Academic literature on the topic 'Italy; political history and theory; 1796'

- Italian counter-revolutionary literature (1789-1799) analyzes Luciano Guerci's recent book (A spectacle never seen again in the world. The French Revolution as a unique, upside down event, for Italian counter-revolutionary writers 1789-1799, Turin, 2008). This is the first analytical study of the major texts, which display common elements. The Revolution is seen by these Italian writers as a unique historical phenomenon and interpreted as a complete overthrow of ancien régime society and Christian religion. The protagonists, whose articles appeared in the «Ecclesiastical Journal of Rome» are, among others, ex-Jesuits, still influential in the Curia, for whom the Revolution was begotten by the "heretical" culturer of the previous centuries, from the Protestant reform to jansenism, the Enlightenment and freemasonry. This original contribution adds to what has become a new field of studies on the Counter-revolution in Italy, France and elsewhere in Europe.Keywords: Counter-revolution, Italy 1796-1799, Jansenism, Jesuits.Parole chiave: Controrivoluzione, Italia 1789-1799, giansenismo, gesuiti.

Abstract Based primarily on an extensive survey of death duty papers in the Public Record Office, this article shows how works of art were taxed - or not - over the course of the long nineteenth century. It sheds light on the theory and practice of capital taxation, and the special treatment accorded works of art, especially when attached to landed estates. It also shows how towards the end of the period government negotiated the countervailing pressures both to professionalize the valuation and assessment of works of art and to protect the ‘national heritage’ in art from sale and export.

This essay examines the role of the Irish, and the performance of Irishness, in the Windmill Row Theatre (1796–1804), which opened a mere eight years after the penal colony of Sydney Cove was established. Influenced by revisionist histories such as Grace Karskens’ The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (2010), and by recent research about the performativity of Irishness on the eighteenth-century London and Dublin stages, it enriches the view that the colony was intended to be ‘a society, not a gaol’. While it offers a corrective to the idea that Sydney Cove was ‘a subsistence colony that would transform felons into farmers’, it takes issue with Robert Jordan's argument in The Convict Theatres of Early Australia (2002) that the theatre would have had little impact on the Irish. It proposes that several plays that were staged constituted a social experiment to manage the gender imbalance in the colony, and also considers the impact of Irish political protest, the role of the 1798 Rising and the effect of the contentious ‘Union of Hearts’ of 1800 on the theatre. It further speculates about Irish convict access to Australia's first commercial theatre, which had its own specifically designed building, booking system, regime of admission prices, and paid staff and actors.

The paper discusses Modigliani, Brumberg, and Ando’s life cycle hypothesis and its difficult acceptance in Italy over the 1960s and 1970s. The increasing attention to the effects of income redistribution on consumption coupled with the strong influence that post-Keynesian economics exercised on the theoretical and political debate of that time led to a widespread preference of Kaldor’s theory as over the life cycle as the best representation of Italian savings behavior.

Thesis advisor: Kenji Hayao
Thesis advisor: Hiroshi Nakazato
The most stunning example of two historical figures working both together and against one another to fashion a shared goal is the demonstration of power and compromise displayed by Count Camillo Benso di Cavour and Giuseppe Garibaldi during the Sicilian Revolution of 1860 and additional events during the greater Italian Risorgimento. This thesis is an attempt to uncover the bargaining strategies utilized by Cavour and Garibaldi throughout their political interactions as well as reach important conclusions concerning the use of interpersonal relationships to aid, not hinder, the outcome of a common political aim. This case study focuses on the years from 1852 to 1870, but specifically looks at 1859 to 1861, largely considering the theoretical framework of political game theory as outlined by Thomas Schelling. After forming two distinct hypotheses regarding both the competitive and cooperative nature of the two men's relationship, this thesis finds a greater cooperative characteristic to their historic interactions, although both hypotheses contribute to a relationship that formed the state of Italy
Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2008
Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: International Studies
Discipline: International Studies Honors Program

