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The Paradoxes of Post-War Italian Political Thought

2012; Routledge; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01916599.2012.664330

1873-541X

Jan‐Werner Müller,

Communism, Protests, Social Movements

Summary This article examines the complex nature of post-war Italian political thought, stressing the importance of Italy's unusual institutional and historical political arrangements, but also the vibrancy of its political ideologies in this period. In the past it has often been argued that the dysfunctional nature of post-war Italian democracy with its rapidly changing governments, and widespread corruption—which nonetheless coexisted with the one party, the Christian Democrats, being constantly in power—led to the atrophying of political theory in general, and political ideologies in particular. But this picture is strongly disputed here—on the contrary it is argued that Christian Democratic, Left and liberal political ideologies were all complex and interesting. Thus if Christian democracy should ultimately be seen as an 'ideology of transition' which existed to help Catholicism adapt to the parameters of modern mass democracy, and which lacked a thinker of the calibre of Jacques Maritain, it nevertheless contained within it important debates on the role of the state, between such interesting thinkers as Giuseppe Dossetti and Alcide De Gasperi. And if anything, political thinking on the Left in the post-war period was even more complex, with visceral debates within the (large) Communist Party (PCI) over whether to work within the law—between such thinkers as Palmiro Togliatti and the Il Manifesto group. Equally on the more revolutionary Left, there were important debates about how quickly capitalism could be made to collapse through revolutionary action between thinkers such as Raniero Panzieri and his more radical disciples, Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri, while later, due to the general failure of these revolutionary efforts, post-modern thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo sought to abandon grand metaphysical narratives, whilst retaining a commitment to Left of centre political commitments. Finally, although not part of a widespread mass movement, the liberal thought of Norberto Bobbio was also highly interesting and sophisticated—borrowing from Hobbes and Kelsen, he sought to advocate a modest form of liberal democracy which allowed for civilised forms of conflict, and the protection of minorities, and which rejected the contention of Marxists that civil rights could not be distinguished from economic ones. Overall, if normative aspirations in post-war Italian politics were often frustrated in practice, this was certainly not due to any lack of theoretical vibrancy. Keywords: Christian democracyCommunist political theoryGramsciNegriBobbioVattimo Acknowledgements I am indebted to Giovanni Capoccia, Samuel Moyn, Edmund Neill and Gianfranco Poggi for their comments and suggestions; special thanks to Paolo Pombeni, Mario Ricciardi and Nadia Urbinati for their extensive and extremely helpful reactions to an earlier version, and for many useful hints. All mistakes are mine. The section on the Marxisti Schmittiani is adapted from my A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (London, 2003). Notes 1Quoted in Norberto Bobbio, Ideological Profile of Twentieth-Century Italy, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, 1995), 164. 2Norberto Bobbio, A Political Life, edited by Alberto Papuzzi, translated by Allan Cameron (Cambridge, 2002), 159. 3I owe this specific observation—and formulation—to Nadia Urbinati. 4I am indebted to Paolo Pombeni on this point. 5Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley, 1984), 423. 6Of course the Communists did regularly govern in the central regions of Italy—Tuscany, Umbria and Emilia-Romagna—but also in the cities of Rome and Naples, again, a phenomenon without parallel anywhere else in Western Europe. For the modello consociativo see Mariuccia Salvati, 'Behind the Cold War: Rethinking the Left, the State and Civil Society in Italy (1940s–1970s)', Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 8 (2003), 556–77. 7Tobias Abse, 'Italy: A New Agenda', in Mapping the West European Left, edited by Perry Anderson and Patrick Camiller (London, 1994), 189. 8Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of '68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956-1976 (Oxford, 2007), 111. 9Antonio Negri, Du retour: Abécédaire autobiographique (Paris, 2002). 11Michael Hardt, 'Introduction: Laboratory Italy', in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, MN, 1996), 1. 10Donatella della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence and the State: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany (New York, 1995). 12Bobbio, Ideological Profile, 159. 13Perry Anderson, 'The Affinities of Norberto Bobbio', New Left Review, 170 (1988). As in other European contexts, the semantics of liberalism are complex, especially, but not only after 1945: Bobbio was clearly seen as a man of the Left, and the designation 'liberal' is one that makes more sense from a contemporary American or, at most, British perspective; in post-war Italy itself, liberalism was usually perceived as conservative or at least as simply advocacy of the free market, and 'liberalism' for many on the Left was a dirty word (though not nearly as dirty as 'conservative', which was wholly rejected by the Christian Democrats). Last but not least—and just to complicate matters further—liberalism could also more plausibly than anywhere else be seen as having been complicit with fascism: after all, Gentile called himself a liberal and for a while presented fascism as a form of liberalism. Finally, to get a sense of the complicated semantics of liberalism in the present, one only need puzzle over the remainders of the Radical party which now calls itself a 'movimento liberale, liberista, libertario'. Thanks to Paolo Pombeni and Mario Ricciardi on this point. For the relationship between contemporary Italian political thought and English-language analytic liberal theory, see Mario Ricciardi, 'Political Philosophy across the Atlantic: A Difficult Relationship?', Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 10 (2005), 59–77. For the question of how to think about liberalism and liberalisation in Western Europe more generally after 1945, see Mark Lilla, 'The Other Velvet Revolution: Continental Liberalism and its Discontents', Daedalus, 123 (1994), 129–57. 14In the same vein, the 1948 constitution contained what many perceived as unfulfilled progressive promises and what Paul Ginsborg has called 'an official morality – democratic, anti-fascist, constitutional, European'; thus the PCI actually became one of its major advocates, appearing as significantly more liberal than Communist parties elsewhere in Western Europe. See Paul Ginsborg, 'Explaining Italy's Crisis', in The New Italian Republic: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to Berlusconi, edited by Stephen Gundle and Simon Parker (London, 1996), 24. 15Given current debates about the limits and possibilities of 'Muslim Democracy' (in analogy with Christian Democracy), the question of how religious ideas were adapted to particular national politics in particular historical circumstances in fact turns out to be highly relevant. On this topic see for instance Vali Nasr, 'The Rise of "Muslim Democracy"', The Journal of Democracy, 16 (2005), 13–27. 16Richard Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory: Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present (Cambridge, 1987). 17Mario Ricciardi, 'Rawls in Italy', European Journal of Political Theory, 1 (2002), 229–41. 18Karl Dietrich Bracher, The Age of Ideologies: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century, translated by Ewald Osers (New York, 1984). 19Togliatti, for instance, claimed that 'the parties constitute democracy in its organizational process'. 20Salvati, 'Behind the Cold War'. 21Witness for instance Bobbio claiming: 'One cannot cultivate political philosophy without trying to understand what is beyond politics, or without venturing into the non-political sphere, and attempting to establish the boundaries between the political and the non-political'. Norberto Bobbio, In Praise of Meekness: Essays on Ethics and Politics, translated by Teresa Chataway (Cambridge, 2000), 28. 22My translation. 23Mario Caciagli, 'Christian Democracy', in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought, edited by Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (Cambridge), 171–72. 24John Pollard, 'Italy', in Political Catholicism in Europe, 1918-1965, edited by Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway (Oxford, 1996), 69–96. See also Giorgio Galli, Storia della Democrazia Cristiana (Rome, 1978). 25Luigi Sturzo, 'The Philosophic Background of Christian Democracy', The Review of Politics, 9 (1947), 3–15. 26Sturzo, 'Philosophic Background'. Also important were student organisations like the Federazione universitaria cattolica italiana (FUCI), from which many post-war DC leaders were to emerge. 27On the formation of de Gasperi's political thought, especially through his experiences in the Habsburg Empire, see Paolo Pombeni, Il primo De Gasperi. La formazione di un leader politico 1881–1918 (Bologna, 2007). 29Jacques Maritain, Christianity and Democracy (New York, 1944), 37. 28On Maritain's personal and intellectual trajectory see in particular Bernard Doering, Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals (Notre Dame, 1983); Jean-Luc Barré, Jacques et Rai sa Maritain: les mendiants du Ciel: biographies croiseìes (Paris, 1995). 30Maritain quoted in Sergio Belardinelli, 'Die politische Philosophie des christlichen Personalismus', in Politische Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Karl Graf Ballestrem and Henning Ottmann (Munich, 1990). 31De Gasperi was by no means a philosopher, but some of his main ideological objectives are discussed in Alcide de Gasperi, Idee sulla Democrazia Cristiana, edited by Nicola Guiso (Rome, 1974). 32Paolo Acanfora, 'Myths and the Political Use of Religion in Christian Democratic Culture', Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 12 (2007), 312. 33Of course personalism was notoriously vague both as philosophy and as politics. 34Quoted in Paolo Pombeni, 'Anti-Liberalism and the Liberal Legacy in Postwar European Constitutionalism: Considerations on Some Case Studies', European Journal of Political Theory, 7 (2008), 31–44. On Maritain's influence in general, see Paolo Pombeni, Il gruppo dossettiano e la fondazione della democrazia italiana (1938-1948) (Bologna, 1979), 51–55. 35Carlo Masala, 'Born for Government: The Democrazia Cristiana in Italy', in Christian Democracy in Europe since 1945, edited by Michael Gehler and Wolfram Kaiser, (London, 2004), 104. 36Masala, 'Born for Government', in Christian Democracy in Europe, edited by Gehler and Kaiser, 107. 37The DC early on shelved plans for a corporatist second chamber. See Klaus von Beyme, Das politische System Italiens (Stuttgart, 1970), 25. 38Luciano Canfora, Democracy in Europe: A History of an Ideology, translated by Simon Jones (Malden, MA, 2006), 182–84. 39See Paolo Pombeni, 'Individuo/persona nella Costituzione italiana. Il contributo del dossettismo', Parole Chiave, 10/11 (1996), 197–218. 40Gerd-Rainer Horn, 'Left Catholicism in Western Europe in the 1940s', in Left Catholicism: Catholics and Society in Western Europe at the Point of Liberation, edited by Gerd-Rainer Horn and Emmanuel Gerard (Leuven, 2001), 13–44. 41Quoted by Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy 1943–1980 (London, 1990), 76–77. 42Luigi Sturzo, 'Has Fascism Ended With Mussolini?', Review of Politics, 7 (1945), 306–15 (309). 43His ideals, however, lived on in the corrente of Iniziativa Democratica and then the corrente Base. 44Masala, 'Born for Government', in Christian Democracy in Europe, edited by Gehler and Kaiser, 109. 45Steven F. White, 'Christian Democracy or Pacellian Populism? Rival Forms of Postwar Italian Catholicism', in European Christian Democracy: Historical Legacies and Comparative Perspectives, edited by Thomas Kselman and Joseph A. Buttigieg (Notre Dame, 2003), 199–227. 46Caciagli, 'Christian Democracy', in Twentieth-Century Political Thought, edited by Ball and Bellamy, 177. 47Quoted in Acanfora, 'Myths and Political Use of Religion', 326. 48Paolo Pombeni, 'The Ideology of Christian Democracy', Journal of Political Ideologies, 5 (2000), 289–300. 49I leave aside here some of the thinkers who continued in a more Catholic-integralist vein—the important work of Augusto Del Noce in particular. 50Alexander De Grand, The Italian Left in the Twentieth Century: A History of the Socialist and Communist Parties (Bloomington, IN, 1989), 100–16. 53Bobbio, Ideological Profile, 166. 51Richard Drake, Apostles and Agitators: Italy's Marxist Revolutionary Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 206–07. 52Carl Boggs, The Socialist Tradition: From Crisis to Decline (New York, 1995), 119. 54There was, however, also extensive planning for the case of the party being outlawed; moreover, the PCI received significant secret subsidies from the Soviet Union annually. See Robert Service, Comrades! A History of World Communism (New York, 2007), 265–66. 55Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1996), 301–02. 56Horn, The Spirit of '68, 115–16. 57See Lucio Magri, 'Problems of the Marxist Theory of the Revolutionary Party', New Left Review, 60 (1970). See also Rossanda's engaging memoir; Rossana Rossanda, La Ragazza del secolo scorso (Turin, 2007). 58Jay, Marxism and Totality, 427. 59Claudio Fogu, 'Italiani brava gente: The Legacy of Fascist Historical Culture on Italian Politics of Memory', in The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, edited by Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fogu (Durham, 2006), 156. 60Richard Drake, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy (Bloomington, IN, 1989), 40. 61Charles S. Maier, 'The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic Policy after World War II', International Organization, 31 (1977), 607–33. 62Drake, The Revolutionary Mystique, 46. 63Bobbio, Ideological Profile, 190–91. 64For the Italian reception of Schmitt—and the Marxisti Schmittiani in particular—see Ilse Staff, Staatsdenken im Italien des 20. Jahrhunderts: Ein Beitrag zur Carl Schmitt-Rezeption (Baden-Baden, 1991); and Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (London, 2003), 177–80. 65Staff, Staatsdenken im Italien, 18; Mario Tronti, 'Su Schmitt. "Le categorie del politico"', in Sull'autonomia del politico (Milan, 1977). 