In this wide ranging, stimulating book Maurizio Viroli assumes two burdens. The first is historical in the narrow sense. Using the methods of the Cambridge School historians, he strives to amend the record on the question of religion and liberty in Italy. The legacy of the Enlightenment, the philosophes, and the French Revolution predispose one to see a historical landscape divided between the forces of feudal and clerical oppression, and the brash, free-thinking opponents of sanctified authority. The defenders of republican liberty are linked with the latter. Viroli objects when this approach returns to the Italian Renaissance and tells the story of republics fighting for liberty using the language of classical Greek and Roman texts primarily, and only incidentally drawing on biblical reservoirs in their fight against outsiders and the treacherous powers of the papacy. Wasn't Machiavelli a model, a humanist student of ancient history who combined a love of republican self-rule, Italian patriotism, and a hatred of the Church? It's not that simple, says Viroli. Not only must we pause to register the revolutionary saints of the English Revolution and the republican instincts lauded by Tocqueville in his descriptions of the New England colonies, but Italy, too, has its own, less triumphant, contribution to make. The modern histories of Italians struggling in the nineteenth century for liberty and unification (the Risorgimento) and those in the twentieth century who resisted fascism (the Resistenza or Second Risorgimento) force upon us a set of historical facts and distinctions that, he insists, cannot be denied. To be against Rome, the Church, and even Catholicism is not to be against religion or even Christianity. Even those who sacrificed, fought, and died for freedom, who were decidedly secular or even anti-Christian, pursued their patriotic causes and the dictates of their conscience with an impetus, he declares, that must be described as religious. Significant elements of modern movements for Italian liberty were explicitly Christian. They wished to make clear that their claim to Christianity was truer than that of the masses and leaders in and of the Church—they stand here convicted of centuries of hypocrisy, cynicism, and moral complacency. The intellectual champions of the Resistenza adapted willfully religious appeals. Benito Mussolini had turned the state into an object of worship; those fighting for liberty, Viroli notes, needed to revive “the religion of liberty” as a counterforce.

The book is thus divided into three sections covering medieval and Renaissance Italy, the Risorgimento, and the twentieth-century resistance to fascism. The second and third document how religion, of a typically reformist, anti-clerical persuasion, was an elemental part of modern Italian liberation struggles against a complicit Church and the demos it corrupted. The first section recovers and emphasizes their counterparts in the Italian Renaissance and the Middle Ages. Without trying to capture all that this thematic chronicle of the languages of the religion of liberty recounts, this capacious survey includes the mystification of the Renaissance republics in arts and letters; Machiavelli and his contemporaries; the late eighteenth-century Italian “Jacobin” efforts (inspired by Rousseau) to repudiate Christianity and reinvent a religion suited to a free people; the chastened, more Christian (if no less reform-minded) nineteenth-century efforts of those such as Luigi Lambruschini to reinvent Italian culture through religion, and the various civic religious components of the programs of Vincenzo Gioberti, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Giuseppe Garibaldi. The efforts to revive the religion of liberty by anti-fascists including Benedetto Croce, Peiro Martinette, and Adolfo Omodeo are also critical to Viroli's project. Nearly all regard their cause as more Christian than the Church and its followers.

Viroli's dominant dichotomy is thus not religion/irreligion but the spiritually and morally “dead” Italians that live in servile submission and complicity with the tyrants who receive the Church's blessing, and those who were reawakened to a mission infused with a religious spirit to defend liberty, the nation, and even human dignity. The latter were moved by this religious spirit to make the heroic sacrifices necessary to this challenge. The former stood by and sunk into degradation abetted by cynicism and indulgence. Viroli's Machiavelli looks in admiration at the pious Christians in Germany encountered during his travels in 1508, and like his anti-Papal contemporaries, salutes them as true Christians, a study in contrast to corruption at home. The religion of liberty therefore opens its doors to zealous reformers. Its heroes include Girolamo Savonarola, who blessed the Florentine Republic in its struggles with foreign powers in league with the Church, and nineteenth-century Italian intellectuals who, notwithstanding the curse of individualism, looked with envy upon peoples who experienced the Reformation that Italy never did.

Viroli's history is a contextualist retreading of Benedetto Croce's declared mission to revive the “religion of liberty” as a counterforce to fascism and servility—the vice Viroli also associates with Berlusconi's Italy (a major theme of his recent book The Liberty of Servants: Berlusconi's Italy, 2011). Viroli's liberals, although he does not describe them as such, set about to create their own political theology. This relates to the book's second, theoretical, and more broadly defined historical burden. It is to make the case not merely for the existence of a religious component in the struggle for liberty, but for the indispensability of that religious component. At root is a Machiavellian question: What does necessity dictate for the preservation of liberty? Whereas Machiavelli is often associated with irreligion and immorality, Viroli's framework appears to invert the question. Isn't religion, it asks, necessary for liberty's survival and defense? That Croce himself had earlier described religion's relation to philosophy as akin to error's relation to truth is not fully explored. In meeting its second burden, Viroli's text does what a good, provocative work of history does: It raises still more questions. In that these were, as Viroli notes, actual wars of religion in the struggle between liberty and its opponents, we do not hear an answer to what must arise as an obvious question. Is religion indispensible to those who fight to preserve liberty for the same reason that it is indispensible to liberty's opponents? In short, is religion's most important contribution that it produces those who are willing to fight? If so, we might find need of a distinction between the reforming content of the religion(s) of liberty that Viroli celebrates and the use of religious sentiments in politics generally. Moreover, in spite of all that this history covers, Viroli's argument doesn't confront the historical evidence of what happens when reformers who fight for a religion of liberty gain power. Viroli laments that the religion of liberty has always faded away, but he does not here consider the potentially negative consequences of a world where the reformer's zealous spirit becomes a lasting, dominant voice, or where these enthusiasts compete amongst themselves for the title of most holy or patriotic. To do that may have required him to reach beyond Italy and again to the question of the dangerous patriot; he might have gone down this road had he more than marked the differences between what were, after all, the religions of liberty. In general, however, the book is a very welcome addition to ongoing debates and will remind readers of a strand of Italian history deserving of attention.