Intellectuals and politics: introductory considerations

The intellectual-power link has frequently been used to define the specificity of Italy’s political culture and its unique process of nation-building. The ways in which intellectuals ‘intervene’ in politics constitute a problematic field of inquiry that is congenital to the legitimation of political authority (Jennings and Kemp-Welch Reference Jennings and Kemp-Welch1997) and that, in recent Italian history, is engrained in the origin and the functioning of post-war political institutions. The concept of ‘intellectual’ had been used in the late nineteenth century with different semantic nuances (Pertici Reference Pertici2002). Nevertheless, it was only in the second half of the twentieth century, with the spread of political and cultural journals, that the relationship between intellectuals and politics reached a new dynamic phase, establishing in the Italian context too a distinguished form of ‘presa di parola pubblica’ (establishing a voice in the public arena) (Bongiovanni Reference Bongiovanni1997; Attal, Gervasoni, Moretti, and Pertici Reference Attal, Gervasoni, Moretti and Pertici2014).

In order to outline how intellectual political discourse dealt with the challenge posed by the democratic mass politics of the new Italian Republic, and to address the interconnections between ‘the political’ sphere and ‘the intellectual’ arena, this article explores the case of the independent political journal Il Mulino. The term Il Mulino concurrently identified a ‘group’ that linked not only the eponymous journal and the publishing house, founded in Bologna in 1951 and 1954 respectively, but also the think-tanks connected to them: Associazione Carlo Cattaneo (1956), Associazione Il Mulino (from 1964) and Istituto Carlo Cattaneo (1965). In the contexts of Italian publishing, the Cold War and its confrontational political arena, the enterprise of the Il Mulino group represents a peculiarity: a successful publishing house and an influential centre-left reformist, progressive liberal-socialist journal, in which different political and historically hostile traditions (i.e. Liberalism, Socialism, Christian left-wing) collaborated in a joint cultural and political project (Maccaferri Reference Maccaferri2009). Accordingly, the journal’s editorial line was collectively decided by its founding members and the dialectical confrontation between their different political and cultural views was perceived as a workshop for experimenting with ‘democracy’. This fertile cultural and political heterogeneity was also reflected in the publishing house’s editorial line. In July 1963, the journal itself outlined its editorial policy as a form of democratic exercise:

In the context of the attempt to establish a new democratic system in Italian politics after the Second World War, the emphasis of this article is on the interaction between intellectual discourse and the process of political legitimation of the new Republic. In other words, Il Mulino offers a chance to reflect on the link between intellectual discourse and political power during a phase of intellectual transition and the stabilisation of the new representative, democratic regime. During the first decade of the Italian Republic, the process of political institutionalisation was accompanied by the need to create a ‘new’ system of beliefs, myths and symbols constructed by the institutions within which new intellectual actors could operate. According to Max Weber’s theory of power, political legitimation is a process of authorisation of the use of coercion that is based on a system of beliefs, which finds its full accreditation through consensus. A democratic government is that form of political authority that seeks consensus through socially shared beliefs, meanings, and culturally determined preferences and interests ([1922] Reference Weber2013). Within this framework, then, intellectual discourse manifests itself precisely in the function of ‘publicising’ power, in making it acceptable or unacceptable, contributing to the institutionalisation of the political authority by means of a transfer of shared cultural values in order to confer stability and enable political power to reproduce itself (Sadri Reference Sadri1992).Footnote ¹ Hence, continuing to regard the history of intellectuals like an ‘inventaire à la Prévert’ (Attal, Gervasoni, Moretti and Pertici Reference Attal, Gervasoni, Moretti and Pertici2014, 55) derived from the function-role or class-representation dyad is sufficient neither to understand the complex dynamics of cultural processes and their links with power, nor to comprehend Italian intellectual discourse as a powerful component of battles of political legitimation.

