Croce, Gramsci, Bobbio and the Italian Political Tradition

Croce, Gramsci, Bobbio and the Italian Political Tradition PDF Author: Richard Bellamy
Publisher: ECPR Press
ISBN: 1907301992
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
This book gathers together fifteen classic essays by leading scholar Richard Bellamy, tracing the history of Italian political thought from Beccaria to Bobbio. Written over the past 25 years, they constitute the first account in English of the modern Italian political tradition. The author pays special attention to the different ways Italian theorists have linked politics and ethics, and their various conceptions of the state and of democracy. The resulting variations on Machiavellian themes gave rise to distinctively Italian understandings of Liberalism, Marxism, Fascism and Socialism, which were all associated with a peculiarly realist account of democracy. Among the thinkers discussed are Cesare Beccaria, Antonio Genovesi, Giuseppe Mazzini, Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, Antonio Gramsci, Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca and Norberto Bobbio. ‘In advancing the tantalising claims that the Italians invented modern politics as well as one of the most important political traditions we have for understanding it, this book is sure to entice and provoke. Richard Bellamy shows how the diverse titular thinkers thought through problems of force and consent, morality and utility, mass movements and democracy, the social role of critical intellectuals, and the critical and utopian dimensions of liberalism and socialism. An important book by one of our most sophisticated observers of contemporary politics.’ Walter L Adamson Dobbs Professor of History, Emory University ‘This is a brilliant and much-needed book on the history of political ideas in modern Italy. An excellent text both for students of Italy’s political thought, and for scholars of democratic theory.’ Nadia Urbinati Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory and Hellenic Studies, Columbia University ‘Admirably combining conceptual and historical analysis, these essays offer imaginative interpretations of important Italian thinkers, and remind us that Bellamy’s world-class contribution in this field has been inspired by his sustained engagement with the premises and principles of liberalism. While specialists in Italian thought will be grateful to ECPR Press for gathering these essays in a single volume, Bellamy’s clear, elegant arguments will interest all students of political theory.’ Joseph V Femia Emeritus Professor of Political Theory, University of Liverpool

Croce, Gramsci, Bobbio and the Italian Political Tradition

Croce, Gramsci, Bobbio and the Italian Political Tradition PDF Author: Richard Bellamy
Publisher: ECPR Press
ISBN: 1907301992
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book

Book Description
This book gathers together fifteen classic essays by leading scholar Richard Bellamy, tracing the history of Italian political thought from Beccaria to Bobbio. Written over the past 25 years, they constitute the first account in English of the modern Italian political tradition. The author pays special attention to the different ways Italian theorists have linked politics and ethics, and their various conceptions of the state and of democracy. The resulting variations on Machiavellian themes gave rise to distinctively Italian understandings of Liberalism, Marxism, Fascism and Socialism, which were all associated with a peculiarly realist account of democracy. Among the thinkers discussed are Cesare Beccaria, Antonio Genovesi, Giuseppe Mazzini, Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, Antonio Gramsci, Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca and Norberto Bobbio. ‘In advancing the tantalising claims that the Italians invented modern politics as well as one of the most important political traditions we have for understanding it, this book is sure to entice and provoke. Richard Bellamy shows how the diverse titular thinkers thought through problems of force and consent, morality and utility, mass movements and democracy, the social role of critical intellectuals, and the critical and utopian dimensions of liberalism and socialism. An important book by one of our most sophisticated observers of contemporary politics.’ Walter L Adamson Dobbs Professor of History, Emory University ‘This is a brilliant and much-needed book on the history of political ideas in modern Italy. An excellent text both for students of Italy’s political thought, and for scholars of democratic theory.’ Nadia Urbinati Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory and Hellenic Studies, Columbia University ‘Admirably combining conceptual and historical analysis, these essays offer imaginative interpretations of important Italian thinkers, and remind us that Bellamy’s world-class contribution in this field has been inspired by his sustained engagement with the premises and principles of liberalism. While specialists in Italian thought will be grateful to ECPR Press for gathering these essays in a single volume, Bellamy’s clear, elegant arguments will interest all students of political theory.’ Joseph V Femia Emeritus Professor of Political Theory, University of Liverpool

Gramsci and the Italian State

Gramsci and the Italian State PDF Author: Richard Paul Bellamy
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719033421
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Discusses the political life of Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party. Including a biographical outline, this book covers the influences on his political thought, his fight against fascism and his eventual inprisonment. The book also includes his prison notebooks.