The conventional explanation, ancient and modern, for the emergence for the first time of the politically interventionist legion in the Roman Republic's history outside the southern Italian city of Nola in 88 BC, rests primarily on the idea that soldiers intervened in politics because of pecuniary self-interest: that is, what they could materially gain from the arrangement. According to this perspective, a mercenary spirit had infected the late-republican citizen-militia which was subsequently exploited by insurrectionist generals such as L. Cornelius Sulla. This was largely possible because C. Marius in 107 BC abolished the traditional timocratic underpinnings of republican military service by allowing the previously-ineligible poor into the army, making pecuniary self-interest the dominant motivation for service in late-republican armies. In isolation and out of context, however, this is an unsatisfactory explanation for intervention. Soldiers had always expected to profit from war: this was a factor in 88 BC, but it was not the new, critical ingredient of late-republican military service that led to large-scale political intervention. Marius' 107 BC recruitment reform did not change the demographic makeup of the army, and the poor had always been represented in service in large numbers without this previously leading to insurrectionist or mercenary armies that were a danger to the state. Instead, Sulla's soldiers intervened for a range of other factors. A process of desensitisation to the risk of fighting fellow citizens, the citizen-militia's tradition of insubordination in political cause and as a forum for the redress of personal grievance, and the pernicious influence of contemporary endemic violence on Roman political discourse - along with the desire to profit from war - all played their part in persuading the army to support Sulla's sedition. In the background, too, was confusion among Sulla's soldiers over who legitimately represented the state. This confusion allowed Sulla to reinforce his credentials to legitimacy, reinforcing the soldiers' decision to help him. There was thus no single economic motive dominating the explanation for intervention. Rather, all these factors acted in unison, and on that day outside Nola in 88 BC, together they proved decisive. For the Republic, it meant that the emergence of the politically interventionist legion, and its subsequent persistent presence in late-republican political dynamics, was all but inevitable.

Totalitarianism has been an object of extensive communicative research since its heyday: already in the late 1930s, such major cultural figures as George Orwell or Hannah Arendt were busy describing the visual and verbal languages of Stalinism and Nazism. After the war, many fashionable trends in social sciences and humanities (ranging from Begriffsgeschichte and Ego-Documentology to Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis) were called upon to continue this media-centered trend in the face of increasing political determination of the burgeoing field. Nevertheless, the integration of historical, sociological and linguistic knowledge about totalitarian society on a firm factual ground remains the thing of the future. This book is the first step in this direction. By using history and theory of communication as an integrative methodological device, it reaches out to those properties of totalitarian society which appear to be beyond the grasp of specific disciplines. Furthermore, this functional approach allows to extend the analysis of communicative practices commonly associated with fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, to other locations (France, United States of America and Great Britain in the 1930s) or historical contexts (post-Soviet developments in Russia or Kyrgyzstan). This, in turn, leads to the revaluation of the very term »totalitarian«: no longer an ideological label or a stock attribute of historical narration, it gets a life of its own, defining a specific constellation of hierarchies, codes and networks within a given society.

