the conditions of a gigantic struggle; it forces the desire to satisfy jealousy by malice into the background; it brings to the fore the pride of free men and thus protects the worker from the charlatanism of ambitious leaders eager for pleasures.”54 Sorel’s “ethics of the producers,” a moral outlook that presented the proletariat as a cohesive and autonomous producer community, was therefore inseparable from its goal of violently ceding from bourgeois society.55 This moralized account of revolution left a strong trace in both Gramsci and, under his influence, Gobetti.56 However, Gramsci differed significantly from Sorel with respect to the location of this moral community. Whereas Sorel associated moral discipline with the guidance of the trade union (the syndicat), Gramsci placed it in the factory, unmediated by trade union influence.57 The freedom of the proletariat to collectively manage its own factories was conceived by the ordinovisti simultaneously as a process of moral self-discipline, the participation by individual workers in a state undergirded by a shared sense of the common good, not a voluntary association that could be exited at will. For Gramsci, under the influence of Gentile, the factory was to be part of an “organic” order in which different productive tasks would be functionally unified in


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a hierarchy of councils whose unity was expressed via an all-encompassing framework of values. It was to be an “ethical state” in which the whole and the parts were conceived as one, and for Gramsci: “The state has always been the protagonist of history.”58 Sorel, on the other hand, remained convinced of the need to smash the state.59 Gobetti, too, defended this unity of liberty and discipline in his account of the “religiosity” and “spirit of sacrifice” of the Turinese workers. The workers’ movement, he argued in a letter of August 1920, was “the only valid force in political life, because it is the only one that can act, in a Sorelian way, as myth.”60 He therefore endorsed Gramsci’s view of the factory council as a site of intensive self-education on the part of the workers, conceiving “myth” less as the conjunction of irrational instincts, as Sorel implied, and more as an expression of moral unity and self-discipline. While the trade union was “a body for resistance not initiative . . . in the council the worker feels his dignity and indispensability as an element of modern life.”61 The workers’ freedom to govern themselves as autonomous producers implied their deeper integration into a cohesive moral order they lacked as mere wage earners. Ordine Nuovo had therefore begun to teach the working classes “discipline and authority.”62 In the factory, he reflected in an article of 1925, in still strongly Gramscian language, the “individual becomes accustomed to feel himself part of a productive process.”63 Continuing, he reminisced: I will always remember the impression I had of the workers when I happened to visit the Fiat plant, one of the few, modern, capitalist, AngloSaxon factories there are in Italy. In them I sensed an attitude of control, an unfeigned sense of certainty, and a contempt for any kind of dilettantism. Those whose lives are in the factory have dignity in their work and the habit of self-sacrifice and toil. There is a rhythm of life based strictly on a sense of tolerance and interdependence that disposes them to punctuality, rigor and continuity. These capitalist virtues suggest an almost arid asceticism; but, in compensation, their suppressed suffering fuels with exasperation a courage for the fight and the instinct for political defense.64

In keeping with the combative, Sorelian tone, this disciplined attitude was enhanced by the capacity of the workers to break fundamentally with the bourgeois order, a point which for Gobetti extended to an almost apocalyptic vision in 1922 as fascist violence grew: “We are in an inevitable crisis through which our people strengthens its will and educates itself toward an exertion of freedom. Above any sentimentality and contingent damage, violence demonstrates vital ferments, resolute energies, mature thoughts.”65


Liberal Communism? Because of the common Sorelian vocabulary, the figures of Gramsci and Gobetti have become indissolubly linked following the recovery of political ideas in prefascist Italy. “I don’t know how to imagine Gramsci without Gobetti,” claims one scholar in his assessment of Gobetti’s place in the history of Italian political thought.66 Yet despite Gobetti’s great admiration for Gramsci and the evident intellectual parallels between them, we should not uncritically associate the liberal’s ideas with those of his communist friend. As we have noted, Gobetti was inclined to view the Russian revolution as an exemplification of liberalism, not as evidence of the persuasiveness of Marxist socialism or communism. This was precisely its “paradox.”67 Indeed, the lesson to be gained from the revolution for Gobetti was less the appropriateness of a specific form of state than the principle of a rupture with the past. Russia was heaving itself into modernity, certainly, just as Italy would have to. But if Gramsci saw the Bolshevik’s success as part of a transition to socialism, Gobetti remained wholly skeptical about socialist political economy, which he viewed as unsustainable. The irony of the Russian Revolution, he remarked at one point, was that it prefigured not so much socialism, but capitalism! In exalting freedom and breaking up the communitarian structure of the tsarist order, the revolution was oriented against a collectivist economy: “The new governing minority has affirmed itself in Russia by creating, through its communist aspirations, the expectations and presuppositions of a capitalistic civilization. The irony of history is that the first bourgeois interests . . . are being created in Russia in the name of Marxism.”68 Indeed, from the beginning his view was that a revolutionary transformation, while understandable in the backward conditions for tsarist Russia, was quite unnecessary in developed states.69 Furthermore, in his praise for the Turinese proletariat’s recognition of the “revolutionary value of the state,” he understood the term “state” not as a concrete apparatus of power (as, in this instance, the factory council was for Gramsci), but as an organized collective consciousness. It was precisely this galvanizing, disciplining force of a revolutionary subjectivity á la Sorel that attracted Gobetti, not its immediate aims as such. If socialism was the “starting point” for this myth, “the point of arrival is always liberalism, history; the painful contingency of problems and solutions that are never in a preconceived system because they are born from the practical conciliation of that system and all the others according to which men think.”70 Gobetti’s later “revolutionary” outlook appears very much a commitment to a revolution of the spirit rather than fundamental reorganization of economic and political institutions.


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His association with Gramsci and Ordine Nuovo inevitably led some of Gobetti’s contemporaries to believe him to be occupying the same ideological camp, an accusation he angrily rebuked in his correspondence: “I am diametrically opposed to Gramsci. My ideas are the fruit of a mature and in-depth examination of the failure of the Italian revolution of the 1800s.”71 This comment disguises Gobetti’s admiration for Gramsci, displayed clearly elsewhere, but it points to his philosophical rejection of reformist socialism, communism, and Marxism as political doctrines.72 Only insofar as these converged on what he saw as liberalism’s emancipatory principles were they of interest to him. Gobetti conceived the workers’ movement as an agent for liberalism’s revolutionary values, not an ideal model of economy and politics. Ordine Nuovo’s great merit, he argued, was to have made “manifest the concrete resolution of creating a state which could resolve the bourgeois crisis and inherit the unresolved problems of the Risorgimento. They concede that the revolution is the conclusion of revolutionary nineteenth-century liberalism.”73 Ordine Nuovo had, he claimed, “interpreted the workers’ movement in its national and liberal sense.”74 Gramsci and his colleagues would certainly have conceded that the workers would take over the legacy of the failed Italian bourgeoisie in producing a national revolution. But they were unlikely to have understood their revolutionary goals as intrinsically “liberal.” For them, the factory council idea had been an extension of socialist thought, while for Gobetti, it was “clearly liberal and autonomist”75: “In the face of the magnificent councils’ movement a liberal could not assume the merely negative position assumed by L. Einaudi or E. Giretti. The liberal is confronted with one of the most characteristically and openly autonomist phenomena which has ever taken place in modern Italy.”76 Later commentators, however, have come to regard Gramsci’s vision of the factory council state as being somewhat antiliberal, insofar as the term “liberal” implies primacy being given to the value of individual liberty.77 Of course, this was not wholly the way Gobetti understood the term, but it is certainly one of the major elements of modern liberal political philosophy. Despite his emphasis on the workers’ self-liberation in the factory state, Gramsci’s view of an organic community of producers gave little sense of an appreciation of the potential for functional differences within the workplace to issue in conflict, nor did his plans sufficiently highlight the potential plurality of values and interests both within and outside the factory. Individual freedom to dissent and the right to be protected from the pressure to conform was not a major theme of his vision. For the most part, political differences were, in his analysis, subsumed within a framework that emphasized moral order and a common commitment by workers to the goals of material production.


As Sbarberi notes, Gramsci’s theory expressed an unresolved tension between the libertarian ideal of self-emancipation and a more closed conception of organic community where social differences were harmonized.78 Far from being “clearly liberal,” as Gobetti put it, the factory council state was premised on a notion of moral equality between producers that Gramsci left critically unexamined and that Gobetti, somewhat bizarrely, seemed to ignore. Indeed, Gobetti preferred to emphasize the hierarchical nature of the factory council, the “aristocracy” of workers that it fashioned “from the bottom up.”79 As we shall see more closely in the next chapter, it was the leadership role of this aristocracy over the workers, not its organic unity with them that, for him, underscored the political significance of the movement. As one commentator notes, the Sorelian myth was embodied for Gobetti neither in the trade union nor the factory but in the leading elite—the “heroic minority”—and its capacity to inspire and educate the workers.80 This leadership role was compatible with the idea of liberty as a struggle for collective emancipation, but it refused the organic imagery of Gramsci’s account of the factory councils. Gobetti’s interpretation of Gramsci and Ordine Nuovo, then, seemed willfully focused on issues that inspired his own, developing outlook. Arguably, each saw in the other an exemplification of their own viewpoints. While Gramsci’s later assessment indicated that he understood the young liberal to have recognized the historical significance of the workers’ movement, Gobetti suggested that, instead, under Ordine Nuovo’s influence, the workers had begun to recognize the value of liberalism. For all their evident commonalities, then, their association seems to be based on a mutual self-affirmation rather than a substantially similar outlook. But Gobetti never managed to shake off his association with the ordinovisti, and to this day, he is often labeled with the peculiar epithet “liberal-communist.”81 This term reflects the unsettled ideological matrix of the period, as traditionally opposed moral and political positions shifted ground and moved into greater proximity. This was precisely what had happened during the interventionist crisis in 1915, as liberal reformers, revolutionaries, and hard-line nationalists began to share similar space. Such intermingling created strange, often unstable, alliances. Gobetti and Gramsci’s alliance, if that is what it was, was one of young idealists inspired by the Russian Revolution and the independent spirit of the Turinese workers. Although their association lasted beyond the immediate moment of the biennio rosso, we should be clear that it reflected more a passing convergence than a common enterprise. As the factory council disputes resolved into compromise, and the workers’ revolutionary fervor died down in the face of economic decline and violent fascist reaction, Gobetti began to define, in greater detail, his own distinctive project of liberal revolution.


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The Defeat of the Occupations The end of the factory occupations eventually came in the last week of September 1920. No organization outside Turin was willing to extend it into a full-scale revolutionary uprising. While the PSI had loudly trumpeted its revolutionary propaganda, its leadership did nothing to indicate a genuine preparation for revolutionary conditions. At its convention on September 10–11, the trades union federation formally rejected the idea of the dispute leading to revolution.82 For his part, prime minister Giolitti continued to refuse to take up the industrialists’ requests to crush the movement. Instead, the government eventually conceded the need for greater workers’ control of industry—but through trade unions, not independent factory councils—and eventually succeeded in formulating a compromise between the metalworkers’ unions and employers, agreeing a “joint commission” to discuss workers’ control and concluding the pay dispute with FIOM. Giolitti’s strategy of absorbing potential enemies appeared to have triumphed again and, a year later, the joint commission eventually came to nothing. Exhausted, impoverished, and demoralized, the occupying workers overwhelmingly agreed to the plan in a series of referendums. Between September 25 and 30, they left the factories and—to a great extent with evident relief—returned control to the employers.83 The “defeat” of the occupations, at least the workers’ more revolutionary demands, came as no great surprise to the ordinovisti, who followed the end of the dispute with bitter recrimination against the indecision of the socialist party. Gramsci and his colleagues now openly demanded the transformation of the PSI into a communist party according to the “twenty-one conditions” laid down by Lenin for membership of the Third International Workers’ Movement.84 This included the expulsion of reformists and the reorganization of the party along “Bolshevik” lines. For the communist revolutionaries—in particular, the ordinovisti and Bordiga’s followers—the conjuncture remained actively “revolutionary.” What was needed, above all, they claimed, was proper organizational leadership, something the PSI manifestly lacked. In January 1921, the party held its annual congress in Livorno. There, the communists formally demanded the transformation of the PSI into a communist party. On their (rather predictable) defeat, they staged a walkout and gathered together in the Goldoni Theatre across the road from the PSI congress. The small rump of revolutionaries then formally constituted the Communist Party of Italy (Partito comunista d’Italia, or PCdI). Bordiga was elected leader, Togliatti took up a place on its executive committee. But Gramsci did not hold a position. Ordine Nuovo, however, was reclassified a party organ and Gramsci returned to Turin to take up his editorship as a dutiful member of the communist party.85


As Gobetti recognized, these events effectively ended the independent vision set out by Gramsci the previous year: “Between Bordiga and Gramsci . . . there are undoubtedly remarkable differences in terms of their thinking.”86 The intransigent Bordiga, as already noted, was highly critical of the factory council movement, regarding it as a distraction from the real business of organizing a revolutionary vanguard. Bordiga, claimed Gobetti, “willingly stops at the mythical phase of the revolution,” while Gramsci had tried to “connect myth with practical action” in the factory council state.87 The new party was forged according to Bordiga’s view that revolutionary politics required a disciplined, hierarchically organized elite. Gramsci’s earlier notion of a participatory revolution in which the workers inserted themselves into history was not compatible with this view. But Gramsci himself had largely abandoned these ideas, under the assumption that effective party leadership was now required. For Gobetti, too, the failure of the factory council movement led inexorably to the requirement for a more disciplined leadership: “The new Communist Party must organize the vanguard of the movement with a stern internal discipline: it must be a leading minority around which the amorphous popular mass orders itself, feels its superiority and accepts its influence. Only this unitary and aristocratic conception can give a soul and ideal personality to the workers.”88 But in 1921, the communist party had effectively opted for a “purist” conception of revolutionary politics, cutting itself off from the mass of workers whose genuine interests it claimed to represent and denouncing all those socialists who did not accept its dogma. The communists turned against the socialists, while the socialists eventually expelled its reformists, who then went on to form a new “unitary” socialist party. The Left had split into squabbling factions, bent on warring with each other, rather than attentive to the rising tide of reaction. This was not the “leading minority” Gobetti was hoping for. While Gramsci remained for him a key figure, in 1922, the liberal noted that the inspiration of the factory council movement was now “lost”: “The brain and activities of the man who interpreted and created the movement [had] dried up.”89 After serving as Ordine Nuovo’s theater reviewer from January 1921, Gobetti then suspended his university studies and took up his six months compulsory military service. During this period he began to prepare his next new venture: a political review that would commence the task of promoting a “unitary and aristocratic conception” of leadership where the factory council movement had failed, further clarifying and developing his revolutionary understanding of liberalism.

4

Liberal Revolution Toward a New Elite

I

n 1922, Gobetti began publishing his weekly review, La Rivoluzione Liberale. The review extended the demand for a renewal of Italian political culture that began with Energie Nove and hosted the views of many of the same friends and commentators who had appeared there. But it also reflected the significant development undergone in Gobetti’s outlook since 1920, and it sought out a larger audience than before. The experience of the factory council movement and the increasing degeneration of Italian political life form the dramatic backdrop of this publication. Rivoluzione Liberale was both a source of commentary on the decline of liberal Italy but also an intervention in its own right, one aimed at revitalizing the liberal conscience at the very moment authoritarian reaction was descending. The review provided a platform for what may be understood as Gobetti’s “mature” political thought, although the young editor was only twenty-one years old at the time of its first issue. There, he set out publicly, and with a renewed confidence, his own, distinctive outlook, forged in the previous years, concerning liberal revolution: the argument that liberalism was an emancipatory ethos immanent to popular struggles to extend freedom, rather than a doctrine of eternal, transcendental principles or a form of state. This liberal—or libertarian—ethos combined with a project to reinterpret Italian history as a series of incomplete or compromised efforts to generate a unified state based on the value of freedom, and to disclose the potential in contemporary political struggles to usher forth a movement for a liberal revolution. To do so, liberalism had to be grasped as an active, combative theoretical outlook, one with political struggle as its fundamental principle, not consensus or compromise. For Gobetti—as for others before him—an enlightened elite had to be at the forefront of that outlook, a new ruling class assembled from a variety of social classes but


which, for Gobetti at least, had as its primary constituency the industrial workers’ movement. In developing these points, the young Torinese drew upon a number authoritative theories and thinkers. As we shall see in this chapter, Gobetti reworked the ideas of the liberal economist Luigi Einaudi to underscore the role of class conflict in sustaining a liberal order, and from the conservative Gaetano Mosca, he endorsed the principle that political success depended on the formation of a ruling elite. These elements helped mark out Rivoluzione Liberale as a distinctive locus of political commentary in the final years of the liberal regime, eventually attracting the interest of a diverse range of intellectuals and young liberals disillusioned with traditional, conservative liberalism, but as yet uncertain how to adjust either to socialism or communism.1 Gobetti’s task, we might say, was to provide arguments to make this adjustment seem more persuasive. And to further disseminate his arguments, in 1924, he published a short, book-length version of his articles, which supplied a condensed narrative study of the “political struggle” underway in Italy, its historical conditions, and the key actors in the present conjuncture.2 Let us begin sketching Gobetti’s arguments for a revolutionary liberalism by examining the historical outlook with which he announced his new review. Rivoluzione Liberale: The Legacies of Italian History The first issue of Rivoluzione Liberale appeared on February 12, 1922. Unlike its predecessor, this publication was a generous, confident broadsheet. This confidence was reflected in its address “To The Readers,” where it set out its mission to continue and to expand the project initiated with Energie Nove, that is, “to set about forging a new political class” with “a clear awareness of its historical traditions and the social needs born from the participation of the people in the life of the state.”3 To this end, Gobetti indicated a variety of themes to be covered: in particular, to deepen a “revisionist” interpretation of the Risorgimento and the history of Italy after 1870, and to analyze the formation of new political forces in Italy and on the international scene. These topics would be accompanied by a practical action, too, to be pursued by Gobetti’s publishing house, including conferences, a school of political education, and an effort to extend the paper’s ideas by engaging with the wider local press. To the “Friends of L’Unitá,” Gobetti claimed his review should be understood as profoundly different

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from the venerable Salvemini’s publication, but he extended an invitation to its followers to join “in our work of study and free critique.”4 Rivoluzione Liberale aimed to undertake a comprehensive and critical rethink of Italian political culture by reexamining modern Italy’s historical legacies and its current domestic and international situation. This was no mere problemismo—that is, the empirical focus on separate, concrete problems—but a more theoretically unified project with an explicit emphasis on the urgency of cultural and political transformation. The critical synthesis of historical, theoretical, and political perspectives was given full elaboration in Gobetti’s opening article, the appropriately titled “Manifesto.” There, he linked the current situation in Italy to its historical legacies. The war, Gobetti claimed, had opened up a vital opportunity to reconstitute Italian political life by imposing discipline on the nation and generating a spontaneous desire to tackle “the central problem of our life as a modern people: unity.”5 The problem of unity consisted in simultaneously subjective and objective dimensions: “The incapacity of Italy to constitute itself as a unitary organism is essentially an incapacity of its citizens to form an awareness of the state and to bring their practical adhesion to the living reality of social organization.”6 This dual incapacity of “awareness” and “organization” was linked, he implied, to three key factors: the absence of a ruling political class; the absence of a modern market economy; and the absence of any experience of the direct exercise of freedom. As a consequence, he continued: “Deprived of liberty, we were deprived of an open political struggle. The first principle of political education was absent, namely the choice between ruling classes. While the vitality of the state—presupposing, in whatever form, the adhesion of citizens—is based precisely on the ability of each to act freely and to realize this way the necessary work of participation, control, and opposition.”7 Gobetti’s diagnosis of Italy’s historical legacy—its unachieved maturation into a liberal civic culture—underscored his thought from hereon in. It announced his contribution to what would later become a critical, revisionist account of Italian history amongst left-wing (particularly Marxist) scholars, a counterpoint to the thesis that the Risorgimento constituted a great advance of freedom. For Gobetti, Italy’s failure to progress into a unified community, founded on a shared principle of liberty, was evident in the absence of a successful ruling class. This absence became, for him, an interpretive key to the historical formation of the state, a task he took up in the remainder of this opening article. In “Manifesto,” Gobetti surveyed the historical formation of modern Italy from the medieval communes to the present, recounting, in successive


phases, the efforts to establish political unity. While the communes had initiated a modern economic system, they remained exclusive and at odds with the Catholic Church. Although thinkers such as Niccoló Machiavelli succeeded in elaborating a modern conception of the state and politics, his lesson had been that of an isolated theorist and remained unheeded two centuries later.8 Post–French revolutionary romantics later developed ideas of political autonomy, but never managed to develop a secular idea of the state because they remained closely tied to the authority of the church. Likewise, the Risorgimento struggles and the unitary state after 1870 remained fundamentally unable to inculcate a sense of common purpose based on the value of freedom and rooted in the public conscience. Instead, compromises and the brute imposition of the new system on its populace resulted in a fractious and disorderly situation all the way up to 1915. Gobetti summarized the current situation as thus: “The state is corroded by a profound difference between government and people: a government without validity and without autonomy because abstracted from real conditions and based on compromise; a people educated in materialism without conscience and will, in a perennially anarchic attitude towards social organization.”9 It was this unstable system, he went on, that “culminates necessarily in Giolittismo.” But, he continued, the world war had precipitated a crisis that rejuvenated the ideal of liberty, this time amongst the wider masses. The old post–Risorgimento liberalism “is dead because it has not resolved the problem of unity. Whoever wishes to take up the legacy of liberalism will have to remedy the problem.”10 For Gobetti, neither the Catholic Popular Party nor the socialists were capable of taking up this task. While “certain communists” (that is, the Turin communists led by Gramsci) had gone further than others in developing a new idea of the state, since the formation of the communist party, their ideas no longer inspired discipline amongst the masses. Nevertheless, he argued: “The workers’ movement has been in these years the first lay movement in Italy, the only one capable of bringing to its ultimate logic the modern, revolutionary value of the state, and of expressing its anti-Catholic, religious identity, denying all churches.”11 And yet, claimed Gobetti, “the healthy part of our ruling class don’t know how to recognize the national value of the workers’ movement.”12 The factory council struggles showed the way to a new form of economy, one based on the free initiative of the workers, potentially uniting them with the industrialists in a disciplined relationship. Although the occupations were defeated, he argued, the movement should not be regarded as a spent force. Gobetti ended his article by underlining the need to undertake “the preparation of free spirits capable of adhering, without prejudice and in the decisive moment, to popular initiative.” Industrialists,

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bankers, entrepreneurs, all of whom share with the workers the ideal of an “anti-bureaucratic revolution,” need to be educated to this new “freedom of vision.” We see in “Manifesto” the core principles of Gobetti’s revolutionary liberalism, which will be repeatedly defended in the years to come. By contrast with a liberal tradition that idealized the accomplishments of the Risorgimento, Gobetti understood Italy’s historical legacy to have been a failure to constitute a unified, autonomous nation-state. The classic, liberal ideal of a government founded on the consent of its people had never been sufficiently institutionalized, indeed not even adequately pursued. The liberal revolution against the feudal order and its mode of governing, which had occurred in England and in France—the central models of modern, bourgeois society for many Italians at that time—had never taken place. A civil order founded on the ethic of freedom remained unaccomplished. The task ahead, Gobetti argued, was to complete this unfinished business by means of the only serious, mass-based political force at large: the revolutionary workers’ movement. Gobetti’s implication was that liberal sympathizers needed to see the workers’ movement as the inheritor of the revolutionary liberal ideals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rivoluzione Liberale’s task was to develop this analysis publicly and promote a project that connected liberals to the working masses. In this respect, the review’s role was to engage the educated elite with sympathies for liberal ideals, not the workers. Unlike Gramsci and Ordine Nuovo, Gobetti conceived the educational task not as one of raising the cultural level of the masses, but rather that of reeducating liberals so as to forge a new ruling class combining workers and industrialists. We shall discuss the sources of, and problems with, this openly elitist argument later in this chapter. But first, let us consider how well this critical historical outlook went down with its readers. Having offered “Manifesto” as an opening gambit for his new project, Gobetti invited readers to respond. In the third issue, he published some of the critical remarks he had received.13 While most were largely in sympathy with Gobetti’s critical reading of the Risorgimento, there was some skepticism about its details and the possibility of a new kind of politics emerging from this critique. Fillipo Burzio, for example—a Giolittian of elitist orientation—thought Gobetti had been too schematic in his interpretation of Italian history and also expressed doubts “on the imminent possibility of a vast popular participation in the ideal life of the state.” Ubaldo Formentini, furthermore, took issue with what Gobetti understood by “adhering to history.” Vulgar Marxism aside, it was clear that if history was truly to be history, it


predetermined no specific developmental course as such. If this was the case, then it was not yet clear that Gobetti had shown why socialists would not still prefer to pursue a form of bureaucratic state socialism. Likewise, Formentini argued that, in response to bureaucratic socialism, Rivoluzione Liberale was likely to end up emphasizing classical liberal principles. How was any new synthesis possible in the short term? Finally, Giovanni Ansaldo underscored the similarity he saw between Gobetti’s analysis of Italian history and Max Weber’s argument concerning the protestant ethic and the “Spirit of Capitalism.”14 Gobetti’s critique of Italian development shared with Weber the view that modern liberal society presupposed a culture of asceticism in order to help “rationalize” forms of social and cultural organization. But for Ansaldo, this capitalist spirit had never existed in Italy because of the power of the Catholic Church, which had spared Italians any doubt about “predestination.” An independent bourgeoisie that invested its identity in the work ethic and a desire to improve society had always been absent. In such circumstances, implied Ansaldo, the preconditions for a modern liberal order were unavailable, and the project of liberal revolution was doomed. Gobetti responded to his critics by pointing out that his intention in “Manifesto” was merely to provide a “description of attitudes,” nothing more.15 Clearly, he replied to Burzio, this was not a full history of the Risorgimento. Rather, it was “our history,” a necessarily simplified perspective written from an “engaged” point of view. There was, however, a reciprocal relationship between historical interpretation and political engagement. It was necessary, claimed Gobetti, to legitimate his project by demonstrating its continuity with a tradition. But the project to renounce reformism and endorse spontaneous revolutionary movements did not absolutely require this historical justification because it was an evident reality that was itself making history.16 Gobetti’s suggestion here was that a historical narrative was useful in order to persuade recalcitrant liberals. Indeed, in response to Formentini, Gobetti agreed that “adhering to history” did not at all mean following a predetermined pattern, since even those who reject history adhere, in some way, to the possibilities it opens up. To adhere to history meant nothing more than that the present is born from the past, creating a future from materials already laid down. But the future was never reducible to the past. Ansaldo’s pessimism was therefore wholly unwarranted—the weight of the past need not constrain action in the present, but rather, it should inspire further advance. The historical difficulties set out in “Manifesto,” claimed Gobetti, were not

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“histories of failure, but indications of a spiritual state, of insuppressible aspirations.”17 The point was not to cultivate a Protestant religion, but to draw out the liberal character of the mass-based and intransigent parties emerging in the current revolutionary crisis.18 Later, however, Gobetti was willing to refer to his own outlook as a form of “Protestantism” since, unlike Catholicism, Anglo-Saxon Protestantism had been open to political conflict and fostered an “heroic” individualism alongside the development of capitalism.19 The Protestant transformations of Europe, he argued, had “proved their vitality in the creation of a new moral character.” It was precisely that type of “moral revolution” that the workers’ demand for factory democracy offered20: “Anglo-Saxon maturity, the capacity to believe in definite ideologies, to face danger and make them prevail, a strict will to take part in political struggle with dignity, are all born from this novitiate [i.e., the workers’ movement] which signifies the last great revolution to occur after Christianity.”21 Gobetti, therefore, disagreed that a “democratic revolution” in Italy was conditional upon religious reform, as some argued, yet he affirmed the view that the absence of a Protestant reformation had inhibited Italy’s maturation into a civic culture and that a spiritual transformation akin to Protestantism was required.22 Gobetti’s defense of “Manifesto” emphasized being engaged in the moment as opposed to writing scholarly history or setting out abstract schemes for social improvement. Yet his reflections on Italian history in Rivoluzione Liberale undoubtedly aimed to develop a critical counternarrative to the idealization of the Risorgimento so as to generate a historical consciousness to inspire liberals to think of the present in terms of an incomplete liberal project. This was also the thrust of his graduating thesis of summer 1922, which examined the liberal ideas of the eighteenth-century poet and dramatist, Vittorio Alfieri.23 It was evident, too, in the short, unfinished manuscript, Risorgimento senza eroi (Risorgimento Without Heroes), published posthumously in 1926, which examined the Risorgimento struggles from the perspective of Piedmont and its largely unknown liberal “heretics.”24 In his response to his critics, Gobetti accepted that there was a “tragic contradiction” between “our attitude as critics and our practical conclusions.” How to “technically realize” the revolution, he admitted, was the “essential problem.” The task for Rivoluzione Liberale, he continued, was to remain firmly opposed to the present order, to avoid all “collaborationism” with the current system and all utopian fantasizing in order to begin forging a new liberal sensibility, “preparing the men who will know how


Figure 4.1

The first issue of La Rivoluzione Liberale, February 1922.

to accept the revolution and to work realistically.” This was a grave, possibly “unpopular” task that itself demanded asceticism and seriousness25 (see Figure 4.1). A Conflictual Liberalism Gobetti’s claim in “Manifesto” that, in failing to offer up a principled ruling class, Italian liberal politics had “deprived” its citizens of “an open political struggle” underscored a core principle of the project of liberal revolution:

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the validation of political conflict. The value Gobetti gave to political conflict informed his entire critique of Giolittian parliamentary politics and, as we will see later, his critique of fascism. For him, too much attention in Italian political thought had been directed at the problem of “authority”— how to get people to obey—when the real issue, as he saw it, was how to support “autonomy.” In Gobetti’s view, a new liberalism had to be formulated with the principle of conflict or struggle at its core. I will consider this crucial aspect of his thought in more detail in Chapter 7. For now, let us consider its meaning and source. Conflict is undoubtedly a key aspect of liberal political theory. The right to dissent and disagree both with co-citizens and the offices of political authority has been a central thread in the liberal heritage. Figures such as John Stuart Mill, for instance, were keen to emphasize the virtues of moral disagreement as one of the key elements of his “principle of liberty.”26 But in Gobetti’s case, we are not dealing only with moral disagreements, which may be tolerated on the basis of an underlying agreement about the appropriateness of the political system. The kind of conflict that Gobetti was suggesting was, arguably, more extensive than that—it indicated a form of political conflict; that is, disagreement over the choice of a ruling class and the form of state under which citizens lived. In this scenario, conflict was not merely a dispute over the distribution of resources and values, but rather a dispute over the very nature of the community and its shared principles. In political conflict of this variety, there may be no rational, common denominator, or institutional arrangement upon which to base a consensus, since that is the very object over which there is dispute. Gobetti’s submersion in Italian idealism instantly set him against any appeal to transhistorical forms of reason, or a universal logic that transcended all differences and disagreements. Unlike Mill—whom he admired greatly and whose On Liberty he published in Italian—he could not, therefore, assume that differences could be more or less harmonized on the basis of a rationally defined principle. Any agreements there might be would have to be forged on the basis of a radical freedom that was itself the source of human creativity. That meant that a genuine political community could only be generated by allowing conflicts between different groups and classes to unfurl unhindered. But in Italy, argued Gobetti, political conflict—and the liberty that was its very premise—had been suffocated by a conservative liberalism that sought to establish control over society. Italian political culture and political practice were deeply infused with the urge to suppress freedom and forge compromises between competing social forces. In an article of March 1923, written in the wake of Mussolini’s “seizure” of power, entitled


“La nostra cultura politica” (Our Political Culture), Gobetti pointed out the paradox that despite the existence of numerous competing ideologies, Italy’s remained an intrinsically conservative state: “Italy, home of all the ideologies and rebellions, is reduced to a land of conservatives where the parties of opposition fear having been too intransigent and hasten to moderate their demands in order to yield to opportunism. The so-called liberals, by continually representing conciliation, have for twenty years undertaken the function of impeding the collision of interests and in this way have managed to safeguard their clienteles.”27 The basis of this reaction against conflict was the Risorgimento’s failure to produce effective “myths” to invigorate political life. The unified government brought “administration” rather than politics, an obsession with security, and the assertion of authority over the populace, rather than a desire to see differences play out in parliament. In numerous articles from 1922 to 1924, Gobetti repeatedly underscored this critique of Italian political culture: the “political immaturity” of its parties,28 the absence of a pervasive liberal tradition,29 and Italian liberals’ general “fear of politics.”30 Instead of disseminating an ethos of liberty, Italian liberalism had identified itself with the practices of government.31 But for Gobetti, as a system of belief, liberalism should not be confused with government. Rather, if it is “to enrich the spirituality of social life,” liberalism “can only act as a revolutionary force, as an opposition to false realisms, to idolatries of existing facts.”32 As soon as it becomes a form of government, liberalism becomes a conservative force and loses its dynamic and its popular appeal. In June 1923, he expanded further on this theme, urging that liberalism be understood less as a doctrine and more a general “method”: “The method of liberalism—considered either in its economic, ethical or constitutional substance—consists in the recognition of the necessity of political struggle for the life of modern society.”33 Thus, it was necessary, he argued elsewhere, for an immature political culture such as Italy’s to develop itself through political struggle: “and political struggle in the modern world has its necessary premise in freedom.”34 Thus, Gobetti’s idea of freedom was more fundamental than a range of civil or political rights, for these were usually established on the basis of a political system that had yet to be achieved in Italy. The liberty Gobetti sought to invoke was an ethos of independence that would erupt into history as a revolutionary force, seeking to reconstitute political order. Summarizing his outlook, he set out the elements of his conflictual liberalism as thus: “Our liberalism, which we call revolutionary to avoid any equivocation, is inspired by an inexorable libertarian passion. It sees in reality a contrast of forces capable of producing ever new leading aristocracies, providing that new popular classes revive the struggle with their desperate will to

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elevation.”35 Before considering the implications of this libertarian ethos further, let us trace the sources of this conflictual liberalism. We noted in the previous chapter that Gobetti was strongly influenced, in spirit, if not in any doctrinal sense, by Sorel. The French syndicalist’s vision of a mythical unity, formed through a catastrophic struggle against capitalism, is undoubtedly one source for Gobetti’s conflictual liberalism, underscoring, in particular, the role of struggle in producing a unified collective subject. But if Sorel provided the key to Gobetti’s emphasis on myth and struggle, it was the economist Luigi Einaudi who accounted for the link between struggle and liberalism. Einaudi (1874–1961) was one of Gobetti’s tutors at the university and an occasional contributor to his publications. A free-market liberal, Anglophile, and trenchant critic of the practices of the Giolittian regime, Einaudi also upheld the progressive nature of social and political competition, free initiative, and conflict.36 By permitting social classes to freely clash and bargain in the marketplace, he had long argued, a capitalist economy could generate a robust culture of its own. With a utilitarian skepticism toward abstraction and a strong belief in the efficacy of practical interests, Einaudi believed the market could discipline social classes by forcing them to organize and clarify their interests: “In struggle and in discussion one learns to measure the force of the adversary, to understand its reasons, to penetrate the internal functioning of the mechanism that brings life to both adversaries.”37 In the marketplace, both industrialists and workers were “liberal” insofar as they recognized a common ethic: “The liberal is he who believes in material or moral perfection conquered through voluntary effort, through sacrifice, through an attitude of working in agreement with others.” The socialist, on the other hand, was “he who wants to impose perfection through force.”38 However, successive Italian governments had traded concessions with various sectors, bargaining with key unions and industrialists, and buying off their deputies for support in parliament. As a consequence, the state did not conform to Einaudi’s preferred, classical liberal model of a neutral “umpire” and guarantor of legality. Instead of “market equilibrium,” the state had generated a squalid “political equilibrium” and, in so doing, had “ruined” the worker’s movement by depriving it of the important education of negotiated settlement.39 The conflictual dimension promoted by Einaudi made a deep impression on Gobetti. If Sorel had emphasized the nonrational motives of human action, Einaudi tended to a more moderate, rationalist perspective, pointing to the natural formation of class interests in the market. Furthermore, Einaudi saw liberalism as a cross-class outlook, an ethos that served both capitalist and worker. But Gobetti was no promoter of laissez-faire liberalism, and his encounter with Einaudi served primarily


to clarify the distinctiveness of his own views. In a lengthy and laudatory profile in Rivoluzione Liberale of April 1922, Gobetti declared his admiration for the thrust of Einaudi’s liberalism rather than its details. “Without theorizing it,” claimed Gobetti of the economist, “he exercises an ancient, austere morality of elementary simplicity.”40 Einaudi’s liberismo (his freetrade views), he claimed, tended away from mere institutional reforms toward a more “spiritual” position: a “faith” rather than a “doctrine.”41 His economic lessons, argued Gobetti, applied to national life and not only to individual behavior. Einaudi had recognized the reciprocity between liberty and the self-organization of classes. And in his principled opposition to dogma, imposed authority, and state compromises, Einaudi had made an important connection between economy and ethics. That is, he understood that a free and competitive economy could engender a free and competitive society and politics.42 Thus, in 1924, Gobetti succeeded in republishing some of Einaudi’s key articles in a small book entitled Le lotte di lavoro (Labor Struggles), a collection that stood as a kind of manifesto of Einaudi’s liberalism.43 Gobetti, of course, did not identify with Einaudi’s political views. The economist was deeply critical of all forms of collectivism, including the Bolshevik Revolution and the Turin factory council movement. While Gobetti accepted his economic arguments against collectivism, he made clear his sense that Einaudi held a “limited” understanding of the political significance of the workers’ movement. Even in 1924, the economist had joined with other, older liberals such as Giovanni Amendola and Luigi Albertoni (editor of the conservative daily Corriere della sera) to revive a conservative liberalism against what they saw as the threat of Marxism and Bolshevik-inspired revolutionary socialism, hoping also to moderate Mussolini’s fascists. But, for Gobetti, Einaudi’s antisocialism had prevented him from appreciating the significance of Marx, not as an “economist” but as a “constructor of myths,” a critic who inspired the workers’ movement to regard itself as the bearer of a new civil order. In this respect, Marxism (which was construed by Gobetti in notably Gramscian terms) was, like the English liberalism Einaudi himself favored, a “formal faith, an interpretation of the world” to oppose to abstract utopias. The workers movement was therefore a “worthy example of liberismo” in its “spiritual” sense.44 But if Einaudi failed to grasp the liberal potential of the workers’ movement, Gobetti was attracted to his sense of conflict and struggle as a process of self-discipline. Unlike Sorel, Einaudi’s view of conflict was not class-centered or anticapitalist. Free initiative was universally valuable: individuals and social classes benefited from the discipline of the market. As we noted in the last chapter, despite his attraction to the communists, Gobetti did not advocate an anticapitalist position, either. Conflict was not, for him, a

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necessary reflex of contradictions in the relations of production that had to be overcome, but the outcome of human praxis more generally, that is, the creative engagement in the world and the need that arises therein to assert autonomy from imposed structures and systems. Gobetti regarded this idealist, cross-class view of conflict as the underlying “spirit” of Einaudi’s writings, even if the latter did not explicitly state it as thus himself.45 With this conflictual, libertarian spirit in mind, Gobetti moved beyond the narrow identification of liberalism with free-trade doctrines or liberal government. While both were clearly of vital, historical significance, an ethic of freedom could not be reduced exclusively to either. On the contrary, a liberal ethic derived from the spontaneous, dialectical clash of social forces and individual wills—it was immanent to human praxis and could not be based on transcendent, eternal truths or institutions built on such truths. Liberty was intimately linked to the practical struggle for autonomy because struggle prepared a shared consciousness of overcoming arbitrary barriers. Einaudi had captured the flavor of this emancipatory spirit, but he had not been able to develop it, limited as he often was by his own affection for Anglo-Saxon culture and empirical observations. Gobetti also “extended” Einaudi’s view of the state as a neutral umpire. Einaudi had rejected the metaphysical idea of the state as a superior rational will, viewing it, instead, as a final arbiter over and above the market. However, for Gobetti, neutrality was itself an ethical position.46 The state was ethical in that its function was to uphold the free clash of opinion: “the state is ethical in so far as it professes no ethics and no theory.”47 This was not the classical liberal view of the state as a social contract, suggested Gobetti, since the state does not simply oversee the clash of egoistic interests in society but also serves, partially, to unify them morally. This amounted to an “ethical immanentism,” rather than an imposed dogma, since it derived its normative force not from any specific content, but from the very principle of freedom itself: “The ethicality of the state is a formal ethicality that has no need to be professed.”48 Opposed points of view must accept the “method of liberty” as their condition of existence, and this imposes an obligation to oppose intolerance or dogmatism. It is the general acceptance of a principle of liberty that charges the state with the power to guarantee individual freedom, but at the same time, negates egoistic impulses by defending a shared ethical outlook. The state was therefore not entirely neutral, since it represented an ethos supporting liberty, and yet that ethos was not such as to impose a substantive moral good. “In this sense,” claimed Gobetti, the state could be defined in terms of relatively neutral “public administration, on the condition that one well understands all the ideality and the religiosity implicit in coordinating wills and in consecrating free initiatives.”49 It is unlikely that Einaudi


would have accepted this rather ambiguous definition of the liberal state, poised as it was somewhere between liberal neutrality and Hegelian statism. But it was clear that, in defining liberalism as an ethos rather than an economic or political system, Gobetti was seeking to emphasize the “positive” moment of generating an inclusive culture based around the principle of liberty rather than the “negative” moment of defending individual rights. Certainly, for Gobetti, these were not incompatible aspects. Yet it was the first task—the idealistic and religious task—rather than the second that, in his view, defined the political objective of a renewed liberalism. Gobetti’s idea of liberty as primarily a collective, rather than individualist, ethic can be seen as early as 1921 in his letter to Ada, where he detailed his private concerns about De Ruggiero’s liberalism: De R[uggiero] is now entirely taken by English economic liberalism: he wants an individualistic liberalism, which I would define as atomistic. He doesn’t understand the need for a national popular movement for the reconstruction of the state; he deludes himself that this can be attained by a reformist movement. Ultimately his conception no longer understands social struggle and he reduces reality to a mechanical composition of facts, without seeing how the result must always be a synthesis of wills.50

Gobetti here demonstrates the central emphases in his liberalism, counterposing his own view of liberty, achieved through collective struggle (which we have also seen him refer to in terms of Sorel’s idea of “myth”), with the notion of liberty defended in reformist, atomistic individualism. Individual liberty is not discounted as an ideal, not by any means. But for Gobetti, the accent was firmly on freedom as a mobilizing ideal. In a later chapter, we shall consider this conflictual liberalism in light of the idea of “positive” and “negative” accounts of liberty. For now, let us recount the central elements of Gobetti’s position: this consisted in a libertarian liberalism based around the principle of emancipation. The emancipatory focus centered on the moment of struggle in which a shared consciousness of liberty was achieved by resisting a fixed or imposed intellectual or political system. Liberty was thus conceived as a precondition for emancipation—a positive faith, spirit, or ethos—rather than a negative right supported by a political or economic system. Thus, for Gobetti, to renew liberalism was not so much to renounce its traditional focus on a neutral state or a free market economy, but to return to its emancipatory principle, foregrounding the conflictual social circumstances through which freedom was originally enunciated.

