Italian Political Thought Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Italian political thought has charted, and often directed, the journey of Western ideas and practices from Roman times to the medieval Christian period to the modern world. Italians have been artisans of political theory and empirical inquiry. The reflections and experience gained in the art and practice of governance by successive generations of Italians have arguably inspired or played a part in the neo-Roman theory of free citizens and free states in early modern Britain, the creation of an Atlantic republican tradition, the growth of public choice theory in the 1960s, and the conceptualization of liberal socialism in the first part of the twentieth century as well as showing that ordinary people can successfully resolve collective-action dilemmas, or contentious politics, in the management of common property resources over extended periods.

Like the Greeks, the Italians had the advantage of an early start. But unlike the Greeks, the Italians did not, for a variety of reasons, stop contributing. Successive generations of Italian thinkers wrote as comparativists and seldom as parochial thinkers or narrow pan-Italian nationalists. Their contributions meshed with, and continue to be easily understood in terms of, familiar categories of thought in the Anglophone world. Because Italy was less directly involved in the competition of national monarchies and was late to achieve national unification, Italian perspectives tended to be less caught up in momentary conflicts. As Anthony Pagden (1990) notes in Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination, “For centuries . . . the Italians had been the most sensitive, the most astute observers of the European political scene” (p. 5). In that sense, Italian political thought often possessed the quality of distance modern social scientists seek. While thinkers often wrote in response to particular political-economic exigencies confronting their community, they each, at the same time, engaged in reinterpreting the past. This way, as John Burrow (2007/2008) put it, “the image of Rome [in the Renaissance] assumed a different form from that current in the Middle Ages, [and] focused not on the imperial city, the urbs aeterna, but on the struggling early republic to which the Romans of the first century BC had themselves looked back as a lost era of patriotic republican virtue” (p. 260). By the time of liberation and unification in the middle of the nineteenth century, Italy had accumulated such a rich and variegated patrimony of political-economic ideas that the meaning of the past posed serious dilemmas about how to look to the future.

For all these reasons, the Italian tradition of political thought is not easily reducible to a single linear narrative or simple summary. Yet general trends do emerge. These are an emphasis on micro foundations of political behavior accompanied by a preference for empirically informed ideas and speculations, an approach to institutional order that does not presume unitary or command forms of rule (the state) as the only way to enhance liberty and institutions of self-government and sustain organized existence, a view of political economy as involving reciprocal assistance and the promotion of public happiness, and a repertoire of republican and liberal ideas that cannot be contained within the analytical framework of either liberalism or republicanism.

Microfoundations

The microfoundations of Italian political thought rest on the individual as the basic constituent of the world (who is malleable by others but who can shape himself) and a strong dose of political realism. Thinkers in the Italian tradition have been concerned with not just the role of ideas but how those ideas emerge and give meaning to political action—hence the persistent reference to the importance of artisanship in the crafting of institutions of all sorts. The discourse about microfoundations has proceeded in terms of the unity of mind and body and the relationship between ideas and deeds.

Unity Of Mind And Body

Following the Greek discovery of the mind, there emerged in the Western philosophical tradition a mind-body dualism. This dualism gave rise to an excessively intellectualistic conception of the mind as the primary source of our ideas. One characteristic of Italian political thought is a rejection of this dualism and an insistence on the unity of man. Over time several arguments have been used to justify this position.

Generalizing from an isolated human consciousness was considered misguided because the world was not something that an isolated mind could imagine and construct ex nihilo. Consequently, both philosophical idealism and extreme forms of rationalism were rejected. Immanuel Kant was seen as pushing the Cartesian system of thought to its logical conclusions and identified with what should be avoided: extreme rationalism. A nineteenth-century thinker went as far as to predict, wrongly, that Kant would be relegated to the dustbin of intellectual history. Italian thinkers were more open to British sensism or empiricism, but they saw problems there too. By locating the search for knowledge and even for truth primarily in the individual’s sensory and emotional experience of a world without history (and hence without culture) much of British empiricism was viewed as replacing one source (the mind) of knowledge with another (sense and emotions). As much as many Italian thinkers during and after the Enlightenment admired the empiricism of the English over the rationalism of the French and the idealism of the Germans, they could not accept any of them in to to.