AbstractIn general, historians of science and historians of ideas do not focus on critical appraisals of scientific ideas such as vitalism and materialism from Catholic intellectuals in eastern and southeastern Europe, nor is there much comparative work available on how significant European ideas in the life sciences such as materialism and vitalism were understood and received outside of France, Germany, Italy and the UK. Insofar as such treatments are available, they focus on the contributions of nineteenth century vitalism and materialism to later twentieth ideologies, as well as trace the interactions of vitalism and various intersections with the development of genetics and evolutionary biology see Mosse (The culture of Western Europe: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Westview Press, Boulder, 1988, Toward the final solution: a history of European racism. Howard Fertig Publisher, New York, 1978; Turda et al., Crafting humans: from genesis to eugenics and beyond. V&R Unipress, Goettingen, 2013). English and American eugenicists (such as William Caleb Saleeby), and scores of others underscored the importance of vitalism to the future science of “eugenics” (Saleeby, The progress of eugenics. Cassell, New York, 1914). Little has been written on materialism qua materialism or vitalism qua vitalism in eastern Europe.The Czech and Slovene cases are interesting for comparison insofar as both had national awakenings in the middle of the nineteenth century which were linguistic and scientific, while also being religious in nature (on the Czech case see David, Realism, tolerance, and liberalism in the Czech National awakening: legacies of the Bohemian reformation. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2010; on the Slovene case see Kann and David, Peoples of the Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526-1918. University of Washington Press, Washington, 2010). In the case of many Catholic writers writing in Moravia, there are not only slight noticeable differences in word-choice and construction but a greater influence of scholastic Latin, all the more so in the works of nineteenth century Czech priests and bishops.In this case, German, Latin and literary Czech coexisted in the same texts. Thus, the presence of these three languages throws caution on the work on the work of Michael Gordin, who argues that scientific language went from Latin to German to vernacular. In Czech, Slovenian and Croatian cases, all three coexisted quite happily until the First World War, with the decades from the 1840s to the 1880s being particularly suited to linguistic flexibility, where oftentimes writers would put in parentheses a Latin or German word to make the meaning clear to the audience. Note however that these multiple paraphrases were often polemical in the case of discussions of materialism and vitalism.In Slovenia Čas (Time or The Times) ran from 1907 to 1942, running under the muscular editorship of Fr. Aleš Ušeničnik (1868–1952) devoted hundreds of pages often penned by Ušeničnik himself or his close collaborators to wide-ranging discussions of vitalism, materialism and its implied social and societal consequences. Like their Czech counterparts Fr. Matěj Procházka (1811–1889) and Fr. Antonín LenzMaterialismMechanismDynamism (1829–1901), materialism was often conjoined with "pantheism" and immorality. In both the Czech and the Slovene cases, materialism was viewed as a deep theological problem, as it made the Catholic account of the transformation of the Eucharistic sacrifice into the real presence untenable. In the Czech case, materialism was often conjoined with “bestiality” (bestialnost) and radical politics, especially agrarianism, while in the case of Ušeničnik and Slovene writers, materialism was conjoined with “parliamentarianism” and “democracy.” There is too an unexamined dialogue on vitalism, materialism and pan-Slavism which needs to be explored.Writing in 1914 in a review of O bistvu življenja (Concerning the essence of life) by the controversial Croatian biologist Boris Zarnik) Ušeničnik underscored that vitalism was an speculative outlook because it left the field of positive science and entered the speculative realm of philosophy. Ušeničnik writes that it was “Too bad” that Zarnik “tackles” the question of vitalism, as his zoological opinions are interesting but his philosophy was not “successful”. Ušeničnik concluded that vitalism was a rather old idea, which belonged more to the realm of philosophy and Thomistic theology then biology. It nonetheless seemed to provide a solution for the particular characteristics of life, especially its individuality. It was certainly preferable to all the dangers that materialism presented. Likewise in the Czech case, Emmanuel Radl (1873–1942) spent much of his life extolling the virtues of vitalism, up until his death in home confinement during the Nazi Protectorate. Vitalism too became bound up in the late nineteenth century rediscovery of early modern philosophy, which became an essential part of the development of new scientific consciousness and linguistic awareness right before the First World War in the Czech lands. Thus, by comparing the reception of these ideas together in two countries separated by ‘nationality’ but bounded by religion and active engagement with French and German ideas (especially Driesch), we can reconstruct not only receptions of vitalism and materialism, but articulate their political and theological valances.

The Italian doctrine of international law developed in the mid-nineteenth century, mainly under the influence of the historical events that characterized the so-called Risorgimento, the political process leading to the political unification and formation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Several scholars largely based their writings on the theory developed by Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, according to which the principle of nationality was the basis for legitimacy and international subjectivity, a theory clearly linked with the political afflatus of the period. This chapter addresses the Italian scholarship of international law during the Risorgimento period, through a series of authors originally so strictly-linked with Mancini’s theories to be qualified, even at the time, as the ‘Italian school of international law’. Such theories were therefore firmly anchored in the Risorgimento, its political ideals and its historical evolution exercising a very significant impact on the international law studies in Italy during those decades.

The chapter offers a comparative study that traces the evolution of fifteenth-century conspiracy literature, illustrating its distinctive features, narrative approaches, and political perspectives. The analysis focuses on the multiform operation of recasting classical models, which matches and, at the same time, underpins the ideological viewpoint in these texts. Specific attention is also paid to the multifunctional role of history in this literature, as it exploits historical narrative, historiographical techniques, and principles, in order to construct a historical memory that conveys a precise political message. This message coincides with the condemnation of the conspiracy as an attack against the state and the ‘prince’, who is now the dominant figure in the political discourse. The key elements that frame this political outlook in the texts are: the function of the author–narrator (as a poet, letter writer, historian, witness); the speeches delivered by historical characters; the stress on the exceptionality of the historical event; the portraits of the conspirators; the representation of the common people; the image of the revenge against the plotters; and the uneasy balance between clemency and vengeance in the ruler’s reaction to the conspiracy. Through the interplay of these components the texts reflect, and contribute to, the development of a theory of statecraft that is informed by a blossoming notion of political realism and plays a crucial role in the definition of a new model of state. Significantly this strand of political thought also emerged in mirrors for princes, which display many elements in common with works on plots.

