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 Here

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.

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: 9780300144185
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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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.

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.

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


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.

Political Creativity

Political Creativity PDF Author: Sakari Hänninen
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1035316226
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
For several decades, Antonio Gramsci has been one of the most studied and discussed political theorists; however, his originality as a political thinker has not yet been fully understood. In this incisive book, Sakari Hänninen explores Gramsci’s political theory of transformation and posits that he was altogether too creative a thinker to be simply categorized as an adherent of a certain school of thought or tradition.

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.

Hegemony and Revolution

Hegemony and Revolution PDF Author: Walter L. Adamson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520050570
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
As a result of his inquiry into the nature of class, culture, and the state, Antonio Gramsci became one of the most influential Marxist theorists. Hegemony and Revolution is the first full-fledged study of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks in the light of his pre-prison career as a socialist and communist militant and a highly original Marxist intellectual. Walter Adamson shows how Gramsci's concepts of revolution grew out of his experience with the Turin worker councils of 1919-1920 as well as his experience combatting the Fascist movement.For Gramsci, revolution meant the steady ascension of a mass-based, educated, and organized "collective will," in which the final seizure of power would be the climax of a broader educative process. Success depended on countering not just the coercive power of the existing economic and political order but also the cultural hegemony of the state. A "counter-hegemony" for Gramsci required the leadership of an organized political party, but at its core lay his conviction that the common people were capable of self-enlightenment and could produce an alternative conception of the world that challenged the prevailing hegemonic culture.Adamson shows how these ideas, which Gramsci developed prior to his imprisonment, led him to a highly original concept of "subaltern" class movements that cohere not just on the basis of economic interest but by virtue of religious, ideological, regional, folkloric, and other sorts of cultural ties as well. These ideas of Gramsci have had enormous influence on a wide variety of subsequent cultural theories including postcolonialism and Foucault-style analyses of discursive practices.