Modern Italian Social Theory

Modern Italian Social Theory PDF Author: Richard Bellamy
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745689027
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
This text provides a clear and systematic introduction to the development of social and political theory in modern Italy. It gives particular attention to relating the main traditions of Italian thought to the history of the country since unification. The work concentrates on six major thinkers, examining how their theoretical ideas influenced their analysis of political behaviour. The thinkers concerned are Pareto, Mosca, Labriola, Croce, Gentile and Gramsci. In discussing the respective theories of each author, the book situates them within the intellectual and social contexts to which they were addressed. The concluding chapter focuses on the recent debates between Bobbio, della Volpe and others about the validity of the Italian road to socialism and its compatibility with the liberal values and institutions of Western democracies.

Norberto Bobbio

Norberto Bobbio PDF Author: David Ragazzoni
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000957268
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
This book explores the writings of Norberto Bobbio (1909-2004) who was Italy’s foremost political, legal, and democratic theorist, a distinguished historian of political and legal ideas, and one of the country’s most perceptive public intellectuals throughout the second half of the twentieth century in Europe. Bobbio’s work offers a unique vantage point for understanding the evolution of twentieth-century ideologies, in Italy as well as in Europe. His biography, scholarship, and militant writings were marked significantly by the vicissitudes of Italian political history, as the country transitioned from constitutional monarchy to Fascist dictatorship to democratic, parliamentary Republic. These events, together with the international challenges posed by the Cold War, made his life and publications an unusually wide-ranging mirror into the complexities of European history and politics. His native country, in fact, provided him with a magnifying glass to scrutinize the respective principles and contaminations of rival ideological traditions in a national and transnational key. The chapters in this volume, written by scholars based in Europe and North America, combine historical contextualization with historical analysis to illuminate the complex ways in which Bobbio studied rival ideologies, examined the relationship between their past and present, and assessed their potential to forge the trajectory of democracy in the future. This book is an insightful resource for advanced students, researchers and scholars of Politics, History and Philosophy, as well as those interested in Italian and European Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Political Ideologies.

Beyond Right and Left

Beyond Right and Left PDF Author: Maurice A. Finocchiaro
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300144180
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Two Italian writers, Gaetano Mosca and Antonio Gramsci, have been very influential in twentieth-century political thought, the first cast as a thoroughgoing conservative, the second as the model of a humanistic Marxist. The author of this provocative book, the first systematic study of the connection between the two men, maintains that they are closer to each other than is commonly supposed-that they in fact belong to the same political tradition of democratic elitism. Maurice A. Finocchiaro argues that Gramsci's political theory is a constructive critique of Mosca's and that the key common element is the attempt to combine democracy and elitism in a theoretical system that defines them not as opposite but as compatible and interdependent. Finocchiaro finds that a critical examination of the major works of the two men demonstrates their shared belief in the viability of democratic elitism and undermines the importance of the distinction between right and left.

Antonio Gramsci: Contemporary applications

Antonio Gramsci: Contemporary applications PDF Author: James Martin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415217514
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description


Alternative Modernities

Alternative Modernities PDF Author: Giuseppe Vacca
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030476715
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Antonio Gramsci lived the Great War as a “historic break,” a profound experience that left an indelible mark on the development of his political thought. Translated into English for the first time, Alternative Modernities reconstructs and analyses this critical period of Gramsci’s intellectual formation through a systematic analysis of his writings from 1915 to 1935. For Gramsci, Soviet Communism, “Americanism,” and the “new” Fascist State were the principle responses to the crisis of the old world order. He portrayed them as the three protagonists of twentieth-century modernity, alternatives destined to tragically clash in the worldwide struggle for hegemony. Among the arguments in his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci casts doubt on the political strategy of Soviet Communism and the theoretical underpinnings of “official Marxism.” Instead, he suggests a radical revision of Marxism by breathing life into a new interpretation whose fundamental concepts are: politics as the struggle for hegemony, the “passive revolution” as a historical paradigm of modernity, and the philosophy of praxis as the welding between visions of the worlds, historical analyses, and political strategies. Gramsci’s intuitions culminate in a new theory of the political subject, supported by a reflection upon the 20th century that still speaks to us today, pointing the way toward a new narrative of world history.