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The New Liberal Elite There is, undoubtedly, a persistent emphasis in Gobetti’s writings on the role of elites in advancing the project of liberal revolution. Rivoluzione Liberale opened by declaring its intention to set about “forging a new political class,” and throughout his career, Gobetti insisted on the creation of a new elite or “aristocracy” from the ranks of the workers’ movement as a first step in regenerating a liberal order. “The world is made of small minorities: these can and must be educated—rationally,” he wrote to Ada in September 1921.51 When talking of the Turin factory council movement, as we have seen, Gobetti typically underlined his interest not in the mass of workers but in the “heroic minority” of its leaders, amongst whom there was developing a new vision of social and political order. Interested neither in their socialism nor collectivism, the workers’ struggles were significant to him because their actions “deny all formulae” and their experiences “will end by bringing us a new ruling class.”52 From the perspective of the twenty-first century, this emphasis on elites might seem a rather dated, and possibly even illiberal, standpoint. Surely a liberal politics, particularly one with the workers’ movement as its vanguard, should be more democratic than this? On the face of it, Gobetti’s elitism would appear to be at odds with his libertarian agenda. However, on closer inspection, it is evident that Gobetti was not adopting an antidemocratic position, but following a long-standing tradition in Italian political thought of associating the prospects for political change with the capacity to assert leadership over an otherwise disunified mass. The most popular statement of this view was, at the time, to be found in the writing of the elite theorist, Gaetano Mosca, whose Elementi di scienza politica (first published in 1896 and translated as The Ruling Class)53 remained widely influential. In this section, I shall examine Gobetti’s use of Mosca’s ideas to sharpen his analysis of how to generate political change. Italian thinkers have long highlighted the public role of an intellectual or political elite. In a country where, historically speaking, political authority was often fragile and short-lived, ideas of universal consent or government by reason gained less purchase than the view that politics was the art of maintaining power, a process in which the superior skills of a gifted minority was a deciding factor. As such, individual or group leadership, in the face of contingent circumstances, became a dominant motif in the Italian political tradition.54 Machiavelli’s The Prince is arguably a classic, if controversial, statement of this view. Later thinkers such as Mazzini, the neo-Hegelians, and Croce gave further prominence to intellectuals as leaders who might educate the people into a unified civic consciousness.55 In


prison in the 1930s, Gramsci would develop an elaborate theory of intellectuals as the key protagonists of class cultural “hegemony.”56 In the late nineteenth century, however, in a context of growing disillusion with democratic government, this strand of thought found expression in the elite theory of Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, both of whom contributed to the development of political science as the study of elite behavior. In their respective works, inspired by the “scientific” rigor of positivist sociology, they sought to define and defend the purportedly “universal” principle that a restricted elite would always rule over the majority of citizens.57 Mosca’s contribution to elite theory was elaborated in his Elementi, which was expanded and republished in 1923.58 A conservative Sicilian, and professor of law at the University of Turin, who was hostile to the advent of democracy in Italy—and, in particular, to the rise of socialism— Mosca developed the argument that, “in all societies,” political power is dominated by a ruling class (classe politica), “always the less numerous, [that] performs all political functions, monopolizes power and enjoys the advantages that power brings.”59 This argument—purportedly a “universal” and scientifically established truth—was used against the claim, by Marxist socialists, that a more egalitarian society would ultimately place hands in the power of the majority. For Mosca, such a claim was both utopian and dangerous. It was neither verified in practice (Elementi is full of empirical observations to disprove the idea) and it served to undermine good government by imposing unrealizable demands on the political system. An informed understanding of political life based on observation suggests, rather, that the presence of a ruling class is a permanent fact of politics. Because of its superior capacity for organization, the ruling elite, he claimed, was able to exploit the desires and fantasies of the wider populace, in reality, getting itself elected into power rather than being chosen by a supposedly “sovereign people.”60 Although he insisted on the universality of his principle, Mosca nevertheless accepted the possibility of variation in the composition of the ruling class and the success of its rule. As the socioeconomic conditions of a society changes, claimed Mosca, so the ruling class was compelled to adapt, drawing its personnel from the ranks of the governed, and appealing to the values and beliefs of its citizenry. Mosca’s preference was evidently that an educated upper-middle class or gentry exercise control over government, and he feared that the expansion of democracy would dilute this middle class influence. Whatever the “scientific” merits of his theory, this normative dimension, not uncommon amongst men of his class and generation, was an ideological motivation behind his work.61 Yet unlike Pareto, who was deeply cynical about the “non-logical” motivations of the majority, Mosca understood the need for the ruling class not simply to manipulate,

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but also to woo the lower classes to gain support and to hold the ruling class in check, preventing it from degenerating into tyranny. Still opposed to a wider democratic suffrage, Mosca came to realize that a representative democratic system would at least permit competition between different groups and prevent any one group from exercising exclusive power over the others. In the second edition of Elementi, therefore, he expressed qualified support for parliamentary democracy. Despite his evident conservatism, Mosca’s work has become known as an early form of “democratic elitism,” that is, an endorsement of the role of representative democracy as a system able to regulate the composition of the ruling class. His “realist” political science sought both to encapsulate a permanent truth about politics—namely, that a restricted elite was always going to dominate—and to recognize the need to incorporate change in the composition of that elite, without which political power would degenerate. As Femia has noted, Mosca’s theory is more flexible than he is often given credit for, for it both endorses a critique of democracy as a utopian fantasy in its more radical, participatory versions, and it exposes the hypocrisy of bourgeois liberal democracy by exposing the tricks by which politicians get themselves into power and then justify their rule.62 Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that radicals such as Gobetti and even Gramsci were happy to make use of Mosca’s insights,63 for, despite misgivings about his methods and some of his conclusions, Mosca was understood, by many, to have grasped some genuine truths about the nature of politics. In April 1924, Gobetti proclaimed: “From the present corruption of the parliamentary regime, Mosca arose to think through the way to salvation, to pose the central problem of Italian life, as of any historical society: the problem of creating a ruling class that with its political formula—with its myths as Sorel will say—interprets diffuse aspirations and organizes the most mature energies.”64 The article, entitled “Un conservatore galantuomo” (A Gentleman Conservative), reveals much of Gobetti’s admiration for Mosca and the link he made between the theory of elites and the project of liberal revolution. Gobetti poured fulsome praise on the theorist of the ruling class, highlighting his scientific rigor and dismissing his positivism as being of less significance than his attention to history and empirical detail.65 Moreover, he underscored the importance of Mosca’s political science: “Mosca’s theory of the ruling class truly is one of those ideas that opens up infinite expanses of terrain for human research.”66 For Gobetti, Mosca’s original conservatism should be understood in its proper context, that is, when he began publishing in the late nineteenth century, when the nation was “immature” and democracy an ambiguous achievement. His was the conservatism of a gentleman, not a reactionary antiliberal. Today, however, Mosca understood the importance of parliament as the locus for


a competition between leading minorities. Parliament, argued Gobetti, was, for Mosca, the “best instrument for a leading minority to take shape, refine itself, differentiate itself and express itself, testing its attitudes through the long apprenticeship of free struggle and open critique.”67 Let us, for the moment, leave aside the question of whether Gobetti himself believed that parliament was the “best instrument” to form a ruling class—a position that largely corresponds to the heightened tension between liberals and fascists in 1924, which we will examine in the next chapter. In his article, Gobetti went on to claim that it was necessary to continue Mosca’s work by accentuating the “democratic and liberal” interpretation of the elite, linking the concept with “political struggle.” Earlier, in 1923, he had claimed: “The concept of an elite that imposes itself by exploiting a channel of interests and general psychological conditions against the old leaders who have exhausted their function is genuinely liberal.”68 It was only through an open conflict between alternative minorities that political progress was achieved. Without the possibility of democratic choice, there would be no renewal of political leaders: “There is no aristocracy where democracy is excluded.”69 This, he implied, was Mosca’s great insight in the second edition of the Elementi, and it was clearly in accord with Gobetti’s view that a new ruling class needed to be cultivated from the conflicts of the postwar period, particularly from Italy’s vanguard working class led by the Turin communists. Again in 1923, reflecting on the concept of the ruling class “accurately elaborated” by both Mosca and Pareto, Gobetti argued: “The process of genesis of an elite is clearly democratic: the people, or rather the various classes, offer up in the aristocracies that represent them the extent of their own force and originality. The state that derives from this is not tyrannical if they have contributed their free efforts as citizens who, for the occasion, have become combatants.”70 But if, for Gobetti, the idea of an elite implied choice and this choice was a “democratic” one, it is not certain that Gobetti was any more enamored of parliamentary liberal democracy than was Mosca. Choice, he claimed, “must be understood not in the sense that there is someone who chooses, but in the sense of a historical process through which the best reveal themselves.”71 That is, the selection of leading elite is not a question of election so much as an outcome of historical struggle in which different groups lock horns and prove their superiority. It was in this “almost physiological sense” that “the governors must represent the governed.”72 Gobetti’s use of the organic metaphor implies that leaders evolve through struggle, coming to represent their constituencies almost through a process of natural selection in which the fittest come to dominate the organism. While the metaphor was not employed by Gobetti again, it does, nevertheless, suggest a sense that the new ruling class must be more than simply delegated representatives

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of the people. Rather, a new elite must prove its worth by rising above the masses, separating from them and proving their superiority over alternative leaders.73 Gobetti’s preference for emphasizing the formation of a new ruling class—a new set of leaders to develop a civic consciousness for Italy—was certainly not antidemocratic. He was not seeking a ruling class that would impose itself on the nation, nor was he suggesting an aristocracy utterly divorced from society and popular experience. Mosca’s work, he believed, had shown how the elite must emerge from society itself. But at the same time, Gobetti held to a hierarchical understanding of political leadership that was common to Italian political thinkers. The ruling class must come from, but also be superior to, the masses. It must function as the people’s educated consciousness. While a heroic minority of workers might develop a new, liberal consciousness, Gobetti was happy to accept that the wider masses need not share this outlook. Responding, in 1922, to the question of whether the workers need adhere openly to liberal principles, he claimed: “It is not necessary that [the workers] adhere to history in the sense that we adhere to it. For us it is important that they unleash their free, revolutionary wills with all the messianism there can be; without awaiting or predicting any outcome, we recognize, quite rightly, that from now on they conclude in a liberal way in so far as they pursue a process of autonomy and liberation and translate their initiatives into political discipline.”74 It was better, he was suggesting, that the workers were inspired by a sense of the necessity of their action in their own terms than attach themselves to abstract principles such as revolutionary liberalism. A liberal outcome was not to be achieved simply by promoting a liberal idea of history: “The process of the workers’ self-consciousness and liberation must follow its own road.”75 For Gobetti, only a small minority of workers’ leaders were in a position to grasp the wider, libertarian project of revolutionary liberalism, and it was they who needed to be “educated—rationally.” Indeed, at times, Gobetti’s comments suggested disdain for the wider public and a suspicion that they remain largely incapable of an intelligent understanding of political life. In one letter to Ada of 1921, he complained: “The masses are only capable of working in short enthusiastic bursts and do not follow a constant directive. . . . Today they admire and love you: tomorrow they will want to kill you because you remind them of their inferiority.”76 From this perspective, the “democratic” character of elites resides in their ability to represent the “better” side of Italians, a view that seems to concur with a wider hostility amongst Italian political thinkers toward the mass of the population. Gobetti’s elitism, while endorsing a democratic and pluralistic competition for a ruling class from within society, often revealed a reluctance to endorse direct engagement by liberals


with the wider public. In this respect, argues Roberts, for all his appeal to popular struggles, Gobetti “remained a typical middle-class intellectual divorced from the masses.”77 As we shall see in the next chapter, this simultaneous promotion of, yet distance from, popular struggles was a serious handicap for those who wished to develop a political resistance to fascism. The Rhetoric of Liberal Revolution Anyone looking for a clearly delineated political philosophy in Gobetti’s writings will be disappointed. Although the period after 1922 marked his maturity as a thinker, Gobetti’s self-appointed role as an ideological innovator involved him assembling a new outlook from a variety of sources, but it never entailed the formulation of a fully worked-out theoretical system. Gobetti’s presentation of a “revolutionary” liberalism, as he admitted himself, remained closely bound up with the historical conjuncture, and his ideas were never presented as arguments drawn primarily from abstract premises. It would be easy, then, to criticize Gobetti for failing to iron out the apparent inconsistencies in his arguments. For example, how do we discriminate between valid and invalid demands for freedom and autonomy? To what extent can “liberalism” be extended to revolutionary socialism if its proponents regard themselves as being opposed to liberalism? Was Gobetti in favor of rights and constitutional mechanisms to protect individual freedom? Which elites are the authentic representatives of social classes? How applicable, we might well ask, are Gobetti’s arguments to environments where liberal-democratic regimes are more established than was Italy’s? In a later chapter, we will return to some of these questions. For at face value, Gobetti’s liberalism seems both radically emancipatory, but also potentially illiberal. His support for the workers’ movement, his elitism, his occasional disdain for the wider public, and so forth, do not obviously align with his professed “liberal” faith. But perhaps we should not evaluate Gobetti strictly within the terms of political philosophy, at least not if that means simply reproving him for gaps in his argument or an absence of logical consistency. In the Introduction, I suggested we ought to treat Gobetti’s innovations as a form of “rhetoric,” that is, as an effort to persuade others to extend their moral vocabulary to groups and circumstances once thought opposed to it. Having garnered an audience of like-minded intellectuals in his early years, Gobetti’s reception of the factory council disputes then provided him with a historical subject through which to renew liberalism by partially redefining that doctrine. As an editor, rather than a political philosopher, Gobetti

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sought to create an inclusive space of reflection on various themes that helped rearticulate liberalism with political struggles. As we have seen, that involved critically revising the idealistic view of the Risorgimento, extending the term “liberal” to parallel experiences of state formation, such as the Russian Revolution, underscoring the conflictual basis of freedom, and staking out the prospects for a new liberal elite rooted in popular struggles unleashed by the war. In this effort, Gobetti’s aim was not to produce a watertight philosophy, but to fashion a network of politically engaged intellectuals to test and debate what was always a broadly delineated project to revitalize Italian political culture. Inevitably, it was an enterprise replete with unresolved issues and contradictions. Yet, the field of political ideology is often contradictory and uneven, involving the unsteady assemblage of diverse, and sometimes mutually incompatible, claims into a relatively stable framework of values and arguments. The success of ideological innovation should be measured, then, not exclusively in terms of logical coherence, but also in terms of its “performative” effect: that is, the ability to get others to talk and argue in new and different ways. Did Gobetti’s rhetoric work? His expansion of liberalism to include the workers struggles, but also to criticize the achievements of the nation-state, amounted to a daring and, for some, appealing rhetorical intervention. Certainly, it left unresolved all sorts of issues, as his (mostly friendly) critics were glad to point out and, undoubtedly, it did not provide a clear platform to politically unify his audience. Indeed, the project of Rivoluzione Liberale was primarily one of critique than one directed at solving practical questions. It was an intellectually driven enterprise by a self-appointed group of young, educated men that was ill-designed to satisfy, let alone mobilize, any immediate interests.78 While the review had its own preferred reading of events, it nevertheless published articles on a variety of themes—such as Italian history, international events, education policy, socialism, and fascism—and it profiled a range of current debates and key intellectual and political figures. It hosted the views of a variety of commentators from a range of opinions, including conservatives and nationalists as well as those closer to its own general “line.” Its editorial position was thus open and critical, rather than didactic or written to a predefined political program. In his review, then, Gobetti’s innovations were submerged within the more general project of gathering opinion and sustaining an engaged audience. But in the 1924 book version of his articles, where his ideas alone were given prominence, Gobetti’s critical interpretation of liberalism came to the fore more powerfully. There, again, he provided a descriptive, historical commentary on political struggles and actors, rather than focus on


purely abstract principles. But the combined strands of his thought were more evidently apparent as a generalized outlook. In Gervasoni’s view, although the book version of La rivoluzione liberale did not provide a systematic philosophical outlook, it nevertheless presented, to the public, a species of liberal argument with a directly political intention.79 Gobetti’s analysis offered what Gervasoni calls a “hermeneutic of politics,” that is, a mode of interpreting political struggles in relation to a tradition of suppressed conflict in Italy.80 Gobetti offered not so much a political program, continues Gervasoni, as a “theory of political action,” a “method” aimed at encouraging others to interpret politics from the perspective of struggles for freedom. Once more, then, it helps to view Gobetti’s arguments as part of a project of persuasion intended to generate a general, critical liberal outlook rather than a purely intellectual or scholarly enterprise. Inasmuch as Gobetti brought together a diverse range of thinkers— many of whom were of, or would later come to, national prominence—to debate the cultural and political situation in Italy, Rivoluzione Liberale could be said to have been a success. In a short period of time, it made a substantial impression on those who came into contact with it. And in addition to the journal, Gobetti also established his own publishing house, bringing to the public numerous works of critical, historical, literary, and ideological significance that supplemented his own efforts, even if they did not directly mirror them.81 Yet despite this considerable activity, Gobetti’s project to refashion liberal ideology did not achieve as much as he might have hoped. The opportunities for rhetorical intervention were becoming harder to guarantee as the euphoria of postwar militancy tipped over into recrimination and violent reaction. Just as Gobetti began to find his own, independent voice, Mussolini’s fascists moved onto the offensive.

5

Contesting Fascism, Defending Liberalism

G

obetti was an instinctive antifascist. His endorsement of popular struggles for liberty, especially those of the revolutionary workers’ movement, naturally set him against the authoritarian demagoguery and antisocialist violence paraded by Mussolini’s fascists. What we have examined in the previous chapter as Gobetti’s liberalism should be simultaneously understood as the guiding thread of his own struggle to contest fascism in the years from 1922 up to his death in 1926. For it was in his opposition to fascism’s initial formation that Gobetti’s revolutionary liberalism found its ultimate nemesis and its greatest political test. This chapter takes Gobetti’s struggle against fascism as its central theme. For him, fascism represented what, famously, he called the “autobiography of the nation.” That is, it contained within it the accretion of all of modern Italy’s political ills: a hostility toward open conflict and a desire to eliminate political differences either by absorbing or by crushing them. With this critique, Gobetti deepened his own, unique interpretation of the postwar crisis. Fascism was not an answer to that crisis, he argued, it was itself a symptom. Thus, he challenged other intellectuals, and particularly liberals, to reject fascism rather than passively accept it or, worse, seek to “tame” it. As Mussolini’s regime drifted inexorably toward dictatorship, Gobetti endeavored to galvanize support in its opposition. Yet Italy’s liberal political class grasped the danger of fascism far too late, and ultimately Gobetti paid for his opposition with his life. Despite this tragic end, however, we find, in his response to fascism, not merely a further elaboration of Gobetti’s revolutionary liberalism. We also see concretely emerging some of the inherent problems with his analysis and a question over the nature of the politics that might be supported by it, for, similarly to the fascists, Gobetti shared a concern to renew and unify political life by cultivating a dynamic ruling class driven by a guiding


“faith.” While his vision differed starkly from that of the fascists, his liberalism nevertheless competed with fascism on this shared rhetorical ground. Gobetti needed to persuade liberals that his outlook, rather than fascism, best grasped the crisis at hand and answered the needs of the time. That he failed to do so also raises questions over the strengths of his arguments to engage a wider, popular constituency. As we shall see in the next chapter, herein lay difficulties of a rhetorical nature that would beset other efforts to develop a radical liberal, antifascist politics when the dictatorship at long last began to crumble. Fascism and the “Seizure” of Power From the perspective of the present, it seems all too obvious to understand fascism as an oppressive, “totalitarian” movement bent on imposing order on society and depriving individuals of their liberty. For most of us, following the experience of Italian and German dictatorships, the Second World War, and the Nazi’s holocaust of the Jews, being “anti-fascist” seems like plain common sense. But for its contemporaries and, indeed, a good part of its initial supporters, it was not in any way obvious what fascism would later turn out to be or to mean. There were clear signs, of course, but amongst those signs were mixed a whole variety of events and feelings that confused the picture. As some historians of fascism have rightly warned, we ought to be careful of reading into the past our knowledge and understanding from the present if we are properly to grasp how the fascists succeeded in coming to power.1 In its early years, fascism was highly distasteful to many liberals and democrats but, to be fair, so were the alternatives: communism and socialism. So, too, for very many others, was the old liberal order. There were few defenders of parliamentary liberal democracy in postwar Italy, and those that there were regarded fascism as one possible threat but, in the heady brew that characterized the dopoguerra, not obviously the worst. Amongst those already opposed to liberalism, such as the communists and other revolutionary socialists, fascism was “just another” form of “bourgeois reaction,” a sign of the decaying last stages of capitalism that should, paradoxically, be applauded for its undisguised hostility toward working class politics. If we are to understand the context in which Gobetti developed his critique of fascism, we must be conscious of this complex, confused picture. Neither liberals, conservatives, nor Catholics, communists nor socialists were in a position to understand fascism from a wholly “impartial” point of view (whatever that might be). Mostly, they viewed it through

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the narrow lenses inherited from their respective traditions. Only later, as the dictatorship was installed and the regime established its control over society, was it possible to develop a complex and rounded view of the phenomenon.2 Even today, there remains wide dispute as to exactly what fascism, in all its varieties and stages of development, might be reasonably said to have been. Was it intrinsically conservative or revolutionary? Was it anti- or pro-capitalist? Was it of the Left or the Right? Was it a coherent ideological formation at all? Fascism defied (and still defies) clear, “objective” definition. If scholars cannot agree still, then it is no surprise that its contemporaries could not, either.3 At the time, interpretations of fascism had to be developed day-by-day, week-by-week. It was not clear that Mussolini would be so successful. Nor, when he was, was it obvious how long his success would last. The parameters for understanding fascism seemed to expand and contract daily, and Mussolini was himself immensely adept at moving them.4 Indeed, he tended to see himself as a “man of action,” and fascism not as an intellectual phenomenon but as a “movement,” a concrete example of “ideas in action,” and hence, not graspable, once and for all, as a set of abstract principles.5 In such conditions, viewing fascism as a credible “threat” that needed to be directly opposed was not an automatic response from most quarters.6 Before we come to Gobetti’s interpretation, then, let us trace the development of this movement and its guiding ideas up to its so-called seizure of power in 1921–22. Despite various disputes about its nature, it is widely agreed that Italian fascism was, in its immediate aspects, a product of the accumulated dislocations caused by the First World War, which aroused a desire for a “strong state” to reinvest Italy and its citizens with a national purpose that neither liberalism nor democracy had achieved. But fascism was more than just a passing reaction: war was itself the central motif of the new fascist worldview that helped to creatively synthesize numerous long-standing criticisms of the liberal state. The interventionist movement, which had expected the war to produce a renewed sense of national purpose, was deeply unsatisfied with the social divisions that military engagement had in fact brought. Mussolini, the maverick socialist revolutionary who had abandoned the socialist party in 1914 over its neutralist stance and made himself the leader of the interventionists’ revolutionary wing, was nevertheless instinctively attuned to the vital impact war could have on postwar political life. Before the conflict had even finished, he had begun to develop a novel outlook that combined revolutionary socialism with nationalism. Setting out the terms of this original synthesis in a noted article of 1917, he addressed himself to a new political subject, namely, workers who had returned home from


the war, and who would bring about “the synthesis of the antithesis: class and nation.”7 The war, in his view, had obliterated the traditional division between class revolutionaries and nationalists. Following in the footsteps set out by earlier nationalists like Enrico Corradini, Mussolini envisaged a new social order by transposing the Marxist imagery of class struggle onto the aggressive nationalist ideals of the interventionists.8 Thus, from 1918, he made his paper, Il Popolo d’Italia, a mouthpiece for revolutionary “combatants and producers.” Fascism’s new ideological synthesis took years to develop, and was certainly not the work of Mussolini alone.9 Yet he successfully made himself the conduit for a variety of concepts and theorems, and the pole of attraction for the groups and individuals that propounded them. Mussolini’s early roots had been in syndicalism, with its guiding idea of a future society of “producers” working together in common cause.10 He had been strongly influenced by Sorel, whose vision of a radical rupture driven by a unifying “myth” helped orient Mussolini toward the power of irrational forces in mass politics (unlike the more rationalist interpretations of Gramsci or Gobetti), but also against socialist reformism, giolittismo, monarchism, and parliamentary liberalism—anything that limited the sense of a spiritual “mission.” Mussolini, too, was impressed by the aesthetic revolt of Prezzolini and Papini, who had themselves built on the idealistic turn begun by Croce. As we noted in Chapter 1, their belief in the mediocrity of liberal politics, and its inability either to unify a divided nation or to inspire a noble vision of life in tune with humanity’s own creative forces, had supported a form of nonterritorial nationalism, a desire to see the national spirit reborn. The desire for rebirth, or “palingenesis,” led by an audacious elite, was also developed by Futurist artists, such as Marinetti and Boccioni, who exulted war as a form of “hygiene,” washing away the past like so much accumulated residue. These aesthetic elements gave a hypermodern accent to the critique of bourgeois culture and values, underlining a sense of the nation as self-creating spirit.11 Like Mussolini, the syndicalists, Futurists, and aesthetes, as well as long-time nationalists, like the conservative Alfredo Rocco of the Italian Nationalist Association,12 looked forward to a regeneration of the nation through participation in the war and to the end of the discredited liberal order. Fascism eventually came to articulate these aspirations through an ideology and an aesthetic centered on war as the mark of national virility. Italy’s rebirth was envisaged as the product of an inexorable struggle among nations, tested through warfare. Mussolini’s aim was to “respiritualize” the state by investing it with the raw, aggressive energy demonstrated in the battlefields.


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It was only in the war’s aftermath, however, in the social and political crisis that turned much of the public against the liberal regime with a vengeance, that Mussolini was catapulted from the margins to the center of Italian public life, becoming a figure of a heterogeneous movement of disaffected Left, Right, and unaligned groups, as well as of numerous, uncategorizable thugs and misfits. The arrival of former combatants, particularly returning officers with high expectations of what was owed them for their efforts in the war, added a powerful, active constituency to this concoction, one for whom the myth of a reborn nation intensely chimed. Fascism came to express, more effectively than any other movement, the ideology of combattentismo.13 Yet even this journey was replete with uncertainty, with different aspects of fascism’s many ideological roots showing at any time. In November 1919, Mussolini summoned to Milan the various heads of the newly organized Fasci di combattimento, bringing together disaffected former military servicemen and interventionists to create a national movement.14 In the next few months, local fasci were organized across the towns and cities of the North. These “fascists of the first hour,” as they came to be called, did not constitute an intellectually coherent organization, consisting, as they did, of evidently disparate elements.15 What united them, however, was an intense hostility toward the outcome of the war and the vacillation of the liberal regime. The feeling that the war should be recognized as a turning point in Italy’s fortunes was common to many groups and parties, but for the fascists, the war itself represented a new image of social unity. Mussolini sought to galvanize support around an image of political life modeled not on the factory or the freedom of individuals, but on the example of the trenches. The fascists shared little at first, but they instinctively understood and intensely admired the image of trench life and the heroic spirit of sacrifice in the face of overwhelming violence. This image was counterposed to the permanent quarrelling of liberal politics and the class sectarianism of the revolutionary Left, which seemed to drag on ceaselessly throughout the war in spite of the troops’ sacrifices. For the fascists, war symbolized the subordination of all social differences to the survival of the nation, conceived as a unifying myth, the source of a “spiritual” bond: “The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality.”16 What, in 1917, Mussolini had called “trenchocracy”—a new order emerging from the collective experience of the trenches—was a central thread in his bid to unify the movement around an authoritarian, antisocialist, and antidemocratic solution to the postwar crisis.17 But this bid did not produce automatic results. The fascists faired badly at the November 1919 elections, and the movement itself was dogged by internal disagreements amongst the Futurists and the syndicalists, not all


of whom cared for Mussolini’s pragmatism.18 At first, fascism was a predominantly urban phenomenon, appealing less to the working class and more to the petty-bourgeoisie and its young, male constituents. Over the course of the next two years, however, as the Left revolted during the biennio rosso, Mussolini successfully began to reposition fascism further to the Right, minimizing the influence of left-wing elements, and leaning toward a policy of minimal state interference.19 It was not until the end of the factory occupations in autumn 1920 that fascism truly began to take off as a popular movement. Fascists joined antisocialist coalitions in cities such as Florence and Turin, tapping in to the growing reaction against gains made by proletarian and radical peasant activities in the previous years.20 The intense fear that had been simmering for the last two years amongst Italy’s middle classes that the proletariat was set to initiate revolution and purposefully destroy their livelihoods created opportunities for fascists to mobilize behind industrialists and landowners. And it was its propensity to violence that eventually won fascism its mass popularity. Throughout 1920–21, “squads” (squadri)—self-organized bands of militia—launched a ferocious campaign of bloodletting against urban workers and radicalized rural peasants. In the provincial towns of the North and Center, fascists joined with local agrarian bosses and existing “patriotic” associations to launch a terroristic counteroffensive against the Left. “Punitive expeditions” of young men—many of them students, shopkeepers, public employees, or farmers—to beat up socialists and undertake acts of arson, intimidation, and individual assaults occurred throughout the Po Valley and in provinces such as Ferrara and Bologna, destroying local union bases.21 Agrarian elites, fed up with what they saw as the government’s inability to protect them from the menace of socialist leagues and town councils, decided to take matters into their own hands and began to finance these—initially, sporadic, but later, more coordinated—brutal attacks on peasant unions and municipal socialist administrations.22 The Left’s gains were gradually reversed and “independent unions” were established by the fascists to organize rural workers. This violence brought a whole new degree of support amongst the older bourgeoisie to the fascists, and transformed the organization significantly, massively expanding its ranks. A conservative constituency of agrarian hard men and local notables swelled into the movement, adding to it an armed wing that seemed to attract, more than repel, popular and financial support. Agrarian fascism was motivated, to a great extent, by the economic self-interest of the agrarians, and hence, by anti-socialism rather than a fascination for war or patriotism. Nevertheless, their support added a cross-class appeal to fascism, and Mussolini began to steer the movement toward an agrarian agenda.23 Inevitably, the fascists appeared divided


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between urban revolutionaries and rural conservatives, and Mussolini had difficulty keeping control of the relatively independent and extremely violent, local initiatives of the agrarians.24 But by spring 1921, the fascists had become a popular, if ideologically amorphous, movement of the bourgeoisie, openly supported by the middle classes, some leading industrialists, and a large proportion of landowners.25 What is particularly surprising, as Lyttelton points out, is that the fascists were “welcomed by the great majority of the Liberal press as a sign of the revival of the bourgeoisie.”26 Being neither a formal party nor having a rigid doctrine, the movement evaded precise categorization, and neither the press nor the authorities saw in it much more than a temporary and entirely legitimate patriotic “defensiveness” that might do some good to quell the threat from the Left. This view predominated within the establishment for some time. Politicians, newspaper editors, magistrates, and particularly the police and the army were inclined to see the squads as being generally beneficial, despite their distasteful, often murderous brutality.27 By 1921, the police and army were, in many instances, prepared to collude in the attacks on trade unionists, making open their sympathies for the fascist program.28 With this assistance, fascists forcibly managed to occupy local seats of government, seize arms, and declare control over towns and cities across northern Italy. Further legitimacy was added when Giolitti invited fascists on to the National Bloc list at the 1921 general election to help defeat the socialists, granting them tacit establishment endorsement and helping them win thirty-six seats.29 It was precisely this wider conservative, virulently anti-socialist reaction in the country at large that Mussolini effectively fuelled and channeled in his direction. Despite evident internal differences and rivalries, Mussolini continued to steer his “unashamedly eclectic” movement further to the Right, emphasizing a liberal economic policy and a desire for order and “hierarchy” in order to attract establishment support, as well as promoting the conservative, rural leaders in the movement, while simultaneously granting symbolic concessions to the republican (that is, anti-monarchist) tendency.30 By the middle of 1922, fascists were effectively running the north of the peninsula and already claiming to have substituted the old state. Having transformed the movement into a party the previous year, Mussolini’s trick was now to present himself to the liberal regime as the broker of public order, the only man who stood between a dangerously volatile movement of popular insurrection and an utterly powerless state. His opportunity came in late October 1922, when, after several failed efforts to establish a working government to the exclusion of the fascists, the liberal political class began to entertain the idea of absorbing them instead.31 Unable to resolve the mounting civil war by forcing fascists off


the streets, since the authorities seemed either powerless or complicit, they might regain their authority by bringing their leader and his fellow parliamentary deputies into the government. This was, of course, a classically Italian liberal maneuver, and by October, the major liberal politicians were convinced of its necessity.32 With the socialists and the Popular Party refusing to cooperate, and the communists serenely disengaged, the king eventually invited Mussolini to form a government, as prime minister, with the liberals. The fascist leader simultaneously had been laying open plans for a military coup—a “march on Rome”—which made this invitation all the more compelling to the establishment, although it is uncertain, tactically speaking, how serious such a plan was.33 Once invited into government, however, a “staged” version of the event occurred in its place, with fascist troops amassing in the capitol (they had arrived by train) to celebrate what many regarded as the “revolution.” The event would form part of the self-mythologizing of “glorious” fascist spectacles that later characterized the dictatorship. For now, however, Mussolini was the legitimate head of a constitutional government. “Autobiography of a Nation” Fascism came to power in Italy by way of an intensifying collapse in institutional and political authority that had begun at least since the end of the war, not like a bolt out of the blue. Even if that collapse was due, in great part, to the fascists’ own efforts at subversion and insurrection, it was impossible for witnesses not to see Mussolini and his followers as being symptomatic of the times. Fascism was understood by many not as an alien creed, but as a legitimate, if severe, reaction to postwar events. So distressing had been the crisis in political authority that most liberal politicians and commentators believed Mussolini’s mass popularity simply needed to be cleverly exploited. Indeed, for some older liberals, fascism’s aims were broadly the same as those of liberalism: namely, to restore order and institutional authority. They believed it was the socialists, not themselves, who had lost out by Mussolini’s arrival in office.34 Mussolini’s new government seemed, at first, to give them good cause for this view, composed, as it was, of a coalition of fascists, conservative liberals, nationalists—who, like many, were unable to distinguish fascism from its claims to represent a forceful “patriotism”—and deputies from the Popular Party who, with the encouragement of the church, managed to overcome their own hostility for the sake of “national pacification.”35 Even moderate liberals like Croce, though offended by the fascists’ exuberant nationalism, initially sought out “something good” in its parliamentary