Italians derived from Giambattista Vico and Catholic thought an awareness of the complex historicity and cognitive evolution of humanity, which did not allow them to reduce human thought either to some mere movement of the speech organs, as Hobbes did, or simply to an atomism of the mind, as Locke seemed to do. The emphasis on self-preservation by English authors was generally viewed as a Protestant way to undermine the importance of human sociality and, indirectly, the teachings of the Catholic Church. This helps to explain why, for example, Italian Enlightenment thinkers privileged comparative cultural analysis rather than introspective psychology. For all their declared hostility to medieval thinkers, many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment figures in Naples as in Lombardy remained within the Catholic tradition when they emphasized the unity of man (and woman).

Union Of Words And Deeds

The independence of Italian political thought showed itself in a closely related feature: an emphasis on empirical inquiry and interdisciplinary work. This involved a rejection of the separation of legal, economic, and philosophical issues into categories distinct from each other and the pragmatic use of classical and Catholic writings and examples. The mode of analysis was especially noticeable in the eighteenth century, but it was not unique to that period. An antiabstractionist and interdisciplinary mode is common to the different periods and streams of Italian thought. The main interest was in men, not Man. This interest took many forms.

With Niccolò Machiavelli, we see it in his insistence on considering individuals self-interested beings and on political realism more generally. His attention to what is, as opposed to what ought to be, is nevertheless always accompanied by speculation of what can be done. Some later analysts regard Machiavelli as practicing a form of humanist realism or civic humanism. Some intellectual historians have discovered this humanist realism at work in Renaissance Naples as well. A chief weakness with Machiavelli’s realism is that it was primarily concerned with how to achieve and maintain power— not unlike what Richard Neustadt was to do in the United States with his work on presidential power. In the words of American economist Scott Gordon (1999), a chief problem with Machiavelli is that he “does not examine the organization of government as a means for making collective decisions, and despite his republicanism, he does not consider how the liberty of the citizen may be preserved, or how the self-interest of the governors may be directed to the service of the general welfare” (p. 162).

There were other thinkers who, just as Machiavelli, had a realistic view of human nature and insisted on a secular view of the state but went much further in showing how the problems of factional politics and government organization can be met to maintain liberty and achieve a stable social order. A case in point is Gasparo Contarini’s De Magistratibus et Republica Venetorum. Well before the English translation as The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, the book became almost instantly a classic study for understanding why Venice of all the other city republics retained such a long-enduring form of republican independence. Contarini’s reflections also became a main source of idealization of the myth of Venice by foreign writers.

From the book alone, one would never know that aside from having served the republic in different important posts abroad, Contarini was a profoundly religious man, a theologian, and a prince of the church. He advanced a temporal and secular view of government: the purpose of civil society is that men “might live happily and commodiously.” He recognized that “there have been many commonwealths which have far exceeded Venice as well in empire and in greatness of estate, as in military discipline and glory of the wars; yet have there have not been any, that may be paragoned with this of ours, for institutions and laws prudently decreed to establish unto the inhabitants a happy and prosperous felicity” (1599, 5 ff).

More generally, Contarini anticipated a lesson American patriots were to learn later from The Federalist: that human beings are rational creatures, that they can devise means of effective governance to generate good laws without either depending on the altruism of governors or denying the importance of civic virtues and human ability in the selection of men for office, and that it is possible to ensure accountability of rulers through various forms of checks and balances. Rulers could be ruled. Against this backdrop, it becomes easier to understand the high praise heaped on Contarini by Gordon, who tends to gloss over the fact that Venice’s form of government was hardly democratic. Still there is something to Gordon’s point when he avers that Contarini’s book “did for political science what Adam Smith’s mode of the marketplace did for economics: it showed how a stable social order can be achieved without a hierarchical structure of authority and demonstrated that personal liberty is harmonious with social order in a pluralist system of countervailing powers” (1999, 162).

Practical realism was also the motivating force behind the ruling elite literature made famous by the works of Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto. When he was still a student at the University of Palermo, roughly between 1878 and 1881, the young Mosca boldly swept away the prevailing tendency among historians and political scientists to explain how governments worked largely by the type of regime this way: “among the constant facts and tendencies that are to be found in all political organisms, one is so obvious that it is apparent to the most casual eye. In all societies—from societies that are very meagerly developed and have barely attained the dawning of civilization, down to the most advanced and powerful societies—two classes of people appear—a class that rules and a class that is ruled” (1939, 50).Yet sensitivity to practical details has not been the privilege of political thinkers alone.

