This chapter relates post-1918 Italy to the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the ascent of the successor states, and analyses, from the Trieste’s vantage point, fascist projects, practices and networks of ‘empire’ in the Adriatic Sea, in Mitteleuropa and in the Balkans between 1918 and 1938. It focuses on three connected aspects. Firstly, the northern Adriatic was the first setting of the ascent of squadrismo, a model of violent action against ‘enemies within’ then replicated elsewhere. Secondly, Italian nationalism and (...) imperialism aimed to reconfigure the post-Habsburg economic space and to reconnect the Adriatic with Central and Balkan Europe. Thirdly, Italian nationalist (then Fascist) élites from Trieste played a critical role, by boosting processes of empire-building and defending Austria vis-à-vis the prospects of Anschluss. In sum, the Habsburg legacies kept on shaping the dynamics of Italianization and fascistization in northern Adriatic and on feeding the search for Italy’s informal empire in Central and Southeastern Europe. (shrink)

This article reconstructs the personal and intellectual friendship between two cosmopolitan intellectuals: Andrea Caffi and Nicola Chiaromonte , who met while in exile in Paris in 1932. After a brief recapitulation of their previous biographies, and an overall presentation of their participation in the revolutionary antifascist group ‘Giustizia e Libertà’ in the thirties, this article provides a detailed analysis of their dialogues and disagreements in the forties and fifties on the topics of socialism and revolution, antifascism and anti-totalitarianism, utopia and (...) history. Particular attention is devoted to their contribution to the debates in the antifascist journal of GL and in the radical journal of Politics . Examined closely, the friendship between Caffi and Chiaromonte appears as a sequence of convergences and divergences, understandings and ruptures, which reflect the tensions and lacerations of the European civil war and its post-war legacy . Looked at again from a distance, however, it reveals a fundamental intellectual unity—a profound apolitical affinity in a century of radical politics which had fed wars, revolutions and totalitarian regimes. (shrink)

How did intellectuals react to the economic crisis of 2007-2008 and its long-term backlash? What did they learn from the main twentieth-century political and social experiences, in order to make a new sense of the traditional cultures of the Left? In order to answer these crucial issues, this proposal will analyze the paths of the well-known historians E. Hobsbawm and T. Judt and their apparently similar, but actually different reactions to the crisis. First, I will focus on their respective books: (...) How to Change the World and Ill Fares the Land. On the one hand, Hobsbawm?s critical approach to the post-1991 world, shaped by his lifelong fidelity to Marxism and his persistent sympathy for the Russian Revolution, was connected to his catastrophic vision of the end of the both conflicting and collaborative dynamics between capitalism and socialism. On the other hand, Judt?s re-thinking of the social-democratic tradition, compelled by the global transformations of the social question, was inspired by his connections with the East Central European dissidents? anti-totalitarian liberalism and by his critical approach to the engagement of the French intellectuals. Second, I will investigate their different interpretations of the?Golden Age? of post-1945 Europe and of the causes of its crisis. Third, I will show how, in spite of their common reference to Marx, late Hobsbawm?s and Judt?s historical visions - respectively combined with determinism and moralism - provide opposite ways of coping with the legacies of the 20th century and of criticizing the language of neoliberal economy within the Left. nema. (shrink)