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coalition.36 Over the next two years, the new government struggled to maintain a broadly constitutional character while simultaneously increasing fascist control over the state. According to Croce’s philosophy, the “instrumental” aspect of politics occasionally needed to take precedence over its moral aspect in order to restore authority.37 For Gobetti, however, the moral and political realms could not be so easily separated. He grasped, very early on, fascism’s fundamentally anti-liberal orientation and dedicated two special issues of Rivoluzione Liberale to interpreting the phenomenon, the first in May 1922, and another in November after Mussolini took up office. He shared the revulsion amongst intellectuals at the crude, demagogic posturing of Mussolini and his movement’s violent, anti-socialist tactics. In contrast to the “heroic minority” he envisaged as the basis of a renewed liberalism, the fascists were a loose grouping of violent reactionaries and fanatics. They were, he claimed, a contradictory and unstable collection of bellicose urban petty-bourgeoisie and agrarian reactionaries, “palingenetics” trading on the myth of revolution, but whose internal disagreements and class divisions could not be hidden.38 Yet Gobetti’s opposition was not as clear-cut as might be imagined for a liberal today, for the fascists shared not a dissimilar vocabulary of revolution and spiritual renewal to his, even if their means and ultimate objectives contrasted radically. Like Gobetti, many fascists spoke the language of “faith” and “religiosity,” and they looked to a renewal of Italian political life through the firm action of a leading elite whose struggle would brush away the decadent old order and “restore liberty.”39 Much of Gobetti’s response to fascism can be understood as an effort to dismiss the veracity of these claims in order to preserve that vocabulary for his revolutionary liberalism. But the battle was consequently on another front, too, for with the language of revolution and renewal, Gobetti aimed to depose mainstream, moderate liberalism in favor of a radical approach to freedom. Thus, rhetorically speaking, Gobetti was caught between two oppositions—fascism and moderate liberalism—whose languages he sought to appropriate for his own project. This dual opposition inevitably created tensions in how he dealt with both, for in opposing fascism, he did not want to endorse the restoration of the old regime. As we shall see below, his anti-fascism— intellectually powerful as it was—remained politically ambiguous because it seemed to withdraw from a decisive principle of opposition. From the early stages, it was fascism’s contingent origins and overstated significance that preoccupied Gobetti. Responding, in May 1922, to the commonly invoked suggestion that fascism was “saving” Italy from socialist revolution, he replied that all it had done was reveal the true nature of the crisis, not resolve it:

98 PIERO GOBETTI AND THE POLITICS OF LIBERAL REVOLUTION Fascism has been the thermometer of our crisis, the measure of the impotence of the people to fashion its own state. But it is precisely this that makes it naïve to ask Fascism for a positive program of reconstruction. This may be the personal preoccupation of Mussolini, but Fascism as such has exhausted its mission in laying bare the national malady, in awakening all the vague and anachronistic forces and obliging the revolution to stare its own problems in the face, all concentrated in a single center.40

Against fascist claims to be the popular basis of a new state, Gobetti retorted that no single party could realistically monopolize the “national spirit.” Such grandiose claims only served to hide the contingent nature of the phenomenon, in particular, its roots in agrarian class politics in the countryside, where its function had been to reassert class control over peasants.41 It was to this reactionary class element that he returned in July, highlighting the divisions within the movement between revolutionaries and conservatives. It was a sign of Italy’s “political immaturity,” he claimed, that it could not produce a stable or coherent conservative party.42 Instead, there existed incoherent and fluid ideological positions that never managed to settle into a stable structure of opposition. Political groups would either openly collaborate with opponents or, by contrast, wildly overstate their own aims without ever achieving anything.43 Likewise, fascism had been unable to become a modern party of industrialists and, once the Left was defeated, Mussolini had ditched its “republican” wing for a reactionary conservatism.44 This ideological opportunism had evidently created confusion among the older liberals, which now permitted Mussolini to indulge in further political “collaboration” with those who were once his purported enemies.45 Gobetti’s accusation of “collaborationism” revealed his continuing hostility toward parliamentary politics and his identification of fascism with the wider problems of political life in Italy, as he saw them. Thus, he remarked on the link between fascism and the socialist party: both, in his view, were heirs to the Giolittian tradition of compromise and the political absorption of enemies. In September 1922, he argued that the socialist party’s lack of a genuine revolutionary intention made it and fascism “equivalent”: “Incapable of real renewal, both are bureaucratic and pettybourgeois and together they hasten to receive the legacy of giolittismo.”46 Later in the year, he would remark that Mussolini had surpassed all examples of transformism, and later still, that giolittismo was “Mussolini-ism in advance.”47 Mussolini, he claimed in 1924, was now the “new Giolitti.”48 These dismissive references were designed to dispel the expectation amongst the wider liberal public that Mussolini and the Fascists offered a genuine renewal of Italian political life. Gobetti passed doubt on the


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credibility of the Fascists as a party of government and alerted readers to the growing anti-liberal nature of the movement. Fascism had no clear ideology and no genuine cultural orientation: “The polemic . . . instead of the thought process, the punitive expedition in place of the political struggle, the duel as the ultimate and perfect exaltation of individual activity: these are the ‘new’ bases and methods of the political education introduced by the Fascists.”49 As for Mussolini himself, he was an opportunist and a dogmatist, a condottiero, an anachronism, a “primitive head of a band of savages possessed by a dogmatic terror.” He lacked the creativity and modern sense of irony of a great politician. Never suffering from doubt, there was clearly “nothing religious about him.”50 But after Mussolini was invited to form a coalition government, Gobetti was forced to sharpen his analysis. This was not a revolution, as many fascists claimed; it was a coup d’état that portended an ominous future. In “Elogio della Ghigliottina” (In Praise of the Guillotine), written in November just after Mussolini’s ascendancy to office, Gobetti returned to his thesis that fascism revealed the truth of Italy’s cultural and political ills.51 Fascism, he argued, represented the “autobiography of a nation”: in it was condensed all of Italy’s cultural and political failings, principally an immaturity of Italians and their party political representatives preventing them from facing up to the liberating force of social and political conflict.52 The “disaster” of fascism lay in its violent and illiberal denial of heresy. But this was a disaster with deep roots in Italy, populated, as it was, by a people with “the spirit of slaves.” For all its “revolutionary” rhetoric, fascism implied a continuation of the traditional practices, in Italy, of substituting open conflict with consensus, compromise, and collaboration between political leaders; thus, as he later put it: “Fascism is the legitimate heir of Italian democracy.”53 Against “Normalization” The new government was soon showing signs of its anti-democratic tendencies. By the end of December 1922, Mussolini had instructed prefects to investigate “subversives,” and had given orders to arrest leaders of the communist party, such as Bordiga and Gramsci. The bloodletting also continued, with fascists killing eleven communists in Turin in the same month and forcing others into exile.54 In Rome, with support from conservative politicians, Mussolini had established his own Fascist Grand Council as a “parallel cabinet” consisting of fascist leaders, and formed the militia as a separate armed force to absorb the squads.55 These latter moves marked the beginning of a separate fascist authority within the structures of the state.


Yet they were viewed by the older political class as a means to control the wider fascist movement by giving it a constitutional sanction that would, in their view, lead to the progressive “normalization” of the situation. Gobetti’s response differed starkly. Fascism was not going to save liberalism, as so many liberals thought. It was bent on destroying it by intensifying the tendency to neutralize conflict. In the early months of 1923, as the authoritarian and dubious constitutional status of the new government came into view, Gobetti campaigned for an intransigent liberal opposition to the government. A fundamental choice lay before liberals: “Either accept the class struggle and call the workers to their libertarian myth, or be satisfied with Fascism.”56 The real conflict of ideals was not between liberty and dictatorship, he argued. It was between “liberty and unanimity,” the ability or not to freely articulate oppositional views: “The historical vice of our political formation consists in its inability to tolerate nuances and to conserve an honest intransigence in holding contradictory positions, prompted by an awareness that antitheses are necessary and struggle coordinates rather than suppresses them.”57 “This atmosphere of liberal dignity,” he continued, “is repugnant to the philosophy of Mussolini.” But Gobetti’s formulation permitted both fascism and traditional Italian liberalism to be equated as philosophies of unanimity. If liberty was to be conquered, it could only be by “renouncing the sterile ideologies of discipline, order and hierarchy. The Italian problem is not one of authority but of autonomy.”58 But the appeal of discipline, order, and hierarchy is extremely powerful, particularly at moments of crisis. Inevitably, many intellectuals and politicians saw benefits in a fascist-led government promising to restore order. Most enthusiastic was the idealist philosopher, Giovanni Gentile—a longtime conservative who had, for some years, tended toward supporting an authoritarian, anti-democratic nationalism—whom Mussolini invited to take up the role of Minister for Public Instruction in 1922. For him, fascism represented more than a restoration of liberalism: it was a fulfillment of the dream of the Risorgimento, the creation of an “ethical state” in which citizen and state were unified. Gentile was destined to become fascism’s most prestigious theorist, the so-called philosopher of fascism.59 But his decision to join the Fascist Party, openly identifying it as the “true liberalism,”60 offended many liberals and eventually lost him the friendship of his onetime collaborator and fellow idealist, Croce. Gobetti, too, hurriedly made clear his own disaffection with the Gentilean variety of idealism.61 Others, like liberal democrat politician and intellectual Giovanni Amendola, did not identify with fascism at all, but hoped, at least at first, that it could be reined in to some kind of constitutional legality. Amendola’s position exemplifies some of the problems that even progressive liberals


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had with developing an opposition to fascism, and it is worth dwelling, for a moment, on the comparison with Gobetti. While Amendola, too, understood fascism as the total negation of liberalism, his attachment to the constitutional monarchy of liberal Italy, and the ideals of national unity he associated with it, held him back from looking outwards to a wider constituency of support.62 Amendola had aligned with the democratic interventionists before the war, and in its aftermath, looked to a radical renewal of the ruling political class, particularly the expansion of democracy and the integration of the wider public into the system.63 The war, he argued, had helped to transform Italy into a nation, creating a “people” with a sense of common purpose. Yet the postwar crisis was, for him, a “moral crisis,” a failure of the old liberal order to fulfill the expectations of returning servicemen and to quell the extremism of the radical Left to which he was bitterly opposed. Communism, to Amendola, was the biggest threat to the country and its institutions; he regarded the factory occupations as evidence of the malign influence of the Soviet Union.64 Fascism, on the other hand, was largely a reaction to the failures of the old regime and to socialist threats to private property. If anything, it was taking up socialism’s “collaborationist” role with the weakened liberal state, while socialists indulged their revolutionary fantasies.65 However, liberalism, he argued, had opened the way to democracy and the harmonization of different points of view in a progressive national consensus, and it was this course that needed to be sustained.66 Liberal institutions, claimed Amendola, rather optimistically, could be salvaged for the good of all: “It is necessary, therefore, that, through this crisis, the state is decisively affirmed and remains what it always should have been: the home for everyone.”67 Although Amendola found fascism repugnant, his first preference was to see it restrained by the constitution and normalized so that a party democracy might emerge.68 Thus, he urged the socialists to ditch their revolutionism and endorse a “national policy” that would separate them from the communists.69 Gradually, however, by the middle of 1923, Amendola came to recognize fascism’s irredeemable hostility toward the centrist liberalism he promoted. Soon, as we shall see, he would be one of anti-fascism’s staunchest defenders. Yet his example serves to highlight some key rhetorical differences with Gobetti. Both men had hoped for a renewal of liberalism as a consequence of the postwar crisis, and each saw fascism as the antithesis of this. In 1924, Gobetti would even publish Amendola’s collection of speeches and articles, La Nuova Democrazia (The New Democracy), as part of his effort to sustain an anti-fascist liberal coalition. Yet for Gobetti, the basis of renewal lay in struggles within society, which he associated with a desire


for autonomy on the part of the workers’ movement, while for Amendola, it lay in the institutions of Liberal Italy and the construction of a partybased democracy. The accent for Amendola was, therefore, on liberalism as a form of consensus and the orderly reconciliation of political differences. His exhortation was thus to the parties to moderate their demands and identify with the patriotic ideal of national unity and deference to the Crown. Gobetti, as we have seen, deployed a radically different argument, emphasizing liberalism as an ideology of conflict, and a unity brought by a common faith in the emancipatory vitality of liberty, rather than in its current institutions. These contrasting ways of defending the renewal of liberalism and defining its relationship to socialism and the state undoubtedly weakened the capacity of liberal critics to establish a common language of opposition to the fascist-led government. In any case, there remained, for many, in the months leading up to Mussolini’s government, the feeling that, however dispiriting the current crisis, the situation remained largely tolerable, yet another example of the cycle of violence and protest from which Italy often suffered. In September 1922, Giuseppe Prezzolini argued, in an open letter to Gobetti in Rivoluzione Liberale, that in the face of widespread popular support for fascism, intellectuals who could not stomach it ought, in all honesty, to just stand aside and form a “Society of Abstainers” (Societá degli Apoti), letting events take their course.70 There was an abundance of people taking sides in the current political situation, and the contributors to Rivoluzione Liberale were better off staying above the fray, contributing to a separate world of intellectuals in order to educate the country over the long term: “Therefore without regret and without doubt, we should continue to make history and not politics.”71 Gobetti responded directly to Prezzolini’s suggestion in the same issue, and again, in another. In the first response, he indicated that such resignation was anathema to him—as revolutionary liberals, he and his companions ought to oppose fascism by joining with the workers’ movement that, through its own myths, was building the new civilization.72 While, admittedly, Rivoluzione Liberale’s contributors were not themselves the new class of leaders, they were developing the culture that would help produce it: “We are more elaborators of ideas than leaders of men, more fomenters of political struggle than its agents.”73 But this was, he claimed, a form of political action in itself precisely because it was disinterested and “apolitical,” looking ahead ten or twelve years, when a new political class might come into being. In a second response in October, however, Gobetti seemed more reticent. He dismissed facile optimism about the future and underlined the “seriousness” with which his review undertook its political engagement.


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“We feel closer to the desperation of the Old Testament,” he claimed, than to any utopian vision of the world, with “the security of being condemned.” This sense of unavoidable tragedy and sacrifice gave Rivoluzione Liberale its disinterested enthusiasm for action.74 But what use was there in constituting a “closed order” of intellectuals, he asked? Resignation, he insisted, in the face of fascism’s curtailment of press freedom would mean forming not a society of abstainers, but “the company of the dead.”75 But, paradoxically, in a telling comment, he also warned that revolutionary liberals needed to be cautious in speaking directly to the masses, for fear of undermining the workers’ autonomous self-development. We are revolutionaries in so far as we are creating the objective conditions that, by corresponding to the rise of the proletarian class indicated to us by history, will generate the new civilization and the new state; not because we set about proclaiming the revolution, referring to it in a newspaper article or a speech to the masses. Rather, our position is so delicate and curious that we take care not to speak to the masses, fearing that for them our words might become an enlightened revelation from on high that interrupts their autonomous assent.76

Exactly what kind of political, as opposed to cultural, resistance to fascism Gobetti was offering was unclear. Indeed, at various other points in his analysis of the political situation, Gobetti himself seemed curiously aloof. Because he opposed the socialist parliamentary grouping (indeed, he bitterly castigated all parliamentary party politics),77 he suggested, there was no point in resisting fascism simply to return to the status quo ante. The country, he argued, needed a test, and the arrival of fascism was an opportune moment to see if Italy was prepared to fight for its liberty. Refusing to collaborate with fascism’s parliamentary critics (“To fight against Mussolini only in order to replace him in six months with Nitti, Cocco-Ortu, Orlando or Giolitti. No and no again”), Gobetti also implied it was necessary to let fascism run its course: “We remain historians over and above the day-to-day . . . and we work for another revolution.”78 Once again, Gobetti’s program was open to the accusation of being an ineffectual, narrowly cultural, rather than directly political, action.79 This refusal to effectively engage a more practical anti-fascist politics is exemplified well in the fact that Gobetti declined to sign the “Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals” edited by Croce (on the invitation of Amendola) in May 1925 to counter Gentile’s “Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals” of the previous month.80 Gentile’s text had defended the view that there was more to fascism than mere force, and his signatories (including Marinetti, Rocco, Curzio Malaparte, and in a letter of support, Luigi Pirandello) supported


his claim that its roots lay in a genuine Italian “spirit.” Fascism, he asserted, had a “religious character” akin to Mazzini’s aspiration to form a civic religion.81 In response, Croce rejected the “chaotic and elusive ‘religion’” and underlined the faith he and his signatories had in the tradition of Risorgimento liberalism.82 The Anti-Fascist Manifesto was signed by, amongst others, Einaudi, Mosca, and Francesco Ruffini. But why did Gobetti, by now a known figure outside Turin, not sign up to this opposition, too? While there is little direct evidence of Gobetti’s views, one commentator speculates that he would undoubtedly have disagreed with the establishment liberalism being praised in the Manifesto. Furthermore, Croce’s national fame meant that an anti-fascism of that variety might diminish Gobetti’s own preference for an opposition that included the communists.83 The climate of political intimidation, however, had, by then, raised to the point that even cultural anti-fascism was difficult to conduct. In February, and again in May of 1923, Gobetti was arrested and temporarily detained by the police under the pretext of subversive activity.84 Nevertheless, he intensified his efforts to generate an active, cultural anti-fascism, and in April that year, the Gobetti publishing house was formed. In March 1924, he published the book version of La rivoluzione liberale, and in December, he became the editor of another review, Il Baretti, devoted to cultural and artistic debates, which stayed in print until 1928.85 These efforts were, as Spriano points out, designed to combat any normalization of the fascist presence in government by keeping open the channels of cultural debate.86 But this did not always win him supporters. For some, Gobetti’s excoriating attacks on the “collaborationism” of the parliamentary opposition were seen as divisive and overly “abstract.” Too often, he seemed to be speaking to a generation yet to come, one untainted by the sins of the parliamentary system, and not to the practicalities of the present. The Aventine Secession In April 1924, national elections were held under a new electoral system brought in by the “Acerbo Law” of the previous year. The law was designed to strengthen fascist power over parliament by rewarding the winner of more than 25 percent of the popular vote a two-thirds majority of the seats in parliament.87 A further step in the regime’s “dictatorship by stealth,” because it substantially reduced pluralist competition, the law had been supported by Salandra and conservative liberals as a way of diminishing the socialist presence in parliament and hardening the “strong state” they saw the fascists offering. The new system also had the effect of winning over to fascism a large number of liberals, particularly southern deputies, since


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joining the government list would be more likely to secure them a seat and, as a consequence, further channels of influence for their local clienteles.88 The elections inevitably brought the result the fascists had expected, giving them a vast majority in parliament. But there was resistance to this manifestly unfair system. Liberal deputies, such as Amendola and the independent socialist Giacomo Matteotti, railed against it. In May, Matteotti made an impassioned speech in parliament against the legitimacy of a regime that both constructed an electoral system in its favor and deployed violence and intimidation to ensure it was elected.89 His speech called for the elections to be annulled, undermining the efforts of those wishing to normalize fascism, and he publicly threatened to discredit Mussolini with evidence of electoral abuses. But in June, Matteotti suddenly went missing, suspected of being murdered by fascist thugs. His corpse was discovered a few months later.90 The murder of Matteotti generated a storm of protest that nearly brought an end to the fascist government. While there was no direct link to Mussolini, it was evident that supporters close to his office had been involved in the murder.91 The squadrist violence that had earlier levered him into power—a violence many had hoped would soon dissipate—now seemed to be out of all control. Flanking supporters of fascism, both in and out of parliament, began to withdraw support. At the end of June, 150 opposition deputies marched out of the chamber to form the “Aventine Secession.” For the first time, Mussolini’s precarious balancing act of threats and concessions looked ready to collapse. The Aventine parties—Amendola’s liberal democrats, socialists, communists, republicans, and the Popular Party— sought to represent the moral high ground, and challenged the king to withdraw confidence in the government.92 Gobetti’s political instincts were clearly sharpened by Matteotti’s assassination.93 For a moment, the Aventine appeared to unify the various opposition parties and threatened to withdraw constitutional recognition for Mussolini, who still relied on the tacit recognition of conservative elites. Gobetti now saw the potential for an intransigent anti-fascist politics led by mass parties.94 He narrowed down his disdain to the older constitutional parties alone,95 talked up the idea of a modern, European democratic parliament,96 and even recruited “Liberal Revolution Groups” across Italy’s major cities to promote an inclusive coalition.97 It was no longer possible to defeat fascism through parliamentary means, he argued: only an intransigent opposition by the Aventine parties might lay the basis for a new ruling class in the future. Rivoluzione Liberale, he boasted, had declared its own Aventine as far back as 1922. The opposition parties had only just caught up! Nevertheless, the Aventine was indeed “a victory for the character of Italians.”98


But Gobetti was not an uncritical supporter of the Aventine. To him, it was still necessary to develop an alliance with the communists and the revolutionary workers’ movement for the sake of the long term. Here, the differences between Amendola, the de facto leader of the Aventine, and Gobetti became clear once more. Having abandoned his previous tactic of seeking to constrain fascism through the constitution, Amendola now sought to invoke an intervention by the monarch and pave the way for a more democratic political system. In May 1925, however, Gobetti ridiculed efforts by the Aventine parties to rally middle class support. This was a social class that had already proved itself easily lost to reaction. And Mussolini was evidently “a very able tactician in moving and converting malcontents.”99 The “only sound basis for a new future politics,” he asserted, “is the workers movement.” If there is forming around the Aventine an élite of young people who understand the situation and who do not delude themselves, then they have the duty to stop the endless polemics against the Communists that threaten to become a useless diversion, not to worry about a theory of the middle classes, not to contrive tricks of coups de main, but to work with sincerity for a workers’ united front, even if this work, given the current depressed condition of the masses, will not bear immediate fruit.100

Such critical advice caught the eye of numerous commentators. The communist paper founded by Gramsci, L’Unitá, applauded the young liberal’s support for a political strategy similar to theirs for an alliance of workers and peasants.101 Prezzolini, however, wrote to Gobetti, chastising him for his “utopian” view: “Italy isn’t Fiat of Turin. . . . Not only is there no united front to be made, but if there were it would be the stuff of madmen. And the ruling class it would produce would be worse than that of the Fascists.”102 Amendola replied, too, in Il Mondo, angrily accusing Gobetti of treating his review as though it were “a Mecca of perfect anti-fascism.”103 In response, Gobetti accused Il Mondo of acting in accord with the fascist press by attacking those who disagreed with it. Explaining his views on the united front strategy, Gobetti reasserted his opposition to an anti-fascism “based on coups de main or conspiracies” and his desire to see a mass movement of workers participating in the political struggle.104 Yet again, however, he added that the workers should be left to their own initiative, to find their own instruments of struggle without excessive interference. The task for Rivoluzione Liberale in developing the front was to “create amongst the young people of all the mass parties opposed to Fascism an atmosphere of critical sincerity and a common will to struggle, without parliamentary worries and without the possibility of compromise.”105 Once again, even


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at this crucial moment of political activity, Gobetti’s eyes were on a more distant horizon, and he seemed not to notice the possible contradiction in supporting both the Aventine and the communists.106 But even as early as 1924, Gobetti himself had understood the differences between two types of anti-fascism: that of the “old democrats and liberals” who were outmaneuvered by the fascists, and that of Rivoluzione Liberale.107 The first was “exquisitely parliamentary . . . they did not feel a natural repugnance towards the victors [i.e., the fascists], they were absolutely alien to working for any other generation.” They were “disoriented” by fascism, not genuinely opposed to it.108 But Mussolini, he continued, could not be held to a program or parliamentary accord—he had to be “unmasked with a ferocious intransigence” by the example of a style of political struggle that would render personal dictatorships unnecessary. What deserved attention for Gobetti was not the specific loss of civil liberties or the violence brought by fascism, but a society that failed to resist, that preferred to domesticate fascism than suppress it. The “merit” of fascism, at the very least, was to have “offered a synthesis” of Italy’s weaknesses.109 To combat it, it was necessary to work for an “integral revolution” of both economy and conscience, to understand “liberty as an absolute value, as human dignity and as the principle of political struggle and formation of parties.”110 Gobetti called this second form of anti-fascism “ethical anti-fascism,” insofar as it was driven by a desire to educate a ruling class that could exhort a new liberal ethos, not one that would simply oppose it so as to return the old order. His later, lukewarm attitude to the Aventine reflected this distinctive—some have called it “existential”— style of opposition.111 In any event, despite its strictly “legalitarian” aims,112 the Aventine was unable to spark a coherent anti-fascist politics, in part because of its selfimposed isolation from parliament, but also because of remaining animosities between the parties. The church in particular would not agree to an alliance between the Popular Party and the socialists. The Aventine failed to act sufficiently quickly or effectively to dislodge Mussolini.113 It was unable to mobilize the doubters who had remained in the chamber and senate, and the government easily won a confidence motion with the support of liberals such as Croce, who felt the government needed more time to fulfill its promise.114 The crisis surrounding Matteotti’s murder nevertheless proved decisive for the fascists, too. Under pressure to take responsibility for his supporters’ violence, Mussolini eventually opted to dispense with parliamentary opposition altogether. On January 3, 1925, he dramatically announced his intention to install an authoritarian order.115 The dictatorship proper had begun: measures were immediately taken to curtail freedom of assembly


and association, particularly against suspected “subversives,” and by October, the regime began to suppress opposition parties and arrest their leaders.116 Although its constitution remained in place throughout the subsequent twenty years of dictatorship, in the workings of its political institutions, Liberal Italy was effectively dead. Into Exile Gobetti’s anti-fascism clearly did not endear him to the authorities. In 1924, Mussolini himself sent a handwritten note to the prefect of Turin, asking to be informed of his activities.117 In addition to Gobetti’s arrests the previous year, his review was also repeatedly sequestered—almost every month of 1925—on the grounds of its purportedly “injurious” defamation of national institutions. Gobetti was regularly given warnings by the prefect about the subversive articles he published. While he vowed bravely to continue, in November, the last issue of Rivoluzione Liberale appeared. Gobetti was ordered to cease all editorial and publishing activities. Already ill after a severe beating by fascist thugs in September of the previous year, which had caused lesions to his heart, Gobetti decided to leave for Paris, the home of many exiled Italian political activists, to continue his work there. In February 1926, he left his wife Ada and their newly born son Paolo in Turin to journey, by train, to France, where the family was to join him later. However, a week later, his friends Prezzolini and Luigi Emory found him in a Paris hotel seriously ill in bed, suffering from a bronchial infection. They moved him to a clinic, but ultimately his heart gave out and he died around midnight on February 15. He was buried in Paris in a simple grave in the Père Lachaise cemetery, which remains there to this day. Gobetti’s death was a shock to his friends and associates back in Italy.118 Il Baretti, his remaining review, published a special issue with a number of obituaries, including one by Einaudi.119 Although many did not agree with all his views, Gobetti had garnered a strong reputation across the spectrum of intellectual life. The book he was completing just before his death, Risorgimento senza eroi, was published in 1926. The collection of his articles on Russia, Paradosso dello spirito russo, was also published that year. Gobetti was not the only anti-fascist to die at the hands of the regime’s brutality. Amendola died in Cannes later that year, also fatally wounded after an assault by fascists. Gramsci, too, who had evaded arrest because of parliamentary immunity, was gaoled in 1926 and left to deteriorate in prison until his death in 1937. By the late 1920s, Mussolini’s regime had effectively stamped out all serious opposition in the country. Gobetti’s name, like those of the others mentioned here, soon faded from daily


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political and cultural debate, kept alive only by the memory of those who harbored a desire to reignite the struggle for liberty. As we shall see in the next chapter, when Italian anti-fascism resurfaced in the 1930s and ‘40s, Gobetti and his ideas emerged as potent symbols of renewed hopes for a revolution against fascism.


6

Politicizing Liberalism Gobetti’s Italian Legacy

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n the face of it, Gobetti’s project for a liberal revolution was not a success. Within only a few years of its enunciation, organized political opposition in Italy was outlawed, parliamentary democracy was replaced by a raft of repressive legislation, and political leaders such as Gramsci were arrested and imprisoned. The deaths of both Gobetti and Amendola in 1926 robbed the antifascist opposition of powerful, critical voices, and effective publicists. Rather than being roused to a liberal revolution, many Italians had instead succumbed, either by force or persuasion, to the authoritarian “revolution” offered by Mussolini. But Gobetti’s legacy in Italy should not be read in narrowly practical terms. The “politics of liberal revolution” comprise not only his own efforts to promote a new political culture in Italy but, to a substantial extent, the dissemination of his ideas amongst later thinkers engaged in struggle against the Fascist regime. After his death, Gobetti’s ideas came to figure as a source of direct inspiration in antifascist quarters. In that sense, his legacy has been a distinctively rhetorical one: his arguments were available as weapons of criticism for others to employ in various ways. The idiosyncratic liberalism he expounded was received as a series of claims that could be inserted, usually selectively, into a range of alternative programs, not as a complete political formula in itself. By politicizing liberalism—that is, by emphasizing the origin of freedom in political conflicts—Gobetti had cleared a unique space that others would partially occupy to refashion the terrain of ideological struggle. This chapter surveys and reviews some of the distinctive ways in which Gobetti’s legacy was appropriated in Italy.1 It begins by considering those who were more or less associated with him during his lifetime—figures such as Gramsci and Carlo Rosselli—and moves on to later thinkers—such the azionisti and Norberto Bobbio—who were more distant from him and

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his experience. In the course of this reappropriation of Gobetti’s thought, contrasting emphases were made, as were competing interpretations, of the nature of his legacy in general. Such differences certainly reflected the changing contexts within which his ideas were revived, but they were also symptomatic of the unsystematic character of Gobetti’s arguments. These arguments centered on his goal of expanding the concept of freedom as a unifying ideal but, depending on how it was interpreted, that goal could be applied with divergent emphases on, for example, the centrality either of liberalism or socialism to radical change, the nature of the Italian state and its history, or the function of elites. Yet for all its internal problems and unresolved tensions, Gobetti’s legacy has remained a powerful, critical resource insofar as it has helped to provoke and unsettle the authoritarian residues in Italian political culture, be they fascist or democratic. A Question of Hegemony? Gramsci and Gobetti I noted in Chapter 3 that Gramsci’s perception of the Turin industrial proletariat had a decisive impact on Gobetti. However, the limits of that influence were also indicated: above all, Gobetti saw liberalism, not socialism or communism, as the most progressive ideological force in Italy’s postwar crisis, and he remained evidently unwilling to endorse the idea of the factory council as the exclusive model of a new state. After the formation of the communist party in 1921 and Gramsci’s absorption into the international communist movement, direct contact between the two diminished and Gobetti began to develop a more independent, if undoubtedly still sympathetic, outlook. But that was not entirely the end of their relationship. Gramsci’s later references to Gobetti and his ideas provide an important clue to the enduring postwar perception of the liberal as a “fellow traveler” of Italian communism. Gramsci’s arrest in 1926—the same year as Gobetti’s premature death— and his subsequent imprisonment, robbed the communist movement of an intelligent and able leader. However, while in prison, Gramsci succeeded in keeping his brain active by writing his now famous “Prison Notebooks” (Quaderni del carcere).2 There, in three thousand pages of handwritten notes drafted in the course of six of his eleven years of incarceration, Gramsci set out a distinctive reading of the historical failings of the Risorgimento and revised his own theoretical outlook for a revolutionary strategy. For him, Italy’s weak state demonstrated the legacy of an incomplete bourgeois cultural and political leadership, or “hegemony”; a failing that now furnished the communist party an opportunity to develop a “national-popular” project that would bring together disaffected social classes and

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bourgeois intellectuals with the revolutionary workers’ movement. Gramsci’s prison writings have since achieved recognition as an innovative and hugely influential recasting of “Western” Marxism. While there is no space here to outline their full significance, we shall instead note the parallels between Gramsci’s analyses and those of Gobetti,3 for both offered similar accounts of how to interpret the postwar crisis and redefine revolution as a popular movement “from below.” By the time of his arrest, Gramsci had begun to revise his interpretation of the postwar crisis. The installation of fascism and the failure of the new communist party to generate any effective resistance had encouraged him to further rethink his perception of the situation. From 1923 up to his arrest, he developed a critique of the leadership of the Italian communists’ theory and practice.4 As he did so, Gramsci began to formulate an alternative outlook, emphasizing the differences between developed and relatively undeveloped capitalist states. In undeveloped states, he argued, bourgeois society—its cultural norms and independent associative organizations— was not elaborate, and hence, a revolutionary assault was easier to accomplish than in more developed states where capitalism had succeeded in institutionalizing itself. There, the bourgeoisie was more effectively embedded in both the structures of the state and throughout society. Between the workers and the “bourgeois state,” therefore, there existed a complex mediating layer of social classes and cultural values and practices.5 Gramsci’s insistence that developed capitalist orders had a more complex social structure was designed to steer his party away from the narrow, class-sectarian strategy it had followed under Bordiga. The party, he argued, should adopt a crossclass strategy to unite northern workers and southern peasants, actively cultivating a common opposition to fascism and capitalism. Gramsci had begun to see fascism as more than just a bourgeois reaction, noting—like Gobetti—its continuity with the reactionary tendencies of the liberal regime, but also its ability successfully to mobilize a range of ideologies in seeking to become an “integral movement.”6 A communist strategy, he argued, likewise ought to create an alternative, inclusive national project. This was the view that essentially formed the basis to his own leadership strategy when he took over from Bordiga in 1924, and which he defended in his “Lyons Theses” (cowritten with Togliatti) at the Third Party Congress of January 1926.7 Later that year, Gramsci produced an important, but unfinished, manuscript titled “Some Aspects of the Southern Question.”8 Stressing the importance of tackling Italy’s historic division between North and South, he drew attention to the role of “intellectuals” in mediating class conflict and creating alliances between classes that reduced the possibility for a clear, conflictual frontier to emerge. Such was the role of figures like Croce

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or Giustino Fortunato, he argued, in helping secure the acceptance by agrarian land-owning classes of the unitary state promoted by the northern bourgeoisie. Croce, claimed Gramsci, “fulfilled an extremely important ‘national’ function. He has detached the radical intellectuals of the South from the peasant masses and made them participate in national and European culture.”9 By justifying unity as the realization of liberty, Croce had helped secure the compliance of potential opponents to the regime, calming down “any passing itch they might feel to rebel against existing conditions,” and producing a kind of secular reformation that attached the northern bourgeoisie to the southern “agrarian bloc.” Gramsci noted that his Ordine Nuovo group in Turin had sought to break with that tradition in order to fashion a new “bloc” around the leadership of the industrial proletariat. As an index of its success, he cited the example of Gobetti who, he claimed, had been placed via the ordinovisti “in contact with a living world he had previously only known through the formulae of books.” Gobetti, whose “most striking characteristics were intellectual honesty and a complete lack of any petty vanity and mean-mindedness,” was convinced that the proletariat was the source of a new national project. Gramsci recognized the startling “new conception” of liberalism that this outlook instigated: “In this view of the world, the principles of liberalism are projected from the order of individual phenomena to that of mass phenomena. The qualities of excellence and prestige in the life of individuals are carried over into the classes, which are regarded as almost collective individualities.”10 While some, as we noted in Chapter 3, might have seen Gobetti’s liberalism as sign of excessive communist sympathies, Gramsci noted that the Ordine Nuovo group regarded him and his Rivoluzione Liberale colleagues more positively, as “spontaneous products of the new historical climate in Italy.” For Gobetti linked up the Turin communists with left-wing, bourgeois and southern intellectuals who were favorable to their program. Intellectuals, Gramsci continued, “develop slowly,” but they come to “represent the entire cultural tradition of a people; they seek to express and synthesize the whole of its history.”11 Gobetti therefore represented precisely the kind of left-leaning bourgeois intellectual that the communist party ought to cultivate to help organize its strategy for power, since intellectuals amongst the proletariat itself would take generations to form. Only then could the “extremely resistant armor of the agrarian bloc” be split. “The proletariat was helped towards the accomplishment of this task by Piero Gobetti and we think that the dead man’s friends will continue with the work he undertook, even without his guidance.”12 But Gramsci’s plans to forge an alternative bloc consisting of the working classes and the peasantry, aided by the support of intellectuals like Gobetti, was permanently interrupted by his own arrest and imprisonment.


