The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  But if there was no real counterpart to the Historikerstreit in Italy, where De Felice could feel he had achieved most of his goals, there was also a less clear-cut shift of intellectual energies at large to the right than in Germany. De Felice’s principal successor, Emilio Gentile, has devoted himself to amplifying the familiar theme that the mass politics of the twentieth century were secularized versions of supernatural faith, dividing these into malign brands—communism, nazism, nationalism—comprising fanatical ‘political’ religions, and more acceptable forms—notably, American patriotism—that constitute ‘civil’ religions: totalitarianism versus democracy in sacred dress. This is a construction that has won more of a following in the Anglosphere than in Italy itself. The same, paradoxically, might be said of the last fruits of operaismo on the left. There, the sober spirit of the enquête ouvrière had passed away with the premature death of Panzieri in the mid-sixties, and at the impulsion of Tronti and the young—then equally incendiary—literary critic Asor Rosa, its outlook underwent two drastic twists.

  From Tronti came the conviction that the working class, far from having to endure successive economic transformations at the hands of capital, was their demiurge, imposing on employers and the state the structural changes of each phase of accumulation. Not in the impersonal economic requirements of profitability from above, but in the driving pressure of class struggles from below, lay the secret of development. From Asor Rosa came the argument that ‘committed literature’ was a populist delusion, for the working class could never hope to benefit from the arts or letters of a modern world in which culture as such was, by definition, irremediably bourgeois. No crude philistinism, or simple-minded Tolstoyanism, followed. Rather, it was only the high modernism of Mann or Proust, Kafka or Svevo, and the radical avant-garde, up to but not beyond Brecht, that mattered as literature—but as so many testimonies, of incomparable formal invention, to the inner contradictions of bourgeois existence, not as a legacy of any use to the world of labour. The gulf between the two could not be bridged by even the best revolutionary intentions of a Mayakovsky: it was constitutive.

  To make good literature, socialism has not been essential. To make the revolution, writers will not be essential. The class struggle takes a different path. It has other voices to express itself, make itself understood. And poetry cannot be behind it. For poetry, when it is great, speaks a language in which things––the hard things of struggle and daily existence––have already assumed the exclusive value of a symbol, of a gigantic metaphor of the world: and the price, often tragic, of its greatness is that what it says escapes from practice, never to return to it.66

  When this was written, its target was the official line of the PCI, and behind it Gramsci, who had believed that the communist movement was the legitimate heir of the highest European culture, from the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment onwards, and that among the problems it needed to solve in Italy was the absence of a national-popular literature. But as the upheavals of the late sixties unfolded, first Tronti and then Asor Rosa decided it made more sense to work within the PCI, where the organized working class was after all to be found, than outside it. In taking this step, Tronti transposed his vision of the primacy of struggles in the factory to the activities of the party in society, radicalizing it into a theory of the autonomy of politics as such from production. Younger than Asor Rosa or Tronti, and the most intellectually ambitious of the trio, Massimo Cacciari completed what they had started, not merely separating culture and economy from revolutionary politics, but proposing a systematic dissociation of all the spheres of modern life and thought from one another as so many technical domains, each untranslatable into any other. In common was only their crisis, equally visible in turn-of-the-century physics, neo-classical economics, canonical epistemology, liberal politics, not to speak of the division of labour, the operations of the market, the organization of the state. ‘Negative thought’ alone had been capable of grasping the depth of this crisis—Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger.67 What Hegel had joined, they refused: dialectical synthesis of any kind.

