The Risorgimento between Ideology and History
The Political Myth of rivoluzione mancata
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5847441 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A William Salomone (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1962 |
| Volume | 68 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 38-38 |
| Publication date | 1962-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The American Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-8762 • E-ISSN: 1937-5239 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1847182 |
| OpenAlex | W2037644651 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
THE close of centenary evocations marking the unification of Italy may well go down in the annals of Italian historical writing as the conclusion of the last battle of the Risorgimento. It is true that in I970 there will be the twentieth of September and Rome to remember. But it seems relatively safe to say that the historians' battles over these tactical objectives have already been fought rather fiercely on other fields with other arms than those of the battle over Italy. As it is, therefore, the commemorative spell that ended in I96I may have registered a turning point in a crucial battle of ideas. There are, at any rate, clear signs that the waning has begun of the most recent conflict between a classic tradition and a multiform critique in the interpretation of the Risorgimento and, a posteriori, of the Liberal aftermath to the crisis of a historic experiment and the dreary agony of an Italian era. Whatever the shadings and the emphases of particulars on each side, the heart of the great historiographical debate, the central question at issue, can now be clearly identified as having involved opposing views on the problem of freedom in the Risorgimento and in the development of the Italian unitary state from Cavour to Giolitti and thence to the coming of Fascism.1 I have no intention of presenting here a full-fledged, formal review of recent Italian historical writing on the Risorgimento and the Liberal state. In fact, some of the most constructive contributions of that historiography are hardly mentioned because many belong to a purer scholarly and professional sphere outside and frequently above the terms of reference of the essential problem treated here. This essay is an attempt to call attention to the ideological aspects of a historiographical problem which, at least by implication, assumed significant political dimensions and moral overtones. Brief and sketchy as it must be, this preliminary study may possibly suggest an
Historiography · History of Italy · Royalist · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,1 |
| Citation span | 1975 - 2023 (49) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |