Abstract
Reviewed by: Enrico Dal Lago, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
Italy and modernity have always been in an ambiguous relationship for scholars and intellectuals. Since its beginnings and as a unified and independent nation, Italy did not seem to fit the paradigm of modernity that characterized Western Europe. Italians have been routinely accused, especially by Anglophone scholars and commentators, of having been slow at constructing a centralized nation-state and a parliamentary system, at industrializing, and at creating a vocal and influential civil society – in other words, at modernizing the same way England, France and Germany have. This has been particularly the case with regard to the south of Italy, where all the original Italian sins and blocs against modernization have been taken to explain a persistent economic backwardness and widespread corruption and crime. To be sure, since the 1980s, a vigorous new tradition of southern Italian scholarship exemplified by the work of Piero Bevilacqua and Salvatore Lupo, among others, has rejected the teleological premises of the paradigm of ‘modernization without development’ – i.e., southern Italy’s supposed peculiar and incomplete path to modernity, which has placed the region at odds with the West. Importantly, these scholars have specifically rejected the practice of biased comparisons with commonly acknowledged paradigmatic cases of modernization, and have successfully argued in favour of analysing modern southern Italian history in its own right. Even in not referring specifically to this important antecedent, with Italian Modernities, Rosario Forlenza and Bjorn Thomassen have begun, in many ways, a similar ‘paradigm shift’ in relation to Italy as a whole. They have also provided an original contribution to the never-ending debate on the relationship between Italy and modernity.
In eight dense sections, framed by introductory and concluding chapters, Forlenza and Thomassen have recounted the main themes running through modern Italian history from post-unification to the present, summarizing admirably the most important intellectual debates, and showing how every current of thinkers effectively created an original tradition of thought, at once specifically Italian and modern. Each of these intellectual traditions sought, in its own original way, to insert Italian history and culture within the context of a specific path to modernity, and, at the same time, respond in the most effective way to the particular challenges posed by the different historical periods in which they operated. Thus, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Liberal philosophers such as Benedetto Croce, on one hand, and Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, on the other hand, together with a number of important Catholic intellectuals, all sought to provide different resolutions to the conundrum represented by the relationship between Italy and the modern world. In the process, they elaborated original and enduring interpretations of modernity which were specifically rooted in Italian history and culture, but which could also provide alternatives to the now prevalent paradigm of western modernization. In this perspective, even the current growing scholarship on ‘Fascist modernities’ appears as a body of works focused on only one of a number of competing ‘visions’ originally put forward by Italian intellectuals – in this case with a prominent role played by Fascist premier philosopher Giovanni Gentile. In different ways, all these ‘visions’ have emphasized both the uniqueness of Italian history and culture and also the universality of their alternative paths to modernity.
One of the striking features of Florenza’s and Thomassen’s reassessment of Italian intellectual history in the past one hundred and fifty years is the continuous reference to the Risorgimento and the period that led to Italian national unification. In fact, both in its actual historical features and in its mythical interpretations, the Risorgimento provided always an important terrain of confrontation among the different and competing ‘visions’ of Italian modernity shown in the book under review. This has continued to be a recurrent theme even in more recent times, as alternating appropriations and fierce criticisms of both the real and imagined circumstances, protagonists, and legacies of the period of Italian national unification have continuously succeeded one another, from the 1943–1945 Civil War through the First and Second Republics, and down to the Presidencies of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and Giorgio Napolitano. In sum, to quote Forlenza and Thomassen, Italian intellectuals have made ‘repeated attempts … to articulate a culture-specific way to the modern’ through ‘constant negotiation over nationhood’; in the process, they created alternative and competing paths to modernity ‘of lasting consequence and importance’, far beyond Italian history and culture (247). Forlenza and Thomassen’s study is an important contribution, which will be of immense benefit to both historians and social and political analysts of modern and contemporary Italy.