The history of Italian intellectuals has been reconstructed by Italian scholarship chiefly via cultural and sociological approaches (Mangoni Reference Mangoni1995; Dotti Reference Dotti1999; d’Orsi Reference d’Orsi2001; Attal Reference Attal2013). Furthermore, traditional historical reconstructions have been largely dominated by the confrontation of two pure types of intellectual: on the one hand, the engagé, serving the ‘cultural politics’ of the left and, on the other, the uncommitted intellectual confined in his own turris eburnea and solely devoted to study, generally identified with Catholic culture, with the exception of the Christian Democrat Giuseppe Dossetti and his group inside the party (Pombeni Reference Pombeni1979). These topoi derived their roots from the broader 1930s European debate on the intellectual’s ‘responsibility’, as epitomised by Julien Benda’s La Trahison des Clercs (1927). In this polemical essay, the French philosopher argued that European intellectuals had lost their role as critical thinkers and had become apologists for nationalism and racism (Walzer, Reference Walzer2004). Moreover, the Italian debate was deeply affected and coloured by Antonio Gramsci’s theorisation, whose notion of the political ‘function’ of the intellectual as being instrumental in raising the collective awareness of the working class, predominantly served the cultural policy of the Italian Communist Party from the late 1940s (Vittoria Reference Vittoria1992).

In embracing categories such as political legitimation, public sphere and consensus, the aim of this article is, instead, to shift the angle of observation towards highlighting the dynamics by means of which intellectuals ‘converse’ with politics, in order to read how intellectual discourse ‘participates’ in politics (Scott Reference Scott1997). Such intellectual discourse by its nature is not exclusively limited to the political discussion but finds its own added value in the political debate.

By the term ‘intellectuals’ I mean cultural actors with an acknowledged cultural capital and access to the media system for addressing public audiences, and who, most importantly, contribute to democratic life. Their vital hermeneutic role is that of enabling a society to understand itself, sometimes stimulating action as well. Being an intellectual is consequently an ideological activity whose function is to exert discursive power onto ‘the political’. According to Michael Freeden, the intellectual’s main function is to participate in distributing significance to values, ideas, ends, and policies. In this respect the definition of ‘public intellectuals’ – commonly used by US scholarship (Small Reference Small2002) – seems rather ambiguous, implying that there could also be a kind of private intellectual. More valuable for understanding the intellectual-power link is the introduction of the concept of the ‘politically-minded intellectual’, identifying those intellectuals with a clear ideational agenda for taking action for change and addressing political questions either in national or transnational contexts (see Freeden Reference Freeden2010, 81).

Il Mulino’s cultural project

The origin of the Il Mulino group can be found in a coterie of friends, initially formed at Bologna’s Liceo Galvani, which gained momentum during their university years, the period coinciding with the fall of Fascism, the civil war and the end of the Second World War. The former Liceo Galvani pupils were the future philosophers Nicola Matteucci and Antonio Santucci, the future sociologists Luigi Pedrazzi and Gian Luigi Degli Esposti, the future literary critic Pier Luigi Contessi and the future labour law expert Giuseppe Federico Mancini. While at Bologna University, they met Fabio Luca Cavazza, and the future literary critics Mario Saccenti and Ezio Raimondi. They founded the journal Il Mulino in April 1951 (Vittoria Reference Vittoria1995, 641). There are two versions of the story about the choice of the review’s title. It was inspired either by the novel Il Mulino del Po, written by the Bolognese writer Riccardo Bacchelli (Nicola Matteucci, interview 24 October 2002), or, according to Luigi Pedrazzi, because the editors were looking for the cultural equivalent of ‘wheat that [has to be] ground slowly for a long time to make good flour’ (Pedrazzi Reference Pedrazzi1998, 736). Felice Battaglia, philosopher and rector of the University in the first five years of the journal’s life, gave his encouragement to the young graduates, while financial support came from the lawyer Giorgio Barbieri, chairman of the Chamber of Industrialists in Bologna and owner of Bologna’s daily newspaper Il Resto del Carlino.

