THE STORY about how a generation of intellectuals, inspired by German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, paved the way for a new Italian State is the focus of a new book by Dr Fernanda Gallo, Associate Professor in History and Politics at Homerton College.
In ‘Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832–1900’, Gallo investigates how intellectuals insisted on the historical and political dimension of Hegel's idealism.
The story of these intellectuals and politicians, who were born at the start of the nineteenth century, the majority of them from Southern Italy, who experienced the collapse of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies and the dissolution of the common cultural and political space of Southern Italy, chronicles how they helped to forge modern Italian political thought.
Challenging notions of centre and periphery, Gallo investigates the long process of transition whereby Italy ceased to be a cluster of isolated and often dominated states and became a single nation-state.
It does so by exploring the influence of Hegelian thought in shaping a new political vocabulary, in large part through the contribution of the Italian Hegelians. Gallo traces the reception and transformation of these ideas, exploring how Hegelian concepts were reworked into political practices: ideas have political power when they are elaborated in connection with the historical context.
Hegel’s philosophy argues that liberty is the unfolding in the history of a process of self-consciousness and that the political liberty of a community is possible only through the development of the self-consciousness of the people about their past and their national character.
This was the path delineated by the philosophy of Hegel, and Italians had to creatively adapt this path to suit their own intellectual past and local philosophical tradition. Italian Hegelianism presents itself as a continuous attempt to elaborate a reading of Hegel that highlights the union between philosophy and history, and the synthesis of idea and fact, centering Hegelianism on the historical reality of life, without however losing sight of the metaphysical and logical dimension of the German philosopher’s thought.
By uncovering this neglected intellectual legacy, Gallo recovers a world characterised by multiple cultural, intellectual, and political affiliations that have since been obscured by the conventional narratives of the formation of nation-states.
It thus rethinks the origins of Italian nationalism and of the Italian state, highlighting the intellectual connections between Germany, the Habsburg Empire, Switzerland, and France, and re-establishing the lost link between the changing geopolitical contexts of western and northern Europe and the Mediterranean. It shows how nations emerged from an intermingling, rather than a clash, of ideas concerning the State and liberalism, modernity and religion, history and civilization, revolution, and conservatism, South and North.
Through the story of this generation of Hegelians, who began to engage with Hegel’s philosophy shortly after his death, in 1832, who had participated in the 1848 revolution, who then led the new Italian government after the unification in 1861, and continued to play a central role in Italian politics until the end of the century, this work contributes to the most recent scholarly debates on Hegel and Italian Hegelianism, to the broader field of the history of political thought, as well as to the research on nineteenth-century Italian history.
What these Italian liberals had established was that an intellectual amalgamation of foreign and local traditions of thought may provide a critical understanding of a body of political thought and often leads to outcomes that bear scant similarity with the original. Italian Hegelianism was shaped by a ‘practical’ understanding of Hegel’s philosophy, where practical has a twofold meaning: it insists on the historical, ethical, and political dimension of Hegel’s metaphysics and the attempts to realise Hegelian political ideas in the practice of political life.
Moving beyond the classical division in Hegelian scholarship between a metaphysical or non-metaphysical understanding of Hegel, nineteenth-century Italian Hegelians reinterpreted Hegel’s categories of logic in a historical and phenomenological perspective, rendering both aspects relevant to the understanding of modern historical times. However, those ideas are valuable only insofar as they can and must turn into reality: the Italian Hegelians’ direct engagement with political action is the by-product of this conviction.
The critical approach to Hegelianism highlighted by Gallo will be passed on to the Italian Hegelians’ most cherished pupil, the founder of Italian Marxism, Antonio Labriola, and will persist as a trait of Italian engagement with Marx’s political thought in Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, and Antonio Gramsci.
In nineteenth-century Italian political thought, philosophical knowledge acquired a “practical” dimension: if ideas are powerful because they unfold in the historical and political world and interact with it in a mutual relationship, then philosophy has a concrete dimension. These intellectuals believed that poor times shape poor ideas, while great ideas shape great times.