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In gaol, however, Gramsci succeeded in further developing his thoughts on the themes raised in his last, unfinished essay: the role of intellectuals in securing the consent of various social classes, the historical background to bourgeois power in Italy, and the way ahead for a proletarian-led bloc of coalescent classes. In addition, Gramsci interwove these issues with a more sophisticated analysis of ideological domination and a theoretical reconstruction of Marxism, conceived as a guide to the practice of generating revolution. The central thread of these complex but disparate analyses was his use of the concept “hegemony” (egemonia).13 Gramsci’s understanding of this term, which he had used on several occasions before his arrest to refer to the guiding role of the proletariat in a revolutionary coalition, was now more complex and multiform. Rather than merely a revolutionary class alliance, mechanically linked together by overlapping, but essentially separate, interests, hegemony signified the combined cultural and political leadership of any class over others: “the supremacy of a social group is manifest in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ . . . A social group [i.e., a class] can and indeed must already be leading before conquering governmental power.”14 Thus, it was not merely narrow economic interests that held hegemony together; it was the permeation of society by an ideological worldview that was able to win the “spontaneous consent” of numerous social classes and groups. Hegemony, claimed Gramsci, was a form of “intellectual and moral leadership” whereby a range of social forces shared the values, aspirations, and “common sense” of the dominant class.15 Gramsci’s concept of hegemony combined both the political sense of a coalition of different interests (implying the necessary exclusion of some) with a more inclusive, cultural meaning indicating shared values and norms. Moreover, it applied not only to a future working class strategy, but to the historical forms of bourgeois order, too. Gramsci used the concept to refer to a variable condition in which a class had succeeded in diffusing a worldview or ideology, elements of which were “spontaneously” shared by other groups and classes. Thus, even the “bourgeois class poses itself as an organism in continuous movement, capable of absorbing the entire society, assimilating it to its own cultural and economic level.”16 This idea of a diffuse cultural ethos echoed the wider aspiration for a common national culture, promoted by Croce as a sense of faith or religiosity. Rather than assume that the bourgeoisie dominates exclusively by force, as Marx and Engels had implied in the Communist Manifesto, Gramsci suggested it was able to win a degree of “consent” across civil society by cultivating this common culture. Thus, the essentially coercive economic and political power of the bourgeoisie was supplemented, to a varying extent, by the popular support of the masses.17

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Where does Gobetti fit with Gramsci’s writings in prison? Gobetti’s name is raised in various places throughout the Notebooks—usually in passing, but typically in positive terms. Gobetti’s contribution to various debates was clearly still alive in Gramsci’s memory, and he was often referenced where Gramsci was discussing interpretations of post–Risorgimento history. He repeated his view that Gobetti had made a “fundamental innovation” with his distinctive understanding of liberalism, one that broke with Croce’s conservative influence.18 He also listed Gobetti as someone who had begun to develop a novel interpretation of the Risorgimento, one intended to guide a political project rather than merely speculate abstractly.19 Given this evidence, it is clear that Gramsci remained impressed by Gobetti’s efforts insofar as they supported his own interest in a revolutionary movement led by the working classes. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the two might be seen as sharing a similar outlook, since Gramsci himself sought to appropriate Gobetti—hegemonizing him, we might say—for his own theoretical perspective. But how does Gramsci’s concept of hegemony compare with Gobetti’s own analyses of the problems of the Risorgimento and the crisis of the liberal state? There are obvious parallels between the two. Both Gramsci and Gobetti saw the postwar crisis as a consequence of the limited political and cultural leadership of Italy’s bourgeoisie, the absence of a “national popular” movement of “intellectual and moral reform.” This view of the Risorgimento as a rivoluzione mancata, a failed bourgeois revolution, would, after the publication of Gramsci’s writings, be contrasted with the liberal interpretation of the Risorgimento as a substantial attainment of freedom.20 For Gobetti, the northern bourgeoisie had failed to develop a liberal ethic that could function in a way similar to a Protestant reformation, that is, to generate a “moral revolution” capable of establishing freedom as the basis of a public philosophy.21 His own exhortation to liberals to grasp liberalism as a “faith” and not a rigid doctrine underscored this semi-“religious” reading. Gramsci, too, was deeply aware of the powerful role of the Catholic Church in holding back a progressive liberal hegemony in Italy. But he was not at all convinced by the claim that the state’s weakness could be traced to the absence of a Protestant reformation,22 for that argument failed to recognize that, in reality, various other kinds of modern movements—such as Croce’s philosophical innovations, scientific positivism, as well as more modern religious movements—had competed at various stages to produce a public philosophy. And, as the Russian thinker Masaryk had pointed out, even Russia had its revolution without a prior religious reform.23 Gramsci expressed surprise, then, that Gobetti had not been more attentive to this critique, since it was his liberal associates who promoted the religious reform argument.24 As we saw in Chapter 4, Gobetti certainly recognized


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the strength of that argument as an interpretation of Italy’s past, but he was not committed to the idea of religious reform as a precondition for a future liberal state. “Our Protestantism,” as he called it, was firmly tied to the heroic deeds of the workers’ movement. Indeed, Gramsci’s criticism was essentially directed at others whom he believed applied this analysis too “mechanically.” The evident similarities between Gramsci and Gobetti on Italy’s failed revolution should not, however, lead us to overidentify their analyses. Despite Gramsci’s tendency to assimilate Gobetti to his own revised outlook, there remain notable differences between the two, not least of which is the fact that Gramsci formulated his prison writings through the lens of Marxism, while Gobetti remained firmly attached to his distinctive version of liberalism. This difference informed their analyses of the postwar situation and the nature of the leadership each thought necessary to turn the crisis into political renewal.25 If, for both, the postwar crisis revealed the exhaustion of an already limited bourgeois hegemony, for the Marxist Gramsci, the objective foundation of that failure was a weak capitalist class lacking an autonomous model of social order that would function as an inclusive cultural system. In his view, such a model and cultural system had to be rooted in the practical economic activity of a class: “if hegemony is ethico-political, it cannot but also be economic, it can only have its foundation in the decisive function that the leading group exercises in the decisive nucleus of economic activity.”26 Class “praxis”—a class’s subjective reflection on its own economic practice—formed the core of its hegemony over other classes. Gramsci’s effort to incorporate this subjective moment into his Marxism later won him wide recognition as an antideterminist, implying, as it did, that an act of political will and imagination was necessary to propel a class from a narrow, “corporate” awareness of its immediate interests to a hegemonic force. At the same time, however, Gramsci’s rooting of hegemony in class praxis ensured he did not stray so far from the classical Marxist view that state power was rooted in economic power, even if this was more complicated than a simple “causal” relation. There was, he proclaimed, always a material substratum to hegemony that set limits to its practical political effects. This lingering economic determinism contrasted with Gobetti’s analysis, for if Gobetti also understood the importance of economic activity as the foundation of any cultural leadership, his analysis was not substantially premised on this point. To Gramsci, the Italian bourgeoisie was no longer in a position to secure its hegemony because it was now redundant in the development of economic forces of production. It had been overtaken by a more “organized” form of economy—which he labeled as “Americanism” and

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“Fordism”—where the market was being replaced by centralized systems of management and command.27 Gobetti, however, understood the crisis in fundamentally cultural terms. The absence of a strong ethic of political conflict led to class reaction, not the loss of economic leadership. The Italy revealed by the arrival of fascism was essentially backward, with an underdeveloped and immature political culture.28 There was no need to explain this backwardness in materialist terms. As a consequence, there was also no need to find a replacement for liberalism as the ideological form of further modernization; the challenge was to renew liberalism in order to give voice to the workers’ objectives. Gobetti was therefore attached to workers’ struggles for “autonomy” with what Sbarberi calls a “bourgeois” understanding of its potential outcome, that is, as a way of promoting the ideal of freedom rather than providing a new and comprehensive principle of economic control.29 This view, however anachronistic it may have been from Gramsci’s perspective, steered away from the latter’s emphasis on the integrative potential of new production methods and the “totalizing” role of the state. This key difference in their analyses of the crisis explains other notable divergences between Gramsci and Gobetti. In Gramsci’s analysis, the crisis of economic leadership that underlay the crisis of hegemony opened the way for a new hegemonic culture based around proletarian activity in the factory. While Gramsci came to recognize the need for revolutionary guidance by the party, he remained convinced that a communist order would be fashioned from the practical activity of the workers themselves, not imposed upon them. A proletarian hegemony was to be centered on the experience of “organic” intellectuals in the workplace, that is, around those workers who had a specialist role in production.30 For Gobetti, too, these new workers’ leaders were central to the formation of a ruling class but, as I noted in Chapter 4, their productive role was, for him, not vital to the content of a new liberal faith. A new elite would emerge from the workers’ desire for autonomy, but its hegemony was not to be based on its techniques of production. The factory was not a model for the new liberal society. Thus, Gramsci’s vision of the party’s leadership role was substantially alien to Gobetti, too. For Gramsci, the party was to be the incarnation of the “Sorelian myth,” a “Modern Prince” (akin to Machiavelli’s famous image) that embodied a new collective will and absorbed the experiences of the workers, guiding them through an awareness, informed by Marxism, of the proletariat’s historical function.31 The party was the unified agent, and Marxism was to be its official creed—the basis of its intellectual and moral leadership over other social classes. One of Gramsci’s great innovations in his Notebooks was this theory of the party as the agent of a


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“national-popular” collective will, a more profound and culturally engaged agency than Lenin’s view of the revolutionary party.32 More than Gobetti, Gramsci understood the need for disciplined organization to realize a revolutionary project, and more than him, he grasped the need to act upon popular “common sense,” rearticulating it around a new consensus that validated the experience of the working class. For this innovation, Gramsci has been understood by the contemporary Left as a deeply democratic thinker, someone peculiarly in touch with popular feeling and the uneven geographies of class domination.33 In comparison, Gobetti appears classically liberal, focused on elite leadership rather than popular participation—a point I shall return to in the next chapter. Yet, however distant from popular experience Gobetti’s approach may seem, he was uniquely focused on the agonistic dimension to hegemony, that is, its orientation toward conflict amongst social groups and classes. This is a dimension that remained ambiguous in Gramsci’s theory of the party, which often seemed designed to secure a harmony of interests and values between “organic intellectuals,” workers, and wider popular constituencies. Scholars have debated, at length, how compatible with a modern sense of democracy and pluralism Gramsci’s theory of the party could reasonably be claimed to be.34 While some point to his awareness of difference, and the need for a certain amount of democratic debate between leaders and followers, others underline how, in essence, his theory was only a revision to a Leninist model of disciplined party leadership, not a substantial alternative to it. Whichever side we come down on in this debate, it is clear that there were tensions that Gramsci did not solve in his model of the party between its popular, democratic aspect and its function as a source of disciplined, enlightened leadership.35 Gobetti, by contrast, was self-consciously focused on elites and their leadership role, largely leaving aside the question of democratic organization and the relationship between leaders and those they represented. Yet because, for him, the primary purpose of intellectual and moral reform was to establish an ethic of popular political struggle in which new social constituencies and elites arose with new ideas of autonomy, there is arguably a greater pluralistic dimension to his thought than to Gramsci’s, which, by contrast, looked forward, as many Marxists do, to a future society in which class conflict was eliminated and democratic dispute reduced to supposedly minor matters of administration. In all, Gramsci’s appropriation of Gobetti can seem rather one-sided in his own favor. While the two undoubtedly overlapped in their concerns and shared a similar outlook on various matters, nevertheless, we can see there were important differences of emphasis. Gobetti’s politicized liberalism was certainly amenable in key respects to Gramsci’s theory of

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hegemony and, given Gobetti’s open enthusiasm for the Sardinian, it is not surprising that close parallels between the two have been highlighted. Indeed, this view of their overlapping concerns ensured, for many communists and their sympathizers, that Gobetti’s legacy could be unproblematically absorbed into the Italian communist strategy.36 Togliatti, who took over as leader after Gramsci’s imprisonment, repeatedly emphasized Gobetti’s status as a communist fellow traveler, that is, as an exemplary petty-bourgeois intellectual who endorsed the historic and revolutionary function of the proletariat.37 As a consequence, the communist perspective on Gobetti’s legacy has largely been one that has played down the “liberal” element in his revolutionary liberalism. Reconciling Liberalism and Socialism: Rosselli and the “Azionisti” Before Gramsci’s prison writings were published in the late 1940s, Gobetti’s influence remained more firmly tied to those young intellectuals with whom he had collaborated in his reviews and who survived him to experience the authoritarian force of the Fascist regime. “To write of Piero Gobetti,” wrote Carlo Levi in 1933, “means, for those of us of his generation, doing autobiography.”38 Having lived and worked alongside Gobetti, it was they who continued his revolutionary liberal project in their own antifascist activities, extending it beyond the domain of political culture into the realms of political theory and action. Amongst these antifascists were individuals such as Leone Ginzburg, Carlo Levi, and Eugenio Montale. Many would later play a key role in the antifascist politics of the Partito d’Azione (Action Party) which took part in the resistance movement from 1943 to 1945. The azionisti, as they were called, were inspired by Gobetti’s analyses and became a major channel for the extension of his ideas, in particular, his view that liberals needed to be reconciled to the workers’ movement. First, let us consider one central figure whose antifascism preceded that of the azionisti, and another ideological innovator, Carlo Rosselli. Rosselli (1899–1937) was an educated, middle class socialist from Florence. He became known for his antifascist journalism and organized resistance to the regime in the movement he organized with his brother Nello, Giustizia e libertá (Justice and Liberty).39 The title of this movement gives a clue to the principle that motivated Rosselli’s activities: the theoretical and political reconciliation of socialists and liberals. That outlook was developed in his book—written while imprisoned by the fascists on the island of Lipari in the late 1920s and smuggled out by his wife—Socialismo liberale (Liberal Socialism), published in France in 1930 following his escape.40


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An earlier version of Rosselli’s argument had first appeared in Rivoluzione Liberale in 1924 as “Liberalismo socialista” (Socialist Liberalism), headed by a short note from Gobetti.41 In this early article, Rosselli argued that socialism should be understood as the heir to liberalism’s “method”— the “complex of norms” that establish a common space of conflict and open debate—as opposed to its “system”—the institutional forms through which these norms have been historically realized, such as parliament, capitalism, the bourgeoisie, and so forth. Democracy, argued Rosselli, was the logical consequence of liberalism because it extended the idea of popular control over the state to wider constituencies. Socialism, he continued, was now the agency through which this extension of liberalism was to be achieved: “Only the socialist movement . . . is capable of reviving the liberal myth in all its splendor.” This was because socialists seek economic autonomy, that is, relief from the burdens of material disadvantage and lack of control in the workplace. In this, they pursue more than narrowly economic issues. They share with liberals the ideals of freedom and autonomy. For Rosselli, it was necessary for socialists to drop the anachronistic dogmatism of Marxism and, like him, adopt the mentality of a “liberal socialist.” Socialism was not an inevitable evolutionary outcome—it was a goal to be pursued with a sense of faith. Italian socialists had tended to oppose liberalism, but instead, they ought to realize their own liberal spirit. The struggle against the fascists, Rosselli concluded, was an opportunity to generate “the respect and love for the principles of liberty and democracy.” Gobetti’s note to Rosselli’s article had suggested his approval of the author’s appeal to the workers’ desire for autonomy. “Our liberalism is also socialist,” he indicated of his review’s broad stance, “if one accepts the assessment of Marxism and socialism we have offered up many times.”42 Rosselli shared Gobetti’s ethical view of liberalism, but the parameters of the former’s liberal socialism were more in keeping with reformist socialism than the revolutionary workers’ politics Gobetti then endorsed. Influenced by British figures such as J. S. Mill and G. D. H. Cole’s “guild socialism,” Rosselli looked toward a self-managed socialist economy “from below” (rather than a planned economy “from above”). While he, too, was critical of the limits of Italian socialism, his orientation toward Turatian socialism, trade unionism, and his hostility toward Marxism and communism set him apart from Gobetti’s peculiar sympathy with the Turin communists. After Gobetti’s death and the installation of the dictatorship, Rosselli joined with others to actively resist fascism, famously succeeding in 1928 in releasing the aged Turati from captivity and dispatching him to France.43 His arguments for a liberal socialism were then later developed in his book during his own imprisonment for antifascist activities. There, he repeated

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his view that socialism was heir to liberalism’s emphasis on liberty, extending it to all individuals and not any one, privileged social class. Again, Rosselli attacked Marxism for its economic determinism and impoverished sense of moral freedom. Socialism, he claimed, needed an “injection of ethics” to confront the problems of the age.44 Grasped “in its essential aspect,” he argued, socialism “is the progressive actualization of the idea of liberty and justice among men.”45 Thus, socialist movements needed to accept the constitutional “rules of the game” of liberal parliamentary politics and concomitant ideas of toleration and legitimate dissent if they were to advance like states such as Britain. On matters of political economy, socialists could accept private property since that did not, of itself, rule out forms of collectivism. The real enemy, he suggested, was statism, whether capitalist or Soviet-style. Bureaucracy and antiliberal authoritarianism stemmed from these top-down systems.46 Invoking Gobetti’s characterization of fascism as the “autobiography of a nation,” Rosselli argued that the Italian political system had been constructed on compromise and not on shared values. Mussolini’s dictatorship represented a return to a kind of antidemocratic monarchism that would, despite itself, encourage Italians, once more, to grasp the myth of liberty. The Italian revolution, he concluded, would have to be a liberal revolution. Following his escape from Lipari, Rosselli set up the movement Giustizia e Libertá (GL) to coordinate various antifascist activities. The movement’s title underscored his view that overcoming fascism meant not the return to prefascist liberalism, but an entirely new synthesis where the workers’ desire for social justice would be included in the very constitution of the new order. The movement presented itself as a nonparty organization of liberals, republicans, and democrats with the primary goal of removing fascism by insurrection.47 While it did not have a formal program of policies, Rosselli nevertheless directed the movement to what he saw as the workers needs and underscored his desire to weld the views of socialists to those of a reconstituted liberal order.48 Once more, Rosselli presented his argument in a distinctively Gobettian terms: the goal of GL was to generate a liberal revolution. Liberalism, he argued, was an “attitude of spirit,” a “virile faith,” and liberals actively supported all efforts of individuals and associations to achieve autonomy from arbitrary interference: “Wherever a struggle unravels, an injustice is fought, an effort at emancipation is undertaken, there the eternal spirit of liberty watches over, there stand the concrete, modern liberals.”49 Like Gobetti, too, Rosselli extended the liberal spirit to the proletariat. “All the active, revolutionary forces of history are by definition liberal,” he claimed.50 Now that the bourgeoisie was exhausted, the proletariat carried the mantle of


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liberty: “Liberalism is the inspirational ideal force, socialism the practical realizing force.”51 But unlike Gobetti, Rosselli continued to underscore the distinctly anti-Marxist and anticommunist orientation to his movement. The communists were skeptical of GL and were its main competitors as antifascists, looking to win working class support. Rosselli repeatedly attacked the communists for their dogmatism, accusing them of having no genuine commitment to liberty.52 In a key article, he directed his attack toward Giorgio Amendola, son of the murdered liberal democrat Giovanni Amendola, who had joined the communists. In a sectarian critique, Amendola (following Togliatti’s lead) had accused GL of tending toward a reconstitution of the old liberal order, and he bemoaned the lack of self-critical minds that Gobetti had nurtured in Rivoluzione Liberale. Rosselli responded forcefully by reclaiming the Gobettian heritage, reminding Amendola that Gobetti had attacked closed mentalities such as his. Unlike official communism, Gobetti’s review had proposed the self-liberation of the proletariat, its “self-elevation” and education in an environment of liberty, not the imposition of a new order upon it.53 Gobetti would hardly have accepted the method of dictatorship. He was not a party man, so why should GL be, especially when it did not even share Gobetti’s “sentimental attachment” to Ordine Nuovo?54 Rosselli disputed Amendola’s association of the bourgeoisie with fascism and pointed out that Gobetti’s description of fascism as the “cult of unanimity” could be applied just as accurately to communism.55 It was, in fact, Amendola himself, he concluded, who had abandoned the “positions of our common youth” nurtured under Gobetti’s guidance.56 Rosselli’s appeal to the authority of Gobetti underscores the importance that antifascists, communists included, attached to his inspiration. But as Bagnoli points out, with Rosselli’s movement in particular, Gobettismo emerged as the intellectual basis to an independent political organization.57 In Rosselli’s writings, there resounded a variety of themes linked to Gobetti: the appeal to youth to serve as a vanguard of liberty, the redundancy of the bourgeoisie as a political force, fascism as the culmination of the liberal order, and the reconstitution of Italy around a renewed, combative sense of freedom. Fundamentally, however, it was Rosselli’s effort to make liberty the meeting point between liberals and the workers that connected him to Gobetti. Yet the difference remained that Rosselli shared nothing of Gobetti’s attachment to the communists, as he recognized himself: for him, the socialist movement remained the most likely candidate to subscribe to the principles of liberal revolution. The mutual hostility between GL and the communists continued up to, and beyond, Rosselli’s

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brutal death, alongside his brother, in 1937 at the hands of French fascists hired by Mussolini. Rosselli’s movement provided a model of militant action for other noncommunist intellectuals who, in 1942, formed the radical liberal Partito d’Azione (PdA). Named after the nineteenth-century party of liberals active in the Risorgimento, the PdA brought together a variety of groups opposed to the regime many of whom, unlike Rosselli, had grown up and matured under the dictatorship. The PdA consisted primarily of liberal democrats, liberal-socialists, and republicans, and it formed a training ground for many well-known postwar intellectual antifascists committed to establishing a liberal democratic republic. Figures such as Norberto Bobbio, Ugo La Malfa, Vittorio Foa, and Carlo Levi all participated in the PdA’s resistance to the regime. Untarnished by experience of the prefascist regime’s hostility toward socialism, many were inspired, like GL, by a desire to reconcile liberal ideas of individual liberty and socialist demands for justice. In this and other respects, the azionisti were inspired by Gobettian themes.58 The key figures in theoretically reconciling liberalism and socialism were Guido Calogero (1904–86) and Aldo Capitini (1899–1968). These young philosophers, trained in Pisa under the guidance of Giovanni Gentile, coined the term “liberalsocialismo” or liberal-socialism, reflecting their view of the indissociable unity of the concepts. Both Capitini and Calogero were influenced by Christian principles linking personal motivation and social responsibilities rather than appealing to transcendent principles. In this, they both sought to fashion an autonomous moral philosophy with the purpose of opposing fascism. Capitini, for instance, developed an openly religious outlook conceiving liberty as a spiritual openness, the basis of a new “sociality” premised on an internal, subjective recognition of others.59 Calogero, on the other hand, offered a more secular outlook, identifying liberty with social justice: Liberal-socialism “is the principle by which we recognize the personhood of others in contrast to our own person and assign to each of them a right equal to our own.”60 Considered apart, liberalism conceives of liberty without justice, while socialism promotes justice, but without individual liberty. These were precisely the failings of prefascist liberalism, Marxist socialism, and communism. Properly conceived as a unity, however, liberal-socialism conjoins liberty and equality as a single, autonomous ethical ideal. That way, individual liberty could not be thought except in terms of a value for others whose liberty, therefore, one must simultaneously will: “The political liberty to which every true democrat aspires is always his liberty measured up to the liberty of others, it is not a personal liberty but a universal one, it is a liberty for everyone. It is, to put it another way, a social liberty.”61


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Calogero argued that his formulation of liberal-socialism was a more effective moral grounding than Rosselli’s liberal socialism. Rosselli had not managed to synthesize the concepts but, instead, mechanically joined them together. His was not a “true and proper liberal-socialist ideology” because it failed to provide a genuinely “logical integration.”62 For Calogero, where other ideologies tended to promote either liberty or social justice, his formulation constituted “a new and coherent synthesis” of the liberal and socialist traditions. It was, he argued “a third way: the way of the union, coincidence and indissoluble co-presence of justice and liberty.”63 Capitini and Calogero’s aim was to socialize individual liberty: for Capitini, this was the premise for a kind of religious reform, while for Calogero, it had a firmly juridical direction. Thus, Calogero offered up this framework as the philosophical basis to the PdA, supporting the establishment of a republican constitution with liberal political institutions that also defended rights to social justice through a mixed economy. But Calogero also shared some of Capitini’s piety, claiming at one point that liberal-socialism “is merely a form of practical Christianity, of service to God brought down to morality.”64 This rather moralistic outlook—which “identified” rather than merely balanced liberty and justice—contrasted with both Gobetti’s and Rosselli’s emphasis on conflict. Where Gobetti and Rosselli had imagined struggles for liberty as the source of progress and an ongoing renewal of freedom, Calogero saw logical—and possibly political—harmony. It would be wrong to suggest that only Capitini and Calogero alone extended Gobetti’s influence in the PdA. As one commentator remarks, the whole movement was inspired by his notion of liberty as “a process of liberation.”65 Another points to Gobetti’s analysis of fascism as a revelation of the inherent ills of post–Risorgimento Italy as a unifying theme in the party.66 These very general points of reference, however, could be understood in various ways. And Gobetti’s ideas were not the PdA’s sole resource. His inspiration to the liberal-socialist wing was more moral than doctrinal, underlining the importance of breaking with the past, but not in helping interpret that past closely or in envisaging any specific future.67 In the face of “totalitarian” enemies such as state communism and fascism, by the mid-1940s, Gobetti’s analyses no longer seemed wholly appropriate to the prevailing political environment.68 There were, in fact, many competing conceptions of the role and purpose of the PdA. Although there was general agreement that a postfascist order had to be based on liberal democratic institutional principles in which civil and political rights were paramount, and premised on the presence of a mixed economy, there was disagreement about the precise way in which this was to be formulated. Indeed, there was disagreement as to whether the party should function as a party with a distinctive program

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and compete for office or, instead, as a movement to stimulate reform within society more generally. In the end, the PdA did participate alongside other parties in the “Committees for National Liberation,” and in 1945, it provided the country with its interim president, Feruccio Parri. However, the party never managed to create a popular basis of support, and functioned more as a party of intellectuals than a mass party with a stable social constituency. In this respect, it reflected Gobetti’s tendency to engage only an elite of intellectuals interested in ideological innovation.69 The PdA was soon outmaneuvered in national politics by the larger and better organized parties—the Christian Democrats, the socialists, and the communists— and eventually dissolved in 1947. The Politics of Freedom: Croce’s Historicism The influence of Gobetti’s politicized liberalism on antifascists in the 1930s and ‘40s was enabled, although indirectly, by the continued presence of Benedetto Croce. Although Croce had given tacit support to the Fascist regime in the 1920s, he soon turned against it and became known as one of Italy’s most distinguished antifascists. Tolerated by the regime for various reasons—not least because of his reputation throughout Europe— Croce provided a kind of nonviolent, intellectual resistance, offering moral succor and, occasionally, practical support to more active opponents of fascism.70 For example, Ada Gobetti, Piero’s widow and later an active antifascist whose activities were recounted in her remarkable Diario partigiano (Partisan Diary), formed a close friendship with the elderly Croce.71 Others, including many of the azionisti, were inspired by Croce’s idealist philosophy to oppose the Fascist state in the name of freedom. Here, the comparison with Gobetti is of particular interest, although there was no direct influence by Gobetti on Croce, for, in the 1920s, Croce had begun to develop a version of his historicist philosophy that chimed with much of the more politicized liberalism that Gobetti had promoted. I have noted in Chapter 1 that Croce’s historicism was presented to the public as a kind of civil philosophy, a lay religion to reconcile individuals to the value of their particular, practical activities. By conceptualizing human action as an ongoing transformation of the world, Crocean idealism denied the value of the abstract universals of party doctrines or scientific knowledge. The only reality was the one freely made by individuals each and every day. The “progressive” shape and character of history could not be determined in advance, but was graspable only by looking back from the present. It was necessary, therefore, to set aside metaphysical guarantees or “transcendent” principles and, instead, trust in providence that freedom would advance.


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Implicit in his prewar writings, therefore, was a sense of freedom as the fundamental premise of human action, rather than as a fixed moral ideal. Thus, Croce denied the political world any inherent moral significance— while it may be informed by moral values, politics was essentially the transient sphere of utility. With that separation of theory and practice, Croce justified his support for fascism as part of a necessary, but temporary, readjustment of politics to practical circumstances. Following the rise of the dictatorship, however, Croce began to revise his argument, now emphasizing the importance of liberalism as an “ethicopolitical” orientation guiding modern history.72 In particular, Croce wanted to affirm the liberal values of the Risorgimento as a distinctive tradition that informed Italian culture and society. Such was the thrust, for example, of his Storia d’Italia (A History of Italy), published in 1927.73 But his intention was not to affirm liberalism as a narrow party ideology. Again—this time more explicitly—he argued for liberalism as “a complete idea of the world and reality,” a “concept of life,” or religion rather than a political doctrine.74 Liberalism was itself a historicist outlook. The liberal concept of life was one that affirmed “the unceasing progress of the human spirit,” the principle of immanence in which human life evolves out of itself and not according to any teleology. So long as we avoided dogmatic identification with any specific ideological vision—one that claimed to permanently “unite” theory and practice—and retained a broadly liberal constitutional framework, human freedom could progress. Such a view, Croce accepted, could admit a variety of possible institutional and economic arrangements. In debate with Luigi Einaudi, Croce also disputed that liberalism necessitated a free market economy. But its compatibility with other systems was only possible insofar as their ideologies did not negate liberalism’s openness to diversity, spontaneity, “struggle and history.”75 Such a negation was present, for example, in doctrines like socialism or Marxism that accepted dialectical change, but only to eventually stifle it. Croce’s historicist liberalism reaffirmed his original philosophy, but shifted its emphasis from a passive to a more active mode of engagement with the world.76 History, he argued, was indeed the “story of liberty,” as humanity made and remade itself according to its own designs.77 Liberalism, conceived as a religious outlook on life, rather than a theory of the state and its limits, could sustain a pluralistic, and even democratic, political order better than any other outlook. This argument served as a powerful antidote to fascism’s arrogant demand for a homogenous social order bound together in hierarchy by a common nationality. For that reason, in the 1920s and ’30s Croce’s writings inspired radical liberals to imagine a future society committed to freedom as a civic principle. Croce’s thought

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also granted intellectuals a political role by highlighting their creative role in expanding an ethos of freedom.78 In key respects, then, Croce’s revised historicism overlapped with Gobetti’s earlier formulation. As I have noted, Gobetti had been deeply influenced by Croce’s historicism and developed a similar conception of liberalism as an ethical outlook akin to religion, affirming the dialectical struggle of groups and classes to generate autonomy. Was Croce now accepting a Gobettian political reading of his own historicism? While Gobetti and the azionisti borrowed from Croce his historicist conception of freedom, the elderly philosopher nevertheless significantly departed from his younger antifascist admirers on the wider, political extrapolation of this conception, for unlike his radical followers, Croce continued to view historicism as a limit on how we understand change. From his historicist point of view, the future grew out of the past and, as such, could not but resemble it.79 Revolutionary fantasies of wholesale change merely imposed arbitrary and unwieldy abstractions on the world. For Gobetti and the azionisti, the cause of liberty demanded a revolutionary reconstitution of the Italian state but, for Croce, liberty always worked itself out in the long term. While it was undoubtedly opportune to be reminded of its value to the Italian cultural and political tradition, liberal values were best understood as part of a continuous historical process, not the outcome of a single dramatic struggle. Despite his early appeal to the antifascists, therefore, by the mid-1940s Croce seemed more conservative and out of touch than ever before. He openly distanced himself from the liberal-socialists, rejecting their claim that liberalism and socialism could be unified. Although amenable to the view that liberty could be promoted in different ways, even by socialists and communists, Croce balked at the idea that it be identified with demands for social justice.80 Furthermore, Croce’s view of fascism clearly contrasted with theirs. For Croce, famously, fascism was best understood as a “parenthesis” in history, a temporary sickness that often besets the cause of freedom, rather than evidence of a structural disorder in the liberal state, as the azionisti saw it. From such “illnesses,” he claimed, liberals should learn and grow.81 Croce’s aim with this metaphor of passing sickness was to absolve Italy of total blame for the horrors of fascism.82 The essential trend of modern Italy, he suggested, was in line with the progressive expansion of liberty. Postfascist Italy was, for him, best modeled on the example of prefascist liberalism, not a new order altogether. Once more, Croce’s conservatism, his attachment to post–Risorgimento liberal institutions, substantially dampened the radical implications of his historicism. Many eventually came to see his defense of liberalism as a resignation to


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history, a fundamentally passive outlook unsuited to the urgency of postwar political life. In light of the master’s reluctance to endorse radical political change, Gobetti’s appeal for antifascists of all varieties makes clear sense. Like Croce, he viewed liberty as an outlook on history, but unlike him, he sought to ground that outlook in concrete political struggles. Historicizing liberalism did not mean either adopting a lofty backward glance across history or simply trusting to providence, but throwing oneself forward into the fray as it unfolded. For Croce, such a view asked too much of the present, investing it with a dangerously utopian expectation that could only endanger liberty itself.83 For Gobetti’s admirers—however much they differed in the form liberty should take—as the fascist order passed away, such a risk seemed worth taking. Norberto Bobbio’s Democratic Liberalism Italy’s postfascist republic emerged from the war a precarious democracy with deep social and political divisions. The cold war hostilities between “East” and “West” translated in Italy (as it did elsewhere in Western Europe) as a conflict between pro-Soviet communism and pro-American Christian democracy. The domestic division between communism and Catholicism never quite mapped onto its international counterparts, but it was sufficiently congruent to render Italy’s new democracy an uncertain settlement of deep ideological antagonisms. Italy’s “republic of parties,” dominated, as it was, by partisan allegiances throughout state and society, provided little space for independent thinking, and the debates on Gobetti’s legacy remained closely tied to competition among socialists, communists, and other left-wing democrats: “The most urgent task,” observes Bagnoli, “seemed to be to define Gobetti politically, to label him and thus, in the final analysis, to line him up behind a party banner.”84 In the midst of this struggle to claim Gobetti for the cause of one party or another, one figure stands out as an admirer who himself sought to criticize Italian political culture from a progressive liberal perspective. Norberto Bobbio (1909–2004), who became Italy’s most eminent political philosopher in the twentieth century, was also born in Turin, and though he did not personally know Gobetti, he was greatly influenced by his reputation amongst intellectuals in that city. Active in the PdA and later a follower of the liberal socialism promoted by Rosselli’s Giustizia e Libertá, Bobbio drew on that tradition to become an incisive critic of postwar Italian democracy. Gobetti figured as a source of direct inspiration to Bobbio’s career as a “militant intellectual” and theorist of democratic culture. Here,

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elements of Gobetti’s political liberalism were cast as a guide toward Bobbio’s own desire for a liberal democratic order that overcame the sterile ideological divisions of “capitalism versus communism,” and supported robust constitutional arrangements within which a more democratic society could be cultivated. Bobbio’s lengthy career as a philosopher and critic cannot be given full treatment here.85 Instead, I shall briefly dwell on his view of the intellectual as a mediator between politics and “culture,” and then consider his approach to democratic theory, for in both these areas, Gobettian themes are ever present. Bobbio’s interest in the relationship between politics and “culture”— that is, between party political allegiances and the wider discussions and debates over matters of public significance undertaken by intellectuals— forms the central thread of his work in the 1950s.86 A witness to the highly partisan politics in the early Democratic Republic, not least the efforts by the communist party under the leadership of Togliatti to attract intellectuals into the party, Bobbio, by contrast, reaffirmed the liberal commitment to free debate and discussion.87 In light of the Soviet regime’s repression of civil liberties, Bobbio cast doubt on the likelihood of a future socialist society ensuring the freedom of citizens to genuinely express views. Marxists were wrong, he argued, to dismiss freedom as an instrument of the bourgeoisie: “We ought to be concerned at the disappearance of individual freedom precisely because individual freedom is a human conquest, or at least the bourgeoisie conquered it for all humanity.”88 Likewise, Italy’s Christian Democrat-dominated politics refused the usual respect given to opposition parties, monopolizing state power, where possible, in order to exclude communist influence. The prospects for the toleration of dissent in both instances seemed wholly unpromising. Reducing culture to a supporting role for party politics—for whichever side—crudely subverted the function of the intellectual. Intellectuals are not prophets, argued Bobbio, and their civic role should always be one of criticism and a certain (although not absolute) distance from the solutions offered by political parties. Instead of a “cultural politics” designed to incorporate the intellectual within the confines of the party, Bobbio exhorted the need for a “politics of culture” in which the conditions for free debate and dissension were promoted.89 That meant respecting individual liberty and the institutions that support its exercise: “A politics of culture should in the first place be a defense and promotion of freedom, and therefore a defense and promotion of the strategic institutions of freedom.”90 Togliatti’s “Gramscian” strategy of enlisting intellectuals into the project for a new proletarian hegemony simply politicized culture and failed to see the constitutive tension


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between cultural debate and politics. If all culture was political, then how might dissenting cultural positions be protected? As Bellamy reminds us, unlike Croce, for whom culture and intellectual activity lay outside politics, Bobbio saw the need to protect culture by means of institutional forms of politics such as constitutional rights.91 That meant not simply exhorting liberty as a metapolitical “faith”—separating the intellectual from any direct politics—but, rather, giving freedom an institutional form by means of a liberal-democratic political system. Bobbio developed his criticism of postwar “cultural politics” into a powerful democratic political philosophy. Influenced by Hans Kelsen’s legal theory, as well as by the classic elite theorists, Pareto and Mosca, he defended the idea of liberal-democratic constitutional “rules of the game” as the safest guarantee that rights and freedoms could be upheld. It was not enough, he argued against the communist party, to imagine that a future society would be “democratic” by virtue of its egalitarian redistribution of economic resources, even if such a society could be achieved. Socialists could not guarantee that all civil disagreements would be resolved in an economic democracy. Nor could the common leftist aspiration for participatory democracy ensure that everyone shared a substantially similar concept of the common good such that independent juridical procedures would be unnecessary. However noble their goals, argued Bobbio, the radical Left remained dangerously naïve in their expectation that social differences could be harmonized without the threat of tyranny and loss of individual liberty. In a famous series of debates, Bobbio claimed Marxism had precious little to say about how state power would be regulated.92 Bobbio’s relationship to the radical Left was clearly more critical than had been Gobetti’s. Indeed, like many thinkers influenced by Croce, Gobetti’s emphasis had been more on liberal values as a cultural or spiritual resource than on defending constitutional rights and freedoms. In a cold war context, however, Bobbio was attentive to the normative deficiencies of Marxist theory in a way Gobetti had never explicitly been. In the 1970s, as the communist party momentarily became the beneficiary of critical public opinion against Italy’s corrupt and inefficient democracy, Bobbio stepped up his interrogation of the Left and the tradition of political theorizing it inherited.93 Neither socialism nor liberalism, he argued, was necessarily democratic, and thus each needed to remain attentive to its undemocratic tendencies.94 Bobbio’s appeal to Gobetti was not the crude identification of his memory with a party (although Bobbio was himself a member of the socialist party). Rather, for him, Gobetti’s lesson resided in a critical ethic that could not be captured in a party program.95 Bobbio saw, in Gobetti, the figure of a “heretic,” someone for whom history discloses itself as “the theatre for

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struggles between men. The clash of antagonistic and of political forces, the debate around ideas is the driving force of civilization and progress.”96 In “teaching us the value of heresy in history,” Gobetti’s lesson aligned with Bobbio’s own interests in the role of the intellectual as an independent (but not politically aloof) critic pursuing a politics of culture. Bobbio identified not with any specific political choice Gobetti made, but with his view of freedom as the necessary condition for political contest and change, and the role of the intellectual as the creator of cultural debate, implied by this view. The fate of the intellectual from a Gobettian perspective, Bobbio argued, was always to be caught in the tensions of history, often marginalized by official day-to-day politics, but occasionally productive in it, too. For Bobbio, Gobetti’s lesson was, fundamentally, a democratic one inasmuch as he exemplified the ethical disposition of an intellectual receptive to historical change but not seduced by it. His openness to the political struggles of the Italian proletariat, to the possibilities of ever new forms of freedom, even his elitism—which, for Bobbio, though “ambiguous,” was essentially democratic rather than antidemocratic97—implied a spirit of engagement with a plurality of social forces that any democratic society required if it were to survive over the long term. This ethic of heresy, in Bobbio’s view, made Gobetti an inspiration to those intellectuals who, like Bobbio himself, refused the closure offered by the messianic politics of the cold war. The only way in which it is legitimate to pose the problem of the historical significance of the work of Gobetti is in the terms which he himself used for those solitary heroes he loved so deeply, those who at any time and above all at difficult times, spoke their conscience, in a way that was sometimes terrible and always disturbing, those who feed our remorse, who force us to face up to what we have forgotten, who put our illusions to flight, mortify our ambitions, denounce our acts of cowardice and thus who convert their own despair into a reason for hope.98

Conclusion I noted at the start of this chapter that Gobetti’s legacy in Italy can be called “rhetorical” inasmuch as it involved the dissemination of a series of argumentative claims rather than a single, unified doctrine. Thus, we have seen how Gramsci appealed to Gobetti’s ideas concerning the failings of the Risorgimento and the need to attract bourgeois intellectuals like him to the communist cause. Rosselli, on the other hand, appealed to Gobetti’s arguments in order to support liberal socialism as the alternative to communism, and the Partito d’Azione followed this direction, underscoring the


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need to combine liberalism and social justice in the reconstruction of the state. Finally, we noted Bobbio’s identification with Gobetti’s spirit of heresy as the basis of a democratic ethic that calls upon intellectuals to escape cultural politics in favor of a more critical politics of culture. Each interpretation absorbed different elements of Gobetti’s thought and developed a distinctive view of his significance as a whole. Doubtless, these appropriations have been self-serving, providing a justification for each thinker’s own concerns, and many have been openly selective in laying claim to Gobetti’s legacy. Yet there is a common theme in each that partly explains the attraction of this figure, especially to intellectuals of the Left. Each was drawn to Gobetti’s politicization of liberalism, that is, to an analysis that looks to emancipatory struggles to escape stale ideological divisions and to initiate a new politics. Revolutionary liberalism conceived freedom not merely as the practice of individual rights, but as the horizon of a collective project rooted in popular experience. For Italian thinkers involved in antifascist politics in the 1930s and ‘40s, those arguments were never in themselves sufficient to provide a substantial political program, but they offered up ways to frame a moral critique of the prefascist state and to imagine a new order based on a collective desire for freedom. Gobetti’s rhetoric of revolutionary liberalism, therefore, continued to help open up a space of thought and action in order to reimagine the connection between ideology, popular struggles, and the role of the intellectual, even if it could be translated into a variety of distinct projects. As Ersilia Alessandrone Perona suggests, it is precisely the “non-theoretical nature” of Gobetti’s thought, that is, its relative openness to diverse readings that, in Italy, has made him available to various kinds of “public use” since his death. This is so, she continues, particularly amongst a “progressive bourgeoisie” wary of the restrictions of a narrow and excessively polarized political culture.99 But can Gobetti’s analyses be removed from the unique experience of antifascist politics and the late development of a democratic culture in Italy? Might they have something to say about democratic politics more generally? In the next chapter, I turn to the issue of Gobetti’s conflictual liberalism and its potential to offer an enduring lesson beyond the context of Italian antifascism.