Conceived at first as a fortnightly bulletin mainly focused on issues related to the running of universities after the Ventennio and war years, in November 1951 the journal was reissued with a completely new format and editorial line, and it soon turned into a prominent review of political opinion. The new masthead specified that it was a ‘current affairs and culture monthly’ and the new editorial line explicitly adopted John Dewey’s pragmatism and the neo-Enlightenment’s advocacy of a liberal-secular, pluralist, rationalist, and progressive society which at the time found considerable resonance in Italy thanks to the existentialist philosopher Nicola Abbagnano (Mori Reference Mori2010). In June 1953 the Il Mulino group participated in the first conference organised by Abbagnano. Nicola Matteucci, Antonio Santucci and Luigi Pedrazzi also signed their group ‘manifesto’ (Mori Reference Mori2006, 317). They saw the regeneration of Italian politics through the lens of the neo-Enlightenment and, consequently, sought to forge a new relationship between culture and politics – an issue which dominated the Italian intellectual debate in the post-war decade – identified first and foremost with the precondition of overcoming historicism and idealism. In a series of editorials published from 1953 to 1957, Il Mulino’s intellectuals explained their strategy, (‘Dopo le elezioni’, 1953; ‘Una lotta nel suo corso’ August-September 1954; ‘Editoriale’, 1957; ‘La misura del nostro compito: il post-fascismo’, 1957), which culminated in the influential Norberto Bobbio article ‘Cultura vecchia e politica nuova’ (Reference Bobbio1955). To close the gap between culture and politics, to remove the separation between intellectuals and society, and to establish a modern democracy, Italian political culture needed a new kind of intellectual who, according to Bobbio, ‘does not act as a mere spectator’ but decides to study concrete problems and, only after having conducted his painstaking research, ‘takes sides’ (583). Dominated by Antonio Gramsci’s theory on the function of the intellectual and by the Italian Communist Party’s instrumental interpretation of it, as already mentioned, the Italian debate was thwarted by the opposition between the organic intellectual and one who, having failed to fulfil his ethical responsibilities, stayed inside his own turris eburnea (Ajello Reference Ajello1997). On the contrary, for Il Mulino, the intellectual was a custodian of specialist knowledge and a ‘technique’, someone who set himself up as the interlocutor on ‘an equal standing’ with the political class. By virtue of that attitude the intellectual contributed to the construction of a specific mental habitus, understood as a shared social space and shared perception of social practices, and a modus operandi participating in the reformulation of the public and political space. In short, he was a ‘technician’ willing to ‘dirty his hands’ in the political arena (Matteucci Reference Matteucci1981a, 516).

By engaging with the debate about the ‘organic’ versus the ‘engagé’ intellectual, Il Mulino had introduced a new element of enquiry. Only a true and efficient circulation of culture could ‘promote a continuous exchange between the ideas of the elites and those of the masses’ necessary to modernise Italian culture, but also necessary was the active presence of an intellectual who made available ‘his operative techniques and not a philosophy reduced to a solitary ideological exercise, or to a myth, or to a religion’ (‘Una lotta nel suo corso’, 1954, 532). Moreover, according to Nicola Matteucci, only in a ‘culture of an instrumental and empiricist kind’ could Italian culture overcome ideologism and ‘[emerge] from a policy of demands sustained by words of agitation and pass on to operative rationality.’ This new culture, which ‘can ensure an organic bond between the intellectual operator of the State and the autonomous intellectual organiser of groups’ (Matteucci Reference Matteucci1954, 751) and can, therefore, bridge the gap between culture and politics, would be based on social sciences, empirical analysis, and rationalistic thinking. It is clear, then, how interwoven was the self-representation articulated by Il Mulino’s intellectuals and the birth of the publishing house, which would become the principal channel for introducing Anglo-American social sciences, seen as instrumental to implementing the link between intellectuals and politics in Italy. In this respect, Il Mulino’s intellectuals declared in 1954: ‘Il Mulino will be at the service of [politics], making an effort to contribute to each one of the interested parties, growing in a clear awareness of itself and its own function and in respect and understanding for others’ (‘Una lotta nel suo corso’, 1954, 533).

