David Ward,Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism,Liberalism,Writing.

Reviewed by: Giuseppe Tosi, Georgetown University, USA

In this work, Piero Gobetti’s New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing, David Ward presents an intellectual biography of one of the most important Italian political thinkers of the 20th century. Ward highlights Gobetti’s figure and works by introducing the dominant ideas prevailing through the entire body of his writings. However, for a better understanding of Gobetti’s main intellectual themes, this study focuses also on the most important intellectual or political characters who had a resonant influence on him and from whom he derived the most important lessons. Among Gobetti’s champions, Croce and Salvemini occupy a place of the utmost relevance, and if Gentile does not accompany them it is only because of his adherence to fascism. On the other hand, Gobetti considers Mussolini and Giolitti as true criminals who have degraded Italian politics.

Most of all, in this study Ward wants to isolate the dominant elements prevailing in the work of Gobetti, and to shed light on the major historical considerations that characterize his work. From this study emerges a portrait of an intellectual who reverses the sense of history and seems more interested in the future than in the past. In fact, the past, for Gobetti, is an element of the future. He envisioned the nation’s future as a project that, if implemented, would deeply transform the state of Italy that he witnessed in the 1920s.

History, in Gobetti’s consideration, is what the past failed to be but what the future could be, provided that certain specific political and cultural actions would take place in the public sphere. His perspective has been clear since the very beginning, when he wrote an article entitled ‘Manifesto’, published in the first issue of La Rivoluzione Liberale. In that article, he offered a detailed examination of the causes that had determined the crisis of Italian liberalism. The reasons lying at the base of the involution of Italian society, he thought, could be found in three critical conditions which were, respectively, the lack of a ruling class, the lack of a modern economic life, and, finally, the lack of a nation’s consciousness and the direct exercise of liberty. He thought that the origins of these deficiencies were to be traced back to the Renaissance, and he investigated their perpetuation up to Italy’s most recent history.

Nevertheless, this framework of interpretation was supposed to serve only as a starting point for a renewed sense of the future; thus it was not strictly how history had generally been viewed up to the early 20th century. Gobetti’s history, as he wrote, was an interpretative scheme for a new history that would be consciously formed by a new generation of Italians. This major change, though, would not happen smoothly. He believed that history was not made up of phases quietly replacing one another over a span of time but was built on major, violent clashes which would bring about social conflict and political opposition. This, according to Gobetti, was the only possible approach that would guarantee a true and lasting change. He didn’t fear class struggle or the collision of diverging interests; quite the opposite, he believed that a radical change would trigger and feed progress, thus providing an irresistible and irreversible thrust toward the future. Gobetti’s rhetoric is full of expressions such as ‘intransigent’, ‘revolution’, ‘liberal’ and, above all, ‘new’. As Ward emphasizes, ‘New Energies’ was the title of his first review, ‘new moral type’ would be the Italian he would have very much liked to see on the national scene, and ‘new protagonist’ would be a self-conscious working class. In this way, Gobetti provided an image of what his country might be if the programmes of reforms and social change that he hoped to see were fully implemented.

Therefore, his historical interpretations of past figures and events are to be read as indications of what needed to be avoided, or of what would be desirable for the construction of a new project. At this point, it may be said that Gobetti’s writing, according to Ward, developed not so much toward history itself but rather in the direction of propaganda intended as a fundamental constituent of a political undertaking. No wonder, then, that critics have disapproved of Gobetti’s intellectual attitude in regard to history. On the other hand, they have missed a crucial point, since they did not fully realize that Gobetti’s distinctive historical interpretation lies exactly in this unheard and provocatively future oriented sense of history.

Unmistakably, all these questions faced by Gobetti configure, at last, an acute reflection on the role of the intellectual in contemporary society, together with his effort to bring about a renovation of the nation and its citizens. But these were also the motives which brought him to viscerally oppose fascism, which he considered as the worst moment of Italy’s history. The failures and limitations of Italian liberalism were for Gobetti the main causes that favoured the rise of fascism, and his unyielding antifascism can only be understood in the framework of the liberal revolution he hoped to see. Gobetti’s analysis of and response to fascism are, for Ward, fundamental keys for understanding the work of this young intellectual. After all, Gobetti’s very life was determined by fascism, and he will be remembered for the most part as an antifascist intellectual whose work is still worth reading today.

In conclusion, the major themes running through the whole of Gobetti’s writings and thought – fascism and antifascism, liberalism and liberal revolution, the intellectual and his writing – are carefully and brilliantly analysed in this study, and Ward’s prose makes the reading of this book a tremendously enjoyable experience.