7

Liberty and Conflict An “Agonistic” Liberalism

G

obetti’s liberalism was a liberalism of conflict. The freedom he envisaged was a freedom to contest the meaning and practice of liberty itself. “The method of liberalism,” he said “consists in the recognition of the necessity of political struggle for the life of modern society.”1 It was this conflictual orientation, no doubt, that attracted intellectuals of various persuasions to his review, for it chimed with the prevailing atmosphere of ideological and political ferment that, in the crisis years after the First World War, appeared to promise the combined renewal and reunification of people and state. But Gobetti’s emphasis on conflict also accounts for the unease that traditional liberals felt—and still feel—toward his views, for those views dispensed with the cherished reference points of nineteenth-century liberalism that once appeared to guarantee liberal values their supremacy. In the wake of figures such as Croce, Sorel, and Prezzolini, Gobetti rejected any appeal to “rational foundations” or notions of inexorable “progress.” Neither reason nor history could guarantee liberalism its success if that meant predetermining the form liberty would take. Unanchored from any suprahistorical foundation, Gobetti’s liberalism was premised on the assertive power of the human will ceaselessly to confront obstacles to its freedom and to envisage new forms of autonomy. Instead of looking to “metaphysics,” Gobetti grounded his political hopes in the contingent struggles of concrete history. Gobetti’s liberalism was certainly of its time—a response to the fragmentation of the already precarious settlement that was the Italian state. But can it have any relevance today, especially for societies where liberal democracy has long been established? In certain respects, Gobetti’s thought can be seen to share the concerns of contemporary political philosophy. Liberal thought is now increasingly criticized over its purported narrow

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rationalism and “ethnocentrism,” and the idea that a liberal order is one premised on a prior rational, consensual agreement between citizens now seems implausible, possibly even anachronistic. Liberals have typically endorsed forms of disagreement as a precondition of liberty, but this endorsement is usually announced from within boundaries of “normative consensus” concerning liberal values. Increasingly, however, those boundaries no longer seem tenable as self-evident truths. What once might have appeared as a natural consensus over the basic values of a liberal-democratic society—individual liberty, “national” cultural and ethnic homogeneity, social and sexual hierarchies, and so forth—have, at least since the mid-twentieth century, come into sustained dispute. Without an agreed moral framework, however, the disruptive presence of conflict over core values looms. It is in this context that Gobetti’s insistence on the primacy of conflict in liberal politics looks like it might have something to contribute to our current circumstances. If social and political differences cannot be contained within the embrace of “rational agreement”—a common set of principles by which to determine the boundaries of political contest—then what is to prevent liberal orders succumbing to a chaotic, perhaps violent, power struggle? The Hobbesian scenario of “a war of all against all,” a condition of chronic anxiety and insecurity, rather than permanent warfare, seems unavoidable. For this reason, the question of how to secure the benefits of a liberal society by reconstructing the grounds of a new moral consensus has been central to the work of liberal and so-called communitarian thinkers in the last forty years. While liberals seek to render more explicit the rational and legal principles that give the individual a stake in the social order, communitarians—who, broadly speaking, dispute liberalism’s often-invoked image of a rational, calculating individual—look to the resources of “tradition” and community as the ground of our political obligations. However, another answer to this dilemma has been to explore a more “agonistic” style of politics, one for which conflict—rather than consensus (whether grounded on reason or tradition)—over the terms of the political community is itself a constitutive principle. Such has been the focus of various types of “postliberal” political thinking in recent years, including civic republicanism and radical democratic thought. In this final chapter, I explore the contemporary orientation toward an agonistic politics and situate Gobetti’s conflictual liberalism within an agonistic frame. Gobetti is rarely recognized as a contributor to this direction in political theory, no doubt because of his relative obscurity, but also because he remains in key respects out of step with many contemporary concerns.2 As we shall see, Gobetti’s thought complements current trends insofar as he pointed to the constant renewal of freedom by linking it to

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the concept of “struggle.” Yet although this aspect of his work lays the basis for a “combative” theory of democracy, as I argue, it nevertheless neglected to link liberty with democratic equality. Instead of a theory of citizenship, Gobetti relied primarily on elites to forge unity from a plurality of struggles. This reliance weakened his case that a distinctly liberal tradition might emerge from an agonistic politics. Despite this gap in his thought, however, I suggest Gobetti’s agonistic liberalism offers an enduring lesson for those prepared to abandon the search for rational consensus as the essential precondition for a liberal political community. Liberalism, Universalism, and Conflict Liberalism is traditionally understood as a political ideology that promotes the freedom of individuals to pursue their private inclinations unhindered by the arbitrary (or undesired) intervention of supraindividual powers such as the state. In this sense, liberals often see themselves as defenders of constitutional rights to free expression, in particular, the right to criticize and, within certain prescribed boundaries, to depose public authority. The image of a liberal order has therefore been one in which public power is made accountable—sometimes through the device of a fictional “social contract”—to the demands of private citizens.3 To this extent, liberalism has long been an ideology of conflict: challenging the accumulated powers of government and upholding the right to withdraw “consent” and remove from public office those with the authority to act in the public’s name, but also resisting the pressure of external power on the exercise of thought and opinion (such as the power of the church, but also public opinion and the press). As Norberto Bobbio has argued, in the classic accounts of liberalism, “progress is seen as brought about solely through the clash of divergent opinions and interests, through conflicts which in the realm of argument further the quest for truth.”4 The price paid for suppressing “heretical opinions,” J. S. Mill proclaimed, nobly, in his essay On Liberty, “is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.”5 Some degree of disagreement and conflict, therefore, has been integral to the liberal ethos. Yet despite the presence of conflict in the liberal tradition, there have been strong tendencies toward severely limiting the character and extent of disagreement. Bound up with liberalism’s historical development was also an Enlightenment rationalism that shaped its demands into the form of “universalist” claims. Liberal thinkers have often presented their demands for individual liberty as expectations held by all “mature” rational minds. As a consequence, liberal politics came to be viewed by many proponents as

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being in touch with the “necessary” conditions of “universal reason” itself. With the emergence of constitutional governments in Europe throughout the nineteenth century, the view came to be held that history itself was progressing inexorably toward the gradual establishment of a common set of liberal values that, eventually, would eliminate the dogmatic, intolerant, and superstitious remanants of the ancién regimes. The legacy of this universalist rhetoric—a rhetoric compounded by over two hundred years of undoubted, but relative, success of liberal ideas and institutions in the West—has been the widespread assumption that liberal values—of individual liberty, toleration, parliamentary government, and so forth—are, or should be, founded on a broad consensus obtainable by the use of common reason. The aspiration of liberal political philosophy, from Kant onwards, has been to render explicit the form of reasoning appropriate to achieving this rational consensus. Perhaps the most famous of postwar Anglo American political philosophers, John Rawls, explicitly aimed at demonstrating the rational basis of a liberal contract conjoining individual liberty and social justice.6 In his later work, Rawls himself sought to define the principles of a political order that would enable what he called an “overlapping consensus” of individuals who, though diverse in their private interests, publicly shared a capacity to reason, and hence a capacity to reach a moral understanding of the parameters of their values.7 In a pluralistic society, claimed Rawls, it was necessary to found political order on a consensus over essential principles of justice that would then set limits to the kinds of disagreements citizens could legitimately pursue. For many, this style of philosophizing is wholly appropriate. What could be more sensible and in tune with the liberal values of open and accountable opinion than to publicly reason about the moral conditions of public authority? However, controversy arises as to what counts as a “reasonable” form of public argument and whether values that do not support a liberal order might be taken into account.8 Furthermore, it is assumed that the employment of valid, logical reasoning on moral issues can establish, without significant remainder, generally agreed principles for balancing the relationship between public and private realms. Such an approach to general principles is intended to harmonize a plurality of points of view by minimizing difference. Indeed, the legalistic tenor of Rawls’ argumentation is part and parcel of an authoritative rhetoric aimed at removing ambiguity from political debate. In this way, consensus can be reached over the moral parameters within which individuals exercise their liberties in a liberal order. Dangerous and divisive conflicts over the nature and extent of liberty are therefore excised from politics.9 The problem with this style of liberal argumentation is that its authors typically presuppose the very community of rational minded individuals


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they seek to create. For critics, such individuals tend to be of a certain sort: those able to separate interests from passions, logical reason from bodily desire, public from private. Only individuals of this kind—types that tend to conform with the self-image of white, male Westerners—are prepared to treat political action as, fundamentally, a form of rational deliberation. Liberal philosophers such as Rawls or Ronald Dworkin have no doubt made great advances, but their assumption that political theory attends to the terms of a rational consensus obscures the wider prejudices that have accompanied such evidently noble assumptions. For it is precisely in the name of universal values and the capacity to reason logically that various constituencies have been excluded from liberal politics. In the recent past, women and people of color, in particular, have found themselves outside the presumed community of rational individuals, regarded as inherently inferior by virtue of their “nature,” “dependents” incapable of the full use of reason. Of course, this is not what contemporary liberal philosophers are arguing for. Indeed, liberals, for a long time, have been at the forefront of the emancipation of excluded constituencies. However, the assumption that liberal ideals can be founded on the appeal to reason alone needs to be held in suspicion, for, it seems, there have been plenty of reasons available to liberals to set aside equal consideration to those regarded as different and lesser human beings.10 In the twentieth century, the Western model of liberal-democratic government clearly did not expand effortlessly to embrace new constituencies of once excluded peoples. On the contrary, greater inclusion has come in the form of intense, often violent, political struggles over the meanings of liberty and equality, of citizenship and democracy, of public and private. From “civil rights” movements of various kinds to “new social movements” such as feminism and ecology, the postwar era of liberal democracy has been a bumpy ride, to say the least. In each case, the terms of political debate have themselves been challenged and redefined. What it means to be a citizen with liberties and responsibilities has been contested and transformed, less as a result of logical reasoning leading to a rational consensus, and more through the protests and conflicts that have altered the very terms of public reason. In such instances, consensus has been more of a loose, sometimes precarious, settlement amongst specific constituencies around certain core issues, rather than a firm agreement or a universal “foundation.” Such precarious and conflictually established settlements are rarely endorsed in a liberal political philosophy that addresses itself to the commands of reason rather than the contingent play of politics. It is precisely this absence of a conflictual politics—or what Chantal Mouffe calls “the political”—from liberal reasoning that has prompted a variety of

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thinkers to pursue an agonistic political theory.11 Political philosophers such as Mouffe, William E. Connolly, Jacques Ranciére, Sheldon Wolin, John Gray, and Quentin Skinner have, in different ways, explored approaches to politics that avoid the rationalistic—and consequently legalistic—tenor of postwar liberal thought.12 But unlike communitarian thinkers, they do not seek to replace reason with a potentially antiliberal veneration of tradition. By stressing the role of contestation, rather than consensus, over common goods, these thinkers have, in different ways, sought out the resources for agonistic political theories grounded on a recognition of the presence of conflict rather than consensus. The adjective “agonistic” comes from the ancient Greek term agon, which refers to a contest between two protagonists. An ingrained culture of contest was thought to be a source of education for the Athenian citizen—by developing individual talents—and hence vital for the community as a whole. This notion of contest or developmental struggle was later revived by Friedrich Nietzsche in his attack on modern, bourgeois society.13 Today, agonistic political philosophies (many of them influenced by Nietzsche) vary in emphasis and scope, but are united in their rejection of the view that political communities are formed on the basis of a common denominator of reason that might enable disagreement to be contained within some prior, overarching consensus. Rather, as Gray argues, “conflict, both within liberal forms of life and between these and other forms of life” is regarded as an “ineliminable and therefore permanent feature of the human condition.”14 The task of political philosophy in such an outlook is not to elaborate the reasoning that leads different points of view to a consensus but, rather, to disclose the ways in which conflict can be recognized and managed. It is important to stress here that by “conflict,” these thinkers do not have in mind only violence and unrestrained hostility (although such extremities are always possible) but, rather, assertions of “difference” based on incommensurable outlooks that often produce rivalry over mutually incompatible demands. Unlike contemporary liberal political philosophy, which has tended to reduce the public significance of such claims by allocating them to the private sphere, agonistic theorists view them as part of a public domain that is continually in formation and open to revision. The more such claims are ruled out of liberal political debate, it is often argued, the more likely it is they will cause rancor and violence on the margins of society, as difference is transformed into a sense of “inferiority.”15 In various, sometimes contrasting, ways, contemporary agonistic theories have tried to supplement liberal-democratic principles with ideas of how to engage social and cultural differences, human passions, and other markers of difference that are often excluded in the liberal tradition.


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It is precisely this agonistic approach to politics—or rather, one version of it—that Gobetti himself had formulated in his revolutionary liberalism in the early 1920s. Before considering his contemporary relevance, let us examine the relationship between the two concepts that were central to Gobetti’s agonistic liberalism: namely, liberty and struggle. Gobetti: Liberty and Struggle Liberty and struggle were closely connected concepts in Gobetti’s revolutionary liberalism.16 Freedom of thought and action, as we saw in Chapter 4, were, for him, a precondition for social groups to articulate interests and to polemicize in order to achieve autonomy and to renew the political class.17 Struggle, on the other hand, provided such groups with the circumstances to achieve self-discipline and a firm conception of their ideals. This mutually supportive relationship between freedom and struggle—which reflected the combined influence of Croce, Sorel, and Einaudi—was exemplified initially for Gobetti in the “heroic” efforts of the factory council movement of 1919–20. After the defeat of the movement, however, the conjoined concepts continued to inform Gobetti’s writings, serving as a general guide to his reinterpretation of Italian history and to his analyses of the postwar conjuncture. To promote freedom, for Gobetti, was simultaneously to promote political conflict: for the one was of little value without the other. Likewise, the suppression of conflict in the practices of Italian liberalism and fascism gave a clue to their essentially illiberal character.18 A genuinely liberal politics, in Gobetti’s view, required an outlook on history and society attentive to the continuous conflictual formation of new demands for liberty, autonomy, and the constant reformulation of the ruling elite. No true liberal could be satisfied merely with the achievements of a certain number of individual rights. Liberty was not simply a legal condition—it was a dialectical impulse in history, expressing itself as “an opposition to false realisms, to idolatries of existing facts.”19 Thus, it could take any number of forms and express itself through a variety of societal agents, not only the bourgeoisie. Liberal values did not emerge conclusively with any specific class, but from the clash of forces in society that constantly threw up new demands for liberation from perceived conditions of tyranny and oppression. Only in struggles to resist economic, cultural, and political heteronomy did freedom find its most vibrant expression and its most challenging test. Without the experience of struggle, liberty simply grew stale and conservative. Thus, for example, the Italian state had crystallized a once vibrant clash of forces but, in so doing, soon prevented any renewal of liberty. In common with fascism, Gobetti claimed, Italian liberals’ withdrawal from struggle had developed into a “fear of politics.”20

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This imbrication between the concepts of liberty and struggle made Gobetti a very peculiar kind of liberal. Indeed, it is not certain that he was a liberal at all, at least for some commentators. Gobetti’s emphasis was on the public significance of liberation—with its implication of critique and the disruption of ingrained truths and practices—not the private exercise of liberty. Inevitably, this placed him outside the mainstream of Italian liberalism.21 What is clear is that he shared little of the deference to the “negative,” or predominantly rights-based, account of freedom that has since dominated liberal thought. For him, conflict was not a rational disagreement between individuals over the order of their preferences. It was not simply a clash between subjects who considered themselves calculators of private self-interest. Instead, conflict was constitutive of the political context of individual choice itself. Before we consider the implications of Gobetti’s thought for the idea of negative liberty, let us first clarify his theory of conflict by way of a comparison, for it was just this liberal “fear of politics” that, around the same time, inspired the German legal philosopher and conservative, Carl Schmitt, to formulate his own agonistic outlook. For Schmitt, too, liberal parliamentarism had denigrated politics in its tendency to foreground compromise and procedure.22 In The Concept of the Political, he affirmed what he saw as the “ever-present possibility of conflict” by specifying the distinction between “Friend” and “Enemy” as the essential criterion of “the political.”23 For this reason, Schmitt’s work has inspired many, such as Mouffe, who emphasize the agonistic dimension to politics.24 Yet Schmitt’s line of argument led him to reject liberalism altogether and, eventually, to support Nazism. The conflictual basis of politics was, for him, indicative of the need for the state—as a “sovereign” entity—to act as supreme arbiter, even if the political could not be reduced to the practices of the state.25 Moreover, his concept of the political was indifferent to the content of the specific conflict that invoked it; whatever its original motivation, the realm of the political arose only where public antagonists confronted each other as enemies.26 Enmity was therefore the primary characteristic of politics. Gobetti, by contrast, focused his attention on political struggles outside the state and the formal domain of politics, adopting the kind of “pluralistic” outlook that Schmitt expressly disliked. Conflict was specified precisely in terms of struggles for autonomy, not political enmity in general. Unlike Schmitt, then, for whom domestic politics had to be suppressed if the political was to be affirmed, Gobetti adopted a more democratic agonism by which the state appeared as a potential obstacle to further conflict, not the supreme expression of conflict. Thus, Schmitt’s agonistic outlook underscored his later commitment to fascism, while Gobetti’s propelled


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him forcefully, and fatally, against it. For both, however, conflict was a constitutive dimension of politics that traditional liberals persistently failed to endorse. If conflict, rather than consensus—public struggles as opposed to the private exercise of freedom—was essential to political life, then it is no surprise that Gobetti found little recognition amongst the more traditional liberals of his day. His agonistic conception contrasted with the views of Italian liberals such as Croce or Amendola, who saw the post–Risorgimento monarchy as the settled framework within which individuals could exercise their freedoms. For Gobetti, by contrast, the formation of the nation-state was fundamentally incomplete, and hence, the political “shell” (to borrow a term from Lenin) inside which individual freedom was to be enjoyed was yet to be formed. Consequently, liberty could not be limited to the private concerns of individuals, but had an inescapably collective dimension. There remained a need, as he put it in his critical reflection on De Ruggiero, for a “national popular movement for the reconstruction of the state”—not a “reformist” politics merely defending individuals, but a new “synthesis of wills.”27 Hence, as Gramsci noted of Gobetti’s principal theoretical innovation: “The principles of liberalism are projected from the order of individual phenomena to that of mass phenomena.”28 This transposition of liberty to a collective rather than an exclusively individual realm permitted the “paradiastolic” extension of the concept to the revolutionary workers that we noted in Chapter 4. But can a liberal set aside the negative concept of liberty in this way without losing any real sense of genuinely being a liberal? Surely, individual liberty is the principal concept in liberal political philosophy, without which the term “liberal” simply cannot apply? This is clearly an issue of vital importance if we are properly to classify Gobetti as a liberal. In the distinction made famous by Isaiah Berlin, the concept of negative liberty is contrasted with that of positive liberty.29 Negative liberty refers to an individual’s ability to act without constraint, and it is a principle closely linked to civil and political rights that protect individuals from arbitrary interference. For Berlin, “positive” liberty refers, on the other hand, to the freedom to fulfill certain predetermined capacities, such as to exercise one’s rational faculties or to realize one’s social nature. Positive liberty therefore involves specifying a distinct mode of human flourishing, a condition in which one is “fully human” according to some prior ideal. But for many modern liberals, this concept involves a dangerous idealization of what it means to be a human agent, one that is often associated with arguments on the Left that assert the desirability of distinct social goods through which we can “become ourselves” or achieve “self-mastery” (for instance, via uncoerced labor or organized social cooperation). Achieving freedom,

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in this sense, may in fact imply excessive restrictions on individual choices, particularly those regarded as detrimental to our “true” natures. Liberals have therefore tended to stand by a negative concept of individual freedom, viewing, with suspicion, any excessive promotion of positive freedoms built around certain collective ideals of human perfection. Such ideals, it is felt, invite interference in individual choices in order to achieve “higher” ends. Was Gobetti’s appeal to a political concept of freedom an example of positive liberty, in Berlin’s definition? His exhortation of a “religious” sensibility, his support for the workers’ movement, and his emphasis on achieving self-discipline through struggle may provide prima facie reasons for thinking so. His was certainly a “positive” promotion of the conditions necessary to achieve a genuinely liberal society. But a closer examination should qualify this view. Of course, as Charles Taylor has powerfully demonstrated, it is difficult even for proponents of negative liberty to escape some, if only minimal, idea of positive freedom.30 Even the view that individuals should be left to decide their own idea of the good life presupposes a certain, if unspecified, notion of what it means to be an agent. Nevertheless, Gobetti did not seek to supplant the negative concept with a substantive idea of human flourishing, bar the implicit (and not insignificant) view that liberty, sharpened through conflict, would serve to realize human potential. Indeed, his instincts often remained broadly with the classical liberal defense of negative liberty. In the view of one commentator who has surveyed Gobetti’s writings on economic and cultural issues, Gobetti persistently defended the free initiatives of individuals to act without the paternalistic interference of the state or any other agency.31 As we have seen, he defended the superiority of free markets over collectivism and he upheld a strong sense of toleration and the right to free speech. What could be more classically liberal than this? Yet, as we have noted, Gobetti was conscious that the political and cultural framework within which individual liberties were to be exercised was, certainly in Italy, incomplete; hence, an ethos of struggle was still required to properly establish a liberal state. Given such incompleteness, it remained a priority, in his view, to extend liberty beyond the defense of individual rights to a more inclusive principle of shared freedom. In this respect, Gobetti’s views might be said to resemble the work of recent proponents of classical republicanism. Quentin Skinner, for instance, has defended a “neo-Roman” theory of liberty that avoids reasoning from the presupposition of “atomistic” individuals bearing rights. Rather, negative liberty is conceived as being inseparable from a shared political liberty, that is, the ancient sense of freedom as the freedom of the community from dependence on the prerogative or power of another.32


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In this conception—which Skinner calls a “third” conception of liberty to be contrasted with the traditional dichotomy—negative freedom pertains to the community as a whole. Political liberty signifies the attainment of free institutions, not the possession of individual rights. To be free in this sense, an individual must belong to a community that is not subject to the will of an individual (such as a monarch) or another power: public institutions must be able to make decisions autonomously. Individuals may indeed exercise more or less personal freedom in this framework— what matters, however, is that the community can determine its choices for itself. Otherwise, individual freedoms are merely privileges granted by a power other than those of the community itself, and therefore may be withdrawn at will.33 Skinner’s point is not to rubbish the traditional concept of negative freedom, but rather to demonstrate that it need not leave us in a condition of asocial individualism. As a freedom from domination, the republican concept was traditionally contrasted not with personal interference, but with the condition of servitude.34 While slaves may exercise varying degrees of personal freedom, their inability to ultimately determine choices for themselves limits their freedom in principle. Such a condition of dependency, when applicable to a whole state, would inevitably lead, it was thought, to a psychological attitude of dependency in the form of self-censorship and a supine withdrawal from matters of public concern. The emphasis, then, was on the autonomy of the institutions that uphold individual freedom and not exclusively on the autonomy of the individual from interference in the making of private choices. It is possible, therefore, to imagine a collective or social liberty without restating a positive theory of freedom based on a comprehensive idea of human flourishing. Although not elaborated analytically this way, Gobetti’s liberalism suggested a similar overlapping of individual and political liberty. To him, it was vital to make liberty a predicate of the political community as a whole, as well as to support negative liberties. Contra Gramsci, for instance, the state’s purpose was for Gobetti to oversee the liberty of its citizens, not to profess a common moral outlook: “The state is ethical in so far as it professes no ethics and no theory.”35 Furthermore, Gobetti’s assertion that Italy’s problem was one not of “authority,” but of “autonomy,” underscored this sense of social freedom as the unifying principle, rather than the imposition of control over a fractious and diverse society, as many traditional liberals thought. Finally, we may also note Gobetti’s disdain for that element of the Italian public with the “spirit of slaves.” Like premodern republicans before him, such as Machiavelli, Gobetti counterposed his ideal of political liberty to the reality of groups and individuals whom he believed lacked a virtuous sense of autonomy: Giolitti, the

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Catholic Church, and the “collaborationists” amongst the parliamentary parties, for example. One of Gobetti’s mottos was even Che ho a che fare io con gli schiavi?—“What I have got in common with slaves?” Gobetti’s primary approach to liberty, then, can be understood broadly in the classic republican sense as political freedom, or autonomy of the community from dependence. Moreover, this sense does not necessarily clash with the modern liberal emphasis on individual liberty. Rather, it merely subordinates individual liberty to a prior concept of a free state, emphasizing public action as opposed to purely private interest. Gobetti’s emphasis on political struggle as a component part of sustaining this sense of liberty—which itself provided the space for struggle—can also be understood as contributing to this republican conception: promoting the energetic and self-disciplining qualities amongst modern social forces in order to keep alive the priority of social freedom over private liberty. Thus, Gobetti explicitly distinguished “economic liberalism” from his account of liberalism concerned with a “political conscience.”36 This conscience, promoted as a cultural, “religious,” or “ethical” outlook, enabled Gobetti to speak across ideological divisions and identify evidently nonliberal movements, such as council communism, with the task of building the political preconditions to exercise individual freedom. Let me summarize this section of the chapter. I have argued that Gobetti’s liberalism contained an agonistic dimension expressed in the linkage between the concepts of liberty and struggle. In conjoining these concepts, Gobetti gave liberty a public, political meaning as opposed to a private, negative meaning. Struggles amongst social groups for their autonomy were constitutive of the political community as such, that is, they generated the ethos through which a community created itself as an autonomous entity. A capacity for conflict, therefore, rather than rational consensus, was essential to sustain this collective investment in freedom. Obviously, it was difficult to convince traditional liberals at the time that social struggles were a way of maintaining political community rather than undermining it, for it involved identifying freedom with an ethos or faith rather than a set of agreed institutions (the liberal monarchy). Yet Gobetti’s agonistic version of liberalism did not reject negative liberty in favor of positive liberty but, instead, specified in terms of political culture the preconditions for negative liberty. A Combative Democracy How, then, does Gobetti’s thought compare with contemporary agonistic political theory? Like contemporary thinkers, Gobetti rejected the assumption of rationalism and universalism. For him, it was faith and myth that


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sustained the shared value of liberty, not rational argument. Likewise, his view of liberty was strongly historicist, focused on the contingent, historical character of demands for freedom, and conscious of its reversals as well as its advances. By rejecting rationalism and universalism, Gobetti accepted the intrinsic vulnerability of liberal politics, that is, its lack of foundation in anything other than the efforts of concrete agents to sustain and fortify it. In this regard, he shared the philosophical orientation of contemporary theorists of agonistic politics. Like them, he believed there was no rational basis to a liberal politics that could guarantee liberty incontestable moral foundations.37 Instead, I shall suggest later, Gobetti’s ideas can be shown, in principle at least, to support a “combative” idea of democracy for which conflict and consensus are in continuous, creative tension. However, there is no doubting there are large gaps in Gobetti’s thought that prevent it from being treated as a fully fledged democratic theory. One of these gaps includes the question of how demands for freedom can be equated by means of a concept of democratic citizenship. Gobetti’s emphasis was primarily on popular struggles for autonomy, on the moment of critical separation and the formation of new elites to represent emergent social forces. This emphasis, I shall note, neglected the idea of citizenship that a properly democratic theory requires. Between Coercion and Consent That Gobetti underlined the importance of struggle in politics is not to say that he rejected any kind of consensus. On the contrary, as we have seen, it was necessary in his view to establish a firm “conscience” of liberty as a shared horizon for Italians. Like Croce, Gobetti understood history, rather than reason, as the ultimate ground of ethico-political demands. Yet, for Croce, history involved the evolution of liberty as an ideal, even if that ideal was interrupted from time to time by “maladies” such as fascism. Gobetti, as we noted in the previous chapter, placed his hopes less in the “backward glance” of Crocean historicism than in a forward-looking perspective of the social struggles of concrete history in the present. Much less sanguine than Croce about the prospects for political liberty, Gobetti held a tragic vision of politics that testified to an acute awareness that liberalism’s regressions could well be enduring, possibly permanent. It was necessary, then, if freedom was properly to embed itself, not simply to have faith in history, but to extend that faith to those social forces in the historical present on whose shoulders the survival of liberty depended. Such forces required a common investment in the value of freedom, that is, they needed to see their own struggles for freedom as part of an open-ended, but collectively shared, project.

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Again, this kind of project was less the rational consensus of contemporary liberalism than an ethical commitment to conflict with others within a common ethos. This is similar to what Mouffe calls a “conflictual consensus,” where social agents are joined in a “thin,” but nonetheless substantial, agreement about the terms in which they conflict and not by a substantive moral agreement.38 Such agents will still be rivals over the meaning and application of the values that link them, but they seek to restrict their conflicts to “adversarial” rather than deeply antagonistic disputes. That is, they aim to recognize each other as legitimate opponents rather than as wholly irreconcilable enemies. For Mouffe, this recognition must be understood not exclusively in terms of formal democratic procedures but, following Wittgenstein, as a “form of life,” that is, as a more general set of shared ethical judgments about how procedural rules are to be applied.39 Not in any way enamored of Italy’s parliamentary democracy, Gobetti endorsed a vision of a plurality of social forces conflicting in society to renew the idea of liberty and the ruling class. It was in this nonprocedural sense that he declared the generation of elites to be “democratic”: “There is no aristocracy where democracy is excluded,” he declared, suggesting the one implied the other.40 This was the anticipation not of a narrow electoral process, but of a combative democratic process within society, one in which new elites emerged from social struggles in order to replace the old, and shared values were therefore constantly open to contest. As we noted in Chapter 4, Gobetti followed Mosca in understanding elites to arise spontaneously amongst social groups, such as the workers’ movement, more or less adequately “representing” them through the propagation of myths.41 The task of Rivoluzione Liberale, he insisted, was to educate those elites in order to form a new ruling class to replace its exhausted predecessor. We also noted in Chapter 4 how Gobetti occasionally appeared to have little faith in the wider public’s ability to fully participate in political life. His vision of a combative democracy, then, appeared slanted, primarily in favor of elites rather than mass participation. Such is the view of one commentator for whom Gobetti’s liberalism, when properly synthesized, amounts to a defense of parliamentary democratic institutions based on elite competition.42 His aim, claims Meaglia, was not to substitute the liberal state (as it was for Gramsci and the communists, for example), but merely to renew it through the formation of a new ruling class “from below.” Conflict and struggle, we might continue, would produce this ruling class, but it would not prevent it from developing its own consensus of liberal values to “regulate” struggle within the context of parliamentary institutions.43 This interpretation of Gobetti extrapolates a view akin to Joseph Schumpeter’s “democratic elitism,” where democracy was understood as system in which elites compete for the popular vote in order to hold office.44 For


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Schumpeter, it was precisely the absence of popular participation in politics that made representative democracy a viable mechanism. Functioning like a free market, democratic choice merely involved the selection of leaders and not the quest for a substantial sense of the common good. Political elites (that is, politicians) offer up policies they believe will appeal to the electorate and, having garnered enough votes to enter office, proceed to participate in democratic decision-making without the involvement of citizens—until, of course, election time comes around again. Doubtless, this interpretation can be assembled from various statements by Gobetti. Yet it drastically narrows down the different strands of his thought. As we have seen, Gobetti’s enthusiasm for parliamentarism only emerged in earnest after Matteotti’s murder.45 It is true that he never sought to replace parliamentary politics, but it is not obvious that Gobetti was committed wholeheartedly and exclusively to that model as the centerpiece of a renewed liberal politics. Indeed, if anything, Gobetti’s democratic elitism points to an unresolved tension in his thought between the creative and ever-renewing sense of liberty-as-struggle and the need to contain that struggle within parameters that sustain a common ethos. This tension is perhaps inevitably exposed once a shared sense of liberty is premised on the indeterminacy of historical struggles rather than a universalist metaphysics, for it remains contingent as to whether any specific conflict contributes to or detracts from a liberal faith. The Schumpeterian model, however, presupposes general agreement, or at least passive indifference, amongst the public toward the democratic system.46 While such a view was popular amongst political scientists after the Second World War, it removed the agonistic dimension of politics, treating democracy as a system of “interest aggregation” within a broadly consensual system. To assimilate Gobetti to that model would therefore be to reduce the conflictual aspect of his thought. Rather, it is better to grasp his perspective as disclosing a tension between the moments of conflict and consensus, struggle and faith, than to reduce it to a theory of representative democracy. From that angle, however, the limitations of Gobetti’s agonistic liberalism are also exposed. Liberty . . . and Equality If Gobetti’s perspective on struggles for liberty lends itself, in principle, to a combative, pluralist theory of democracy, there remains a significant silence in his thought that would otherwise help round out his approach: namely, the concept of democratic equality, or citizenship. As Mouffe argues, contemporary liberal democracies combine both the demand for

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liberty supported by a constitutional state and a much older tradition of democratic equality.47 Liberalism, she points out, is not intrinsically a democratic ideology but, rather, has been adapted to democracy over time, bringing together the concepts of private freedom and public equality in a notion of democratic citizenship.48 As C. B. Macpherson has put it, modern liberal democracy is distinctive insofar as it entails both the democratization of liberalism—the extension of rights to a wider social constituency than ever before—and the liberalization of democracy—the limitation of democratic equality to representation within constitutional regimes upholding the “inalienable” rights of individuals in a market society.49 This combination of liberty and equality, explains Mouffe, constitutes a “paradoxical” relationship because it involves two contrasting logics: one of difference, in which individuals are regarded as having diverse private or group interests, and one of identity, whereby the state mirrors the collectivity as a community of equals. Conjoining liberty and equality, liberal democracy is expected to serve “the people” in such a way that nevertheless prevents popular demands encroaching on private freedoms. The tradeoff between liberty and equality can never be fully and finally settled, in Mouffe’s view, but is the site of ongoing agonistic struggles. These struggles involve disputes over, for example, who counts as a legitimate member of the community, what kinds of social difference should be tolerated, or the degree to which private rights can be limited by the “needs” of society as a whole. Without a conception of citizenship, it would be difficult for different struggles to be conceived as equivalential, and not as separate, rival demands. Hence, struggles for liberty and autonomy need to be woven back in to an embracing idea of citizenship in order to give them legitimacy. Mouffe’s argument helps illuminate the absence of an appreciation of citizenship in Gobetti’s thought. Beyond a shared faith in liberty (previously explored), Gobetti’s arguments did not explore the implications of that idea for citizenship. This is not to say demands for equality as such were of no importance to him. On the contrary, Gobetti shared the view that the material inequalities of southern Italy needed to be resolved if a stable order was to be established. And he was clearly aware of the aspirations of the Turin communists in their defense of the factory council struggles as a “socialist” experiment. However, as was noted in Chapter 3, Gobetti’s interest in the factory councils was fundamentally in terms of its example as an emancipatory force and not as a model society. For him, the factory councils exemplified struggles for liberty for the working class, not (like Gramsci) the framework of a new form of state in which all citizens were related as “producers.” Rather than consider the idea of democratic citizenship as a way of conceptualizing the equivalence of different struggles for liberty, Gobetti


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placed his trust in the role of elites—leaders of social classes and of political movements joined together as a new ruling class—to generate a collective political conscience. Yet he did not consider how elites might choose to compromise the demands of their supporters. As Bobbio notes, Gobetti appeared satisfied that elites would be “democratically” representative of their original constituencies and did not explore the various ways they might function in this relationship, perhaps by limiting or excluding those they represented from extending their autonomy or refusing to recognize other struggles for liberty.50 His idea of what was democratic about elites was therefore “ambiguous,” continues Bobbio, because it was not a “procedural” sense of democracy whereby representation is regulated and open to recall, but a “normative” one that seemed to overestimate the unity of leaders and led. In the absence of a conception of democratic citizenship through which individuals might themselves address the mutual compatibility, or not, of diverse demands for autonomy and the value of the leaders of such demands, Gobetti’s combative democracy relies heavily—perhaps unrealistically—on the guiding role of elites. Gobetti’s agonistic liberalism therefore falls short of a full account of the necessary conditions for a combative pluralist democracy. He was able to envisage a plurality of rival concepts of freedom contributing to a robust democratic order, but he remained silent on how agonism might translate into an inclusive theory of democratic citizenship. Gobetti’s arguments did not exclude such an idea, but nor did they substantially engage it. The plurality of demands for autonomy that Gobetti endorsed were not thought in terms of how they might be practically unified, and therefore what consequences might follow in mediating diverse and, in all likelihood, rival conceptions of freedom. For him, it was enough that a common sense of liberty functioned as the unifying myth of a liberal politics. If Gobetti emphasized the moment of struggle and difference, it was in fact Gramsci who managed to theorize more systematically the moment of consent and identity. As I argued in Chapter 6, his conception of hegemony conceptualized revolution as the process in which diverse social and political demands were woven into a larger, organic framework of beliefs and values, mediated by intellectuals and party members. While most liberals today would find his Leninist-inspired model of politics abhorrent, and contemporary radical democrats would reject factory production as the model for citizenship, Gramsci was nevertheless aware that an effective “national-popular” politics had to negotiate a variety of struggles for emancipation by linking them to an inclusive and unifying (“hegemonic”) ideological system. Of course, as we have already noted, what Gramsci lacked was Gobetti’s agonistic commitment to pluralism and struggle, something arguably incompatible with his conception of revolutionary politics.