In addition, according to Il Mulino’s intellectuals, who were also feeling the pressure of the climax of the Cold War, the still hegemonic position of idealism posed a serious threat to Italian political culture and new-born Italian democracy, because it had emerged in two more threatening and equally totalising philosophies: the anti-modern Catholic integralism, on the one hand, and the secular radical Jacobinism represented by Marxist philosophy on the other (Matteucci Reference Matteucci1981b, 107). On the contrary, the realisation of neo-Enlightenment reason could have been possible through a dialectical encounter with metaphysics by adopting a social sciences approach in order to read Italian society and culture critically. According to Relazione introduttiva al Primo Convegno Amici e Collaboratori del Mulino, the first book launched by the new publishing house, ‘converging towards a shared methodology capable of highlighting all potential research hypotheses’ was the pre-condition ‘to get rid of every ideological apriorism’ and, consequently, was an effective way ‘to overcome all prejudice, which still dominated Italian political life’ (Mancini Reference Mancini1954, 12).

To this end, the journal Il Mulino’s cultural project could be expanded by launching a publishing house, which was officially founded on 3 June 1954. Oral sources agreed in connecting the birth of the publishing enterprise to mere chance.Footnote ² More convincing are Luigi Pedrazzi’s reminiscences: he highlighted the role played by USIS-United States Information Service and by Fabio Luca Cavazza (1998, 736).Footnote ³ On behalf of the US government, USIS was one of the most active institutes at the forefront the cultural Cold War, promoting cultural activities throughout Western Europe in order to challenge the alleged hegemony of communist culture. In Italy, one of its most successful activities was supporting the publication of American literature and American books in general by funding their translations. Among Italian publishers involved in this operation were Mondadori, Bompiani, Longanesi, Neri Pozza, and Salani (Tobia Reference Tobia2008, 20). Together with Il Mulino, starting from 1959 USIS contributed to the publication of the series ‘Classici della Democrazia Moderna’ edited by Nicola Matteucci in collaboration with the historian and founder of the journal Nord e Sud Vittorio de Caprariis. In the same year, Il Mulino also launched the series ‘Collezione di Storia Americana’, jointly edited by Matteucci and de Caprariis with the historian Rosario Romeo, and the Americanist Mauro Calamandrei (Capozzi Reference Capozzi2003, 96).

It would, however, be mistaken to link the foundation of the publishing company to the action of Cavazza and USIS alone, in association with the politics of the cultural Cold War (Bello Reference Bello2015). Years before the publication of Frederick Jackson Turner’s La frontiera nella storia americana (1960) and the first volume of L’età di Roosevelt (1960) by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., both published in Italian in Reference Schlesinger1960 within a publishing context dominated by the Marxism/idealism dichotomy, Il Mulino had already established its reputation as a leading publishing house for disciplines such as sociology, political science, and Anglo-American social sciences in general. The second and third publications in 1954 set the trend: Filosofia e sociologia (1954), proceedings of the congress held in Bologna in April 1954 and organised by Nicola Abbagnano and Felice Battaglia; and Geografia delle elezioni italiane dal 1946 al 1953, edited by Francesco Compagna and Vittorio De Caprariis (1954). It is not hard to find amongst the titles published in the following years by Il Mulino some classic works of contemporary political sciences: Democrazia e cultura by Hans Kelsen (Reference Kelsen1955), Ideologia e utopia by Karl Mannheim (Reference Mannheim1957), Teoria e struttura sociale by Robert King Merton (1959), and La struttura dell’azione sociale by Thomas Parsons (Reference Parsons1962).

