Tuesday, June 25, 2013
5.59 (PC Hoofthuis)
As Mike Rapport has recently highlighted in his book 1848. Year of Revolution (2011) a torrent of revolutions ripped through Europe in the year 1848. The storm swept away the conservative order that had held sway since the fall of Napoleon in 1815. This revolutionary tendency contributed to link together the idea of Europe to that of modernity (F. Chabod, Storia dell’idea d’Europa, 1961). This relation between Europe and modernity inspired the majority of Italian patriots during the process of political emancipation called Risorgimento. In this paper I analyse, through an historical and philosophical perspective, the relevance of this theme in the political thought of one of the most neglected political thinkers of the Italian Risorgimento, the Neapolitan Hegelian Bertrando Spaventa. He was, along with Francesco De Sanctis, the most important representative of the Italian Hegelian School during the nineteenth century. Spaventa was one of the first philosophers proposing a sort of Begriffsgeschichte of the idea of modernity, analysing its evolution through the different European countries, from the Italian Renaissance to the German Idealism. The only way to create a free and unite nation is, for Spaventa, to understand the deep link between the Italian and the European revolution. Indeed he was persuaded that “modern philosophy is no more neither British, nor French, nor Italian, nor German, but European”. It means that in order to understand national thought and national policies it is necessary to identify the idea of modernity with the European revolution.