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We might say, perhaps, that while Gramsci’s arguments were concerned primarily with the politics of consent, Gobetti’s were oriented toward the politics of conflict.51 Both explored, with great insight, the tensions between conflict and consent in radical politics. Yet neither managed adequately to conceptualize an effective way of mediating that tension.52 For all his insights, Gramsci remained committed to a “Jacobin” politics of the revolutionary party, prioritizing unity over plurality, while Gobetti’s endorsement of popular struggles prioritized plurality, and consequently relied heavily on the role of elites in guiding those struggles toward a liberal ethic. Conclusion It is possible to understand why few liberals, both in Gobetti’s time and today, have identified closely with his revolutionary liberalism. Gobetti’s insistence that conflict and not consensus should be central to the liberal message, as well as his endorsements of the workers’ struggles for autonomy, placed his thought beyond the normal benchmarks of liberal ideology. Indeed, Gobetti has had the misfortune to fall between two mutually antagonistic camps. He was a self-identified liberal who rejected the dogmatic primacy given to individual liberty and supported the revolutionary workers, and he was a friend of communists who nevertheless emphasized liberty rather than economic equality or the centrality of production to revolutionary politics. Neither a traditional liberal nor a communist, Gobetti has remained an ambivalent figure, difficult to align within the usual classifications of modern political ideology. I have argued that Gobetti’s ideas make sense if conceived as an agonistic form of liberalism, employing a conception of political liberty not dissimilar to the republican idea of freedom. In this conception, a shared liberty can be sustained only by continually refreshing the value of political freedom through a plurality of struggles for independence in society. Such a conception overlaps with the contemporary proposal by radical democrats to generate a conflictual consensus where shared norms are not rationally agreed in advance, but are themselves open to the cut and thrust of disputation and debate. Released from any metaphysical guarantees, an agonistic politics of this kind implies a vibrant, combative image of democratic life. Yet Gobetti’s thought was insufficiently equipped to provide a full account of the combative democracy his writings suggested. With little consideration of the importance of democratic equality as the counterpart of liberty, Gobetti’s liberalism imagined a variety of struggles for autonomy,


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but it could not adequately conceptualize a politics that would coordinate demands for liberty through a concept of democratic citizenship. As a consequence, there was nothing to assure liberals that demands for autonomy would not exceed the idea of political equality and the constitutional state. Likewise, for communists, there was little in Gobetti’s writings to assure them that struggles for liberty would necessarily surpass liberalism and overthrow the liberal state in favor of socialism. Gobetti’s agonistic liberalism was therefore provocative, but it did not have entirely clear political objectives. The “left edge of liberalism,” as David Roberts calls it, promoted by Gobetti, was extremely fragile as a political force. At best, it attracted young middle class intellectuals to engage new radical movements, but it could not secure them in a distinctively liberal program, and often, they later joined other political movements.53 The gaps in Gobetti’s thought also render his ideas difficult simply to “adopt” today. For those who promote an agonistic approach to democracy, Gobetti’s arguments would need to be supplemented with a broader sense of conflict. His models of social struggle primarily revolved around the workers’ movement and centered on the historical experience of the incomplete nation-state in Italy. Today, however, social conflicts proliferate across a wide variety of social differences, generating a multiplicity of conceptions of freedom, autonomy, and equality. From ethnic and religious identities, the politics of gender and sexuality, to national and global inequalities, the expanding diversity of social struggles both within and beyond the nation-state demands a broader sense of agonism than Gobetti could ever have imagined. Such conflicts extend far beyond class boundaries and into the subjective identities of agents at all levels of society. In a “postfascist” world that has witnessed the declining salience of class politics and the growth of a diversity of new social movements and new forms of political participation, Gobetti’s agonistic liberalism, and particularly his elitism, are likely to seem somewhat dated. Nevertheless, despite these limitations, Gobetti’s thought is a reminder that the political game—be it an elite-driven democracy or even something more participatory—is open to critique, contest and, sometimes, radical revision. Unless liberals extend their concept of freedom to engage this political dimension, they are at risk of enclosing themselves within a legalistic culture that prioritizes consensus over conflict, losing touch altogether with the intellectual and material vibrancy of social polemic. But Gobetti’s example also reminds us how difficult this lesson is to learn. Inspiring a renewed faith in freedom requires an enormous, perhaps unrealistic, commitment to politics, and an improbable reliance on the virtues of elites to satisfactorily mediate conflict in a way that enriches our understanding of liberty rather than neutralizes it.


Afterword

P

iero Gobetti was, without doubt, an astonishing figure—a precocious intellectual with a distinctive message and an ardent campaigner engaged with a variety of cultural and political currents. My focus in this book has been on his political thought but, in this, I can claim only to have skimmed the surface of his interests and the impact they have had on others. More than just a political thinker, in his short life, Gobetti was also a literary and cultural critic, a translator, historian, publisher, and, of course, an editor. This abundance of activity seems out of all proportion with his relative youth, and it seems clear that Gobetti spread himself widely, but perhaps thinly. Indeed, I have indicated in the previous chapters that, in relation to the political storm that surrounded him, Gobetti had much of note to say but, in the short-term, this had only a moderate practical impact. Indeed, his contribution to the world of politics was primarily as an intellectual, that is, as an organizer and stimulus of critical cultural debate and discussion, self-consciously on the periphery of events, encouraging others to undertake an urgent revision of liberal values. This is what I have called the “rhetorical” aspect of the project of liberal revolution. While there was certainly a politics involved, it was, fundamentally, an intellectual politics designed to persuade others to reimagine liberalism—to reimagine Italy— for a new, more combative age. If, in this, he set out an original and inspiring vision, he nevertheless did not go much further. Gobetti was a moral critic and an ideological innovator, but not a philosopher or politician. He argued for an extension of liberal values in the face of liberalism’s catastrophic collapse, but he did not think through all the details, nor did he win the support of all those he engaged. It is little surprise, perhaps, that his influence outside of Italy has been negligible. Yet it would be premature simply to dismiss Gobetti as a “minor figure” of Italy’s prefascist history. Certainly, his ideas were, in themselves, too undeveloped to present as a complete political theory. But, as I suggested in Chapter 7, Gobetti’s aim to enhance the role of conflict in liberalism significantly overlaps with a growing contemporary interest in the agonistic dimension of democratic politics. Even if he cannot supply a wholly

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convincing democratic theory, Gobetti’s argument still resonates in the twenty-first century as liberal democracies face a variety of challenges, from the uneven effects of “globalization” to the increasing pluralization of demands for cultural “respect,” recognition, and justice. In this context, there still remains a tendency, amongst elements of the traditional Left, as well as the Right, to assert the primacy of “consensus” over plurality and disagreement. As the cultural and moral certainties of previous generations pass into oblivion, the appeal of demands for “moral order” to resolve a looming sense of rudderless contingency is inevitably accentuated. Too often, alas, such demands entail the vilification of certain groups and the imposition of social and cultural standards that remain essentially arbitrary. Such is the nature of attacks on ethnically, culturally, or even sexually defined minorities who fall outside dominant, purportedly “universal” cultural norms. Faced with a sufficiently hysterical anxiety over “threats” to order or security, liberal democracies are prone to illiberal and undemocratic reaction. Unless we value political conflict, however, the role of democratic contest over the norms that govern us is inevitably undermined. As much as rights or constitutional guarantees, a culture of robust and passionate debate keeps alive the prospect that new forms of freedom may continue to emerge, and ensures that custom and tradition do not fossilize into sources of reaction. While contemporary party-based democracies rightly value their own traditions of public dialogue and critical accountability, too often, even these established institutions and habits fail to adequately connect with the experiences, grievances, and conflicts of the wider society. It is still all too common for national parliaments and assemblies to solidify into self-serving communities of elites to the exclusion of many of the constituencies they purportedly serve. Gobetti’s conflictual liberalism speaks to the desire for a robust democratic culture, even if it did not, of itself, manage to produce it. In modern Italy, even after the Second World War, such a culture has only taken a “spectral” form, existing as an unfulfilled promise, persistently thwarted by the “antipolitics” of party strategy, populist demagoguery, and the forces of reaction.1 Gobetti’s intransigent belief in liberalism as an ethic of conflict, resistant to the allure of images of order and authority, and open to continual renewal on the basis of social and political struggles is, therefore, still a vital reminder of the need to remain alert to the potential, and recurrent, deficiencies of liberal democracy and the attendant “fear of politics” that frequently characterizes public life. In an age when the “grand narratives” of political ideology are declared redundant and the appeal to reason as a universal foundation to political community seems unlikely—at least, outside of university classrooms—to produce a desired “consensus,” Gobetti’s

AFTERWORD

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combative vision of democracy remains highly suggestive, if not as a practical model, then at least as a spur to reimagine the meanings and practices of freedom. Yet we should also be wary of simply roping in Gobetti to the causes of contemporary radical democracy. His injunctions against a narrow political culture inclined to avoid conflict are inspiring, but his work cannot simply be “applied” to the present day without losing some of its original force. If his ideas continue to inspire a libertarian critique of compromise politics—as they did during Italy’s political crisis of the 1990s when the corrupt democratic system was dramatically exposed2—we should not forget that they were conceived long before the “identity politics” of “postindustrial democracies” and the near obsession with personal choice and lifestyle autonomy currently promoted there. The force of Gobetti’s arguments stemmed, to a great extent, from the presupposition that bourgeois-liberal society was being replaced by forms of politics based around new centers of industrial production. His suspicion of the Italian public, his emphasis on elites, and the primacy he gave to the industrial workers tended to place the accent of his liberalism less on an appreciation of the diversity of a “politics of identity” and more on an organized, disciplined class politics. Writing before the experience of socialist authoritarianism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, Gobetti trusted workers’ leaders to fulfill the “liberal” function of representing the workers and disseminating amongst them a spirit of liberty and autonomy. All this may seem somewhat far-fetched and a long way from the consumer-oriented and culturally diverse liberal democracies of today, and it should qualify any “overlap” we might see between Gobetti and contemporary radical democratic ideas. But Gobetti, like other critics and thinkers in the past, need not speak directly to our current predicaments to be a useful reminder of the possibilities before us. If his “sociological” points of reference and some of his inclinations were premised on a type of society that has now passed, nevertheless, his example as an ideological innovator—one uniquely untarnished by what communism became or by the defensive horizons of cold war liberalism—stands as a provocative reminder of the intrinsic flexibility of liberalism and its concept of freedom. If there is much to despair in the undeveloped nature of his arguments and the tragic brevity of his life, nevertheless, his significance as a political thinker may be said to lie in his demonstration of the enduring capacity of ideology to creatively challenge and stimulate political life. In this, for sure, Gobetti has earned the status of a classic political thinker.


Notes

Introduction 1. Paolo Bagnoli, “Piero Gobetti and the Liberal Revolution in Italy,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (1997): 34, 37. 2. David D. Roberts, “Frustrated Liberals: De Ruggiero, Gobetti, and the Challenge of Socialism,” Canadian Journal of History 17 (1982): 62. 3. Gobetti’s relative obscurity outside of Italy is explained by Norberto Bobbio as a consequence of his place in a distinctive context: “all of [Gobetti’s] work is bound strictly to the political struggle in Italy in a period in which the history of our country, which culminates in fascism, is so different from that of other European nations.” Norberto Bobbio, Italia fedele. Il mondo di Gobetti (Florence: Passigli, 1986), 64. Nevertheless, an English translation of selections of Gobetti’s work has recently been published, although with little historical contextualisation. See Piero Gobetti, On Liberal Revolution, ed. Nadia Urbinati, trans. William McCuaig (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). Full public access (in Italian) to Gobetti’s weekly review, La Rivoluzione Liberale, including the work of all those who contributed to it between 1922 and 1926, is publically available on-line in a digital format. This excellent resource was created in consultation with the Centro Studi Piero Gobetti (Piero Gobetti Study Centre) in Turin and can be accessed at http://www .erasmo.it/liberale/. 4. A point also underlined by Bobbio, Italia fedele, 64. 5. For a detailed intellectual biography of Gobetti, see Marco Gervasoni, L’intelletuale come eroe. Piero Gobetti e le culture del Novecento (Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2000). For shorter but still illuminating studies of Gobetti’s life and thought, see in particular: Paolo Bagnoli, Piero Gobetti: cultura e politica in un liberale del Novecento (Florence: Passigli, 1984); Bobbio, Italia fedele; Anna Maria Lumbelli, Piero Gobetti “Storico del presente” (Turin: Deputazione Subalpina di Storia Patria, 1967). 6. An extensive bibliography of the numerous studies on Gobetti can be found in Giancarlo Bergami, Guida bibliografica degli scritti su Piero Gobetti, 1918–1975 (Turin: Einaudi, 1981). 7. See, for example, Giuseppe Bedeschi, La fabbrica delle ideologie: Il pensiero politico nell’Italia del Novecento (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002), 142, 143. 8. Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).

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9. Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 178–79. 10. Ibid., 182. 11. For a classic statement, see Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. H. C. LawsonTancred (London: Penguin, 1991). My views have been influenced to some extent by Chaïm Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982). 12. Here, I draw upon Larry Seidentop, “Two Liberal Traditions,” in The Idea of Freedom, ed. Alan Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 153–74. 13. On this distinction between “negative” and “positive” freedom, see Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118–72. The distinction will be discussed in Chapter 7. 14. See Charles Taylor, “Kant’s Theory of Freedom,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 318–37. 15. On the development of this European style of liberalism, including its Italian variant, see Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society: An Historical Argument (Cambridge: Polity, 1992). 16. For a discussion of the New Liberals, see Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978). 17. On Gobetti and the liberal-socialist tradition in Italy, see James Martin, “Italian Liberal Socialism: Anti-fascism and the Third Way,” Journal of Political Ideologies 7, no. 3 (2002), 333–50; Nadia Urbinati, “La tradizione politica italiana,” in Liberal-socialisti: Il futuro di una tradizione, ed. Nadia Urbinati and Monique Canto-Sperber (Venice: Marsilio, 2004): 71–96. 18. For an important, contemporary example of this effort to critically reimagine liberty, see the work of Quentin Skinner: “A Third Concept of Liberty,” Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2002), 237–68. I return to Skinner’s work in Chapter 7. 19. See Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, ed. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill (New York and London: Guilford, 1999), 217–25. Bitzer’s work is, of course, controversial, and my reference to it here is merely to indicate the need to understand the wider context to which rhetorical interventions were responses. 20. My breakdown of Gobetti in Chapters 2 to 5 broadly follows Bobbio’s scheme: the “early” period, 1918–20 (Chapter 2); the period of “maturation,” 1920–22 (Chapter 3); the “mature” period, 1922–25 (Chapters 4 and 5). See Italia fedele, 14. 21. See Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric, 13–18. 22. On the notion of an “ideal auditor,” see Edwin Black, “The Second Persona,” in Lucaites, Condit and Caudill, Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, 331–40. 23. Throughout the text of this book, I follow the convention of using “fascism” or “fascist” with a lowercase initial to indicate the general ideology or movement, and with an upper-case initial to indicate the formal title of the state or party.

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24. On “paradiastole,” see Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol 1: Regarding Method, 183–87. 25. On “metonymy,” see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1980), 35–40. 26. Norberto Bobbio, Saggi sulla scienza politica in Italia, 2nd ed. (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996), 222.

Chapter 1 1. “There is no figure in our history whose existence is identified, I would say almost integrated, with the history of the crisis of the liberal state and the advent and consolidation of the fascist regime more than Gobetti, who wrote his first article in November 1918 and his last in December 1925.” Norberto Bobbio, Italia fedele. Il mondo di Gobetti (Florence: Passigli, 1986), 14. 2. Giuseppe Mazzini, The Duties of Man and Other Essays (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), 82. See also, in the same volume, “Faith and the Future,” 141–94. On Mazzini’s biography, see Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). For an insightful assessment of his political thought, see Bruce Haddock, “State and Nation in Mazzini’s Political Thought,” History of Political Thought 20, no. 2 (1999): 313–36. The importance of Mazzini’s ideological vision for later political projects is discussed in Emilio Gentile, Il mito dello stato nuovo dall’antigiolittismo al fascismo (RomeBari: Laterza, 1982), 259. 3. For a positive evaluation of liberal Italy, which diverges from what follows, see Susan A. Ashley, Making Liberalism Work. The Italian Experience, 1860–1914 (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2003). For a “revisionist” outlook on the Risorgimento that seeks to move beyond both its loyal defenders and harshest critics, see Lucy Riall, The Italian Risorgimento. State, Society and National Unification (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 4. In this paragraph, I have drawn upon Martin Clark, Modern Italy, 1871–1995, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Longman, 1996), esp. chap. 2. 5. Ibid., 29. 6. See Franklin H. Adler, Italian Industrialists from Liberalism to Fascism. The Political Development of the Industrial Bourgeoisie, 1906–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 7. See Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana, 4 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 1957–2078. 8. Clark, Modern Italy, 53. 9. See John A. Davis, Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). On the historical emergence of organized crime, see John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004), chap. 1–4. 10. Clark, Modern Italy, 40–41.

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11. Ibid., 63. For an outline of the different meanings in modern history attributed to the terms “left” and “right,” see Giampiero Carocci, Destra e sinistra nella storia d’Italia (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002). 12. Clark, Modern Italy, 64–65. 13. See Roberto Vivarelli, Il fallimento de liberalismo: Studi sulle origini del fascismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1981), esp. chap. 1. 14. Ibid., 36–40. 15. A summary of the “debate on the state” is provided in Clark, Modern Italy, 114–17. 16. For an illuminating discussion of the crisis of Italian parliamentary politics at the end of the century, see Giulia Guazzaloca, Fine secolo. Gli intelletuali italiani e inglesi e la crisi tra Otto e Novecento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004). 17. On the problems of cultivating national identity in modern Italy, see the essays in Bruce Haddock and Gino Bedani, eds., The Politics of Italian National Identity: A Multidisciplinary Perspective (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000). I have also examined this issue in “Ideology and Antagonism in Modern Italy: Poststructuralist Reflections,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2005): 145–60. 18. For a positive assessment of Giolitti’s strategy, see Giuseppe Bedeschi, La fabbrica delle ideologie: Il pensiero politico nell’Italia del Novecento (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002), 6–11. For more comprehensive historical commentaries, see Giampiero Carocci, Giolitti e l’età giolittiana. La politica italiana dall’inizio del secolo alla prima guerra mondiale (Turin: Einaudi, 1971) and Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’Italia contemporanea: L’età giolittiana (Turin: Einaudi, 2003). 19. This argument is set out in Gentile, Le origini dell’Italia contemporanea. 20. On Italian socialism’s early history, see Gaetano Arfé, Storia del socialismo italiano (1892–1926), 2nd ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1977). 21. See Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth-Century (London: Fontana, 1997), 5–26. 22. Bedeschi, La fabbrica delle ideologie, 5; see also Arfé, Storia del socialismo, 98–110. 23. See Bedeschi, La fabbrica delle ideologie, 6. 24. Clark, Modern Italy, 146–50. 25. Giovanni Amendola, “Il Convegno nazionalista,” (1910), in La cultura italiana del’900 attraverso le riviste. Vol. 3 “La Voce” (1908–1914), ed. A. Romanò (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), 259. 26. On the relationship between antigiolittismo and a desire for a “new state,” see Paul Corner, “State and Society, 1901–1922,” in Liberal and Fascist Italy, ed. Adrian Lyttelton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 17–43; Gentile, Il mito dello stato nuovo. 27. On the positivist and idealist strands of social theory in Italy at this time, see Richard Bellamy, “Social and Political Thought, 1890–1945,” in Lyttelton, Liberal and Fascist Italy, 233–48. 28. For profiles of Salvemini, see Bedeschi, La fabbrica delle ideologie, 28–44; Norberto Bobbio, Ideological Profile of Twentieth-Century Italy, trans. Lydia G.

NOTES

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

163

Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 86–90; Eugenio Garin, La cultura italiana tra ‘800 e ‘900 (Bari: Laterza, 1962), 103–54. See Gaetano Salvemini, “Nord e Sud nel partito socialista italiano,” Critica Sociale (December 16, 1902), in Movimento socialista e questione meridionale, Opere IV, ed. Gaetano Arfé (Milan: Feltrinelli), 239–48. For a helpful overview of the centrality of the South to Salvemini’s politics, see Gaetano Arfé, “Il meridionalismo di Gaetano Salvemini,” Il Ponte 11, no. 12 (1955): 2001–13. See Salvemini, “La questione meridionale,” Educazione Politica (December 25, 1898 and June 10 and 28, February 26, and March 14 1899) in Movimento socialista e questione meridionale, Opere IV, 71–89. Garin, La cultura italiana tra ‘800 e ‘900, 117–23. Salvemini, “La questione meridionale,” 71. See Salvemini, “Il ministro della mala vita” (1910), in Il ministro della mala vita e altri scritti sull’Italia giolittana, Opere IV, ed. Elio Apih (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962), 73–141. See, for example, Salvemini, “La lotta antiprotezionista e il partito socialista,” Avanti! (May 23, 1914), in Movimento socialista e questione meridionale, Opere IV, 553–56. See Bedeschi, La fabbrica delle ideologie, 19–28. Ibid., 19–20. On this point, see Garin, La cultura italiana tra ‘800 e ‘900, 116–17. Emilio Garin, Intelletuali italiani del XX secolo (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974), 3. Benedetto Croce, “Per la rinascita dell’idealismo,” in Cultura e vita morale (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1993), 34. Here, I draw upon Edmund E. Jacobitti, Revolutionary Humanism and Historicism in Modern Italy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981). On this tradition in Italian political theory, see Joseph Femia, The Machiavellian Legacy. Essays in Italian Political Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). On Croce, see Richard Bellamy, “Liberalism and Historicism: Benedetto Croce and the Political Role of Idealism in Italy, c. 1880–1950,” in The Promise of History, ed. A. Moulakis (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 69–119; Jacobitti, Revolutionary Humanism and Historicism in Modern Italy; David D. Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). See Benedetto Croce, Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1981). For a discussion of Croce’s Aesthetic, see Jacobitti, Revolutionary Humanism and Historicism in Modern Italy and “The Impact of Croce’s Aesthetics of 1902 and Today’s Revolt against Modernity,” in The Legacy of Benedetto Croce. Contemporary Critical Views, ed. Jack D’Amico, Dain A. Trafton, and Massimo Verdicchio (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 174–95. On this impact, see Jacobitti, “The Impact of Croce’s Aesthetics,” 180–81.

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47. See Norberto Bobbio, Politica e cultura, 2nd ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), 78–96. 48. See Croce, “Il partito come giudizio e come pregiudizio,” in Cultura e vita morale (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1993), 185–91. 49. Croce, “Fede e programmi,” in Cultura e vita morale (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1993), 158. 50. Ibid., 162. 51. On this shift in Croce’s politics, see Bellamy, “Liberalism and Historicism”; Bobbio, Politica e cultura, 177–228; and Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism. 52. See David Ward, “Intellectuals, Culture and Power in Modern Italy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 83–85. 53. See Giuseppe Prezzolini and Giovanni Papini, “La politica della ‘Voce,’” (1911), in La cultura italiana del’900 attraverso le riviste. Vol. 3 “La Voce” (1908–1914), 393–97. 54. See, for example, his praise for Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism in Giuseppe Prezzolini, La teoria sindacalista (Naples: Francesco Perrella, 1909). 55. See Emilio Gentile, “La Voce” e l’età giolittiana (Milan: Pan, 1972). 56. Prezzolini, “Che fare?” (1910), in La cultura italiana del’900 attraverso le riviste, 208. 57. On Croce’s historicism and its impact, see Jacobitti, Revolutionary Humanism and Historicism in Modern Italy; Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism; and Bellamy, “Liberalism and Historicism.” 58. On the vociani and their influence on nationalism, see Gentile, Il mito dello stato nuovo, 81–101. 59. On the interventionist crisis and the differing positions of the various protagonists, see Adian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power. Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 20–25. 60. On Croce’s position in relation to the war, see Bedeschi, La fabbrica delle ideologie, 96–109 and David D. Roberts, “Croce and Beyond: Italian Intellectuals and the First World War,” International History Review 3 (1981): 201–35. 61. See Bedeschi, La fabbrica delle ideologie, 95. 62. A point made by Bedeschi, ibid., 91, and underscored by Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 22. 63. Clark, Modern Italy, 185. 64. Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 30. 65. Emilio Gentile, The Origins of Fascist Ideology, 1918–1925 (New York: Enigma, 2005), 39. 66. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 30, 49. 67. Gramsci, Quaderni, 311. I have partly adapted my translation in light of the English version: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Qunitin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 275–76.

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68. Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 30. 69. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 56. 70. For an examination of the varying forces in play during the lead-up to the fascist takeover, see Joseph Baglieri, “Italian Fascism and the Crisis of Liberal Hegemony: 1901–1922,” in Who Were the Fascists? Social Roots of European Fascism, ed. Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, and Jan Petter Myklebust (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1980), 318–36.

Chapter 2 1. See the editor’s introductory comments in Stanlislao Pugliese, ed., Italian Fascism and Anti-Fascism: A Critical Anthology (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 61–62. 2. See Marco Gervasoni, L’intelletuale come eroe. Piero Gobetti e le culture del Novecento (Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2000), 19–25. 3. See Lucy Riall, The Italian Risorgimento. State, Society and National Unification (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 14–15. 4. Gobetti, “Le università e la cultura. Torino,” Conscientia (January 23, 1926), Scritti politici, ed. Paolo Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), 909. From hereon, this collection of Gobetti’s writings will be abbreviated SP. 5. On the civic role of Turin’s university, as well as Gobetti’s relation with it, see Angelo d’Orsi, La cultura a Torino tra le due guerre (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 4–6. 6. See Gobetti, “Le università e la cultura. Torino,” 911. 7. d’Orsi, La cultura a Torino, 6–11. 8. See Norberto Bobbio, Italia fedele. Il mondo di Gobetti (Florence: Passigli, 1986), 205–16. 9. Paolo Bagnoli, Piero Gobetti: cultura e politica in un liberale del Novecento (Florence: Passigli, 1984), 16. For a survey of Turin’s intellectuals, see Norberto Bobbio, Trent’anni di storia della cultura a Torino (1920–1950) (Turin: Einaudi, 2002). 10. Martin Clark, Modern Italy, 1871–1995, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Longman, 1996), 192. 11. Antonio Gramsci, “La settimana politica [XVI]. La funzione storica delle città,” L’Ordine Nuovo (January 17, 1920), in L’Ordine Nuovo 1919–1920, ed. Valentino Gerratana and Antonio A. Santucci (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), 387. 12. Clark, Modern Italy, 193. 13. The use of the word “nove” comes from the Latin novus, meaning new or young. In commentaries, the title “Energie Nove” is therefore sometimes rendered “Energie Nuove” (nuovo meaning “new” in Italian). 14. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 26. 15. On combattentismo, see Emilio Gentile, The Origins of Fascist Ideology, 1918– 1925 (New York: Enigma, 2005).

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16. See Gobetti, “Rinnovamento,” Energie Nove (November 1–15, 1918), SP, 5. See also “Volontà,” Energie Nove (November 1–15, 1918), SP, 15–16. 17. Gobetti, Carteggio 1918–1922, ed. Ersilia A. Perona (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 3. See also his letter of February 2, 1919, to the editors of the Torinese student magazine, L’Azione Studentesca: Gobetti, Carteggio, 30–31. 18. Gobetti, “Rinnovamento,” 5. 19. Gobetti, “Propaganda italiana all’estero,” Energie Nove (November 15–30, 1918), SP, 23. Gobetti’s metaphors of “youth” and “heroism” are examined in chap. 5 of Gervasoni, L’intelletuale come eroe. 20. Gobetti, “Commenti e giustificazioni,” Energie Nove (December 15–31, 1918), SP, 30. 21. Ibid., 32. 22. Ibid. 23. Gobetti, Carteggio, 5. 24. Ibid., 12. See also Gobetti’s various public defenses of Croce: “B. Croce e i pagliacci della cultura,” Energie Nove (November 15–30, 1918), SP, 17–21; and “Croce oppositore,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (September 6, 1925), SP, 876–81. Gobetti was keen to distinguish Croce from his many admirers: “I hate the Croceans: they are empty, inert windbags like the anti-croceans. I despise them just as much as I admire Croce,” in “Nota III [I crociani],” Energie Nove (January 1–15, 1919), SP, 46. 25. On Gobetti’s relationship with Prezzolini and La Voce, see Emilio Gentile, “Gobetti e La Voce,” L’Osservatore politico letterario (1971), 14–20; Giuseppe Prezzolini, ed., Gobetti e “La Voce” (Florence: Sansoni, 1971). 26. See also “Giolitti, giolittismo e antigiolittismo,” Energie Nove (July 5, 1919), SP, 125–28. 27. Gobetti, “La Nostra Fede,” Energie Nove (May 5, 1919), SP, 77. 28. Ibid., 78. 29. Ibid., 86–87. 30. See Bobbio, Trent’anni, 40–43. 31. “La Nostra Fede,” 88. 32. Ibid., 87. 33. See Antonio Gramsci, La città futura 1917–1918, ed. Sergio Caprioglio (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), 3–35. 34. See Gramsci, “Indifferenti,” La città futura (February 11, 1917), in La città futura 1917–18, 13–15; and “La disciplina,” La città futura (February 11, 1917), in La città futura, 19–20. 35. See Gervasoni, L’intelletuale come eroe, 34. Gobetti criticized revolutionary socialist politics for its empty phraseology in Gobetti, “La Nostra Fede,” 79, 82–83. For his critique of Bolshevik collectivism, see “Rassegna di questioni politiche,” Energie Nove (July 25, 1919), SP, 138–53. 36. Carteggio, 27. See also 38. Gobetti praised Salvemini for his influence on Energie Nove and for his distance from any single party in “Il problema dei problemi,” Energie Nove (January 15–31, 1919), SP, 46–48.

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37. In addition to a number of articles by Gobetti, as well as others, scattered throughout the review—see “Il problema della scuola media [I] Il liceo,” Energie Nove (March 1–15, 1919), SP, 53–65; “Il problema della scuola media [II] Il ginnasio.” Energie Nove (March 15–31, 1919), SP, 66–70; Energie Nove also devoted a special issue (Series II, no. 9) to scholastic reform. 38. Gobetti, “La Società delle Nazioni,” Energie Nove (January 1–15, 1919), SP, 36–41. 39. “Traditore o incapace?,” Energie Nove (December 1–15, 1918), SP, 28–29. 40. Paolo Spriano, Gramsci e Gobetti, 3rd ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), 103. 41. See Gobetti’s letter to Ada Prospero of April 19, 1919, in Piero Gobetti and Ada Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza. Lettere 1918–1926, ed. Erslia A. Perona (Turin: Einadui, 1991), 35. 42. See “Il nostro movimento,” Energie Nove (May 5, 1919), SP, 104–5; “Verso una realtà politica concreta,” Energie Nove (May 20, 1919), SP, 105–13. 43. Gervasoni, L’intelletuale come eroe, 58. 44. Christopher Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 1870–1925 (London and New York: Methuen, 1967), 511. 45. Clark, Modern Italy, 203–4. 46. On the history of postwar Italian nationalism, see Giuseppe Bedeschi, La fabbrica delle ideologie: Il pensiero politico nell’Italia del Novecento (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002), 44–62 and Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power. Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 15–30. 47. Seton-Watson, Italy, 516–19. 48. On early fascism, see Philip Morgan, Italian Fascism, 1919–1945 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 13–16. I will discuss the roots of fascism in more detail in Chapter 5. 49. Seton-Watson, Italy, 512–15. 50. Ibid., 512. 51. Ibid., 519–27. 52. See Antonio Gramsci, “Salveminiana,” L’Ordine Nuovo (June 28-July 5, 1919), in L’Ordine nuovo, 1919–1920, ed. Valentino Gerratana and Antonio A. Santucci (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), 112, 113. Although the article is contained in this collection of Gramsci’s work, the editors indicate that the original was not signed and it is very likely, in fact, to have been penned by one of the paper’s other editors, Angelo Tasca. See also Gramsci, “Maturità,” L’Ordine Nuovo (June 7, 1919), in L’Ordine Nuovo, 64–65. 53. See Giovanni Gentile, Opere filosofiche (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), 453–681. For a useful, and critical, overview of Gentile’s ideas, see chap. 6 of Richard Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory. Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present (Cambridge: Polity, 1987). A full discussion of Gentile’s philosophy can be found in H. S. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press, 1960), and a neat, if wholly uncritical, defense can be found in A. J. Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2001). Biographical information and a useful account of his relationships with other thinkers is available in

168

54. 55.

56.

57.

