Preliminary Programme

A high degree of political contrast was typical of the history of Italy as a unified country, characterizing also the intellectual debate.
This contrast was declined in various ways and in several cases it was flanked with other important discussions that characterized the reflection on the State and the Italian society, as the “southern question” (questione meridionale).
In particular, at the beginning of the 20thcentury, many intellectuals wondered about the feeble legitimation of the Italian state and of its own elites in the first decades after the unification. Guido Dorso, a lawyer from the southern small town of Avellino, took part in this debate, through a network of relationships and exchange of ideas with some of the leading intellectuals of the time in Italy.
Pursuing a reflection on political standpoint, he questioned about the inferiority of the South of Italy and its failed development. In his opinion, the way out for Southern Italy to this unfavourable situation would have to get through a revolution based on political and ethical values; this democratic revolution would have allowed to regenerate the whole Italian country. Dorso had the opportunity to fully develop his thought with the publication of the book ‘La rivoluzione meridionale’ (The southern revolution), printed during the same months of the full establishment of fascism.
Forced to silence during the years of dictatorship, he wondered the ways in which such a revolution might occur, leading him to develop a reflection on the formation of political elites and the origin of modern dictatorships, in the essays that arrange the book Dittatura, classe politica e classe dirigente (Dictatorship, political elite and ruling class). This work, published in 1949, three years after his death, can be considered as the acme of his intellectual biography. (Show less)

The paper examines, mostly through the use of epistolary sources, the publishing strategies attempted by Antonio Labriola in establishing himself as a Marxist theoretician at the closing of the nineteenth century. Through this examination, the paper also draws a picture of the intellectual space of the Second International that is slightly different from the conventional, SPD-dominated one. It suggests that though German publications such as Die Neue Zeit remained the main avenue to intellectual recognition and influence, other, more oblique and more risky strategies were possible, as is shown by Labriola’s case.
A self-consciously provincial thinker, Labriola, a university professor who had converted to Marxian socialism in the late 1880s, resented the state of Italian socialism, and refused to publish theoretical articles in Italy for fear of being associated with a movement which he thought was too positivistic and essentially distant from the spirit of Marxism. Despite his epistolary acquaintance with central figures of the German party such as Engels and Kautsky, however, he failed in gaining access to the pages of the Neue Zeit for most of the 1890s. Labriola’s breakthrough came when, in 1895, Georges Sorel offered him the opportunity of publishing a number of essays with the French Devenir Social, a minor journal that could, nonetheless, exert considerable appeal in virtue of its publication place, i.e. Paris, and that could offer a space for theoretical reinvention which Labriola craved for.

Though the series of essays published in the Devenir established Labriola’s reputation as a Marxist theorist, they contained a number of heterodox assumptions which, potentially, could serve as the basis for either a critique of Marxism or a rethinking of historical materialism on a different philosophical basis, and hence with different political implications. This is, in fact, what happened. Benedetto Croce and Georges Sorel, two figures who had been intimately connected to Labriola as he was developing his essays, took Labriola’s ideas and turned them into criticism, both theoretical and political, of the hegemonic Marxism of the SPD, much to the displeasure of Labriola. The paper tries to shed light on the dynamics which, first, made possible the publication of Labriola’s texts in France and, subsequently, the consequences which derived from publishing in a more open theoretical environment than Germany. (Show less)

The paper discusses the extent to which the contacts and networks between university intellectuals in four Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark) in the period 1880–1914 constituted an intermediary intellectual field between national and “European” intellectual spaces. There have indeed been intense contacts between the region’s universities, reflecting a long history of Nordic cooperation and identity discourses and manifested institutionally in disciplinary associations, student exchange and transnational publication forums. But to what extent did such inter-Nordic intellectual cooperation amount to the creation of an intellectual field in a sociological sense? Where were the “centers” of such a space; how important were inter-regional networks with respect to contacts with other regions; how often were dissertations defended, books published and academic positions filled by persons from neighboring Nordic countries? (Show less)