In a famous novel set in seventeenth-century Milan, Column of Infamy, the nineteenth-century writer Alessandro Manzoni, a chief figure in Italian literature, ably sketched the personal responsibility of public officials to do good even under autocratic political regimes. More recently, students of comparative politics have described the phenomenon with the expression “Rome flattens everything. Fascism without Rome would have been Nazism. «The slogan of Italian Communism in the 1970s and 1980, “the Italian Way to Socialism,” captures a dimension of the same thought, as did Antonio Gramsci’s earlier refashioning of Communism. Some theorists, such as Hannah Arendt, have explained the same thought in grander terms: “the almost automatic general humanity of an old and civilized people” (Arendt 1963, 179).

Multiform Nature Of Political Rule

In identifying the multiform nature of political rule as an enduring lineament of Italian political thought, there is no suggestion that the principle of liberty and the conceptual language appropriate to that principle had been worked out in institutional forms from the very beginning—far from it. But there is no doubt that a prevailing view among successive generations of thinkers was to think of liberty and self-government as plants of many roots.

Aquinas accepted the doctrine of natural hierarchy with the king as the best kind of ruler, while arguing for widespread popular participation in the actual conduct of government. He unsuccessfully tried to reconcile both views through a theory of a mixed constitution. Likewise, Dante’s (1998) call for an extension of natural hierarchy (the monarchy) to solve the problem of universal peace came alongside his strongly held view that “citizens do not exist for the sake of the consuls nor does the people exist for the king; quite the contrary the consuls exist for the sake of the citizens and the king for the sake of the people” (p. 69).

The great challenge over the course of Italian history was how to suggest solutions to what was a visible reality throughout the entire peninsula and islands: widespread asymmetrical human relationships but also a great commingling of horizontal and vertical legal systems as well as ascending and descending political and economic orders. Men of thought and action knew a lot about local self-rule and good government, but they still did not find a satisfactory solution to how to organize multiple jurisdictions in relation to each other. Lorenzetti’s famous painting about good and bad government in the communal hall of Siena generated learned commentaries about which mechanisms were appropriate to translate into practice his vision of good government. For all their brilliance, the people in Lorenzetti’s fresco did not have the intellectual resources to think of ways to combine self-rule with shared rule. Thus, while many Italian thinkers rejected Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan as an appealing argument but disastrous for the prospects of self-government, they did not offer persuasive alternatives—and what they suggested has seldom, if ever, reached the international scholarly community.

A leading nineteenth-century federalist and republican thinker from Milan, Carlo Cattaneo, characterized the lack of conceptual resources in the construction of a new cognitive map this way: “the idea of equality of rights in the disparity of force, the idea of federal justice, was a ray of light reserved to illuminate future generations” (Cattaneo 1858/1957, 243) in North America—a point also made by Tocqueville (1835/1969) in the first chapter of Democracy in America when he drew attention to the fact that Americans were building society on a new foundation and applying “theories till then unknown or deemed unworkable” (p. 30). It was in fact Cattaneo who, probably for the first time in the history of Italian political thought, showed that it was possible, through a federal commercial republic, to harmonize and foster liberty (the focus of liberal theory), equality (the focus of democratic theory), and heterogeneity (the focus of federalist theory). Characteristically, Cattaneo envisioned a federal commercial republic for Europe as well as Italy.

The unification of Italy in the nineteenth century was a rejection of Cattaneo’s vision and an affirmation of the entrenched view of the European state. The Risorgimento differed from earlier European state making in some important respects.

The prospect of a single political regime for the entire Italian peninsula and islands generated considerable debate for more than sixty years on two general topics: whether it was possible to achieve freedom and self-government through peaceful means and avoid the trap of violence, armed revolt, and war and what constitutional design or model of government was best suited to a population that had lived under separate and diverse political regimes for more than thirteen hundred years. Some of the sharpest minds took part in the debate. As described by Raymond Grew (1996), the challenge of constitutional choice had “a particular resonance in Italy where nineteenth-century constitutions were associated with the liberties of medieval communes; the historical and patriotic perspective of [Ludovico Antonio] Muratori; the romantic figure of [Pasquale] Paoli popularized by Rousseau; and the eighteenth-century projects for constitutions in Corsica, Tuscany and Lombardy, which were written by prominent Italians and widely discussed across the peninsula” (p. 221).

