Status Updates From Risorgimento: The History o...

This isn't a book I'd recommend to an average reader, it's dense with knowledge, delves deep into the theory of history and it attempts to shed a new light on events that have been so thoroughly researched and discussed before. In the first 50 or so pages the author gives a textbook relation of the events and really nicely presents the opinions and achievements of historians so far.It's fun but tough to wraphead arou

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The question of causality (what caused national unification?) is not entirely resolved by the move to representations and meaning, however fruitful this latter analysis is proving to be. Even now, we know comparatively little about what happened to transform a vibrant cultural movement of nationalism into a clearly more compromised political programme.

Hence, the idea of a united Italy was a political idea with little economic resonance. The economic arguments made by Risorgimento liberals in favour of national unification were, according to most economic historians, the result of wishful think- ing.

“... Gramsci's identification of the Risorgimento with a failed bourgeois revolution cannot be sustained. He relies on a model of national development that fundamentally distorts the locally and regionally based nature of social conflict, and his analysis underestimates the problems of creating a revolutionary movement with truly national appeal....

« That is, by dissolving the connections between society and politics, this approach has loosened the causal link between middle class and Risorgimento, and the corresponding centrality of the Risorgimento for middle-class Italy has also been downgraded. As a result, it seems impossible to explain the Risorgimento by using a class- based analysis. »

Calls for Italian unity were, if anything, undermined by recourse to the past: ancient Rome was glorious but was characterised by civil war and factionaliom (the Republic), or by repression and decadence (the Empire). The medieval age of communal independence was heroic, but was also a period of political fragmentation and civil conflict.