Ideological Profile of Twentieth-Century Italy

Ideological Profile of Twentieth-Century Italy PDF Author: Norberto Bobbio
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400864178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Anyone interested in the entire sweep of political thought over the last hundred years will find in Norberto Bobbio's Ideological Profile of Twentieth-Century Italy a masterful, thought-provoking guide. Home to the largest communist party in a democratic society, Italy has been a unique place politically, one where Christian democrats, liberals, fascists, socialists, communists, and others have co-existed in sizable numbers. In this book, Bobbio, who himself played an outstanding role in the development of Italian civic culture, follows each of the major ideologies, explaining how they developed, describing the key actors, and considering the legacies they left to political culture. He wrote Ideological Profile in 1968 to explain from a personal perspective the history behind that decade's tumultuous politics. Bobbio's defense of democracy and critique of capitalism are among the themes that will particularly interest American readers of this updated edition, the first to appear in English. Beginning in the late nineteenth century with positivism and Marxism, Bobbio next presents the ideological currents that developed before the outbreak of the First World War: Catholic, socialist, irrational and anti-democratic thought, the reaction against positivism, and the thinking of Benedetto Croce. After discussing the impact of the war, the author turns to the revolutionary-reactionary polarization of the postwar period and the ideology of fascism. The final chapters consider Croce's opposition to fascism and the ideals of the resistance and conclude with the post-Second World War "Years of Involvement." Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Gramsci and Marxist Theory (RLE: Gramsci)

Gramsci and Marxist Theory (RLE: Gramsci) PDF Author: Chantal Mouffe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317744373
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This book familiarizes the English-speaking reader with the debate on the originality of Gramsci’s thought and its importance for the development of Marxist theory. The contributors present the principal viewpoints regarding Gramsci’s theoretical contribution to Marxism, focussing in particular on his advances in the study of the superstructures, and discussing his relation to Marx and Lenin and his influence in Eurocommunism. Different interpretations are put forward concerning the elucidation of Gramsci’s key concepts, namely: hegemony, integral state, war of position and passive revolution.

Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci PDF Author: Dante Germino
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807116555
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Dante Germino’s biography of the Italian communist and political theorist Antonio Gramsci offers a major reassessment of this important twentieth-century thinker. Germino analyzes Gramsci’s remarkable life as well as his extensive oeuvre, from the early Turin articles to the meditative Prison Notebooks. Gramsci saw society as composed of a small but powerful political center and a large body of emarginati—marginalized people at the periphery of society who are denied access to traditional positions of power. That vision led Gramsci to concentrate on the significance of the “common man” as he developed his theory of the political organization of society. The persistent theme in Gramsci’s work is how the ordinary man thinks, feels, and endures, and how the course of political institutions is shaped by the efforts of the marginalized to erode the boundaries of the center. Gramsci’s approach is perhaps best expressed as a reunion of philosophy and experience and a revaluation of the quotidian. Gramsci’s new politics of inclusion anticipated by well over a half-century the recent epoch-making developments in the USSR and in Eastern Europe. His antiauthoritarian leadership style as secretary of the Italian Communist party in the 1920s prefigured Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost. Gramsci’s insistence on the international Communist movement’s openness to new social formations at the grass roots is supremely relevant to developments in Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland, where forces hitherto kept at the margins of political life by ossified Communist-party structures have burst on the scene with unprecedented vitality. Gramsci refused to revere Marx as a “shepherd with a crook.” Equating history with the “rhythm of liberty,” he emerges as a prophetic voice in the desert of a bureaucratic and dogmatic communism. The dramatic recent changes in the Italian Communist party under Achille Ochetto also owe their ultimate inspiration to this diminutive, hunchbacked theorist-practitioner from Italy’s periphery. Germino’s compelling study of Gramsci’s personal life and intellectual development offers fresh insights into Gramsci’s work that will be of interest to all students of cultural and political theory. Of particular interest is his extensive consideration of the preprison writings both in their own right and for the light they cast on the Prison Notebooks.