Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T10:33:24.706Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Italian Political Culture in Historical Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2016

Paul Ginsborg
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Much more so than in the recent past, the eyes of Europe and even of the world are on Italy. This attention does not derive from any innovative solutions that Italy may have offered to the grave problems which today face modern states: those of environmental pollution, of unemployment, of racism, of declining political legitimacy. Rather, Italy has attracted intense scrutiny for two principal reasons. First, because certain courageous magistrates, both in Palermo and Milan, have waged an unprecedented and dramatic war against criminal organizations and political corruption, and this in one of the most corrupt democracies in Europe. Their lead has been taken up in France and Spain, and their actions studied by colleagues as far away as Japan and Argentina. Unexpectedly, the Italian state has produced and allowed space for a group of public servants who have earned admiration on a global scale.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , 1995 , pp. 3 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Recent examples of this school are Tullio Altan, C., La nostra Italia, Feltrinelli, Milan, 1986; Sapelli, G., ‘The Italian crises and capitalism’, see below in this issue of Modern Italy, pp. 000; Cartocci, R., Fra Lega e Chiesa, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1994; Galli, C., ‘La cultura politica’, in Vertone, S. (ed.), La cultura degli Italiani, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1994, pp. 33–70.Google Scholar

2 Santoro, C. M., La politica estera di una media potenza, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1991, p. 38, where he distinguishes between ‘the four quadrants in which the regions of Italy can be divided (North-West; North-East; South-West and South-East), each of which can be identified as an independent structure characterized by a high level of functional autonomy’.Google Scholar

3 Davis, J., People of the Mediterranean, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1977, p. 13.Google Scholar

4 Franchetti, L., Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia, Donzelli, Rome, 1993 (1877), p. 40.Google Scholar

5 For the undoubted capacity of clientelism to channel resources to particular Italian regions during the history of the Republic, see Mutti, A., ‘Il particolarismo come risorsa. Politica ed economia nello sviluppo abruzzese’, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, 35, 1994, 4, pp. 451–518.Google Scholar

6 De Cecco, M., ‘A trent'anni per miracolo tutti trovano un lavoro’, La Repubblica (section Affari e Finanza); 9 January, 1995.Google Scholar

7 Ginsborg, P., ‘Familismo’, in Id. (ed.) Stato dell'Italia, Il Saggiatore, Milan, 1994, p. 79. I added (p. 81.) that the form of familism specific to Italy derived historically ‘from strongly cohesive and matricentric family units, with strong intergenerational ties, from a society characterized, especially in the South, by vertical rather than horizontal ties, and from a deep-rooted distrust of the central state’. Naturally, this definition, like every generalization of the sort, must be made subject to qualifications based on regional and class differences. For the original use of the term ‘amoral familism’ see Banfield, E., The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Free Press, Glencoe (III.), 1958.Google Scholar

8 Signorelli, A., ‘L'incertezza del diritto. Clientelismo politico e innovazione nel Mezzogiorno degli anni ‘80’, Problemi del Socialismo, 1988, 2–3, p. 258.Google Scholar

9 Useful indications are to be found in Piselli, F., Arrighi, G., ‘Parentela, clientela e comunità’, in Storia d'Italia. he regioni. La Calabria (ed. Bevilacqua, P. and Placanica, A.), Einaudi, Turin, 1985, pp. 367–494; Bevilacqua, P., ‘Uomini, terre, economie’, in Ibid., pp. 295–364; Franzina, E., ‘Le strutture elementari della clientela’, in Id, La transizione dolce, Cierre Edizioni, Verona, 1990, pp. 105–70.Google Scholar

10 For this shift in nineteenth century Sardinia, see Addari Rapallo, C., ‘Nome e famiglia in Sardegna’, in Oppo, A. (ed.), Famiglia e matrimonio nella società sarda tradizionale, La tarantola, Cagliari, 1990, pp. 160–61; for Andalucia, Pitt Rivers, J., ‘Ritual kinship in the Mediterranean: Spain and the Balkans’, in Peristiany, J. (ed.), Mediterranean Family Structures, CUP, Cambridge, 1963, p. 324. On a more general level, Lynch, J.H., Godparents and Kinship in Early Medieval Europe, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1986; Signorini, I., Padrini e compadri, Loescher, Turin, 1981.Google Scholar

11 See, for example, Greco, G., ‘Potere e parentela nella Sicilia nuova’, Quaderni di Sociologia, XIX, 1970, 1, pp. 3–41.Google Scholar

12 Accati, L., ‘Il marito della santa. Ruolo paterno, ruolo materno e politica italiana’, Meridiana, 13, 1992, pp. 82–83; see also Signorelli, A., ‘Patroni e clienti’, in Pasquinelli, C. (ed.), Potere senza stato, Riuniti, Rome, 1986, p. 155.Google Scholar