In this essay Wight clarified the importance of dynastic legitimacy—that is, hereditary monarchy—in European history. In the Middle Ages and subsequent centuries, rulers were mainly princes who inherited their crowns. The principal exceptions were the leaders of republics, including Venice, Ragusa, Genoa, and Lucca in Italy; the Swiss confederation; and the United Provinces of the Low Countries. Dynastic principles included the theory that the ruler was chosen by God through hereditary succession, and that the monarch represented his or her subjects, notably with regard to the official religious denomination of the country. Such principles made dynastic marriages valuable means to provide heirs to the crown, to clarify succession to the throne, to consolidate alliances, to gain influence and wealth, and to legitimize territorial gains. Despite imprudent and egocentric behaviour by some royal leaders, monarchs were increasingly expected to pursue national rather than personal dynastic interests. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna reaffirmed dynastic principles of legitimacy, including in Venice and the Netherlands; the Swiss confederation was a conspicuous exception. Dynastic rulers have, however, tended to become symbols and instruments of national unity and self-determination. Popular support for dynastic houses has in many cases led to popular legitimacy for constitutional monarchies.

Marxism has slowly declined in recent literature on the economic and social history of the ancient world. If one happens to run into the name of Marx or the term Marxism, it is generally within the context of polemical remark. In spite of recurrent attempts to resuscitate it as an ideal foil for anti-Communist polemic, Marxism made its final exit from the field of ancient historical studies in the 1960s, when new Marxist and Marxist-inspired historiography came to the fore. This chapter discusses the changing role of Marxism in Italian history-writing. It focuses on the historians who claim themselves as Marxists, and those who employ Marxist categories and draw on Marxist theory yet refuse to be defined as Marxists. The chapter examines the debates of the different groups on the historiographic phase marked by the circulation of Marxist concepts, analytical tools, and models outside the strictly Marxist milieu. One of the most striking aspects of this phase is the existence of a trend for the formation of research groups that shared not only an affinity or ideological adherence to Marxism, but also an interest in historical theory and a similar orientation in cultural politics. These interdisciplinary approaches stimulated the confluence of individual competences in group projects aimed at singling out new topics and developing investigational strategies. This historiographic phase also reflected a sense of community, a refusal of traditional academic hierarchies, a wish to keep individualism in check, and the rejection of erudite isolation. In Italy, these forms of association served as a means for ethical and political self-representation of cultural hegemony.

The first chapter introduces some of the major theoretical attempts at elaborating a critical and not merely geographical notion of the South in general and of Southern Italy in particular. It thus first engages with the category of “the south” in decolonial theory and in contemporary political sociology. The ways in which these fields theorize southerness encompasses class, gender, race and sexuality, thus establishing links with intersectional theory. The chapter then moves on to discuss the particular genealogy of similar conceptual frameworks in the Italian context taking into consideration intersectional scholarship produced in and on the Italian context, and the elaboration of critical notions of southerness arising specifically from the history and culture of Southern Italy. Thus, in its conclusion, the chapter also ponders on the affordances of a regional focus for Transnational studies.

The chapter is dedicated to anti-Fascist author, painter, and activist Carlo Levi. In his work, Levi elaborated the most consequential critique of totalitarianism, the ideological centrality of politics and their detrimental effects on individual life, to appear in Italy in the immediate aftermath of Fascism. Levi’s cosmopolitan experiences—between Libertarian Judaism, political activity in the Action Party, and his engagement with interwar European culture—inform his unpredictable empathy with subaltern and marginal classes in his memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945). With stunning poetic intensity, Levi’s book subverts the Western political thought based on the centrality of the state, arguing for a new polity based on inclusion, autonomy, and self-government. Furthermore, his other neglected texts, Fear of Freedom (1946) and The Watch (1950), respectively constitute the first critical theory of totalitarianism in Italy and a rebuttal of the models of time, history, and politics that sustained the new party-system which took power after the transition.