In the same spirit, the activity of the Associazione Carlo Cattaneo and the subsequent think-tank has to be considered. The Istituto Cattaneo developed the empirical socio-political research promoted by the group and within this project of crucial importance the financial assistance provided by US funds was vital; in 1956, thanks to a cultural exchange between the US and Italy supported by US Information Service, Fabio Luca Cavazza made contact with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Twentieth Century Fund and the Ford Foundation. Starting from the late 1950s, the Ford Foundation funded research into the state of Italian universities. The Comitato di studio sui problemi dell’Università – directed by Luigi Pedrazzi and comprising all Il Mulino members as well as Pietro Rescigno – received the sum of 35,000 dollars to carry out such research. The most important research project, however, was the one into political participation in Italy led by political scientists Giorgio Galli and Alfonso Prandi, with the collaboration of Giovanni Evangelisti, Gianfranco Poggi, and Giacomo Sani, funded by the Twentieth Century Fund of New York from 1962 to 1964.Footnote ⁴ In those same years and in particular during the John Kennedy administration, Cavazza became one of the interlocutors of the US State Department’s so-called ‘Italian desk’ and made contact with the intellectual scene related to the left of the Democratic Party, in particular Kennedy’s special advisor Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Although some historians have emphasized Cavazza’s role in reshaping the US-Italian relationship after the ambassadorship of Clare Boothe Luce (Gentiloni Silveri Reference Gentiloni Silveri1998), it is nevertheless clear that through Cavazza’s reports the US government had the opportunity to read Il Mulino’s analysis of Italy’s political situation. Furthermore, Cavazza was instrumental in organising preliminary talks between Kennedy administration delegates and Italy’s DC and PSI leadership during the lengthy political phases culminating in the centre-left coalition and first Aldo Moro government. Il Mulino, which, starting from 1959, was also able to count on the collaboration of the author of the Ventotene Manifesto and Europeanist federalist Altiero Spinelli played a minor but essential role in this operation by organising a conference on the US-European relationship in April 1961. This episode was the official occasion for the US delegates to make a trip to Italy. Among others, the party included James E. King, senior analyst for the Institute for Defense Analysis, Washington Post writer Leo Wollemberg, Italian-American member of Congress Victor Anfuso, Robert Amory Jr and Dana Darand of the CIA, as well as Schlesinger himself. Immediately after the conference and thanks to Cavazza, King and Schlesinger obtained appointments with the President of the Republic Giovanni Gronchi, DC leaders Amintore Fanfani and Aldo Moro, and Socialist leader Pietro Nenni.Footnote ⁵

Between cultural modernisation and political agenda

The need to carve out a modern political culture theoretically based on the overcoming of idealism and historicism was soon translated into the debate on ‘the opening to the left’ and was central to the intellectual discourse of Il Mulino. Italian historiography has mainly interpreted the transition to the DC-PSI (Christian Democracy and Italian Socialist Party) coalition governments, whose political origin can be traced back to 1954 with the first attempt made by Fanfani, as a party-political process. By adopting a systemic approach, the centro-sinistra has been interpreted as the process that allowed the Italian political and constitutional system to enter a phase of further stabilisation and maturity (Pombeni Reference Pombeni1997); whereas, according to Italian historiography on political parties, with the ‘opening to the left’ the PSI reconnected with its own reformist tradition and eventually freed itself from Marxist-Leninist ideology (Degl’Innocenti Reference Degl’Innocenti1993). Whether the centre-left was the first step towards overcoming the ostracism of the PCI and the left in general, or whether it was an episode in the political climate of the Cold War and the Western Camp, the focus still remains on one part of the problem.

Notwithstanding the contribution of these interpretations, however, this investigation engages with a different perspective. In those same years Italy underwent one of the most striking and impressive economic transformations in its history. On leaving economic autarky behind and instead joining an open system of trade and financial relations once again, Italy was soon able to latch on to the post-war Fordist cycle, entering the golden age of post-war affluence on an equal footing (Petri Reference Petri1997). Whether the ‘affluent society’ actually existed (a debate that started with John Kenneth Galbraith’s book of Reference Galbraith1958), or whether the Italian economic miracle was just an optimistic neo-capitalist expression, recent scholarship has pointed out the role played in Europe’s transformation by ‘consumeristic culture’ and ‘Americanisation’. The influence of American culture on European culture in the twentieth century, above all after the end of the Second World War on popular culture, media and consumer behaviour, has been widely studied (De Grazia Reference De Grazia2006). While not necessarily a critical term, within the Italian debate in the 1950s and 1960s, Americanisation was most often used by critics to indicate a process of cultural homogenisation and, interpreted through the lens of the confrontational Cold War context, Americanisation also meant a reduction in political diversity and therefore a potential threat to the nascent democratic system (Crainz Reference Crainz2005).