58. 59. 60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

NOTES

Gabriele Turi, Giovanni Gentile: una biografia, 2nd ed. (Turin: UTET Libreria, 2006). See Gregor, Giovanni Gentile, 20–22; Harris, Social Philosophy, 15–19. On the difference between Croce and Gentile’s philosophies, see Harris, Social Philosophy, 19–22; David D. Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 105–16. Gentile, “Le due democrazie,” “Liberalismo e liberali” and “L’idea monarchica” in Dopo la vittoria: Nuovi frammenti politici (Rome: La Voce, 1920), 110–11, 172–73, and 154–55, respectively. See also his comments in “Il problema politico” of 1920, in Gentile, Discorsi di religione (Florence: Sansoni, 1957), 25. As Harris points out, Gentile’s use of the word “state” implied not the concrete structures of power and command so much as the idea of a unified moral will, which any empirical state would only ever approximate: “It is fair to say that when he talks about ‘the State’ Gentile usually means, or ought to mean, what we call ‘conscience.’” See Harris, Social Philosophy, 62. Nevertheless, Harris recognizes the “dangerous ambiguities” of this usage (see Social Philosophy, 63, note 72). I will return to Gentile’s idea of the ethical state in Chapter 5. Gregor, Giovanni Gentile, 29–33. On Gentile’s nationalism, see Bedeschi, La fabbrica delle ideologie, 109–16. See Gentile, Guerra e fede. Frammenti politici (Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1919) and Dopo la vittoria. See, for example, Gentile, “L’educazione nazionale,” in Guerra e fede (Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1919). Gobetti’s support for Gentile’s pedagogic interventions is noted in “La questione della scuola,” Energie Nove (January 1–15, 1919), SP, 42–43, and also in a letter to Ada of August 1919, where he talks of “having already gotten close enough to Gentile’s position” on pedagogy, which he admired for its “poetic attraction” by which “all problems, in unifying themselves, acquire a new light.” Nella tua breve esistenza, 89. See also Gervasoni, L’intelletuale come eroe, 45–46. Palmiro Togliatti, “‘Guerra e fede’ di Giovanni Gentile,” L’Ordine Nuovo (May 1, 1919), in Opere, Vol. 1, 1917–1926, ed. Ernesto Ragionieri (Rome: Editori Riuniti), 20. For the argument that both Gramsci and Gobetti were influenced by Gentile’s idealism, see Augusto Del Noce, Il suicidio della rivoluzione (Milan: Rusconi, 1978). On the “myth of the new state,” and particularly its place in the emergence of fascism, see Emilio Gentile, Il mito dello stato nuovo dall’antigiolittismo al fascismo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1982). Togliatti, “Parassiti della cultura,” L’Ordine Nuovo (May 15, 1919), in Opere, Vol. 1, 27–29. Togliatti’s title—“Cultural Parasites”—is a parody of the title of Gobetti’s article—“B. Croce and the Clowns of Culture”—defending Croce. See Gobetti, “B. Croce e i pagliacci della cultura.” See Gobetti, “Polemica con L’‘Ordine Nuovo’ (Nota),” Energie Nove (May 15, 1919), SP, 113–15. Gobetti also mentioned Togliatti’s attack in a letter to Caramella (see Gobetti, Carteggio, 54). Ordine Nuovo followed with a short defense

NOTES

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

169

of their critique of Gobetti and the “academic vanity” of the professors upon whom he drew support. The article was unsigned, but is attributed to Gramsci: see Gramsci, “Contributi a una nuova dottrina dello stato e del colpo di stato,” L’Ordine Nuovo (June 7, 1919), in L’Ordine Nuovo, 72–73. Gervasoni, L’intelletuale come eroe, 34. Clark, Modern Italy, 204–5; Seton-Watson, Italy, 539–43. Seton-Watson, Italy, 540. See Gobetti, “Frammenti di estetismo politico,” Energie Nove (November 30, 1919), SP, 164–78. Seton-Watson, Italy, 549–50. These results were later confirmed in the local elections in the autumn of 1920. See Clark, Modern Italy, 212–13. See Mario Missiroli, Polemica liberale (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1919). An argument developed in an earlier publication, La monarchia socialista: Estrema destra (Bari: Laterza, 1914). Gentile, “Liberalismo e liberali,” 172. Ibid., 173–74. Gentile, “‘Il pericolo’,” in Dopo la vittoria, 185–87. Guido De Ruggiero, “Polemica liberale,” Il Nuovo Giornale (November 20, 1919), in Scritti politici 1912–1926, ed. Renzo De Felice (Bologna: Cappelli, 1963), 306. De Ruggiero, “Discussioni socialiste,” Il Resto del Carlino (July 17, 1919), in Scritti politici, 277. De Ruggiero’s analyses were developed in his study of European liberalism, published in 1925. See De Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism, trans. R. G. Collingwood (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959). For a comparison of De Ruggiero with Gobetti, see David D. Roberts, “Frustrated Liberals: De Ruggiero, Gobetti, and the Challenge of Socialism,” Canadian Journal of History 17 (1982): 59–86. For a general overview of De Ruggiero’s political thought, see Bedeschi, La fabbrica delle ideologie, 230–46. Togliatti, “Che cos’è il liberalismo?,” L’Ordine Nuovo (September 20–27, 1919), in Opere, Vol. 1, 63–69. Gobetti, “Frammenti di estetismo politico,” 169 (emphasis in original). Gobetti, “Rassegna di questioni politiche,” 150–51. Ibid., 151. Ibid. See also his remarks on Trotsky: “Trotzki,” Il Resto del Carlino (April 5, 1921), SP, 206–10; and on Lenin: “L’Ora grave,” Ordine Nuovo (September 3, 1921), SP, 218–22, 221. Gobetti, “Rassegna di questioni politiche,” 152, 151, 152. Gobetti, “Frammenti di estetismo politico,” 175. Ibid., 170–71. In Gentilean fashion, Gobetti contrasted the “empirical” forms of state in history with its “eternal idea.” See ibid., 172–73. “Rassegna di questioni politiche,” 152. “Per il 1920,” Energie Nove (December 20, 1919), SP, 178–80. Carlo Levi, “Gli anni di Energie Nove,” Il contemporaneo 3, no. 7 (1956): 3.

170

NOTES

91. On Gobetti’s influence on Levi, see David Ward, Carlo Levi. Gli italiani e la paura della libertà (Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2002). 92. Barbara Allason, “Ricordo di Piero Gobetti,” in Trent’anni di storia italiana (1915–1945), ed. Domenico Zucàro (Turin: Einaudi, 1961), 131–32. 93. Prezzolini, Gobetti e “La Voce,” 37. 94. See his letters to Santino Caramella and Giovanni Ansaldo of July, August, and October 1919 in Carteggio, 66–69, 70–71, 75–76, 79–82, and also “Per il 1920.” 95. See “Intermezzo,” Energie Nove (February 12, 1920), SP, 181–82. 96. See his letter to Caramella of February 18, 1920, Carteggio, 98–103. 97. See his letter to Caramella of February 13, 1920, Ibid., 95–96. Throughout 1920, Gobetti continued to suggest in correspondence that he intended to republish Energie Nove. 98. See “Esperienze liberale [VI],” La Rivoluzione Liberale (June 18, 1922), SP, 378–80. 99. Gobetti, “I miei conti con l’idealismo attuale,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (January 18, 1923), SP, 445. 100. Spriano, Gramsci e Gobetti, 106.

Chapter 3 1. For a historical account of the occupations, see Paolo Spriano, L’occupazione delle fabbriche, settembre 1920 (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), 159. The English translation is The Occupation of the Factories. Italy 1920, trans. Gwyn A. Williams (London: Pluto, 1975). See also Martin N. Clark, Antonio Gramsci and the Revolution that Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977). 2. FIOM: Federazione italiana operai metallurgici (Italian Metalworkers Federation). 3. AMMA: Associazione tra gli industriali, metallurgici, meccanici e affini (Association of Metallurgical, Mechanical and related Industrialists). 4. Spriano, Occupation, 63, 117–18. 5. Ibid., 118. 6. Ibid., 68. 7. See Antonio Gramsci, “Il programma dell ‘Ordine Nuovo,’” L’Ordine Nuovo (August 14, 1920), in L’Ordine Nuovo 1919–1920, ed. Valentino Gerratana and Antonio A. Santucci (Turin: Einaudi, 1987) [hereafter, ON], 621. 8. Ibid., 619. 9. On De Leon’s influence on Ordine Nuovo, see Paolo Spriano, “L’Ordine Nuovo” e i consigli di fabbrica. Con una scelta di testi dall’”Ordine Nuovo” (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), 66–69. Spriano’s text also contains numerous writings from Ordine Nuovo by Gramsci and other writers. 10. Gramsci’s writings are collected in L’Ordine Nuovo. The best theoretical assessment of Gramsci’s ideas in Ordine Nuovo is Darrow Schecter, Gramsci and the Theory of Industrial Democracy (Aldershot: Avebury, 1991). Alternative contextual discussion can be found in Carl Levy, Gramsci and the Anarchists

NOTES

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

171

(Oxford: Berg, 1999). For a sketch, see also James Martin, Gramsci’s Political Analysis. A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1998), 24–29. Gramsci, “Lo sviluppo della rivoluzione,” L’Ordine Nuovo (September 13, 1919), ON, 206. See Gramsci, “La conquista dello stato,” L’Ordine Nuovo (July 12, 1919), ON, 131–32. On Gramsci’s criticisms of reformist trade unionism, see “Sindacati e consigli,” L’Ordine Nuovo (October 11, 1919), ON, 236–41, and “I sindacati e la dittatura,” L’Ordine Nuovo (October 25, 1919), ON, 256–62. See Gramsci, “Lo sviluppo della rivoluzione,” 206, and “Sindacalismo e consigli,” L’Ordine Nuovo (November 8, 1919), ON, 298–99. “Lo sviluppo della rivoluzione,” 206. “Sindacati e consigli,” 238–39. For Gramsci’s critique of Italian syndicalists, see “Sindacalismo e consigli,” and for his critique of anarchists, see “Socialisti e anarchici,” L’Ordine Nuovo (September 20–27, 1919), ON, 215–19. On Gramsci’s relationship to anarchism generally, see Levy, Gramsci and the Anarchists. See Gramsci, “Note sulla rivoluzione russa,” Il Grido del Popolo (April 29, 1917), in La Città futura 1917–1918, ed. Sergio Caprioglio (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), 138–42. See Gramsci, “Lo stato italiano,” L’Ordine Nuovo (February 7, 1920), ON, 403–8. Gramsci, “Il nostro Marx,” Il Grido del Popolo (May 4, 1918), in Il Nostro Marx 1918–1919, ed. Sergio Caprioglio (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), 6. Ibid., 5–6. On Bordiga and Il Soviet, see Paolo Spriano, Storia del Partito comunista italiano, I. Da Bordiga a Gramsci (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), chap. 3. Spriano, “L’Ordine Nuovo,” 100–104. Ibid., 111–12. See Tasca’s defense from Gramsci’s criticism in Ibid, 266–90. Gramsci, “Per un rinnovamento del partito socialista,” L’Ordine Nuovo (May 8, 1920), ON, 511. Piero to Ada, in Gobetti and Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza. Lettere 1918– 1926, ed. E. A. Perona (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), 375–76. Gobetti’s reaction to the factory occupations, the Turinese workers, and evidence of the influence of Gramsci upon him is visible mostly in writings subsequent to the events. See, in particular, Gobetti, “Storia dei comunisti torinesi scritta da un liberale,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (March 26, 1922), Scritti politici, ed. Paolo Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), 278–95 (hereafter SP). An English translation of this important article can be found in volume one of James Martin (ed.), Antonio Gramsci: Critical Assessments of Political Philosophers (London: Routledge, 2002), 213–24. For an illuminating sketch of Gramsci and Gobetti, see Paolo Spriano, Gramsci e Gobetti, 3rd ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1977). I have made a (rather rough) translation of the first chapter of this book (previously in an article published in Studi storici) in Martin (ed.), Antonio Gramsci: Critical Assessments, 60–82.

172

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28. See Gramsci, “Stato e sovranità,” Energie Nove (February 1–28, 1919), in Il Nostro Marx, 518–23. 29. Gobetti, Carteggio 1918–1922, ed. Ersilia A. Perona (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 120–21. 30. Gobetti, “Storia dei comunisti,” 282. 31. Gobetti, “Uomini e idee [X],” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 22, 1924), SP, 646. 32. Gobetti, Carteggio, 124. 33. Gobetti, “Storia dei comunisti,” 289. 34. Ibid., 290. 35. See his letter of May 14, 1921, to Prezzolini in Gobetti, Carteggio, 209. The project continued in preparation in June with, it seems, Gramsci’s approval. See Gobetti’s further letter to Prezzolini in which he indicates Gramsci’s preference concerning the volume’s contents: Gobetti, Ibid, 211–12. However, Gramsci’s departure for Moscow in 1922 appears to have interrupted these plans. 36. Gramsci, “Vecchia musica,” L’Unità (July 2, 1925), in La costruzione del Partito Comunista 1923–1926, ed. Elsa Fubini (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), 377. 37. See Gramsci, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” (September-November 1926), in Gramsci: Pre-Prison Writings, ed. Richard Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 313–37. 38. In Chapter 6, however, I examine Gramsci’s references to Gobetti in his later work. 39. Gobetti, “Storia dei comunisti,” 294. 40. See, for example, Gobetti, “La rivoluzione italiana. Discorso ai collaboratori di “Energie Nove,” L’Educazione Nazionale (November 30, 1920), SP, 187–94. 41. Gobetti, “Storia dei comunisti,” 283. 42. On the various aspects of Gobetti’s interest in Russia, see Bruno Bongiovanni, “Piero Gobetti e la Russia,” Studi storici 37, no. 3 (1996): 727–46. 43. Ibid., 730. 44. See Paradosso dello spirito russo, in Gobetti, Scritti storici, letterari e filosofici, ed. Paolo Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), 289–341. 45. Gobetti, “Rassegna di questioni politiche,” Energie Nove (July 25, 1919), SP, 151. 46. See Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and also the essays collected in Sorel, From Georges Sorel. Essays in Socialism and Philosophy, ed. John L. Stanley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). For an illuminating study of the formation of Sorel’s ideas, see Marco Gervasoni, Georges Sorel, una biografia intelletuale. Socialismo e liberalismo nella Francia della Belle Èpoque (Milano: Edizioni Unicopli, 1997). 47. Sorel, Reflections, 118–19. 48. Ibid., 118. 49. “Myths must be judged as a means of acting on the present . . . even supposing the revolutionaries to have been wholly and entirely deluded in setting up

NOTES

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

173

this imaginary picture of the general strike, this picture may yet have been, in the course of the preparation of the revolution, a great element of strength if it had embraced all the aspirations of socialism and if it had given to the whole body of revolutionary thought a precision and a rigidity which no other method of thought could have given” (Ibid., 116–17). On Sorel’s reception and influence in Italy, see Gian Biagio Furiozzi, Sorel e l’Italia (Messina: G. D’Anna, 1975). On the various strands of Italian syndicalism, see Carl Levy, “Currents of Italian Syndicalism before 1926,” International Review of Social History 45 (2000): 209–50. See Giancarlo Bergami, “Sorel e i giovani rivoluzionari di Torino,” Il Ponte 8–9 (1970): 1062–64. See, for instance, Sorel’s discussion of the distinction between bourgeois “force” and “proletarian” violence: Sorel, Reflections, 165–72. Ibid., 159–60. Ibid., 159. See chap. 7 of Reflections. For commentary on Sorel’s influence on Gramsci, see Darrow Schecter, “Two Views of the Revolution: Gramsci and Sorel, 1916–1920,” in Antonio Gramsci: Critical Assessments, vol. 1, ed. James Martin (London: Routledge, 2002), 153–71. On Sorel’s influence on Gobetti, see Pietro Polito, “Gobetti e Sorel,” Mezzosecolo: materiali di ricerca storica 6 (1985–86): 29–62. See, for example, Gramsci’s critique of the syndicalists, “Sindacalismo e consigli.” Gramsci, “La conquista dello stato,” 128. This point is made by Schecter, “Two Views of the Revolution,” 165. Gobetti, Carteggio, 140. Gobetti, “Storia dei comunisti,” 287. Ibid., 292 Gobetti, “Il nostro protestantismo,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 17, 1925), SP, 824. Ibid., 825. Gobetti, “Storia dei comunisti,” 292. See Giampiero Carocci, “Piero Gobetti nella storia del pensiero politico italiano,” Belfagor, 6 (1951): 148. Norberto Bobbio also begins his study of Turinese cultural life with a chapter devoted to Gramsci and Gobetti together, pointing to their joint role as instigators of a distinctive culture of intellectual militancy in the city. See Trent’anni di storia della cultura a Torino (1920–1950) (Turin: Einaudi, 2002), 5–14. For a more recent, critical evaluation of the intellectual relationship, see Franco Sbarberi’s “Gramsci e Gobetti: un eredità difficile,” in L’utopia della libertà eguale. Il liberalismo sociale da Rosselli a Bobbio (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999), 25–53. A point underlined by Paolo Bagnoli, Rosselli, Gobetti e la rivoluzione democratica, Uomini e idee tra liberalismo e socialismo (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996), 132–33.

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68. Gobetti, “Il problema della civiltà russa,” L’Ora (November 23, 1923), in Scritti storici, 425. On this interpretation of the Russian Revolution as a Menshevite strategy delivered by Bolsheviks, see the discussion by Bongiovanni, “Piero Gobetti e la Russia,” 738–39, 742–44. 69. Gobetti, “La rivoluzione italiana. Discorso ai collaboratori di ‘Energie Nove,’” L’Educazione Nazionale (November 30, 1920), SP, 187–94. 70. Gobetti, Carteggio, 141. 71. Ibid., 183. 72. Gobetti, Carteggio, 194, 205, 222. See also his scathing critique of the socialist leader Fillipo Turati, “Letture sui partiti politici,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 8, 1922), SP, 304–8. 73. Gobetti, “Storia dei comunisti,” 293. 74. Ibid., 290. 75. Ibid., 293. 76. Ibid., 289. 77. See, for example, the assessment made by Schecter, Gramsci and the Theory of Industrial Democracy. 78. Franco Sbarberi, Gramsci, un socialismo armonico (Milan: Angeli, 1986). This tension, argues Sbarberi, continues into Gramsci’s later writings in prison. Sbarberi compares the tension in Gramsci with Gobetti’s “conflictualism” in L’utopia della libertà eguale, 49–53. 79. Gobetti, “Storia dei comunisti,” 288. 80. See Polito, “Gobetti e Sorel,” 44. 81. See the discussion by Marco Revelli, “Gobetti ‘liberal comunista’?” in I dilemmi del liberalsocialismo, ed. Michelangelo Bovero, Virgilio Mura, and Franco Sbarberi (Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1994), 63–84. 82. See Spriano, Occupation, 89–95. 83. Ibid., 122–23. 84. On the PSI and the “twenty-one conditions,” see Spriano, Storia del Partito comunista italiano I, 70–71. 85. On the formation of the PCdI, see ibid., chap. 7. 86. Gobetti, “Storia dei comunisti,” 291. 87. Ibid., 292–93. 88. Ibid., 292 89. Ibid., 294.

Chapter 4 1. Gervasoni distinguishes three phases in Gobetti’s editorship of La Rivoluzione Liberale: the first from February to October 1922, the second from then until mid-1924, and the remaining third until its closure in late 1925. See L’intelletuale come eroe. Piero Gobetti e le culture del Novecento (Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2000), 73–164. 2. See La rivoluzione liberale: Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia, in Scritti politici, ed. Paolo Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), 913–1078 (hereafter SP). For a

NOTES

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

175

comprehensive discussion of the book, treated as a statement of Gobetti’s liberalism, see Gervasoni, L’intelletuale come eroe, 118–43. I base my reading of Gobetti’s liberalism in this chapter on the original articles rather than the book version. “Ai lettori,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (February 12, 1922), SP, 225–26. “Agli amici dell’Unità,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (February 12, 1922), SP, 226–27. “Manifesto,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (February 12, 1922), SP, 228–29; emphasis in original. Ibid., 229. Ibid. Ibid., 230. Ibid., 236. Ibid., 238. Ibid., 238–39. Ibid., 239; emphasis in original. The responses were published under the heading “Polemica sul ‘Manifesto’” in La Rivoluzione Liberale, no. 3 (February 25, 1922). The paragraph that follows draws upon the original publication. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003). Weber’s study was first published in German in 1904. “Politica e storia (Polemica sul ‘Manifesto’),” La Rivoluzione Liberale (February 25, 1922), SP, 253. Ibid., 254. Ibid., 257. Ibid., 255. See Gobetti, “Il nostro protestantismo,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 17, 1925), SP, 823–26. This article was first published in December 1923 in the Protestant journal, Conscientia. Ibid., 824–25. Ibid., 825. On the question of religious reform in Gobetti’s thought, see Giorgio Spini, “L’eco in Italia della Riforma mancata,” in Gobetti tra Riforma e rivoluzione, ed. Alberto Cabella and Oscar Mazzoleni (Milan: F. Angeli, 1999), 43–58. I agree with Roberto Paris’s argument (in the same volume) that Gobetti was interested primarily in the significance of Protestantism in promoting a civic political culture and not in religious reform as such. See “Piero Gobetti et l’absence de Réform protestante en Italie,” in Gobetti tra Riforma e rivoluzione, especially 36–37. See La filosofia politica di Vittorio Alfieri, now in Gobetti, Scritti storici, letterari e filosofici, ed. Paolo Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), 87–146. See Risorgimento senza eroi (1926) in ibid., 23–83. Gobetti had planned to publish the text before his death. The incomplete manuscript was edited by his friend Santino Caramella.

176

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25. “Politica e storia (Polemica sul ‘Manifesto’),” 255–56. 26. See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 27. “La nostra cultura politica,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (March 8, 1923), SP, 458–59. 28. See Gobetti, “Note di politica interna [I],” La Rivoluzione Liberale (July 30, 1922), SP, 397–400. 29. “Il liberalism e le masse [I],” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 10, 1923), SP, 477–78. 30. “Democrazia,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 13, 1924), SP, 677. 31. See Gobetti, “Il liberalismo in Italia,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 15, 1923), 1. 32. “Liberali e conservatori,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (March 26, 1922), SP, 277. 33. “Revisione liberale (Postilla),” La Rivoluzione Liberale (June 19, 1923), SP, 515. 34. Gobetti, “La nostra cultura politica,” 476. 35. “Revisione liberale (Postilla),” 515. 36. For a profile of Einaudi and his thought, see Norberto Bobbio, Ideological Profile of Twentieth-Century Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 81–86. 37. Luigi Einaudi, Le lotte del lavoro, ed. Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1972), 9. 38. Ibid., 6. 39. Ibid., 9. 40. Gobetti, “Il liberalismo di L. Einaudi,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 23, 1922), SP, 323. 41. Ibid., 330. 42. Ibid., 335–56. 43. Le lotte di lavoro had as its subtitle, “La belleza di lotta” (The beauty of struggle), and its introduction emphasized the author’s “lively sympathy for the efforts of those who wish to improve their lot [elevarsi] by themselves and who in this effort struggle, fall, and pick themselves up at their own expense in order to succeed and perfect themselves” (1). Gobetti’s publication of the volume was part of an effort to revitalise liberal thought following Mussolini’s rise to political office. 44. “Il liberalismo di L. Einaudi,” 328–29. See also Gobetti’s remarks on Marx in “L’ora di Marx,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 15, 1924), SP, 640–41. On this reading of Marx, see Gervasoni, L’intelletuale come eroe, 157–58. 45. In the same article, Gobetti drew attention to “certain, absolutely Hegelian points” in Einaudi’s work. See “Il liberalismo di L. Einaudi,” 331. It is worth noting, however, that Einaudi distanced himself from Gobetti in his obituary in Il Baretti of 1926. 46. Ibid., 331–32. 47. “Il liberalismo in Italia,” 1. 48. “Esperienza liberale,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 2, 1922), SP, 301. 49. Ibid.

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50. Piero to Ada, in Gobetti and Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza. Lettere 1918– 1926, ed. E. A. Perona (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), 449; emphases in the original. I have briefly discussed De Ruggiero’s liberalism in Chapter 2. 51. Letter to Ada, September 9, 1921, ibid., 500. 52. Gobetti, Carteggio 1918–1922, ed. E. A. Perona (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 160. 53. Elementi was repeatedly updated up until 1939. For a selection of key passages, see Mosca, La classe politica, ed. Norberto Bobbio (Bari: Laterza, 1966). The standard English translation is The Ruling Class, ed. Arthur Livingston (New York and London: McGraw-Hill, 1939). 54. On this theme, see Joseph Femia, The Machiavellian Legacy. Essays in Italian Political Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). 55. Bellamy highlights the role ascribed to intellectuals in Italian political theory. See Modern Italian Social Theory. Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 7–8. 56. For a discussion of Gramsci’s theory of intellectuals, see my “Between Ethics and Politics: Gramsci’s Theory of Intellectuals,” Modern Italy 3, no. 1 (1998), 67–85. 57. On Pareto and Mosca’s role in developing political science in Italy, see Norberto Bobbio, Saggi sulla scienza politica in Italia, 2nd ed. (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996). 58. As Bellamy points out, the three-times updated Elementi came to reflect the changing view of its author on political events in Italy, marking a shift in his views from an anti-democratic to a reluctantly pro-democratic position. See Modern Italian Social Theory, 34–35. 59. Mosca, The Ruling Class, 50. 60. Ibid., 154. 61. The scientific claims of Mosca’s theory have been heavily disputed. For a discussion, see Femia, Machiavellian Legacy, 126–44. Bellamy focuses on the ideological motivation to his claims: Modern Italian Social Theory, 34–53. 62. Femia, Machiavellian Legacy, 142. 63. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci, while dismissive of many of Mosca’s claims, also made use of his work to conceptualize the relationship between leaders and the led inside the revolutionary party. For a discussion of the influence of Mosca on Gramsci, see Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Beyond Right and Left: Democratic Elitism in Mosca and Gramsci (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). 64. Gobetti, “Un conservatore galantuomo,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 29, 1924), SP, 656. 65. Ibid., 654–55. 66. Ibid., 656. 67. Ibid. 68. Gobetti, “Il liberalismo in Italia.” 69. Gobetti, “Un conservatore galantuomo,” 657. 70. Gobetti, “Il liberalismo in Italia.” 71. Gobetti, “Un conservatore galantuomo,” 656.

178

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72. Ibid., 657. 73. On Gobetti’s democratic elitism, see Bobbio, Saggi sulla scienza politica in Italia, 221–30. 74. Gobetti, “Esperienza liberale,” 302; italics in original. 75. Ibid. 76. Piero to Ada, September 9, 1921 in Gobetti and Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza, 500. See also Pietro Polito, “Gobetti e Sorel,” Mezzosecolo: materiali di ricerca storica 6 (1985–86): 45–46. 77. David D. Roberts, “Frustrated Liberals: De Ruggiero, Gobetti, and the Challenge of Socialism,” Canadian Journal of History 17 (1982): 78. 78. A point that Bobbio also underlines. See Italia fedele. Il mondo di Gobetti (Florence: Passigli, 1986), 28. 79. Gervasoni, L’intelletuale come eroe, 123. 80. Ibid., 135–38. 81. For a list of some of the many authors published by Gobetti, see Bobbio, Italia fedele, 11. That list includes literary works by Eugenio Montale, and works of political analysis by Salvemini, Amendola, Missiroli, Prezzolini, Guido Dorso, and Adriano Tilgher. For a discussion of the contributors to Rivoluzione Liberale, see Gervasoni, L’intelletuale come eroe, 170–83.

Chapter 5 1. See Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London and New York: Penguin, 2004). 2. Later responses to fascism from those who witnessed its initial development are now legion. Unlike Gobetti, all benefited from seeing the movement transform into a regime, and revised their earlier views considerably. For the liberal-democratic Left, see Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism (New York: Viking Press, 1936); from the Marxist Left, see Palmiro Togliatti, Lectures on Fascism (New York: International Publishers, 1976), his Lenin school lectures in Moscow of the mid-1930s. 3. Recent debates have focussed on the search for a fascist “minimum,” that is, a statement of the fundamental ideological core to fascism. For this view, see Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). I am not wholly convinced of the value of this enterprise, but for a useful discussion of the debates and controversies surrounding the historical and ideological interpretation of fascism, see Aristotle A. Kallis, ed., The Fascism Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) and Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism. For a look at issues concerning the specifically Italian variety of fascism, see Richard J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship (London: Arnold, 1998). 4. This is not the place for a full discussion of the character of Mussolini. But for a very useful and up-to-date biographical discussion, see Richard J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini (London: Arnold, 2002).

NOTES

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5. See Emilio Gentile, The Origins of Fascist Ideology, 1918–1925 (New York: Enigma, 2005), 1–3. As Gentile points out, although Mussolini disavowed viewing fascism as one political ideology amongst others, it is nevertheless possible to draw out some of the guiding threads in the development of his thought that fed into the movement. 6. The changing historical meanings of both fascism and anti-fascism are usefully discussed in Giovanni De Luna and Marco Revelli, Fascismo/antifascismo: Le idee, le identità (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1995) and Aurelio Lepre, L’anticomunismo e l’antifascismo in Italia (Bologna: il Mulino, 1997). 7. Benito Mussolini, “Trenchocracy,” Il Popolo d’Italia (December 15, 1917), in Fascism, ed. Roger Griffin (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 29. 8. On Corradini, see Mauro Marsella, “Enrico Corradini’s Italian Nationalism: The ‘Right Wing’ of the Fascist Synthesis,” Journal of Political Ideologies 9, no. 2 (2004): 203–24. 9. For a discussion of the intellectual lineage of fascism, see A. J. Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005). 10. Mussolini’s intellectual and personal formation is discussed in A. J. Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1979) and Bosworth, Mussolini. 11. On this aesthetic revolt, see Walter L. Adamson, Avant-garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1994). The aesthetic of self-creation in fascism is explored in Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: the Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 12. Rocco’s ideas are sketched in Giuseppe Bedeschi, La fabbrica delle ideologie: Il pensiero politico nell’Italia del Novecento (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002), 55–62. 13. On combattentismo, see chap. 2. 14. On the fasci, see Philip Morgan, Italian Fascism, 1919–1945 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 13–16. 15. Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power. Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 46. 16. Benito Mussolini, “The Naple’s Speech,” (October 24, 1922), in Fascism, 44. 17. See Mussolini, “Trenchocracy,” 28–29. 18. See the analysis of the results of the 1919 elections in Morgan, Italian Fascism, 16–17. 19. Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 47–52. 20. Ibid., 36–38. See also the discussion of the biennio rosso in Morgan, Italian Fascism, 21–34. 21. Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 60–62. For a detailed discussion of the expansion of fascism into the provincial towns, see Paul Corner, Fascism in Ferrara 1915– 1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 104–208 and Anthony L. Cardoza, Agrarian Elites and Italian Fascism: The Province of Bologna, 1901–1926 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982), 290–386, esp. 346–53.

180

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22. Cardoza, Agrarian Elites, 294; Corner, Fascism in Ferrara, 109–11; Morgan, Italian Fascism, 34–40. 23. Cardoza, Agrarian Elites, 326–27. 24. See ibid., 331–35. 25. Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 62. 26. Ibid., 38. 27. See, for example, Cardoza, Agrarian Elites, 308–9. 28. Morgan, Italian Fascism, 41–42. 29. Ibid., 40–43. 30. The description is Philip Morgan’s: ibid., 48. See also Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 72–76. 31. Morgan, Italian Fascism, 54–56. 32. Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 90. 33. Lyttleton expresses doubt about how realistic a military coup was. See ibid., 83–93. See also Morgan, Italian Fascism, 57–59. 34. See Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 115. 35. Ibid., 99, 97. 36. See Fabio Fernando Rizi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 43–49. Croce was later accused of providing passive support for the dictatorship. Fabio Rizi goes a long way in providing evidence contrary to this accusation. 37. A view developed in the first two chapters of Benedetto Croce, Politics and Morals (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1946). 38. See “Note di politica interna [I],” La Rivoluzione Liberale (July 30, 1922) in. Scritti politici, ed. Paolo Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1960) (hereafter SP), 397– 400; “Esperienza liberale [V],” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 28, 1922), SP, 354–57. 39. On Italian fascism as a form of “political religion” in which politics itself becomes a site and object of worship, see Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996). Falasca-Zamponi provides an alternative, “aesthetic” reading of fascism’s use of symbols in her Fascist Spectacle. 40. Gobetti, “Esperienza liberale [V],” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 28, 1922), SP, 356. 41. Ibid., 357. 42. This argument is also developed in “Il liberalismo in Italia,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 15, 1923), 1. 43. Gobetti, “Note di politica interna [I],” La Rivoluzione Liberale (July 30, 1922), SP, 397. 44. Ibid., 398–99. 45. Ibid., 399–400. 46. Gobetti, “Note di politica interna [III] (Risposta a M. A. Levi),” La Rivoluzione Liberale (September 10, 1922), SP, 406. 47. See Gobetti, “Commemorazione,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (October 30, 1923), SP, 533 and “L’ora di Marx,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 15, 1924), SP, 640.

NOTES

181

48. Gobetti, “Dopo le elezioni,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 15, 1924), SP, 637. See also his claim that there were no “substantial differences between Mussolini and Giolitti” in “Lo storicismo di un mistico (Postilla),” La Rivoluzione Liberale (December 7, 1922), SP, 435. 49. Gobetti, “Uomini e idee [V],” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 28, 1922), SP, 358. See also his derisory comments on the Futurists: “Uomini e idee [III],” (May 4, 1922), SP, 348. 50. Gobetti, “Uomini e idee [V],” 359–60. 51. On Gobetti’s distinctive interpretation of fascism, see Marco Revelli, “Piero Gobetti e il fascismo. La teoria della ‘rivelazione,’” in Perché Gobetti. Giornata di studio su Piero Gobetti (Torino, 16 aprile 1991), ed. Cesare Pianciola and Pietro Polito (Turin, 1993), 103–20. 52. “Elogio della ghigliottina,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (November 23, 1922), SP, 431–34. 53. “Noi e le opposizioni,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 22, 1924), SP, 644. 54. See Aldo Agosti, Togliatti: Un uomo di frontiera (Turin: UTET Libreria, 2003), 45–46. 55. Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 104–5. 56. Gobetti, “Il liberalism e le masse [I],” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 10, 1923), SP, 479. 57. Gobetti, “Problemi di libertà,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 24, 1923), SP, 494. 58. Ibid; italics in original. 59. On Gentile’s role as the philosopher of fascism, see A. J. Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2001), 47–65; H. S. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press, 1960), 160–223. For Gregor, Gentile’s philosophy long anticipated the fundamental principles of the fascist doctrine. 60. See Harris, Social Philosophy, 167–78; Gabriele Turi, Giovanni Gentile: una biografia (Florence: Giunti, 1995), 315. 61. Gobetti, “I miei conti con l’idealismo attuale,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (January 18, 1923), SP, 441–48. 62. For a discussion of Amendola, see Bedeschi, La fabbrica delle ideologie, 143–53. 63. See Amendola, “L’Italia sulla soglia del dopoguerra,” (1919), in La Nuova Democrazia (Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1951), 3–19. 64. Amendola, “Il governo e la situazione,” Corriere della Sera (September 17, 1920), in In difesa d’Italia liberale. Scritti e discorsi politici (1910–1925), ed. Antonio Carioti (Florence: Liberal libri, 2001), 90. 65. Amendola, “Il Mezzogiorno e la crisi politica italiana,” Speech at Sala Consilina (October 1, 1922), La Nuova Democrazia, 144. 66. See Amendola, “Prefazione a ‘Una Battaglia Liberale,’” (March 1924), La Nuova Democrazia, xxxi. 67. Amendola, “Il Mezzogiorno e la crisi politica italiana,” 145; italics in original.

182

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68. See Amendola, “Al di sopra degli equivoci,” Il Mondo (April 11, 1923), In difesa d’Italia liberale, 119–20. 69. See, in particular, his letter to Fillipo Turati of August 1923. In difesa del’Italia liberale, 123–26. 70. See Prezzolini, “Per una Società degli Apoti,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (September 21, 1922), in Gobetti e “La Voce,” ed. Giuseppe Prezzolini (Florence: Sansoni, 1971), 60. 71. Ibid., 62. 72. Gobetti, “Per una società degli apoti [I],” La Rivoluzione Liberale (September 28, 1922), SP, 409–10. 73. Ibid., 410. 74. Gobetti, “Per una società degli apoti [II],” La Rivoluzione Liberale (October 25, 1922), SP, 412. 75. Ibid., 414–15. 76. Ibid., 414. 77. See, for example, his comprehensive diagnosis of Italian political culture, “La nostra cultura politica,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (March 8, 1923), SP, 456–76. 78. “Questioni di tattica,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (November 23, 1922), SP, 429–30. 79. Gevasoni also notes an “oscillation” in Gobetti’s support of other anti-fascists. See Marco Gervasoni, L’intelletuale come eroe. Piero Gobetti e le culture del Novecento (Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2000), 146. 80. See the extracts collected in Stanislao Pugliese, ed., Italian Fascism and AntiFascism: A Critical Anthology (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 117–25. 81. Gentile in ibid., 119. 82. Croce in ibid., 124. 83. See Sergio Caprioglio, “Gobetti, Gramsci e il manifesto del primo maggio 1925,” Belfagor XLVIII, no. 6 (1993), 633. 84. Spriano, Gramsci e Gobetti, 118–20. 85. Ibid., 130–32. Although it took as its object “cultural” rather than political concerns, Il Baretti was motivated by a similar desire, on Gobetti’s part, to generate a critical liberal outlook. 86. Ibid., 120–21. Gobetti’s criticism of the parliamentary opposition to fascism was typically scathing. See “Noi e le opposizioni”; “Democrazia,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 13, 1924), SP, 674–78, and “Congiure e opposizione (Postilla),” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 22, 1923), SP, 500–502. 87. Morgan, Italian Fascism, 65–66. 88. Ibid., 71–75. 89. See Giacomo Matteotti, “L’elezione, secondo noi, è essenzialmente non valida,” in Italian Fascism and Anti-Fascism, 65–69. 90. On Matteotti’s murder and its consequences, see Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 237–40; Morgan, Italian Fascism, 75–78. 91. Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 239–40.

NOTES

183

92. Morgan, Italian Fascism, 75–76. 93. For Gobetti’s response to Matteotti’s murder, see “Ho conosciuto Matteotti,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (June 17, 1924), SP, 707–8; “Due tattiche,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (June 24, 1924), SP, 732–34; and “Matteotti,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (July 1, 1924), SP, 735–52. 94. “La situazione,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (July 8, 1924), SP, 752–57; “La settimana,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (November 25, 1924), SP, 793–800. 95. See, for example, “Saluto all’altro parlamento,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (November 11, 1924), SP, 791–93. 96. See “La successione,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (December 10, 1924), SP, 801–4. 97. “Gruppi della “Rivoluzione Liberale,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (July 8, 1924), SP, 758–60. See also Gervasoni, L’intelletuale come eroe, 149–50. 98. “Bilancio,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 24, 1925), SP, 826. 99. Ibid., 828. 100. Ibid. 101. See the reproduced article in Caprioglio, “Gobetti, Gramsci e il manifesto del primo maggio 1925,” 641–42. 102. Prezzolini, quoted in ibid., 640. 103. Amendola, quoted in ibid., 643. 104. Gobetti, “Il fronte unico,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (June 7, 1925), SP, 841. 105. Ibid., 842. 106. A point noted by Gervasoni, L’intelletuale come eroe, 154. 107. See Gobetti, “Noi e le opposizioni,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 22, 1924), SP, 641–44. 108. Ibid., 641–42. 109. Ibid., 644. 110. Ibid., 643. 111. On Gobetti’s “existential” (as opposed to “political”) anti-fascism, see De Luna and Revelli, Fascismo/antifascismo. 112. Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power, 242–43 113. Ibid., 258. 114. Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 243. 115. See Ibid., 265–67 and Benito Mussolini, “La situazione sarà chiarata,” in Italian Fascism and Anti-Fascism, 70–76. 116. Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 267–78. 117. See Gervasoni, L’intelletuale come eroe, 111. 118. Ada Gobetti’s heartrending entries in her diary on receipt of the news of Piero’s death go some way in expressing the shock of his loss: Nella tua breve esistenza. Lettere 1918–1926, 697–707. 119. See the special issue of Il Baretti 3, no. 5 (March 16, 1926). On the reception of Gobetti’s thought immediately following his death, see Ersilia A. Perona, “Alle radici della fortuna di Piero Gobetti,” in Gobetti tra Riforma e rivoluzione, ed. Alberto Cabella and Oscar Mazzoleni (Milan: F. Angeli, 1999), 122–28.