66Staff, Staatsdenken im Italien, 197. 67In his obituary of Schmitt in the Italian Communist newspaper, Tronti essentially argued that he wanted to be for Schmitt what Marx had been for Hegel. See Mario Tronti, 'Dentro il Leviatano', L'Unità, 24 April 1985. 68Staff, Staatsdenken im Italien, 200. 69Enrico Berlinguer, AusteritaÌ, occasione per trasformare l'Italia (Rome, 1977). 70Abse, 'Italy: A New Agenda', in Mapping the West European Left, edited by Anderson and Camiller, 205. 72Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, The Future of Religion, edited by Santiago Zabala (New York, 2005), 45–46. 71See in particular the collection Il pensiero debole, edited by Pier Aldo Rovatti and Gianni Vattimo (Milan, 1983). 73Santiago Zabala, '"Weak Thought" and the Reduction of Violence: A Dialogue with Gianni Vattimo', Common Knowledge, 8 (2002), 452–63. 74Adelino Zanini, 'Weak Thought between Being and Difference', in Radical Thought in Italy, edited by Virno and Hardt, 54. 75Richard Rorty, 'Heideggerianism and Leftist Politics', in Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo, edited by Santiago Zabala (Montreal, 2007), 149. 76Ginsborg, 'Explaining Italy's Crisis', in The New Italian Republic, edited by Gundle and Parker, 24. 81Bobbio, A Political Life, 41. 77Bobbio, A Political Life, 12. 78For his political thought see Carlo Rosselli, Liberal Socialism, edited by Nadia Urbinati, translated by William McCuaig (Princeton, 1994). 79Nadia Urbinati, 'Introduction: Another Socialism', in Rosselli, Liberal Socialism, xix. For the classic Italian debate on this see Benedetto Croce and Luigi Einaudi, Liberismo e Liberalismo (Milan, 1988). 80Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory, 141–42. 84Quoted in Corina Yturbe, 'On Norberto Bobbio's Theory of Democracy', Political Theory, 25 (1997), 377–400 (385). 82Nadia Urbinati, 'The Importance of Norberto Bobbio', Dissent, 51 (2004), 79. As Bobbio observed in his memoirs: 'Curiously, liberal-socialism, which was a philosophical construct, was embodied in what was supposed to be a party of "action"'. See Bobbio, A Political Life, 41. 83An even more pronounced embrace of il liberalismo di matrice anglosassone, especially of the American experience, can be found in the work of Nicola Matteucci, one of the founders of Il Mulino. See in particular Nicola Matteucci, Il liberalismo in un mondo in trasformazione (1972). 85Norberto Bobbio and Danilo Zolo, 'Hans Kelsen, the Theory of Law and the International System: A Talk', European Journal of International Law, 9 (1998), 355–67. 86On the following, see Nadia Urbinati, 'Liberalism in the Cold War: Norberto Bobbio and the Dialogue with the PCI', Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 8 (2003), 578–603. 87Galvano Della Volpe, 'Comunismo e democrazia moderna', Nuovi Argomenti, 7 (1954). 88Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory, 151. 89See also in particular Norberto Bobbio, Which Socialism? Marxism, Socialism and Democracy, edited by Richard Bellamy, translated by Roger Griffin (Cambridge, 1987). Which Socialism? includes a response by Negri, who always maintained that there was a Marxist theory of the state but that it could not be found through exegesis of Marx's writings; rather, it had to be constructed for the present in Marx's spirit. 91Norberto Bobbio, The Future of Democracy: A Defence of the Rules of the Game, edited by Richard Bellamy, translated by Roger Griffin (Cambridge, 1987), 21–22. 90Bobbio, A Political Life, 160. 92Quoted by Urbinati, 'Liberalism in the Cold War', 586. 93Vincenzo Ferrari, 'The Firm Subtleties of a Philosopher in "Everlasting Doubt": Remembering Norberto Bobbio', Journal of Law and Society, 31 (2004), 578–91 (580). 94Bobbio, In Praise of Meekness. 95On Berlin's and Aron's liberalism see Jan-Werner Müller, 'Fear and Freedom: On "Cold War Liberalism"', European Journal of Political Theory, 7 (2008), 45–64. 96Urbinati, 'Liberalism in the Cold War', 584. 97See also Francesco Fistetti, 'La crise du marxisme en Italie: 1980-2005: Esquisse d'une histoire des intellectuels', Cités, 32 (2007), 159–83. 98Antonio Negri, 'Constituent Republic', in Radical Thought in Italy, edited by Virno and Hardt, 214. 99Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (Minneapolis, MN, 1994). 100Danilo Zolo, Democracy and Complexity: A Realist Approach (Cambridge, 1992). See also Danilo Zolo, 'Complessità, potere, democrazia', in Niklas Luhmann, Potere e complessità sociale, translated by Reinhardt Schmidt and Danilo Zolo (Milan, 1979). 101Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory. 102For reasons of space I have had to omit here a discussion of the one of the most interesting right-wing thinkers—one-time Lega Nord chief ideologue Gianfranco Miglio. I provide a brief analysis of his thought in the chapter on the New European Right in A Dangerous Mind.