The centralized system that emerged in liberal Italy after 1860 was greatly helped by war, but it was also the product of a conscious choice between alternative regimes. At the same time, federalist, nonunitary principles of organization were such a central part of the Italian political tradition that the victory of centralized government and administration failed to eclipse them completely. Nonunitary forms of rule gained renewed support starting in the 1880s, as government performance began to deviate radically from expectations. The establishment of regional government in the 1960s and recent attempts at fiscal federalism attest to the enduring attraction of a theory of governance grounded in a polycentric system of order.

Political Economy

There is a rich literature available in English on the importance of trade in the history of Italian political thought. The experience of Venice as a transnational commercial republic generated a considerable literature in several languages, and its outpouring continues unabated. Equally important theoretically, although less known, are the treatises in support of commerce, trade, and entrepreneurship penned by two friars in the fourteenth century: San Bernardino of Siena and San Antonino of Firenze. San Bernardino’s originality was in promoting economic entrepreneurship, and for this his work has been widely praised by historians of economic thought and of the Austrian school of economics. But it was not until the Enlightenment that the centrality of trade and commerce emerged in full force in Italian political thought, under the rubric of political, public, or civil economy.

Two main Italian groups of political economists of the time from Milan and Naples worked, often independent of one another, to place economic issues at the center of public thought and life. A combination of factors came together, and these include various attempts to update the Aristotelian and Scholastic tradition and the Italian tradition in physics and mechanics; the extension of the emerging scientific methods to the betterment of human society; the renewed importance of the principle of usefulness, especially in the work of the Milanese Pietro Verri, now extended to reform institutions of society, as evident in Beccaria’s famous work on crime and punishment; and an attentiveness to political, economic, and intellectual developments taking place in Europe. Italian thinkers were as much influenced by their European counterparts as the latter, Baron de Montesquieu and Adam Smith included, were influenced by the former.

A recent book by John Robertson (2005) advances a powerful restatement of the interconnection of different movements of ideas during the Enlightenment. He focuses on similar facts in dissimilar milieux that conventional wisdom would hardly put together: the Enlightenment in Scotland and Naples, the two “kingdoms governed as provinces” (p. 147). He breaks new ground in showing why the science of human nature and sociability was an essential part of the intellectual life in both kingdoms and how much David Hume andVico drew, albeit in different ways, on the revival of Epicurean moral philosophy in seventeenth-century France, which in turn served to provide philosophical foundations for political economy. Robertson challenges us to think again about the proposition advanced by standard accounts that have Scottish illuminati resolve “the riddle” of the modern world all by themselves—or that the Enlightenment was a movement dedicated to the overthrow of religion and even clerical power, more generally. The commitment to political economy in Scotland and Naples began when Hume, Ferdinando Galiani, and Antonio Genovesi persuasively argued that commerce might replace war and conquest as the means of human betterment and national aggrandizement. Genovesi wrote about human betterment and the wealth of nations years before Adam Smith did.

The Neapolitan and Lombard thinkers sketched sophisticated blends of institutional interaction between public and private institutions that went beyond the narrow confines of state and market to give meaning to trade as socialites or reciprocal assistance and to convey a strong positive relationship between trade and public trust and happiness. These intellectual developments raise questions of their own that did not have answers at the time: why were the outcomes of the Enlightenment very different in Scotland and Naples? What factors were at work in the two kingdoms that advanced or retarded human betterment? What happened after 1760?

Other generations of scholars answered these questions in the nineteenth century, thereby generating a new body of ideas and empirical inquiry. Interregional variations were accounted for in two ways. First there were the relative bargaining powers, transaction costs, and discount rates of regional rulers visà-vis others who counted in society: the Sicilian parliamentary barons were stronger and more united than their Neapolitan and Lombard counterparts vis-à-vis their respective rulers. Second, what were also at work were alternative conceptions of how best to repair failings in agriculture as well as government. The interaction of these factors created a complex matrix of choice and results. Some wanted to make a tabula rasa of the past but could not for the way they pressed the issue; the result was that either nothing was done to repair failings or some reformist policies were introduced. Others succeeded in making a tabula rasa of some institutions. The net result was that for different reasons “liquidating the heredity of the past” (to use the famous words of the Neapolitan Frenchinspired viceroy of Sicily, marquis Domenico Caracciolo) did not produce the desired results in both Naples (were that it succeeded) and Sicily (where it did not). Where more modest reforms were introduced with local cooperation, such as in Lombardy and Tuscany, they had far more productive consequences than anticipated.

