Sensibilities Of The Risorgimento

A purely political framework does not capture the complexity of the culture behind Italians’ struggle for liberty and independence during the Risorgimento (1815-1861). Roberto Romani identifies the sensibilities associated with each of the two main political programmes, Mazzini’s republicanism and moderatism, which in fact were comprehensive projects for a political, moral, and religious resurgence. The moderates’ espousal of reason entailed an ideal personality expressed by private virtue, self-possession, and a public morality informed by Catholicism, while Mazzini’s advocacy of passions led to ‘enthusiasm’ and a total commitment to the cause. Romani demonstrates that the patriots’ moral quest rested on a thick cultural bedrock, dating back to Stoicism and the Catholic Aufklärung, and passing through Rousseau and the Revolution.

'A model of how culture can be related to politics, even politics of the very highest level, this book offers a multitude of sparkling and surprising insights into melodrama, opera, and political sensibilities, not just in Italy but in France, England, and eastern Europe as well. The author's deep learning and elegant style are bound to attract readers to this period that was so critical to the formation of modern politics.' -Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles, USA This book investigates the narrative of nationhood during the Italian Risorgimento and its ability to reach a new and wider audience. In Italy, an extraordinary emotional excitement pervaded the struggle for national independence, suffusing the speeches and actions of patriots. This book shows how this ardour borrowed the tones, figures and spectacular nature of the melodramatic imagination feeding the theatre and literature of the time, and how it could resonate with a largely uneducated audience. An important contribution to the new historiography on the Italian Risorgimento and on nineteenth-century nationalism in Europe, it offers a fresh perspective on the public sphere during the Risorgimento, focusing on the transnational links between political mobilisation and the growth of new media and burgeoning mass culture. Carlotta Sorba is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Padua and founder of the Centro interuniversitario di storia culturale (CSC), Italy. She is a cultural historian of nineteenth-century Europe with special interest in the relationship between theatre, society and politics.

Providing a comprehensive history of Italy from around 1800 to the present, Italy in the Modern World traces the social and cultural transformations that defined the lives of Italians during the 19th and 20th century. The book focuses on how social relations (class, gender and race), science and the arts shaped the political processes of unification, state building, fascism and the postwar world. Split up into four parts covering the making of Italy, the liberal state, war and fascism, and the republic, the text draws on secondary literature and primary sources in order to synthesize current historiographical debates and provide primary documents for classroom use. There are individual chapters on key topics, such as unification, Italians in the world, Italy in the world, science and the arts, fascism, the World Wars, the Cold War, and Italy in the 21st century, as well as a wealth of useful features for students, including: * Comprehensive bibliographic essays covering each of the four parts * 23 images and 12 maps Italy in the Modern World also firmly places both the nation and its people in a wider global context through a distinctly transnational approach. It is essential reading for all students of modern Italian history.

This book charts the varieties of political moderation in modern European history from the French Revolution to the present day. It explores the attempts to find a middle way between ideological extremes, from the nineteenth-century Juste Milieu and balance of power, via the Third Ways between capitalism and socialism, to the current calls for moderation beyond populism and religious radicalism. The essays in this volume are inspired by the widely-recognized need for a more nuanced political discourse. The contributors demonstrate how the history of modern politics offers a range of experiences and examples of the search for a middle way that can help us to navigate the tensions of the current political climate. At the same time, the volume offers a diagnosis of the problems and pitfalls of Third Ways, of finding the middle between extremes, and of the weaknesses of the moderate point of view.

'This is the first account in English of the making of Italian nationhood from the perspective of constitutional history. It is also the first to consider the role that the House of Savoy played in this process. Bringing together influential experts in the field, the collection covers the evolution of the Italian constitution from Russian diplomacy’s little-known planning of the Risorgimento to the monarchy’s demise after its clashes with fascism. Combining systematic coverage with original research, the volume includes such varied themes as the king’s role in the Italian wars of independence, the Italian peninsula’s forgotten charters of 1848, and the story of the ephemeral building that housed the first Italian parliament. Contributors are: Carolina Armenteros, Andrea Ungari, Paolo Colombo, Frans Willem Lantink, Christian Satto, Giulio Stolfi, Valentina Villa, Tommaso Zerbi, and Romano Ferrari Zumbini.