13 See the entry ‘Famiglia’ in Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. 5, Ente per l'Enciclopedia Cattolica, Vatican City, 1950, pp. 994–95.Google Scholar

14 Ruffini, E., ‘La teologia di fronte alle problematiche della famiglia nella tensione tra “pubblico e privato”’, in Università Cattolica di Sacro Cuore, La coscienza contemporanea tra ‘pubblico'e ‘privato’, Vita e Pensiero, Milan, 1979, p. 149.Google Scholar

15 For these distinctions, see Baget Bozzo, G., Il partito cattolico al potere, Vallechi, Florence, 1974, vol. 1, pp. 14ff.Google Scholar

16 Nicotri, P., Tangenti in confessionale, Marsilio, Venice, 1993.Google Scholar

17 Ibid, pp. 54–56 (Naples Cathedral); pp. 120–23 (Basilica of Saint Anthony, Padua); pp. 62–66 (Church of Saint Ambrose, Milan); p. 97 (Milan Cathedral).Google Scholar

18 Thompson, E. P., ‘The peculiarities of the English’ (1965), in The Poverty of Theory, Merlin, London, 1978, p. 47. For a development of Thompson's concept in an English context, see Corrigan, P. and Sayer, D., The Great Arch. English State Formation as Cultural Revolution, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1985. For the Italian case, some indications are to be found in Ginsborg, P., ‘Gramsci and the era of bourgeois revolution in Italy’, in Davis, J.A. (ed.), Gramsci and Italy's Passive Revolution , Helm, Croom, London, 1979, pp. 33–36. Crucially important is the article by Anderson, P., ‘The notion of bourgeois revolution’, in English Questions, Verso, London, 1992, pp. 105–118.Google Scholar

19 Anderson, , ‘The notion of bourgeois revolution’; for the socio-political consequences of the late affirmation of bourgeois revolution, see the acute observations of Mouzelis, N., ‘Modernity, late development and civil society’, in Hall, J.A. (ed.), Civil Society, London, 1995, pp. 224–49. See also his earlier Politics in the Semi-periphery, Macmillan, London, 1986.Google Scholar

20 Arrighi, G. (ed.), Semiperipheral Development. The Politics of Southern Europe in the Twentieth Century, London, Sage, 1985. However, it is worth remembering that there exists no automatic connection between the socio-economic strength of a bourgeoisie and the affirmation of the enlightened elements of bourgeois revolution; German history has much to teach us here. Furthermore, Mouzelis is, in my opinion, entirely right when he shifts the weight of explanation away from economic determinism, both of a Marxist and non-Marxist sort, towards an examination of the failings of the internal apparatuses of peripheral and semi-peripheral states (Mouzelis, ‘Modernity, late development and civil society’, pp. 248–49.).Google Scholar

21 Ginsborg, P., ‘L'Italia, L'Europa, il Mediterraneo’, in Stato dell'Italia, p. 645.Google Scholar

22 Braudel, F., The Wheels of Commerce, vol. 2 of Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, trans. Reynolds, Siân, Collins, London, 1982, p. 549, where he refers to the state as ‘an unfinished entity, seeking to create its identity, unable to exercise all its rights or carry out all its tasks’.Google Scholar

23 Cohen, E. W., The Growth of the British Civil Service, 1780–1939, Frank Cass, London, 1965 (1941), p. 112.Google Scholar

24 Pizzorno, A., Comunità e razionalizzazione, Einaudi, Turin, 1960.Google Scholar

25 Diena, L., Gli uomini e le masse, Einaudi, Turin, 1960, p. 73.Google Scholar

26 Cancogni, M., ‘Cicicov in Campidoglio’, L'Espresso, II, 1956, n. 4, 22 January.Google Scholar

27 Gagliardi, P. and Turner, B.A., ‘Aspects of Italian management’, in Hickson, D.J. (ed.), Management in Western Europe, De Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 1993, p. 151.Google Scholar

28 Fiori, G., Il venditore. Storia di Silvio Berlusconi e della Fininvest, Garzanti, Milan, 1995.Google Scholar

29 For a discussion of the chimera of the transition to socialism through the strategy of structural reform, see Ginsborg, P., ‘Le riforme di struttura nel dibattito degli anni cinquanta e sessanta’, Studi Storici, 1992, 2–3, pp. 653–68.Google Scholar

30 Locatelli, G., Martini, D., Mi manda papà, Longanesi, Milan, 1991, p. 189.Google Scholar

31 Signorelli, , ‘L'incertezza del diritto’, p. 264. For the results of this research, Signorelli, A., Chipuò e chi aspetta, Liguori, Naples, 1983.Google Scholar

32 Bagnasco, A. (ed.), ‘L'associazionismo’, in Stato dell'Italia, p. 324–37; Trigilia, C. (ed.), Cultura e sviluppo, Donzelli, Roma, 1995.Google Scholar