Yet, if the centre-left was the first moment of re-connection between economic growth and social transformation and the first moment of stabilisation for Italian democracy, thanks to the rapprochement between DC and PSI it was also a ‘cultural revolution’. The centre-left was a politico-cultural revolt against the ‘integralism’ of the various Italian political cultures, a sort of ‘political’ secularisation, while at the same time it was an attempt to enlist Italy in the paradigm of contemporary Western constitutionalism: the principle of ‘government by discussion’ (Pombeni Reference Pombeni2003, 219).

In line with this, I suggest that Il Mulino’s intellectual discourse should be read within this broader perspective. The need to ‘govern’ the new challenge posed by the affluent society and the economic miracle was, for the Bolognese intellectuals, the field where the ‘modernisation of culture’ and the ‘modernisation of the political’ met. The political answer to this challenge was to include the Socialist Party in the governing coalition. They wrote in 1963: ‘the centre-left coalition was made possible by the mounting wave of the economic miracle, which is bringing our economy to the phase of neo-capitalism, introducing mass consumption, high wages, the ideology of benessere’ (‘Per un esame di coscienza’ 599). More importantly, for Il Mulino intellectuals the centre-left was the answer to the ‘divorce between politics and culture’ and the discovery of the affluent society (whether supposed or real) had made this ‘divorce more serious’ (‘Editoriale’ 1960, 4). Political equilibria had remained the same as in 1946–1948, but, in the meantime, neither intentionally nor consciously, economic developments had changed the face of society and had become a factor demanding political change. Consequently, ‘the centre-left policy, to be effective and positive, cannot be a policy “against” the economic miracle’ but a ‘necessary stimulating and balancing element within it’ (‘Per un esame di coscienza’1963, 606).

The experience of Il Mulino, which had made the encounter between all three Italian cultural ‘souls’ (i.e. Catholics, Liberals and Socialists) its own editorial line, would have acted as a test site for the political project of the centre-left: ‘This has allowed us to constitute a base for the encounter between Catholics and Socialists well before the politicians even started to speak of the centre-left’ (‘Per un esame di coscienza’ 1963, 606). Moreover, Il Mulino’s cultural project could have operated as a foundation on which political modernisation could be erected. As they had declared in what might be called Il Mulino’s manifesto, Relazione introduttiva al Primo Convegno Amici e Collaboratori del Mulino, the sense of ‘our historical drama lay in the recurrent way of speaking of “worlds”, Catholic, Communist, democratic.’ Healing ‘these radical fractures of national life and founding the bases of democratic cohabitation by means of an organic bond between intellectuals and the masses,’ was the challenge Il Mulino’s intellectuals faced (Mancini Reference Mancini1954, 13).

Within this scenario, the historicism/idealism debate and the ‘different’ kind of intellectual advocated by Il Mulino brought further consequences. Not only was it necessary to overcome the humanistic tradition but, in order to build a bridge between culture and politics and support the development towards an advanced democracy, it was mandatory to surpass the notion of anti-fascism as a sufficient criterion for defining the parameters of a democratic culture. In May 1957 in an unsigned editorial (which is, however, traceable to Nicola Matteucci), Il Mulino had introduced the argument. To the accusation that anti-fascist ideology was degenerating into a sort of reverse Fascism (‘alla rovescia’), which had already been exposed by Italian Liberalism (Nicolosi Reference Nicolosi2014), Matteucci added the ‘generation gap issue’, claiming his own as the first post-fascist generation of intellectuals, and stating they were ‘destined to inherit democracy’. The moral renaissance and economic growth demonstrated by Italy after the Liberation from Nazi-Fascism forced Italian culture to face a ‘new’ reality, and obliged the ‘new’ intellectual to look forward and not backward in order to improve democracy. Social sciences and the neo-Enlightenment lesson, once more, were pivotal to this operation (‘La misura del nostro compito’ 1957, 319). It is important to point out here that the journal had published this article (‘La misura del nostro compito’) before the Tambroni crisis and the episode of July 1960 (Di Loreto Reference Di Loreto1993); consequently, its polemical argument should be understood within the frame of Il Mulino’s anti-communist stance and within the debate on how to define democracy arising from Anglo-American political theory and political sociology (Barbano Reference Barbano1998), and not as an acceptance or legitimisation of extreme right-wing ideology and politics. What was at stake for Il Mulino was the link between politics and culture re-elaborated in a different and more challenging scenario: the new modernity expressed by ‘affluence’. In an article which came out in June 1966 and which, though signed by Luigi Pedrazzi, voiced the whole group’s position, asking why Italy had not achieved civil and political progress to match its economic progress, the Bolognese intellectual replied: ‘Italian public opinion lacks the most real right conferred by participation, which consists in being able to punish and get rid of the political rulers, replacing them altogether or in part with new actors’ (Pedrazzi Reference Pedrazzi1966, 507).

It is clear how, from this perspective, the way to reconnect culture and politics was to anchor Italy’s political culture to the European tradition of constitutional liberal democracies, by unlocking what they described as the Italian ‘imperfect two-party system’. This apt expression, borrowed from American politology, was made famous in the volume by Giorgio Galli published by Il Mulino in 1966. However, Galli’s work stemmed from the research funded by the Twentieth Century Fund, and it was the fruit of collaborative work and discussions that had always distinguished the group (interview 24 January 2003).

According to Il Mulino, Italian democracy was sui generis: certainly ‘bipartite’, hegemonised by the DC and the PCI, but at the same time Italy was ‘imperfect,’ blocked by the incapacity for alternation in government. The ‘imperfect two-party system’ of Italian politics was one dominated by two leading parties, one of which, for internal and international reasons, would never be allowed to take over executive power. By and large, everyone in politics, the PCI included, accepted the situation as unchangeable: a democracy frozen between Christian Democrat opportunism and Communist conservatism (Galli Reference Galli1966, 28). Comparison with the other European countries pushed Giorgio Galli and Bologna’s intellectuals to consider the imbalance of the Italian system as deviance. The solution for overcoming the ‘divorce between politics and culture’ could only come from ‘a rationalising of the existing political structure’ and ‘a simplification of the party system’, implementing a political system where ‘public opinion can easily punish the politicians’ by voting for the other party whose political proposal had been expounded in a explicit programme (Pedrazzi Reference Pedrazzi1966, 507). The reference to the Westminster model and the spatial analysis of the political competition theorised by Joseph La Palombara, Otto Kirkhheimer and Sigmund Neumann, which in those same years the publishing house translated, is plain to see (Sivini Reference Sivini1967,Reference Sivini1971).

What exactly did ‘simplification’ mean for Il Mulino’s intellectual debate? In two editorials published in July 1966, the journal clarified this point: it meant reducing the number of political parties in order to create a real alternating democracy and de-ideologising Italian political discourse. On the one hand, this would guarantee that Italy would be part of the tradition of Western democracies and, at the same time, would help to promote a new order of priorities on the political agenda (i.e. welfare policies, economic reforms). On the other, this ‘secularisation of politics’ would eventually take on board the overcoming of idealism and put it into practice by surpassing the sterile confrontation between PSI, DC, even PCI ‘communist reformists’ (Pedrazzi Reference Pedrazzi1966, 506; Tamburrano Reference Tamburrano1967, 481).Footnote ⁶

Starting from here, for Il Mulino’s intellectual discourse the challenge of modernity posed by new economic and social conditions was to be dealt with by means of ‘planning’ and, thanks to the empiricist culture and the assistance of the social sciences, also ‘scientificity’ (Maccaferri Reference Maccaferri2009). These words were recurring in the political debate that during the centre-left political phase had been acquiring an almost thaumaturgical value (Favretto Reference Favretto2003, 54). Evidently the political moment prevailed: according to Il Mulino’s analysis, the party rationalisation would bring with it all the other aspects, guiding them towards an accomplished modernisation and democratisation.

The reactions to Il Mulino’s political project were few and (not surprisingly) irate (Maccaferri Reference Maccaferri2009). For a fledgling democratic system just emerging from a long dictatorship and a civil war, which had designated anti-fascist mass political parties as the instrument of political representation and had chosen a proportional electoral system (Scoppola Reference Scoppola1997), introducing the notion of post-fascist intellectuals and a two-party system was extremely ambitious and premature. Italy was not ready (yet).

