The principal subject-matter of Gallo’s erudite work is the reception of Hegel’s political philosophy by southern Italian intellectuals and political actors before, during and after the revolutions of 1848. The book details their attempts at employing Hegelian conceptuality in their struggle to establish Italy as a modern state. Gallo’s aim is not exclusively narrative and explanatory. She also aims at debunking conceptions that southern political scholars had a secondary role in the making of Italy, providing ample evidence against commonplaces about the meridione as cultural backwater.
The historical period treated is clearly defined, though by necessity there are numerous references to earlier philosophers like Bruno, Campanella and Vico on the one hand, and later ones like Labriola, Gentile, Gramsci and Croce, on the other. Two issues contribute to the rich complexity of this study: objective ambiguities in Hegel’s own political doctrine, and the rapid transition of southern Italy from Bourbonic absolutism to membership in a nation-state. Special attention is given to the Renaissance interpretations during the Risorgimento; to interpretations of Vico and Hegel on history; to Catholicism, anti-clericalism and calls for a Protestant-like Reformation; and to the belief in the practical applicability of Hegel’s philosophical principles.
Despite the considerable variety of topics and figures discussed, the author never loses sight of the forest for the trees. The focus remains throughout on the role of Hegel’s political theory in the writings and programmes of intellectuals and politicians whose common goal was the founding of Italy as a modern state.
A substantial introduction is followed by five chapters covering the ideology and politics of southern Italy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The epilogue deals with the contributions of twentieth-century Italian philosophers as well as the rise of Fascism from the ashes of liberalism.
The introduction (‘Hegel from the Margins’) provides a helpful overview, one to which readers can always return when fearing they will become lost in the wealth of historical, biographical and theoretical issues discussed. Gallo highlights the peculiarities of Italian ‘reformed’ Hegelianism, e.g., its predominant focus on Hegel’s philosophy of history and political philosophy, or the linking of Vico with Hegel, both conceiving history as a movement of the spirit, the former as a circular movement, the latter as a spiral one directed towards humanity’s attainment of ‘consciousness of freedom’. Gallo’s study shows how debates in Anglophone, French and German scholarship on the role of Hegel’s Science of Logic in the philosophies of nature and spirit were peripheral for Italian thinkers, given their emphasis on the political aspects of Geist – a perspective no doubt owed to their main representatives being exiled, jailed, or actively engaged in politics.
Chapter one (‘The “Vico-Effect”’) explores the influence of Vico and Hegel on interpretations of the failed eighteenth-century rebellions against Bourbonic rule, which some viewed as precursors of 1848. In this and subsequent chapters, the author demonstrates the pivotal role played by (usually unacknowledged) philosophers: the Kantian Colecchi; the Hegel scholar Romagnosi; Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, scholar and translator of Vico; the lawyer and revolutionary Turchiarulo, first translator of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right; and Marianna Florenzi Waddington, influential proponent of the conceptual continuity from Bruno to Hegel. Gallo offers vivid portraits of the political conditions in which natural right theorists, constitutional lawyers and liberals carried on their debates: ubiquitous educational Jesuitism, tentacular censorship, drastic penalties. We also learn about the remarkable ideological diversity in the Neapolitan School. Main themes here are the conceptually distinct but practically inseparable meanings of ‘state’ and ‘nation’, as well as the Neapolitans’ embrace of Hegel’s conception of statehood as requiring an objective and subjective dimension: the post-1848 Restoration proved to exiles and political prisoners that a revolution of objective state institutions is doomed to failure unless accompanied by a revolution in people’s consciousness and will.
Chapter two (‘The Renaissance’) discusses nineteenth-century debates about individual conscience and liberty in the Renaissance. Gallo shows that Bruno and Campanella loomed large in the consciousness of Italian Hegelians – including twentieth-century Marxists – playing a role similar to that of the birth of Protestantism in continental Europe.
Chapter three (‘The Risorgimento’) picks up the thread of the connection Renaissance-Risorgimento. Gallo offers reasons for the potentially confusing conflation of the two. For its proponents, the anachronism was negligible vis-à-vis their primary aim of state-building: whether re-birth or re-arising, both movements signaled the end of a civilisational decline and the potentiality for renewal. De Sanctis’ Storia della letteratura italiana makes lavish use of ‘risorgimento’ in reference to Machiavelli, paradoxically considered as a ‘negation of the Risorgimento’ (because of his privileging of effectual, not moral truth) but also as an embodiment of modern individuality – the ante litteram bourgeois. Indeed, Machiavelli already understood his doctrine as guidance for practical action, and the purpose of his Principe to be Italy’s liberation and unification. For De Sanctis, this radical thinker of modern individuality is the paradigm figure of spirit in search of itself – the gnothy seauton of spirit in Hegel’s doctrine.
Chapter four (‘The Ethical State’) engages the so-called Southern Question by detailing Bertrando Spaventa’s reading of Hegel’s notions of right, civil society, statehood, nationhood and ethical life. While rejecting Hegel’s arguments for the death penalty, for constitutional monarchy, and for the historical necessity of war, Spaventa adopts Hegel’s rejection of contractualism and his organicist notion of the state.
Chapter five (‘Hegelians in Charge’) and the Epilogue detail the role that events following the demise of Bourbonic despotism played in the life, thought and careers of progressive and conservative figures like Villari, Labriola, Gentile, Gramsci and Croce.
The high scholarly quality of Gallo’s research is due both to the documentary sources she provides and to her command of the philosophical subject-matter. Readers may feel overwhelmed by the rapid succession of facts and theories in some chapters, but the determined reader will be fully rewarded in the end.