  Operaismo had always been anti-historicist, as it was antihumanist. In Cacciari’s Krisis (1976), it now found inspiration in a line of nihilist thinkers, of whom Nietzsche was initially the most important for his account of the will to power, whose contemporary incarnation could only be the PCI. But there was to be no irrationalism. What the ‘culture of crisis’ called for were new orders and forms of rationality, specific to each practice. So in guiding the party towards its objectives, Weber and Schmitt—not Gramsci—were the indicated counsellors, each a specialist of politics as cold, lucid technique. Intellectually speaking, a more thoroughgoing rejection of the Marxism enshrined in the PCI, steeped in a Hegelian spirit of synthesis, would be difficult to imagine. But politically, the Nietzschean turn of operaismo proved perfectly compatible with the official line of the party in the early seventies. For what could the will to power in Italy at the time mean? Clearly, Tronti argued, it was the PCI’s vocation to rule the country as the architect of an alliance between organized labour and big capital to modernize economy and society, not unlike the New Deal in America, which he had always admired—a pact of wages and profits against the parasitism of rents.

  The PCI, for its part, which had always been tolerant of theoretical differences so long as they did not threaten political disturbance, accommodated the advocates of negative thought without difficulty—by this time it was no longer capable of engaging critically with such exotic outcrops anyway. Sensible of the prestige these were coming to enjoy, in due course it assured them honours in the political sphere whose autonomy they had upheld. Cacciari became a deputy for the PCI, before going on to make a career as mayor of Venice, where he now sits; Tronti and Asor Rosa were eventually made senators. Inevitably, the price of such integration into a party that so conspicuously failed on the terrain of power they had appointed for it was the fade-out of operaismo as a coherent paradigm. Twenty years later, the PCI now only a memory, Asor Rosa would compose a melancholy balance-sheet of the Italian Left, to which he and Tronti remained in their own fashion faithful, while Cacciari today is an ornament of the right of the Democratic Party, combining—not unfittingly for an admirer of Wittgenstein—mysticism and technicism in a politics otherwise much like that of New Labour.68 In those who came after, the intellectual legacy of negative thought was little more than an arid cult of specialization, and concomitant depoliticization.

  At the crossroads of the late sixties, Negri went in the opposite direction, prospecting not a compact for modernity between capital and organized labour under the aegis of the PCI, but an escalation of conflicts between unorganized—or unemployed—labour and the state, towards armed struggle and civil war. After the crushing of the autonomia he had theorized, and his arrest by a Communist magistrate on trumped-up charges of master-minding the death of Moro, exile in France produced a steady stream of publications, the most notable on Spinoza. Here was prepared the metamorphosis of the non–factory worker of the late-twentieth-century autonomia operaia into the seventeenth-century figure of the ‘multitude’ in Empire, co-written with Michael Hardt, and appearing in the United States well before it saw print in Italy. Since the book’s fame, Negri’s international impact has been larger than his national influence, though a younger following exists. The same holds true of Giorgio Agamben, a late-comer to the constellation, sharing many reference-points—Heidegger, Benjamin, Schmitt—with Cacciari, but with a political inflexion poles apart.

  Viewed comparatively, the similarities of operaismo to strands in the gauchisme that flowered in France in the decade from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies are striking—all the more so, for the lack of any direct contact between them. It seems to have been an objective concordance that took thinkers around Socialisme ou barbarie along much the same path as those around Contropiano, from a radical workerism to an anti-foundational subjectivism—although in the later Negri or Agamben, with
their debts to Deleuze or Foucault, French and Italian currents flowed directly into each other. The contrasting outcome of the two experiences is largely to be explained by differences of national situation. In France, the PCF offered no temptations, and the revolt of May–June ’68 was as brief as it was spectacular. In Italy, where the popular rebellion lasted much longer, Communism was less closed, and the thinkers were significantly younger, the afterlife of operaismo remains greater, if confined to the margins.