The Enlightenment that Failed explores the growing rift between those Enlightenment trends and initiatives that appealed exclusively to elites and those aspiring to enlighten all of society by raising mankind's awareness, freedoms, and educational level generally. Jonathan I. Israel explains why the democratic and radical secularizing tendency of the Western Enlightenment, after gaining some notable successes during the revolutionary era (1775-1820) in numerous countries, especially in Europe, North America, and Spanish America, ultimately failed. He argues that a populist, Robespierriste tendency, sharply at odds with democratic values and freedom of expression, gained an ideological advantage in France, and that the negative reaction this generally provoked caused a more general anti-Enlightenment reaction, a surging anti-intellectualism combined with forms of religious revival that largely undermined the longings of the deprived, underprivileged, and disadvantaged, and ended by helping, albeit often unwittingly, conservative anti-Enlightenment ideologies to dominate the scene. The Enlightenment that Failed relates both the American and the French revolutions to the Enlightenment in a markedly different fashion from how this is usually done, showing how both great revolutions were fundamentally split between bitterly opposed and utterly incompatible ideological tendencies. Radical Enlightenment, which had been an effective ideological challenge to the prevailing monarchical-aristocratic status quo, was weakened, then almost entirely derailed and displaced from the Western consciousness, in the 1830s and 1840s by the rise of Marxism and other forms of socialism.

The writings of Thomas Robert Malthus continue to resonate today, particularly An Essay on the Principle of Population which was published more than two centuries ago. Malthus Across Nations creates a fascinating picture of the circulation of his economic and demographic ideas across different countries, highlighting the reception of his works in a variety of nations and cultures. This unique book offers not only a fascinating piece of comparative analysis in the history of economic thought but also places some of today’s most pressing debates into an accurate historical perspective, thereby improving our understanding of them.

An examination of revolutions in the Iberian and Italian peninsulas, Sicily and Greece in the 1820s that reveals a popular constitutional culture in the South After the turbulent years of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna’s attempt to guarantee peace and stability across Europe, a new revolutionary movement emerged in the southern peripheries of the continent. In this groundbreaking study, Maurizio Isabella examines the historical moment in the 1820s when a series of simultaneous uprisings took the quest for constitutional government to Portugal, Spain, the Italian peninsula, Sicily and Greece. Isabella places these events in a broader global revolutionary context and, decentering conventional narratives of the origins of political modernity, reveals the existence of an original popular constitutional culture in southern Europe. Isabella looks at the role played by secret societies, elections, petitions, protests and the experience of war as well as the circulation of information and individuals across seas and borders in politicising new sectors of society. By studying the mobilisation of the army, the clergy, artisans, rural communities and urban populations in favour of or against the revolutions, he shows that the uprisings in the South—although their ultimate fate was determined by the intervention of more powerful foreign countries—enjoyed considerable popular support in ideologically divided societies and led to the introduction of constitutions. Isabella argues that these movements informed the political life of Portugal and Spain for many decades and helped to forge a long-lasting revolutionary tradition in the Italian peninsula. The liberalism that emerged as a popular political force across southern Europe, he contends, was distinct from French and British varieties.

This book investigates the narrative of nationhood during the Italian Risorgimento and its ability to reach a new and wider audience. In Italy, an extraordinary emotional excitement pervaded the struggle for national independence, suffusing the speeches and actions of patriots. This book shows how this ardour borrowed the tones, figures and spectacular nature of the melodramatic imagination feeding the theatre and literature of the time, and how it could resonate with a largely uneducated audience. An important contribution to the new historiography on the Italian Risorgimento and on nineteenth-century nationalism in Europe, it offers a fresh perspective on the public sphere during the Risorgimento, focusing on the transnational links between political mobilisation and the growth of new media and burgeoning mass culture.