Nationality before liberty? Risorgimento political thought in transnational context

Abstract

The introduction to this special issue reviews the historiography on the political thought of the Risorgimento from De Ruggiero's famous History of European Liberalism (1925) to the most recent publications. It draws attention to the endurance of the post-war Gramscian paradigm that continues to underline the backwardness and traditional features of Risorgimento liberalism and political culture despite the challenges posed to that interpretation by more recent research. The aim of the essays included in the issue is to place new emphasis on the connections, parallels and engagements that existed between the Italian and European political thought of the period, rather than on the exceptionalism of Risorgimento political thought, while suggesting that the tension between liberty and nationality constituted a distinctive features of Italian post-revolutionary political culture.

Challenging intellectual hierarchies. Hegel in Risorgimento political thought: an introduction

“…Despite a long and erudite tradition in Italy of studying these ideas as "storia delle dottrine politiche", a more analytical and theoretically informed approach based on the methodological engagement with, for instance, Anglo-American studies of political theory, the so-called Cambridge school (Pocock 2009, pp.3-19), or a Koselleckian history of concepts (Müller 2014, p.77) has emerged only relatively recently. Since then, the history of Italian political thought has quickly developed into a vibrant field of research (Bellamy 1987(Bellamy , 2014Isabella 2012;Ragazzoni 2018;Recchia and Urbinati 2009;Romani 2012;Sabetti 2010;Thom 1999;Urbinati 1990). The different contributions to this special issue all stand for an approach to Risorgimento political thought that actively engages with recent international debates in intellectual history, while also adopting an explicitly transnational perspective.…”

“…1 The transnational orientation of its cultural and intellectual life bears witness to the centrality of its position within the Italian peninsula and within Europe. As a consequence, the South also assumes a particularly prominent role when the history of Italy's political emancipation is placed in the context of larger transnational debates (Isabella 2009(Isabella , 2012 and of Italy's multiple imperial connections (Isabella and Zanou 2015;Laven 2002;Körner 2018). Moreover, within this transnational context of ideas Italy was not the representative of an amorphous global South that had to learn from a more advanced other in the North or in the West, or that simply absorbed conventions that Imperial lords practiced in front of their eyes.…”