On the Edge of Democracy

Rosario Forlenza’s book aims to explore the meanings and understandings of democracy that underpinned Italy’s transition between the summer of 1943, when Mussolini was removed from government, and 1948, when the new republican constitution came into force. In Forlenza’s words, these were ‘liminal years’. As he explains, anthropologists describe liminality as a time of lost certainties; a phase when ‘the usual constraints on thought, self-understanding, and behaviour are relaxed, opening the way to new experiences and exercise of the imagination’ (p. 13). The dissolution of Fascist structures of power, Italy’s occupation by two foreign armies and a deeply divisive and traumatic civil war led to a ‘liminal situation of contested sovereignty’: in such a context, Forlenza asks, how did Italians imagine their country’s post-fascist future? What meanings did they attach to democracy and how did these meanings change? Historical research on the 1943–8 period, he argues, has predominantly looked at

Archaeology · Constitution · Context (archaeology · Democracy · Government (linguistics · Liminality · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Sovereignty · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Philosophy