Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Giuliano Procacci and nationalism

2010; Routledge; Volume: 15; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1354571x.2010.502393

1469-9583

Stuart Woolf,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Abstract The work and career of the late Giuliano Procacci (1926–2008) is reviewed. One of the few Italian historians of his generation who sought to make his work accessible to a wide educated public, Procacci's historical writing, political commitment and moral conviction were closely connected, while the cosmopolitan and international scope of his work in turn reflected his belief in an ‘inter-dependent world sysetm’. This critical analysis shows how the different strands of Procacci's historical thought came together in the engagement with nationalism that has dominated his later work and especially his deeply researched comparative study of nationalism in history text books written in different coutries of the world since the end of the Cold War. Keywords: Contemporary nationalismhistory text bookseducationthe ‘new democracies’national identitieshistoriographyhistorical writingglobal history Notes 1 The original French edition (Procacci, G. (1967) Histoire des italiens, Paris: Fayard), immediately published in Italian and English, was translated into twenty languages. 2 Benvenuti, F., Bertolissi, S., Gualtieri, R. and Pons, S. (eds) (2008) La passione della storia. Scritti in onore di Giuliano Procacci, Rome: Carocci. 3 Detti, T. and Gozzini, G. (eds) (2001) Ernesto Ragionieri e la storiografia del dopoguerra, Milan: Franco Angeli; Scirocco, G. (2009) ‘Un dialogo non interrotto: Arfé e Salvemini tra storia e politica’, Passato e Presente 77: 57–77. Gastone Manacorda (Manacorda, G. (1992) ‘Bilancio di uno storico’, in Il movimento reale e la coscienza inquieta, Milan: Franco Angeli, pp. 255–73), who was born in 1916, ten years before Procacci, and hence experienced fascism as an adult, testifies to an analogous experience as a young intellectual in the Communist Party. 4 Nicolucci, F. (2008) ‘In ricordo di Giuliano Procacci’, ‘Blog Archive’, http://www.fabionicolucci.it/?p=448 (last accessed 19 December 2009). 5 Procacci, G. (1968) Storia degli italiani, Rome–Bari: Laterza, p. xv. 6 Procacci, G. (1984) Dalla parte dell'Etiopia. L'aggressione italiana vista dai movimenti anticolonialisti d'Asia, d'Africa America, Milan: Feltrinelli. 7 Procacci, G. (1999) Storia del mondo contemporaneo. Da Sarajevo a Hiroschima, Rome: Editori Riuniti, p. 9. 8 Wallerstein, I. (1974) The Modern World-System. Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the World Economy, New York: Academic Press. 9 Procacci, op. cit., note 7. 10 Procacci, G. (1989) Premi Nobel per la pace e guerre mondiali, Milan: Feltrinelli. 11 Procacci, op. cit., note 7, p.11. 12 Ibid., p. 11; Procacci, G. (2005) Carte d'identità. Revisionismi, nazionalismi e fondamentalismi nei manuali di storia, Rome: Carocci, pp. 181–2. 13 Procacci, G. (1952) ‘Marc Bloch’, Belfagor 7(6): 662–75; Procacci, in Procacci, G. (1955) ‘Dal feudalismo al capitalismo. Una discussione storica’, Società 11(1): 123–38, displays the same interests in his discussion of Maurice Dobb's Studies in the Development of Capitalism. Procacci (Procacci, G. (1970) La lotta di classe in Italia agli inizi del secolo XX, Rome: Editori Riuniti) brought together and expanded his major articles published in Studi Storici, 1962 and 1964 and Rivista Storica del Socialismo; Merli, S. (1966), ‘La grande fabbrica e la formazione del proletariato industriale di masse’, Classe, 1(1). 14 Procacci, G. (1965) Studi sulla fortuna di Machiavelli, Rome: Istituto Italiano per l'età moderna e contemporanea. 15 Procacci, op. cit., note 12, p.161. 16 Procacci, op. cit., note 7, p. 10. 17 Procacci, G. (2001) La disfida di Barletta tra storia e romanzo, Milan: Mondadori. The disfida was the story of the successful challenge in 1503, soon after the French and Spanish invasions of the peninsula, of 13 Italian against 13 French cavaliers in Apulia to refute the accusations of Italian cowardice. 18 Procacci (2007) ‘Nazionalismo e questioni della lingua’, Studi Storici 48(3–4): 589–634. 19 Federico, V. (2004) ‘“Insegnare la storia in un mondo globale”. Una riflessione sui manuali di storia a livello internazionale’, Società e Storia 104: 385–9. 20 Procacci, G. (2003) La memoria controversa. Revisionismi, nazionalismi e fondamentalismi nei manuali di storia, Cagliari: AM&D. 21 Saitta, A. (1953–55) Il cammino della civiltà, 3 vols, Firenze: Nuova Italia. 22 Procacci, op. cit., note 12, pp. 9, 179. 23 Ibid., p. 162. 24 Petrungaro, S. (2006) Riscrivere la storia. Il caso della manualistica croata (1918–2000), Aosta: Stylos. The fact that the book has now been translated and published in Zagabria is an encouraging sign. 25 Times Educational Supplement, 18 August 1989, in Nash, G., Crabtree, C. and Dunn, R.E. (2000) History on Trial, New York: Vintage Books, pp. 141–2. 26 Woolf, S. (2007) ‘The changing role of history and of historians over the past half century’, Storia della storiografia 52, 3–29, see p. 26. 27 Procacci, op. cit., in particular, p. 61. 28 Ibid., pp. 68, 73. 29 Ibid., pp. 152–3. 30 Ibid., pp. 92–6. 31 Ibid., pp. 22, 33, 51, 55, 81. 32 Ibid., p. 181.