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Chapter 6 1. For comprehensive surveys of Gobetti’s posthumous intellectual legacy, see Paolo Bagnoli, “On the Fortune of Piero Gobetti in Italian Historiography,” The Journal of Italian History 2, no. 2 (1979), 293–335 and Ersilia A. Perona, “Alle radici della fortuna di Piero Gobetti,” in Gobetti tra Riforma e rivoluzione, eds. Alberto Cabella and Oscar Mazzoleni (Milan: F. Angeli, 1999). 2. See Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valetino Gerratana, 4 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1975). English translations of key selections are: Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quntin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971) and Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Derek Boothman (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995). On Gramsci’s imprisonment and the conditions under which he wrote his Notebooks, see Alistair Davidson, Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography (London: Merlin Press, 1977), 242–69. 3. For a fuller account of the content of Gramsci’s prison writings, see James Martin, Gramsci’s Political Analysis. A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1998), especially chaps. 2–4; Richard Bellamy and Darrow Schecter, Gramsci and the Italian State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), and Joseph Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981). 4. On this phase in Gramsci’s thinking, see Martin, Gramsci’s Political Analysis, 29–37. 5. See Gramsci’s letter to the communist party leadership of February 9, 1924, Lettere 1908–1926, ed. Antonio A. Santucci (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), 223–38 and, in particular, “Un esame della situazione italiana” in Gramsci, La costruzione del Partito comunista 1923–1926 (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), 113–24. 6. See Gramsci’s letter to Togliatti of August 1923, Lettere, 127–28. 7. See “La situazione italiana e i compiti del PCI” [Lyons Theses] in La costruzione del Partito comunista, 488–513. 8. See “Alcuni temi della quistione meridionale” in ibid., 137–58. Below, I make use of the following translation: “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” (September-November 1926), in Gramsci: Pre-Prison Writings, ed. Richard Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 313–37. 9. Gramsci, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” 334. 10. Ibid., 335. 11. Ibid., 336. 12. Ibid., 337. Gramsci’s continued interest in Gobetti is further evidenced by letters to party colleagues in 1924 from Vienna, where he had been posted. Gramsci asked that copies of La Rivoluzione Liberale be sent him and also commented positively on the merits of Gobetti’s analysis of fascism. See Gramsci, Lettere, 137–38, 162, 216, and 334. 13. For excellent discussions of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, see Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought; Bellamy and Schecter, Gramsci and the Italian State. See also the relevant articles in James Martin, ed., Antonio Gramsci: Critical

NOTES

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

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Assessments of Political Philosophers (London: Routledge, 2002), particularly vol. 2, part 8. Gramsci, Quaderni, 2010. Ibid., 1376–78. Ibid., 937. See ibid., 763–64, 1049–50, 2302–3. See ibid., 1353 and 2023. See ibid., 1815, 1975. See also his recollection of the exchange between Prezzolini and Gobetti on the “Society of Abstainers,” Gramsci, Quaderni, 2216–18. For a discussion of the postwar “revisionist” interpretation of the Risorgimento as a rivoluzione mancata, see William A. Salomone, “The Risorgimento between Ideology and History: The Political Myth of rivoluzione mancata,” The American Historical Review 68, no. 1 (1962), 38–56. See also chaps. 1 and 6 of Lucy Riall, The Italian Risorgimento. State, Society and National Unification (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). See Gobetti, “Il nostro protestantismo,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 17, 1925) in Scritti politici, ed. Paolo Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1960) (hereafter SP), 823–26. See Gramsci, Quaderni, 1682–85. Ibid., 318. See also 515. Ibid., 1683. On the differences between Gramsci and Gobetti’s interpretation of the Risorgimento, see Richard Bellamy, “Two Views of Italy’s Failed Revolution,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 6, no. 2 (2001), 265–69. Gramsci, Quaderni, 1591. See his analyses in Ibid., 2139–81. On the thesis of Italy’s “backwardness” in Gobetti’s interpretation of fascism, see Marco Revelli, “Piero Gobetti e il fascismo. La teoria della ‘rivelazione,’” in Perché Gobetti. Giornata di studio su Piero Gobetti (Torino, 16 aprile 1991), ed. Cesare Pianciola and Pietro Polito (Turin: Piero Lacaita, 1993), 103–20. Franco Sbarberi, L’utopia della libertà eguale. Il liberalismo sociale da Rosselli a Bobbio (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999), 47. See the discussion in Gramsci, Quaderni, 1513–30, on the “organic” and “traditional” intellectuals, which is built around an enquiry into the “new type of intellectual” emerging from the industrial factory production processes. See Gramsci’s notes on the Modern Prince in ibid., 1555–61. I have discussed his theory of the party in chap. 4 of Martin, Gramsci’s Political Analysis. For an in-depth discussion, see Anne S. Sassoon, Gramsci’s Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Hutchinson Education, 1987). See, for example, Stuart Hall’s “Gramsci and Us” in The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988): 161–73. See, inter alia, the essays in Chantal Mouffe, Gramsci and Marxist Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979); Massimo L. Salvadori, Gramsci e il problema storico della democrazia (Torino: G. Einaudi, 1970); Femia, Gramsci’s

186

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

NOTES

Political Thought; Sbarberi, Gramsci, un socialismo armonico (Milan: Angeli, 1986); and Bellamy and Schecter, Gramsci and the Italian State. I have discussed these tensions in “Between Ethics and Politics: Gramsci’s Theory of Intellectuals,” Modern Italy 3, no.1(1998), 67–85, reprinted in Martin, ed., Antonio Gramsci: Critical Assessments of Political Philosophers. As the eminent communist party historian and Gobetti scholar, Paolo Spriano remarked in 1976 of the early reception of Gobetti in the 1940s and postwar period, “[Gobetti’s] paradigm of the liberal revolution appeared to us as being naturally impossible as well as completely alien. We preferred our own ouvrierisme, which seemed to lend an overall view of the process of social renewal to his libertarianism. We translated Gobetti’s references to the historic liberating role of the working class into Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.” Quoted in Bagnoli, “On the Fortune of Piero Gobetti,” 324. See Ibid., 303, 308. Gramsci’s essay on the “Southern Question” was published in Lo Stato operaio in 1930 and served as a justification for the communists’ appropriation of Gobetti. See Perona’s discussion in “Alle radici della fortuna di Piero Gobetti,” 135–39. Levi, cited in Perona, “Alle radici della fortuna di Piero Gobetti,” 142. For an excellent account of Rosselli’s life and thought, see Stanislao Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Anti-fascist Exile (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999). In this chapter, I have drawn upon my own account of Rosselli in “Italian Liberal Socialism: Anti-fascism and the Third Way,” Journal of Political Ideologie 7, no. 3 (2002), 339–41. See Carlo Rosselli, Liberal Socialism, trans. William McCuaig (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). Rosselli’s article appeared in the July 15 issue of 1924. For Gobetti’s note, see “Liberalismo socialista,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (July 15, 1924), SP, 761. Ibid., 761. See Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli, 79–84. Rosselli, Liberal Socialism, 77. Ibid., 78. See Ibid., 53–54. See Rosselli, “Non vinceremo in un giorno, ma vinceremo,” Giustizia e Libertà (n. 1, November 1929), in Scritti dell’esilio. I “Giustizia e libertà” e la concentrazione antifascista (1929–1934), ed. Costanzo Casucci (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), 10–12; “Il nostro movimento e i partiti,” Giustizia e Libertà (n. 10, September 1930), in Scritti dell’esilio, 13–15. Rosselli, “Agli operai,” Giustizia e Libertà (n. 24, March 1931), in Scritti dell’esilio, 26–32; C. Rosselli, “Chiarimenti al programma,” Quaderni di “Giustizia e Libertà” (n. 1, January 1932), in Scritti dell’esilio, 35–49. C. Rosselli, “Liberalismo rivoluzionario,” Quaderni di “Giustizia e Libertà” (n. 1, January 1932), in Scritti dell’esilio, 51. Ibid. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 53–55.

NOTES

187

53. C. Rosselli, “Risposta a Giorgio Amendola,” Quaderni di “Giustizia e Libertà” (n. 1, January 1932), in Scritti dell’esilio, 61. The controversy is discussed in Bagnoli, “On the Fortune of Piero Gobetti,” 302–5 and in Perona, “Alle radici della fortuna di Piero Gobetti,” 137–41. 54. Rosselli, “Risposta a Giorgio Amendola,” 62. 55. Ibid., 63. 56. Ibid., 65. 57. Bagnoli, “On the Fortune of Piero Gobetti,” 304. 58. For an outline of the unifying themes of “Azionismo,” see Giovanni De Luna, “L’Azionismo,” in La politica italiana. Dizionario critico 1945–95, ed. Gianfranco Pasquino (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1995), 165–80. For a historical account, see Claudio Novelli, Il Partito d’Azione e gli italiani (Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2000). The place of Gobetti amongst the azionisti is surveyed in Bagnoli, “On the Fortune of Piero Gobetti,” 305–8. 59. See his essays “Liberalsocialismo” (1942); “Orientamento per una nuova socialitá” (1943); and “Complessitá del liberalsocialismo” (1945) in Aldo Capitini, Liberalsocialismo (Rome: Edizioni e/o, 1996), 19–42, 43–50, and 59–66. 60. Guido Calogero, Difesa del liberalsocialismo ed altri saggi, ed. Michele Schiavone and Dino Cofrancesco (Milan: Marzorati, 1972), 199. 61. Ibid., 79. 62. Ibid., 69. 63. Calogero, Difesa del liberalsocialismo, 77. 64. Ibid., 226. 65. De Luna, “L’Azionismo,” 172. 66. See Novelli, Il Partito d’Azione e gli italiani. 67. A point made by Bagnoli in “On the Fortune of Piero Gobetti,” 306. 68. An argument made explicitly by Aldo Garosci in “Il passato nel presente. Eredità Gobettiana da respingere e da accettare,” Nuovi Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà 1 (1944): 78–85. 69. A point made by Sbarberi in L’utopia della libertà eguale, 43. 70. For a detailed account of Croce’s anti-fascism, see Fabio Fernando Rizi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). 71. See Ada Gobetti, Diario partigiano (Turin: Einaudi, 1996). 72. On the politics of Croce’s historicism, see chapter 5 of David D. Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 73. See the English translation: A History of Italy, 1871–1915 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1929). Croce pursued a similar argument in History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (London: Allen & Unwin, 1934) and History as the Story of Liberty (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1941). 74. Croce, Politics and Morals (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946), 78, 80. 75. Ibid., 81. Croce and Einaudi’s positions are republished in Benedetto Croce and Luigi Einaudi, Liberismo e liberalismo, ed. Paolo Solari (Milan-Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1957). Croce’s view of history was criticised by Gramsci for not recognizing moments of struggle and conflict. For a defense against

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76.

77. 78.

79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84.

85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92.

NOTES

Gramsci, see Richard Bellamy, “A Crocean Critique of Gramsci on Historicism, Hegemony and Intellectuals,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 6, no. 2 (2001): 209–29. On this shift and its continuity with his historicism, see Richard Bellamy, “Between Economic and Ethical Liberalism: Benedetto Croce and the Dilemmas of Liberal Politics,” History of the Human Sciences 4 (1991): 175–95; Norberto Bobbio, Politica e cultura, 2nd ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 2005). See Croce, History as the Story of Liberty. On Croce’s concept of liberty and its influence on the anti-fascists, see David Ward, Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943–46: Benedetto Croce and the Liberals, Carlo Levi and the “Actionists” (Cranbury, NJ and London: Associated University Presses, 1996), 46–52. See also Bobbio, Politica e cultura, 90–93. Ward, Antifascisms, 72. See his “Libertà e giustizia” (1943) in Croce and Einaudi, Liberismo e liberalismo, 88–100. See Croce, Politics and Morals, 84: “The liberal mind regards the withdrawing of liberty and the times of reaction as illnesses and critical stages of growth, as incidents and steps in the eternal life of liberty; and therefore it understands the purpose that such times have fulfilled and the useful task they have accomplished.” On Croce’s view of fascism, see Ward, Antifascisms, 73–75. For a comparison of Gobetti and Croce, see Bagnoli, “On the Fortune of Piero Gobetti,” 311. Ibid., 310. On the formation of Italy’s “republic of parties” and the constraints its political system imposed on politics, see Pietro Scoppola, La Repubblica dei partiti. Evoluzione e crisi di un sistema politico 1945–96 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997). For a fuller discussion of Bobbio’s life, see his autobiography, A Political Life, ed. Alberto Papuzzi (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). Illuminating assessments can be found in Richard Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory. Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 141–56; Reset and Corrado Ocone, eds., Bobbio ad uso di amici e nemici (Venice: Marsilio, 2003); Perry Anderson, “The Affinities of Norberto Bobbio,” New Left Review 170 (1988): 3–36; Sbarberi, L’utopia della libertà eguale, 162–213. See Bobbio, Politica e cultura. See his “Difesa della libertà” and “Dialogo tra un liberale e una comunista” in ibid., 31–40 and 41–52, respectively. Ibid., 37. See “Politica culturale e politica della cultura,” in ibid., 18–30. Ibid., 23. Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory, 144. Bobbio’s own reflections on Bobbio’s approach to a politics of culture can be found in “Croce e la politica della cultura” in Bobbio, Politica e cultura, 78–96. See Norberto Bobbio, Which Socialism? Marxism, Socialism and Democracy, ed. Richard Bellamy (Cambridge: Polity, 1986).

NOTES

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93. This critical relationship to the Left underlay Bobbio’s own widely read interpretation of Gramsci in the late 1960s. See his “Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society” in Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory. Bobbio’s various essays on Gramsci are collected in Saggi su Gramsci (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1990). 94. See Norberto Bobbio, Liberalism and Democracy, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (London and New York: Verso, 1990). 95. On Bobbio’s interpretation of Gobetti, see Bagnoli, “On the Fortune of Piero Gobetti,” 328–35. Bobbio’s reflections on Gobetti and his influence are to be found in Norberto Bobbio, Italia fedele. Il mondo di Gobetti (Florence: Passigli, 1986). 96. Bobbio, cited in Bagnoli, “On the Fortune of Piero Gobetti,” 329. 97. Norberto Bobbio, Saggi sulla scienza politica in Italia, 2nd ed. (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996), 229–30. 98. Bobbio, cited in Bagnoli, “On the Fortune of Piero Gobetti,” 334. 99. Perona, “Alle radici della fortuna di Piero Gobetti,” 156.

Chapter 7 1. Gobetti, “Revisione liberale (Postilla),” La Rivoluzione Liberale (June 19, 1923) in Scritti politici, ed. Paolo Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1960)(hereafter SP), 515. 2. However, Bobbio notes Gobetti’s “agonistic conception” of history in Saggi sulla scienza politica in Italia, 2nd ed. (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996), 228. Marco Gervasoni also notes, in passing, the similarity of Gobetti’s liberalism with the work of Chantal Mouffe, which I explore later in this chapter: see L’intelletuale come eroe. Piero Gobetti e le culture del Novecento (Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2000), 123, 141. See also Nadia Urbinati, “Introduction: Liberalism as a Theory of Conflict,” in On Liberal Revolution, ed. Nadia Urbinati (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000): xv–lvi. 3. For a cogent restatement of this view, see Norberto Bobbio, Liberalism and Democracy, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (London and New York: Verso, 1990). 4. Ibid., 22. 5. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 34–35. 6. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 7. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 8. For a discussion of these issues, in particular as they concern “communitarian” critiques of liberal individualism, see Shlomo Avineri and Avner de-Shalit, eds. Communitarianism and Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).

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9. My reasoning here follows the criticisms made by Chantal Mouffe. See The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 22–31. 10. For a critique of Western liberalism in this regard, see Anthony Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). 11. See, in particular, Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993). 12. See, in addition to Mouffe’s work previously cited: William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1995) and Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2000); Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox; Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Sheldon S. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” Constellations 1, no. 1 (1994), 11–25; and Quentin Skinner, “A Third Concept of Liberty,” Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2002): 237–68. Also, from a more analytical perspective, see Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict (London: Duckworth, 1999). 13. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “Homer’s Contest,” in his On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Revised Student Edition, 2007), 174–81. 14. Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, 68. 15. A point underscored by Mouffe in her “A Politics Without Adversary,” The Democratic Paradox, 108–28. 16. On the link between liberty and conflict, see Piero Meaglia, “Gobetti e il liberalismo. Sulle nozioni di libertà e di lotta,” Mezzosecolo: materiali di ricerca storica 4 (1980–82), 193–222. 17. Marco Revelli argues that, for Gobetti, conflict is a political value superior to autonomy. See “Gobetti ‘liberal comunista’?” in I dilemmi del liberalsocialismo, ed. Michelangelo Bovero, Virgilio Mura, and Franco Sbarberi (Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1994), 83–84. 18. See Gobetti, “La nostra cultura politica,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (March 8, 1923), SP, 456–76. 19. Gobetti, “Liberali e conservatori,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (March 26, 1922), SP, 277. 20. Gobetti, “Democrazia,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 13, 1924), SP, 677. 21. See Gobetti’s criticism of what he saw as De Ruggiero’s individualistic liberalism, at page 80. 22. See Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1988). 23. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 32. 24. See Chantal Mouffe, ed., The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London and New York: Verso, 1999).

NOTES

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25. For a discussion of conflict in Schmitt, see William Rasch, “Conflict as a Vocation: Carl Schmitt and the Possibility of Politics,” Theory, Culture & Society 17, no. 6 (2000), 1-32. 26. See Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 38. “The political can derive its energy from the most varied human endeavors, from the religious, economic, moral, and other antitheses. It does not describe its own substance, but only the intensity of an association or disassociation of human beings whose motives can be religious, national (in the ethnic or cultural sense), economic, or of another kind and can effect at different times different coalitions and separations.” 27. Piero to Ada in Gobetti and Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza. Lettere 1918– 1926, ed. Ersilia A. Perona (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), 449. 28. Antonio Gramsci, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” (SeptemberNovember 1926), in Gramsci: Pre-Prison Writings, ed. Richard Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 335. 29. For his classic statement on “positive” and “negative” liberty, see Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118-72. 30. See Charles Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?” in The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, ed. Alan Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 175-93. 31. Meaglia, “Gobetti e il liberalismo.” 32. This argument is pursued by Skinner in a number of works spanning several years, each with a different context in mind. See, inter alia, “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives,” in Philosophy in History, ed. J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 193-221; “The Paradoxes of Political Liberty,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Value 7 (1986): 225–50; Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and “A Third Concept of Liberty.” 33. Skinner, “A Third Concept of Liberty,” 250. 34. Ibid., 256–61. 35. Gobetti, “Il liberalismo di L. Einaudi,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 23, 1922), SP, 331–32. On Gobetti’s conception of the state, see Chapter 4. 36. Gobetti, “Il liberalism e le masse [I],” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 10, 1923), SP, 477–78. 37. To Gray, for instance, liberalism should be regarded as a modus vivendi rather than a superior, rational form of government. See Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism. 38. See Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 103–4. 39. Ibid., 67–69. 40. Gobetti, “Un conservatore galantuomo,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 29, 1924), SP, 657. 41. See Gobetti, “Il liberalismo in Italia,” La Rivoluzione Liberale (May 15, 1923). 42. Meaglia, “Gobetti e il liberalismo,” 214. 43. Ibid., 219.

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44. See Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: HarperPerennial, 1975). 45. Indeed, at one point, Gobetti claimed that for a liberal, the democratic state cannot be equated with an electoral system since a state is formed through an aristocracy derived from the dialectic of liberatory struggle in society. See Piero Gobetti, “Esperienze liberale [IV],” La Rivoluzione Liberale (April 23, 1922), SP, 338–42. 46. See David Held’s critique in Models of Democracy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 194–96. 47. See Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 2–5. 48. This distinction between liberalism and democracy is noted by Bobbio in Liberalism and Democracy. 49. See C. B. Macpherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 50. Bobbio, Saggi sulla scienza politica in Italia, 230. 51. I have examined Gramsci’s “politics of consent” in Gramsci’s Political Analysis. A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1998), chap. 3. 52. Interestingly, Mouffe’s work aims to combine both a theory of democratic equality (conceptualized via a neo-Gramscian theory of hegemony) and a version of agonistic pluralism, which I have associated with Gobetti. Her important interpretation of Gramsci can be found in “Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci,” in Gramsci and Marxist Theory, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 168-204. 53. See David D. Roberts, “Frustrated Liberals: De Ruggiero, Gobetti, and the Challenge of Socialism,” Canadian Journal of History 17 (1982): 59–86.

Afterword 1. For an insightful discussion of one recent example of “anti-politics” in Italy, see Paul Ginsborg, Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2005). 2. See, for example, Paolo Flores d’Arcais’s enthusiastic essay, “Gobetti, liberale del futuro,” in the single volume reprint of Piero Gobetti, La Rivoluzione Liberale. Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), vii-xxxii.

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Index

Acerbo Law, 104 Actualism, 41, 45 agonism Gobetti and, 7, 11, 119, 136–37, 142–43, 146–47, 149, 151, 152–53, 189 n2 political philosophy and, 7, 11, 140–41, 146–47, 148, 149, 150, 155 Albertoni, Luigi, 78 Alfieri, Vittorio, 73 Allason, Barbara, 47 Amendola, Giorgio, 123 Amendola, Giovanni, 21, 78, 100–102, 105, 106, 108, 111, 123, 143, 178 n81 AMMA, 50, 170 n3 anarchists, 53 Ansaldo, Giovanni, 72 Ansaldo Steelworks, 51 anti-fascism early Italian, 2, 101, 104, 106–7, 111 Gobetti’s, 10, 89–90, 97, 106–7, 108 later Italian, 2, 11, 109, 111, 120–26, 128–29, 133 See also Aventine Secession Austrian-Hungary, 28 Avanti!, 23, 28 Aventine Secession, 104–8 azionisti, 111, 120, 124, 126, 128 Bagnoli, Paolo, 123, 129 Banca Commerciale Italiana, 50 Baretti, 104, 108, 176 n45, 182 n85 Bellamy, Richard, 131 Bentham, Jeremy, 5

Berlin, Isaiah, 143–44 biennio rosso, 49, 64, 94 Bitzer, Lloyd, 9, 160 n19 Bobbio, Norberto, 2, 11, 25, 111, 124, 129–32, 133, 137, 151, 159 n3, 173 n66, 189 n93 Boccioni, Umberto, 92 Bologna, 94 Bolsheviks/ism, 1, 44, 45, 52, 53, 58–59, 62, 65, 78, 166 n35 Bordiga, Amadeo, 39, 54, 57, 65–66, 99, 113 Bulgaria, 30 Burzio, Filippo, 71, 72 Calogero, Guido, 11, 124–25 Capitini, Aldo, 124–25 Caporetto, 29 Caramella, Santino, 175 n24 Catholic Church, 14, 16, 24, 70, 72, 116, 146 Catholic parliamentarians, 19, 28, 39, 43, 90 See also Italian Popular Party (Partito populare italiano, or PPI) Cavour, Count Camillo, 14, 32 Christian Democrats, 125, 129, 130 Christianity, 73, 124, 125 citizenship, 11, 14, 18, 69, 137, 139, 147, 149–50, 153 civic republicanism, 136 civil society, 16–17, 18 Cold War, 129, 157 Cole, G. D. H., 121 combattentismo, 34, 38, 93, 165 n15

204

INDEX

Communist Manifesto, 115 Communist Party of Italy (Partito comunista d’italia, or PCdI), 57, 65, 70, 96, 99, 105, 113, 120, 126, 131 communists/ism, 1, 6, 49, 52, 54, 57, 62, 63, 65, 68, 90, 101, 112, 121, 123, 124, 125, 150, 157 Communitarians, 136, 140, 189 n8 conflict, 1, 6–7, 10, 63, 68, 73, 74–77, 78–79, 80, 84, 87, 88, 89, 100, 113, 125, 135–53, 156, 157, 187 n75, 190 n17 Connolly, William E., 140 consensus, 7, 11, 18, 29, 67, 75, 119, 136–37, 138–40, 143, 146, 147–49, 152, 153, 156 Corradini, Enrico, 92 Corriere della sera, 78 Croce, Benedetto, 3, 9, 11, 31, 42, 46, 54, 56, 60, 81, 92, 100, 115, 116, 135, 141, 143, 187 n75 and philosophical idealism, 13–14, 23–27, 35–36, 40, 53, 126–29 and politics, 21, 28, 25–27, 41, 96–97, 103–4, 107, 113–14, 126–29, 131, 147 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 42 de Leon, Daniel, 52 democracy, 4, 8, 11, 28, 52, 54, 81, 84, 85, 91, 127, 135, 139, 156 Antonio Gramsci and, 119 Carlo Rosselli and, 121 elite, 83–84, 148–49, 153 Giovanni Amendola and, 101–2, 106 Gobetti’s “combative” theory of, 11, 137, 142–43, 146–52, 157 Guido Calogero and, 124 Italian parliamentary, 13, 18, 19, 20, 26, 82–83, 90, 99, 105, 111, 148 Norberto Bobbio and, 129–32 radical, 136, 151, 157 workplace, 49, 51, 52, 73

Democratic League for the Renewal of National Politics, 38, 43 d’Entreves, Alessandro Passerin, 33 Depretis, Agostino, 17 De Ruggiero, Guido, 44, 80, 143, 169 n78, 177 n50 Diario partigiano (Partisan Diary), 126 dicianovismo (1919-ism), 38, 42 Dorso, Guido, 178 n81 Dworkin, Ronald, 139 Einaudi, Luigi, 10, 33, 43, 63, 68, 77–80, 104, 127, 141, 176 n45 elections 1919, 42–43, 50, 93 1921, 95 1924, 105 Elementi di scienza politica, 81, 82–83, 84, 177 n53, 177 n58 elite(s), 1, 10, 11, 37, 38, 39, 43, 45, 64, 66, 67, 68, 71, 84–85, 94, 149, 151, 157 See also ruling class elitism, 34, 71, 81–86, 148–49, 153 See also ruling class Emory, Luigi, 108 Energie Nove, 34–38, 46, 47, 48, 56, 58, 67, 68, 165 n13, 166 n36 Engels, Friedrich, 115 England, 71 equality, 4, 11, 26, 149, 152 factory councils, 1, 49, 50, 51–55, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 81, 141, 150 factory occupations (September 1920), 9, 48, 49, 50–55, 56, 58, 65, 78, 171 n26 Fasci italiani di combattimento (Italian Combat Groups), 39, 93, 122 fascism, 1, 2, 3, 6, 10, 13, 14, 26, 27, 30, 44, 86, 87, 89–109, 113, 118, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 141, 142–43, 160 n23, 178 n2, 178 n3, 179 n5, 179 n6, 180 n39

INDEX

agrarian, 94–95 Croce and, 96–97, 100, 103–4, 107, 126–29, 147 Gobetti’s interpretation of, 75, 89–90, 97–99, 100, 107, 123, 125 origins of, 18, 39, 90–93, 167n48 seizure of power, 90–96 urban, 94 See also Mussolini; squadri Fascist Grand Council, 99 Fascist Party, 100 Femia, Joseph V., 83 Ferrara, 94 Fiat, 33, 51, 61, 106 FIOM, 50, 65, 170 n2 First World War, 1, 3, 8, 13, 19, 27–29, 31, 32, 91, 135 Fiume, 38, 42 Florence, 94 Foa, Vittorio, 124 Formentini, Ubaldo, 71, 72 Fortunato, Giustino, 114 foundationalism anti-, 7, 11 rational, 8, 135–36, 139 France, 15, 16, 17, 28, 32, 71, 108, 120, 121 Freeden, Michael, 4 French Revolution, 29, 32, 70 Futurists, 28, 92, 93 general strike, 59–60 Gentile, Giovanni, 3, 25, 53, 54, 60, 100, 124, 168 n60, 168 n62 and fascism, 100, 103–4 idealist philosophy of, 40–41 on liberalism, 44, 100 on the “ethical state,” 41, 100, 168 n57 German Social Democratic Party (SPD), 19 Germany, 28, 30, 58, 90 Gervasoni, Marco, 88, 189 n2 Ginzburg, Leone, 120

205

Giolitti, Giovanni, 18–21, 22, 23, 28, 30, 32, 50, 65, 75, 98, 162 n18, 181 n48 giolittismo,21, 23, 28, 35, 39, 44, 92, 98 Giretti, E., 63 Giustizia e libertá (Justice and Liberty), 120, 122, 129 Gobetti, Ada (née Prospero), 46, 55, 59, 80, 81, 85, 108, 126, 183 n118 Gobetti, Paolo, 108 Gramsci, Antonio, 2, 3, 4, 11, 16, 29, 33, 36, 39, 40, 41, 49–66, 70, 71, 82, 99, 106, 108, 111, 132, 143, 148, 167 n52, 169 n65, 174 n78, 187 n75, 189 n93, 192 n52 and Gobetti, 9–10, 47, 55–64, 83, 92, 112–20, 168 n62, 172 n35, 173 n66, 184 n12 and the communist party, 55, 65–66, 118–19, 152 and the factory councils, 51–55, 63–64, 66, 118, 150 and the Russian Revolution, 53–54 on “hegemony,” 112–13, 115–20, 151–52 on Marx/Marxism, 54, 113 on the “ethical state,” 61, 145 See also Ordine Nuovo; ordinovisti; Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere) Gray, John, 140, 191 n37 Great Britain, 5, 6, 17, 28, 122 Green, T. H., 5 Hegel, G. W. F., 24, 25, 80 hegemony, 9, 13, 16, 24, 82, 112, 115, 151, 192 n52 historicism, 24–27, 126–29, 147 Historic Left, 17–18 Historic Right (destra storica), 17, 44 Hobhouse, L. T., 5 Hobsbawm, Eric, 29, 34 humanism, 24 Hungary, 30

206

INDEX

idealism liberal, 6 philosophical, 9, 14, 21, 24–27, 31, 40–42, 45, 75, 100, 126 See also Croce, Benedetto; Gentile, Giovanni ideology, 4, 25–26, 76, 125, 136, 152, 156 Industrial Workers of the World, 52 intellectual(s), 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 11, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 41, 43, 46, 57, 59, 68, 81–82, 86–88, 113–16, 118–19, 120, 124, 126, 128, 130–32, 133, 135, 165 n9, 177 n55 interventionism, 28, 38, 91–92, 101 interventionist crisis, 28, 64, 164 n59 Itala, 51 Italian Liberal Party, 21 Italian Nationalist Association, 92 Italian Popular Party (Partito populare italiano, or PPI), 39, 43, 70, 96, 105, 107 Italian Socialist Party (Partito socialista italiano, or PSI), 19–20, 22, 23, 28, 39–40, 43, 65, 66, 95, 96, 98, 104, 105, 107, 126, 131 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 138 Kautsky, Karl, 19 Kelsen, Hans, 131 Labriola, Antonio, 54 La Malfa, Ugo, 124 Lenin, Vladmir Ilych, 43, 45, 54, 58, 65, 119, 143, 151 Leonardo, 27 Levi, Carlo, 2, 46–47, 120, 124 liberalism, 1–11 communist, 62–64 European, 5, 138 Italian, 1, 8, 13, 27, 32, 43–46, 76, 141–42 revolutionary, 1, 31, 46, 68, 71, 85, 86–88, 89, 97, 120, 133, 141, 152

liberals “Classical” English, 5, 78, 79, 80 European, 1, 5 New, 5–6 liberal-socialism (liberalsocialismo), 6, 11, 124–25, 128 liberty “positive” and “negative,” 4–5, 80, 143–46 Lipari, 120, 122 Locke, John, 5 Lyon Theses, 113 Lyttelton, Adrian, 95 Machiavelli, Niccoló, 25, 70, 81, 118, 145 Macpherson, C. B., 150 Malaparte, Curzio, 103 Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, 103–4 Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals, 103–4 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 92, 103 Marx, Karl, 25, 52, 54, 78, 115 Marxism, 6, 23, 24–25, 36, 45, 49, 54, 56, 59, 60, 62, 63, 71–72, 78, 92, 113, 115, 117, 118, 121, 122, 127, 130, 131 Masaryk, Thomas, 116 Matteotti, Giacomo, 105, 107, 149 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 13, 81, 104 Meaglia, Piero, 148 Mezzogiorno, 15 Mill, John Stuart, 75, 121, 137 Missiroli, Mario, 43–45, 178 n81 Mondo, 106 Montale, Eugenio, 120, 178 n81 Mosca, Gaetano, 10, 33, 43, 68, 81–86, 104, 131, 148, 177 n61, 177 n63 Mouffe, Chantal, 139–40, 142, 148, 149–50, 189 n2, 192 n52 Mussolini, Benito, 2, 10–11, 13, 23, 28, 39, 42, 43, 75, 88, 89, 91–96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 105, 106, 107,

INDEX

108, 111, 122, 124, 178 n4, 179 n5, 181 n48 myth, 50, 58, 59–60, 61, 62, 64, 66, 76, 77, 78, 80, 83, 93, 100, 121, 146, 148, 151, 172–73 n49 nationalism, 27, 14, 38–39, 43, 91–92, 167 n46 Nazis/ism, 90, 142 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 27, 35, 140 On Liberty, 75, 137 See also Mill, John Stuart Ordine Nuovo, 40, 41, 42, 49, 51–55, 56, 57, 61, 63, 64, 66, 71, 114, 123 ordinovisti, 40, 42, 52, 54, 56, 60, 64, 65, 114 Papini, Giovanni, 27, 42, 92 paradiastole, 10 Paradosso dello spirito russo (Paradox of the Russian Spirit), 59, 108 Pareto, Vilfredo, 82, 84, 131 Paris, 108 Paris, Roberto, 175 n22 Parri, Feruccio, 125 Partito d’Azione (Action Party), 11, 120, 124–26, 129, 132 Pelloux, General, 19 Perelman, Chaïm, 9 Perona, Ersilia Alessandrone, 133 Perrone group, 50 Piedmont, 73 Pirandello, Luigi, 103 political, concept of the, 7, 139 Popolo d’Italia, 92 positivism, 21, 22–23, 24, 26, 32, 36, 59, 116 Po Valley, 94 Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 3, 27, 35, 42, 46, 47, 56, 57, 92, 102, 106, 108, 135, 166 n25, 172 n35, 178 n81 Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere), 112–13, 115–20, 177 n63 See also Gramsci, Antonio

207

Protestantism/Reformation, 72, 73, 116–17, 175 n22 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 60 Ranciére, Jacques, 140 Rawls, John, 138, 139 Reflections on Violence, 59 Revelli, Marco, 190 n17 revolutionary party, 54–55, 66 rhetoric, 4–5 Gobetti’s, 8–12, 86–8, 97, 99, 111, 132–33, 138, 155 Risorgimento, 14, 27, 32, 48, 63, 68–74, 87, 100, 116, 124 Risorgimento senza eroi (Risorgimento without Heroes), 73, 108 Rivoluzione Liberale (Liberal Revolution), 1, 10, 48, 59, 67–88, 97, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 114, 121, 123, 148, 159 n3, 174 n1, 184 n12 Roberts, David D., 153 Rocco, Alfredo, 92, 103 Rosselli, Carlo, 11, 111, 120–24, 125, 129, 132 Rosselli, Nello, 120 Ruffini, Francesco, 33, 104 ruling class, 9, 10, 17, 21, 28, 30, 67, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 81–85, 148, 151 See also elite(s); elitism Russia, 6, 28, 45–46, 53, 59, 62, 116 Russian Revolution, 30, 45, 48, 49, 53–54, 58–59, 62, 64, 78, 87, 174 n68 Salandra, Antonio, 104 Salvemini, Gaetano, 3, 9, 13, 21–23, 27, 28, 31, 37, 38, 40, 46, 48, 56, 58, 166 n36, 178 n81 Sardinia, 15 Sbarberi, Franco, 64, 118, 174 n78 Schmitt, Carl, 7, 142 Schumpeter, Joseph, 148–49 Second World War, 90, 149, 156 Seton-Watson, Christopher, 38

208

INDEX

Sicily, 15 Skinner, Quentin, 4, 140, 144–45, 191 n32 social contract, 24, 79, 137 socialism, 5, 19, 25, 26, 44, 120, 121, 127, 131, 153 liberal, 121–22 reformist, 36, 45, 59, 63, 70, 92 revolutionary, 4, 10, 43, 45, 49, 59, 62, 68, 82, 90, 91–92, 101, 111, 112, 124, 166 n35 state, 72, 157 Turati’s, 20, 22 See also liberal-socialism Socialismo liberale (Liberal Socialism), 120 Solari, Gioele, 33 Sonnino, Sidney, 18, 19 Sorel, Georges, 43, 50, 53, 54, 59–61, 62, 64, 77, 78, 80, 83, 92, 118, 135, 141, 173 n50 Southern Question (questione meridionale), 22, 57, 58, 113–14, 186 n37 Soviets, 54 Soviet Union, 100, 157 Spriano, Paolo, 48, 51, 104, 170 n9, 186 n36 squadri (squads), 94, 105 state, 25, 142 ethical, 61, 79–80 Gobetti’s views on, 45, 62, 68–70, 79–80 Italian, 9, 10, 13–19, 22–23, 24, 27, 50, 58, 68–74, 130, 141 organic, 10, 52–53, 60, 64, 118

Storia d’Italia (A History of Italy), 127 Sturzo, Don Luigi, 39 syndicalism, 27, 53, 60, 92, 93 Tasca, Angelo, 51, 54–55, 167 n52 Taylor, Charles, 144 Terracini, Umberto, 51 Third International Workers’ Movement, 65 Tilgher, Adriano, 178 n81 Togliatti, Palmiro, 33, 40, 41, 42, 44, 51, 65, 113, 120, 130, 168 n65 transformism (trasformismo), 17, 20–21 Trotsky, Leon, 45 Turati, Filippo, 19–20, 22, 121 Turin, 1, 9, 32–33, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 64, 65, 94, 108, 114, 150, 165 n9, 173 n66 University of, 32–33, 38, 47, 48, 51, 165 n5 Unitá, 22, 37, 38, 58, 68, 106 universalism, 7, 24, 26, 75, 82, 137–39, 146, 147, 149, 156 Vico, Giambattista, 24 Vivarellli, Roberto, 18 Voce, 27, 35, 57, 166 n25 vociani, 164 n58 Weber, Max, 72 Westinghouse, 51 Wilson, President Woodrow, 37, 38 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 148 Wolin, Sheldon, 140

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