Also by the nineteenth century, with industrial development, new ways to conceptualize the relationship between politics and economics were gaining ground among attentive Italian thinkers and the public. One way was that the form of government best suited to free men in a commercial society was not the enlightened despotism or monarchical sovereignty of the previous century but a constitutional monarchy or a federal republic. Most political and economic thinkers continued to promote free trade, but they differed from their counterparts in the Scottish Enlightenment in their search for mechanisms capable of reconciling economic inequality with adequate provision for those excluded, who possessed no property except their labor.

These developments help to explain why Italian fiscal theory and political economy “have never been plagued with the heritage of utilitarianism which has so influenced the development of fiscal theory in England and America” (James M. Buchanan 1987, 334). It equally helps to explain why many nineteenth-century thinkers such as Cattaneo, Napoleone Colajanni, and Antonio de Viti de Marco found no contradictions in being friends of both free trade and the nascent labor movement and could praise Britain but also criticize its government for the treatment of the working class and the Irish people. The world of equality, they thought, has as much to fear from politics as from economics.

By the twentieth century what had been a broad current of political-economic thought branched out in even broader directions to inspire two seemingly opposed ways of thinking: a liberal formulation of socialism in the 1930s in response to both the Great Depression of 1929 and Fascism and the emergence of public choice theory in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. It should come as no surprise that some of the early writings of James Buchanan, before public choice gained its name and fame, were published in the Italian journal Il Politico, whose editor, Bruno Leoni at the University of Pavia, did much to keep the flame of classical liberalism alive in the immediate postwar period.

A Public Science Beyond Liberalism And Republicanism

For quite some time it was commonplace in the international intellectual community to maintain a binary, paradigmatic distinction between liberalism and republicanism, nourished by a growing literature. A recent study by Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson has helped to discredit the binary distinction. The authors draw on the writing of six leading thinkers— Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Germaine de Stael, and Benjamin Constant—to successfully demonstrate that many republican principles and ideas were part of the modern liberal beginnings. Their conclusion, unthinkable in Anglo-American academic circles as late as the 1970s, is unsurprising to careful students of Italian political thought.

Machiavelli aside, there are streams of republican thought in Italian history yet to be tapped. Practically every region of Italy can point to some form of free government or republican democracy in the past. This republican tradition is not to be confused with the French republican tradition that misled Gramsci so much. As Franco Venturi noted, “Jacobin propaganda, monotonous and exalting at the same time, brought into Italy a republican ideal which was ill-suited to a country in which the republican experience was firmly rooted” (1971, 19) A chief merit of Cattaneo in the nineteenth century was to go beyond republicanism and liberalism to fashion a public science aimed at making sense of the progress of civilization (incivilimento) and self-government that could not be adequately addressed by either separately. Equally important, Cattaneo’s work can be used jointly with more recent studies to suggest ways to remove untenable and false distinctions and dichotomies that have so preoccupied the Anglophone academic world: the distinction between negative and positive liberty and the dichotomy between methodological individualism and community; between individual action, collective action, and institutions; and between self-interest and the public good. In stressing the master role of ideas, Cattaneo argued that people have first to learn the arts of incivilimento before they can practice self-governance. Polycentric federal republicanism lies at the heart of his science of self-governance. Cattaneo laid the groundwork for a public science that never developed in the nineteenth century but may be developing in the early twenty-first century in the form of civic studies and a science of citizenship, with the Indiana University Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, founded by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, as one of its major centers.

Conclusion

In spite of the importance of the contributions sketched above, Italian political thought as a whole has not had as much influence as British thought in the development of liberty and institutions of self-government throughout the world. No doubt, it is partly due to the relative position of the two countries in world affairs. But if the study of comparative political thought is more than simply the study of canonical authors and texts, then there is much to be gained from a careful study of the history of Italian political thought. The preceding pages suggest why.

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