Search

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 (2011) and Ill Fares the Land (2010). 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 (with special regard to the long-term impact of the crisis of 1929 and to the influence of Soviet communism) 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.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This debate aims to investigate the political and economic transformations taking place between the crises of the 1970s and the transitions of the 1990s, by analysing the spectrum of concrete alternatives and the contingent, diverse choices too often identified and summarised through the catchword of “neoliberalism”. The three casestudies focus on Italy, Hungary and Yugoslavia, with attention to the trajectories of three internal mediators like Vittorio Foa, Tibor Liska and Branko Horvat. They were aware of the decline of previous political cultures and economic models vis-àvis the new challanges, but they tried to deeply revise the relationship between State and market and to point out a diverse language of reforms still linked to the reference to “socialism”, despite the crisis and breakdown of the Soviet block. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article delves into Vittorio Foa's exploration of labor, self-governance, and freedom, challenging the pervasive narrative of "neoliberalism" characterizing the period from 1973's energy crisis to the 2008 financial crisis. It highlights the introspective discussions within Western left-wing movements concerning the crisis in existing political-economic systems and reevaluates the dominant categories in 20th-century socialist cultures.

We investigate the problem of dimension reduction for plates in nonlinear magnetoelasticity. The model features a mixed Eulerian--Lagrangian formulation, as magnetizations are defined on the deformed set in the actual space. We consider low-energy configurations by rescaling the elastic energy according to the linearized von Kármán regime. First, we identify a reduced model by computing the Γ-limit of the magnetoelastic energy, as the thickness of the plate goes to zero. This extends a previous result obtained by the first author in the incompressible case to the compressible one. Then, we introduce applied loads given by mechanical forces and external magnetic fields, and we prove that sequences of almost minimizers of the total energy converge to minimizers of the corresponding energy in the reduced model. Subsequently, we study quasistatic evolutions driven by time-dependent applied loads and a rate-independent dissipation. We prove that energetic solutions for the bulk model converge to energetic solutions for the reduced model, and we establish a similar result for solutions of the approximate incremental minimization problem. Both these results provide a further justification of the reduced model in the spirit of the evolutionary Γ-convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay investigates the relationship between politics and culture during the fascist dictatorship, the Second World War and the civil war of 1943-45, through the particular perspective of the personal and intellectual link between Leone Ginzburg and Cesare Pavese. The two friends were tied by the literary passion and the editorial work for Einaudi but were divided by different attitudes towards politics. A still prevailing view understands the former as a representative of the intellectual’s political commitment, devoted to fight fascism, the latter as a sample of disinterest towards politics, in spite of his closeness to antifascist networks and his post-war way to communism. A comparative analysis, extending to their common interlocutor Giaime Pintor, allows to bring to light tensions, contradictions, and ambivalences between politics and culture so far overlooked by an exclusive focus on the fascism/antifascism dichotomy. As a matter of fact, whereas the study of Russian literature fed Ginzburg’s moralistic conception, by circumscribing the political sense of his antifascism, the interest in the German culture, alongside his anthropological and ethnological research, pushed Pavese towards the temptation of fascism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Italian politician and writer Angelo Tasca with Italian fascism, French exile, European culture. It mentions education and researches by Tasca on the genesis and the evolution of fascism in Europe and Leonardo Rapone underlines the link of continuity between the historical reconstruction of Tasca and the elaboration around fascism on the part of the communist group gathered around Gramsci and Togliatti.