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Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism 1830-1920

2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: CXXV; Issue: 514 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ehr/ceq126

1477-4534

Matthew Kelly,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

This collection has two main aims and this review will consider them separately. The first is to demonstrate that Giuseppe Mazzini's political thought was expressly internationalist or global in its intended consequences. As the editors make clear, they wish to see Mazzini's legacy wrested from right-wing Italian nationalists, and Nadia Urbinati's opening essay, which explains how Mazzini fits in a Kantian tradition in which the purpose of politics is ‘perpetual peace’, lays down a crucial ideological marker. Urbinati argues that Mazzini's thinking about nation should be distinguished from nationalism, for he advocated a system of government based on nationality, a creed of duty towards others, including the members of other nations, which could only be fulfilled through democratic political structures. As such, the true patriot must submit himself not merely to the interests of his nation but to an internationalist idea of nation itself. Maurizio Isabella argues that, although Mazzini believed that liberal interventionism was legitimate, he did not advocate the creation of international institutions or codes of law. Instead, as an ethical cosmopolitan, Mazzini believed that ‘peace and international stability would result from the virtue inherent in the domestic political life of the European nations once they were blessed with democratic and republican institutions’. To facilitate the emergence of a world of nations, Alberto Mario Banti and Simon Levis Sullam show in essays that usefully extract sizeable quotations from Mazzini's colossal œuvre, was to accelerate the fulfilment of God's intention. Mazzinianism, then, was a religious creed and not, as interpreted by Cardinal Cullen of the Irish Catholic Church—here scrutinised by Colin Barr—a secularising ideology. What Mazzini emphatically opposed, however, was papal despotism and the superstitious servitude that sustained it. At the same time, he rejected anticlericalism, regarding it as a dangerous fanaticism, urging instead that the priests become a part of ‘the people’, thereby restoring the church to its true self. God might rule in heaven, he argued, but only through the agency of ‘the people’—sacralised in Mazzinian discourse—could God's intentions be realised. In rich and complementary essays, Eugenio Biagini and Christopher Duggan explore the appeal of Mazzini's ‘Protestantism’ to English nonconformists—those men and women who, in Biagini's phrase, ‘regarded life as a pilgrimage of duty’. Radical Dissenters, Biagini argues, were better placed to develop a full understanding of Mazzini's ideas than were his Italian Catholic compatriots; equally striking is Duggan's observation that, to British enthusiasts, Mazzini ‘seemed almost the antithesis of the conventional Italian’, possessing ‘essentially Evangelical Protestant characteristics’: he was quiet, earnest, moralistic, austere in his habits, dutiful and charitable. Mazzinian ideas were made more attractive to British liberals by Mazzini the man.