withdrawn’s Reviews > Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State > Status Update

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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. »