  Retrieval of fascism on the right, eclipse of workerism on the left, have relocated the space of the centre, in which secular and clerical versions of the juste milieu have traditionally coexisted. There, paradoxically, the break-up of Christian Democracy, ending the rule of an overtly Catholic political party, rather than diminishing the role of religion in public life, has redistributed it more widely than ever before across the political spectrum, as DC voters have not only often divided evenly between Centre-Right and Centre-Left, but proved the most volatile single sector of the electorate, making them a ‘swing factor’ all the more eagerly prized by the contending blocs. In pursuit of them, former leaders of the PCI, not to speak of ex-Radicals, have fallen over each other to explain their private religious sensibility, attendance at mass from an early age, hidden spiritual vocation, and other requisites for a post-secular politics. In effect, what the Church has lost with the passing of a mass party of strict obedience, it has gained with the diffusion of a more pervasive, if lower-temperature, influence in society as a whole. With this has gone a descent into levels of superstition not seen in many years, the fruit of Wojtiła’s occupancy of the papal throne, when more beatifications were pronounced (798) and saints made (280) than in the previous five centuries in the history of the Church,69 the number of miracles necessary for sanctification was halved, and the grotesque cult of Padre Pio—a Capuchin divinely visited by stigmata in 1918, author of any number of supernatural feats—took off, to a point where the mainstream press can in all seriousness debate the veracity of his triumphs over mere laws of science.

  A secular culture capable of this degree of complaisance to belief is unlikely to be more combative towards power. Under the Second Republic, opinion in the central organs of Italian print culture has rarely deviated from the standard doxa of the period. Most of its output during this time was indistinguishable from what could be found in the neo-tabloid papers of Spain, France, Germany, England or elsewhere—no self-respecting commentator failing to call for reforms to cure society’s ills, for which the remedy was always the need for more competition in services and education, more freedom for the market in production and consumption, and a more disciplined and streamlined state, variations turning only on the sweeteners to be offered those on the receiving end of the necessary adjustments. Conformity of this kind has been so universal that it would have been unreasonable to have expected Italian columnists and journalists to show more independence of mind. The attitude of the press towards the law is another matter. At the forefront—after the magistrates had launched their attack on its corruption—of the hue and cry against the political class of the First Republic, it has proved remarkably submissive since Berlusconi established himself as a centrepiece of the new order, limiting itself for the most part to pro forma criticisms, without a hint of the guerre à l’outrance that could really have damaged him or driven him from the scene.

  For that, its fire would have had to be directed not just against Berlusconi himself, but also the judges who regularly acquitted him, the statute of limitations that voided charges against him, the presidencies that assured him immunity, and the Centre-Left parties that made him into an accepted, indeed valued, interlocutor. Nothing could have been further from the general tenor of the press in these years, where complaints of malpractice are regularly tinged with fear and servility. The feebleness of this record is highlighted by the rare exceptions to it. Of these, one above all stands out, the reporter Marco Travaglio, whose implacable indictments not just of the criminalities of Berlusconi or Previti, but of the entire system of connivances that has protected them, not least those of the press itself, have few parallels in the tame world of European journalism in these years. Not unexpectedly, Travaglio, whose books have sold in the hundreds of thousands, is a figure of the liberal right, expressing himself with a ferocity and freedom of tone all but unknown on the left.70

  In Europe—this is not true, at least in the same way, of America—the world of the media as a rule reflects more than it creates the condition of a culture, whose quality ultimately depends much more on the state of its universities. In Italy, notoriously, these have remained archaic and under-funded, many departments sumps of bureaucratic intrigue and baronial patronage. The result has been a steady loss of the country’s best minds to positions abroad. Virtually every discipline has been affected, as the roster of leading scholars either based or working for long stretches in the United States shows: Luca Cavalli-Sforza in genetics, Giovanni Sartori in political science, Franco Modigliani in economics, Carlo Ginzburg in history, Giovanni Arrighi in sociology, Franco Moretti in literature, to whom younger names might be added. Not a diaspora in a strong sense, since nearly all have maintained their links to Italy, most still participating in one way or another in its intellectual life, their absence has nevertheless obviously weakened the culture that produced them.

