In Search of Order: Portrayal of Communists in Cold War Italy

This article analyzes the battle between Italian Communists and anti-Communists during the early Cold War. Without denying the critical role of high politics or the rivalry between Washington and Moscow, the article places the home front at the center of its analysis, using a bottom-up perspective. Drawing on the rhetoric, remembrances, and visual propaganda produced by Communists and anti-Communists alike, the article shifts the focus of attention away from governments and diplomacy and toward imagination and culture as agents of historical change. Looking beyond the institutional-administrative sphere of politics, the article explores the aspirations, emotions, expectations, and hopes formulated by Italians under conditions of existential uncertainty. The article concludes that the Cold War in Italy was, above all else, an internal contest between two parties over what the recent past meant and what would ensure a just and stable order for society

Christianity and Political Thought:Augusto Del Noce and the Ideology of Christian Democracy in Post-War Italy

This article engages with the thought of Augusto Del Noce (1910\u2013 1989), the most important Italian Catholic philosopher and political thinker of the 20th century. The focus is on how Del Noce came to elaborate a Catholic \u2018modernity,\u2019 bridging a positive encounter between Catholicism, democracy and freedom. This philosophical project had a considerable impact on modern Italian culture and politics. At the theoretical level, the argument is embedded within the larger aim of recognizing attempts within Catholic philosophy to articulate an Italian political trajectory that does not simply accept the tale of a singular path to modernity based on the Enlightenment model but instead tries to articulate an alternative vision of the modern, grounded within a transcendental perspective

Catholic Modernity and the Italian Constitution

This article analyzes the Catholic contribution to the Italian republican and democratic Constitution of 1948. It focuses on the specific way \u2013 inspired by Catholic social philosophy \u2013 in which the Italian citizen became symbolically coded as a \u2018person\u2019 and not as an \u2018individual\u2019. The Catholic project for the new Constitution had a considerable impact on modern Italian culture and politics and on the building of a modern mass democracy and welfare state. During the crucial historical juncture that followed the collapse of Fascism, Catholic politicians and intellectuals sought to interpret and give direction to the idea of political modernity, producing a positive encounter between Catholicism, democracy, and freedom. At the theoretical level, the argument is embedded within a larger aim to recognize attempts within Catholic philosophy and political thought to articulate a trajectory that moved away from the Enlightenment model, trying instead to articulate a Catholic, post-liberal and \u2018spiritual\u2019 political modernity

'Abendland in Christian Hands': Populism and Religion in Contemporary European Politics

This chapter examines the relationship between religion and right-wing populist politics in contemporary Europe, particularly as manifested in public reaction to migration from Muslim countries. More specifically, it focuses on the central trope of European right-wing populist discourse: the defence of Europe\u2019s Christian identity from the \u2018Islamisation\u2019 of the continent

Europe\u2019s Forgotten Unfinished Revolution: Peasant Power, Social Mobilization, and Communism in the Southern Italian Countryside, 1943\u201345

Between 1943 and 1945, groups of peasants took over dozens of villages and small towns in southern Italy and proclaimed the birth of independent republics. During their brief existence\u2014sometimes just a few days\u2014the peasant republics implemented revolutionary measures, including the redistribution of land and the establishment of people\u2019s courts. This article draws attention to these forgotten episodes and suggests that they can best be understood by adopting an anthropological perspective and viewing social mobilization through an experiential lens. It draws on court documents and personal accounts to examine the quasi-revolutionary experiences of the southern Italian peasantry. Revolutions in general can be seen as social dramas and political rites of passage in which the successive phases of rupture, liminality, and reaggregation are the distinct stages of a total process that generates a transformation. This approach makes it possible to disentangle the conceptualization of revolutions from structures as well as from ideology, culture, and agency; to comprehend revolutions that unfold unscripted or without the decisive leadership of a vanguard whose ideas and expectations pre-exist the revolution and therefore teleologically determine its development; and to initiate comparative analysis in regard to symbolism, morphology, and the dynamics of social action