Il Mulino’s intellectual discourse and politics: concluding considerations

The role of the intellectuals in the Italian post-war public debate, their relationship with politics and the issues and positions from which they chose to engage in social and political criticism have been extensively studied. This article has charted the first two decades of activity of the Il Mulino group, focusing on its intellectual discourse for modernising Italian political culture during a phase of outstanding economic and social change, culminating in the centro-sinistra political formula. Within this case-study, I have focused on the perspective of political legitimation and on the issue of consensus. The introductory theoretical framework was designed and applied to expose the limits of traditional accounts of Italian intellectuals and free up some space for more interdisciplinary inquiries.

In order to overcome the ‘cultural autarky’ brought about by Fascism and after the ‘epic’ years of the material and moral reconstruction of the new Italian Republic, the intellectual discourse of Il Mulino sought to combine cultural modernisation with political innovation by overcoming idealism and historicism with the importation of Anglo-American social sciences. The ‘divorce between culture and politics’, to use the journal’s words, would be reconciled by the action of a new kind of ‘intellectual-cum-technician’ who would be able to find a synthesis between the three Italian cultural and political traditions (Liberal, Catholic, Socialist). Having elected neo-Enlightenment and Anglo-American pragmatism as its theoretical background, Il Mulino’s publishing and intellectual activities, which were the fruitful combination of Liberalism (represented by Nicola Matteucci), Catholicism (represented by Luigi Pedrazzi), and Socialism (represented among others by Federico Mancini and Giorgio Galli), would act as a political laboratory.

The project of this group of intellectuals was, therefore, to contribute to the stabilisation of Italian democracy by anchoring it to the European and Western tradition of constitutional liberal-democracies. Their intellectual discourse was supposed to support the process of legitimisation of a political system, which was still undergoing stabilisation, by advocating a process of ‘rationalisation’ capable of leading the Italian political system towards the praxis of the ‘alternating democracies’. However, within Italian institutional culture hegemonised by the role of political parties, the reiterated defence of a political rationalisation, understood as cultural modernisation but which actually could have been equated to merely reducing party representation, tended to undermine the argument’s cogency. A subsequent militant reading of the events of the late 1960s (Foot Reference Foot2003) actually put the themes raised by Il Mulino’s analysis on ice for a rather long time.

The issues at the heart of the journal’s intellectual discourse in the 1960s would reappear at the end of the twentieth century and, if we turn to recent Italian political debate, there is sufficient evidence to argue how lucid and convincing its discourse was, albeit in the long term. As regards the idealism/neo-Enlightenment question and the new kind of intellectual, it seems all too easy to refer to recent Italian ‘governi tecnici’ (De Bernardi Reference De Bernardi2014) and to the extent to which the question of intellectuals-cum-technicians has become hegemonic (Traverso Reference Traverso2013). Moreover, after the end of the Cold War and during the difficult transition years towards the so-called Second Republic, the two-party system and the Westminster model became (and still are) at the top of Italy’s political-cultural agenda (Crainz Reference Crainz2013). The solutions elaborated by Il Mulino, nonetheless, were meant for a different era in which Cold War assumptions were the perimeter, political participation and political debate were mainly framed by party subcultures, and the Italian public sphere as well as intellectual discourse were not shaped by television alone. Indulging too much in this interpretation, however fascinating it may be, could lead to misunderstanding and decontextualising of the history of Il Mulino as well as Italian post-war political accounts, and a conceiving of the history of Italian intellectual discourse merely as an appendix to the history of the dilapidated Italian Prima Repubblica.

Notes on contributor

Marzia Maccaferri is Associate Lecturer in the Department of Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work focuses on post-war European political history, in particular the history of Italian and British intellectuals in comparative perspective. Her recent and forthcoming publications include: The Re-Emergence of Territorial Cleavage in West European Politics. Regionalism in Historical Perspective 1960s-1990s (American Historical Association, 2015), and Between Empire and Europe. Intellectuals and the Nation in Britain and France During the Cold War, both co-written with Lucia Bonfreschi (Routledge, 2016).