  Whether any comparable levies are likely to arise out of the circumstances of recent years remains to be seen. On the face of it, the chances would seem slim. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the depth of the reserves on which the country can draw. A glance at Spain, whose modernization is now often held up by self-critical Italians as a model of what they have missed,71 is a reminder of them. Although its economic growth has been higher, transport systems are faster, political institutions are more functional, organized crime is less widespread, and regional development more even—all real gains over Italy—Spain remains by comparison a provincial culture, with a much thinner and more derivative intellectual life, whose relative backwardness is only underlined by the modernities surrounding it. For all the disrepair of the country, the Italian contribution to contemporary letters is of different order. No country in Europe, indeed, has recently produced a monument of global scholarship to equal the five volumes on the international history and morphology of the novel edited by Moretti, and published by Einaudi—an enterprise of peculiarly Italian magnificence, of whose scale the Anglophone reader gets only a glimpse in the hand-me-down version, parsimonious in sympathy and spirit, issued by Princeton. Nor is it difficult to find examples of a continuing Italian capacity to shake received paradigms abroad. Ginzburg’s manifesto ‘Clues’, not to speak of his essay reconstructing Dumézil, attempted by no French historian, would be one case; the distinguished classicist Luciano Canfora’s recent book on democracy, censored by its outraged publisher in Germany, would be another; the political scientist Danilo Zolo’s demolition of ‘international justice’, cherished in Britain and the Netherlands, a third. Such traditions do not die easily.

  4

  What, beyond the existing cross-party establishment, of political opposition? From the mid-sixties onwards, Italian Communism had another strand, neither official nor operaista, that proved more authentically Gramscian than anything its leadership could offer, or ultimately tolerate. Expelled in 1969, the Manifesto group around Lucio Magri, Rossana Rossanda and Luciana Castellina went on create the newspaper of that name that continues to this day, the one genuinely radical daily in Europe. Over the years, it was this current that produced far the most coherent and incisive strategic analysis of the problems facing the left, and the country—descent from Hegel, not surprisingly, supplying better equipment for the task than fascination with Heidegger. Today its legacy is in the balance, its three leading figures composing memorials of their experience, each of which will be significant. The first to appear, Rossanda’s crisply elegant Ragazza del secolo scorso, has been a national bestseller. But in 2005 their journal
was closed, and the daily is now, amid the credit crunch, at risk of disappearing. MicroMega, the thick bimonthly edited by the philosopher Paolo Flores d’Arcais, is in no such danger, as part of the publishing empire whose showpieces are the Roman daily La repubblica and the weekly newsmagazine L’espresso. Under the Second Republic, Flores has made of his journal the organizer of the most uncompromising and effective front of hostility to Berlusconi in Italy, playing a political role unique in the EU for an intellectual publication of this kind. A year after the victory of the Centre-Right in 2001, it was from here that a wave of impressive mass protests against Berlusconi was launched, outside and against the passivity of the Centre-Left.

  In these, two other figures played a central part. One was Nanni Moretti, the country’s most popular actor/film director, whose cinema had for over a decade tracked in critical, if often winsome, fashion the dissolution of the PCI and its fall-out. The other was the historian Paul Ginsborg, author of the two most commanding histories of post-war Italy, an Englishman teaching at Florence, distinguished not only as a scholar but now as a citizen in his adoptive country. In the second of his histories, covering the period from 1980 to 1998, published in English as Italy and Its Discontents (and in this edition going up to 2001), Ginsborg had put forward the hypothesis that, for all the evidence of egoism and greed of its yuppy stratum—the ceti rampanti that flourished under Craxi—there existed alongside it in the Italian middle class a sector of more thoughtful, civic-minded professionals and public employees—ceti medi riflessivi—who were capable of altruistic actions, and formed a potential source of renewal for Italian democracy. The proposal met with some scepticism when he developed it.72 But in 2002 it came true. For it was the layer he had identified that essentially provided the troops for the demonstrations against Berlusconi of that year.