Abstract Italy during the Middle Ages was remarkable as scene of a conflict between two rival systems and principles of government, monarchy and city republic: first of realm (regnum) and republic or city-state, then within city-states of republic and despotism-in contemporary terms government ‘a comune’, ‘a popolo’, or ‘a liberta’ and government ‘a tiranno’, signoria, or principato. It was a singular experience, without parallel since antiquity, without sequel until the modern age. In Europe generally the dominant ideal of government was everywhere princely rule (princeps in republica et respublica in principe) and outside political theory, imbued with Greco Roman thought, the central issue of politics, of liberty and authority, was the balance of power between monarchy and aristocracy (or aristocracy and commons), of constitutional restraints on divinely sanctioned kingship. And so it remained for centuries. Even in Italy itself the struggle of republicanism and principality proved only a parenthesis in the prolonged progress of European monarchy. From the viewpoint of later history it was an episode, an eccentricity, significant less for itself than as sign of a deeper difference, something alien or anomalous in medieval Italy, for some prophetic, for others rather backward-looking, but in any case anachronistic. Whereas for most countries the Middle Ages marked the beginning-or resumption-of a distinct identity, Italy (where Langobardia did not replace Romania) has appeared by contrast a lard of ambiguous character: for Jacob Burckhardt the home of a people both atavistically ancient and precociously modern; for Stubbs a ‘strange borderland’ between ‘dead’ and ‘living history’, leading a ‘double existence’, part antique part medieval, placed in a special relation to Europe by a special relation to the past; for Renan more simply a country without a Middle Age, just antiquity and Renaissance: ‘II n’y a pas eu de moyen age pour l’Italie; ii ya eu decadence de la civilisation ancienne, et renaissance de cette civilisation aux lieux memes OU elle etait tombee en poussiere.’

This introduction explains the importance of the 1984 international gathering of anarchists in Venice and grounds Volontà in the history of 20^th century anarchism. After May 1968 and the militant radicalism in 1970s Italy, the leading intellectuals of the international anarchist movement were trying to think through “what now?” Anarchism, like the revolutionary left more broadly, was caught between a series of epochal shifts. The early 1980s saw the onset of what we would now call “neoliberalism”, entailing a dramatic transformation of the role of the state, work, rates of inequality, and the rise of consumerist individualism. Industrial employment went into freefall across the Global North, reconfiguring the global geographies of exploitation and class. Anarchism itself endured an existential challenge, subsumed in its political form under the so-called “new social movements”, with the ecological and feminist movements in particular taking the lead. These issues are not historical curiosities: the essays in this volume have lost none of their power in attempting to address these paradoxes not only in theory, but with the urgency of renewing a sense of what anarchism is (and could be) within a libertarian movement that can realistically strive to change the world.

Exactly one hundred years have passed since the publication of the final edition of Oswald Spengler’s Twilight of the West. His gloomy predictions are coming true in a bizarre and even monstrous manner. The accelerated pace of the postmodern twilight requires the use of not so long ago completely unknown terms, such as “transgenderism,” “critical race theory,” “intersectionality,” “white privilege” etc., not to mention the ever-growing number of letters associated with the LGBTQ+ cult. We are witnessing a civilizational and moral decline unprecedented in history. The current twilight of the West has numerous secondary manifestations, such as the celebration of deviance as a laudable “lifestyle,” the imposition of multiculturalism and unrestricted immigration from the Third World, the demonization of the white, heterosexual male as the source of the so-called toxic muscularity etc. This article aims to penetrate the roots of the post-postmodern, increasingly posthuman ideological foundation of the West-as-ideology. It is found in de-Christianization, which began in Italy in the late Renaissance, received its mature form in the French Enlightenment, and today has a chthonic, distinctly thanatological character. Euro-globalist and American-hegemonic forms of madness are only apparently different. They share the same hatred towards traditional, spontaneously emerging societies and cultures. The differences between the two models of Sunovrat are not in the different concepts of global political and ideological monism, but above all in the pace and the means of implementing the cultural and moral revolution.