The Liberal Socialism of Carlo Rosselli An excerpt from Rosselli's Liberal Socialism, with an introduction
Urbinati, Nadia
Introduction by Nadia Urbinati Carlo Rosselli has been known for some time in the English-speaking world as a hero of the Italian resistance to fascism—a larger-than-life figure in memoirs and...
...This article has been excerpted from Carlo Rosselli's Liberal Socialism, edited by Nadia Urbinati, to be published by Princeton University Press in May 1994...
...But his writings have never until now been translated...
...The first anti-Fascists affiliated with Giustizia e Liberta belonged to the early political emigration (between 1922 and 1927), and apart from the "heretical socialist" Rosselli, most were liberals and republicans (the latter, given their Mazzinian background, had a propensity for conspiratorial action...
...Like other Jews of her generation, Amelia experienced the first period of assimilation as a moment of great liberation, and for this reason she could not be anything but a strong WINTER • 1994 • 113 Liberal Socialism supporter of the Italian constitutional monarchy...
...The socialists complained that Giustizia e Liberty did not recognize the working class as the only, or the major, political and social protagonist, the communists that it conceived only of a democratic revolution...
...Along with the Spanish anarchists, Giustizia e Liberty had formed the Catalonian battalion...
...in turn, these liberties need a politics of social justice to remain alive...
...People came to the movement," wrote Rosselli in 1937, "from all parties: there were socialists, Communists, democrats, republicans, Sardinian autonomists, pupils of Gobetti, Gramsci, and Salvemini, intellectuals without party...
...This conclusion, so intelligent and yet so difficult for the anti-Fascist parties to grasp, was inspired by his deep awareness of the peculiar condition of exiles, "almost always very bad judges" both of the politics of the country in which they live and those of their own...
...Gramsci had already elaborated his version of workshop democracy and founded L'Ordine Nuovo, one of the most original political journals of the time...
...This was the case with the historians Franco Venturi, Enzo Tagliacozzo, and Max Salvadori, the writer Nicola Chiaromonte, the union leader Vittorio Foa, and the legal and political theorist Norberto Bobbio...
...It created a sensation all over Europe, and thanks to Francesco F. Nitti's book Escape, in the United States as well...
...Religion should have the function of keeping alive the faith in human dignity and solidarity...
...The program was strongly criticized by the anti-Fascist parties, especially because it sounded too moderate, too timid, in envisaging the "new Italy...
...The very young came to the rebellion on their own path, passing through a solitude of tyranny...
...Rosselli's most significant experiences in those cities came from outside the university...
...Back in France, in Bagnoles de l'Orne — where he went with his family to recover from phlebitis before returning to Spain—he and his brother Nello (who never was active in the anti-Fascist movement) were assassinated by Mussolini's hired killers, in collaboration with the Petainistes...
...Their principles were parliamentary democracy, large regional autonomies (almost a federal system), and workshop democracy (councils and unions...
...Amelia Rosselli was a talented and wellknown playwright, and an habituée of the nationalistic circles and avant-garde literary clubs that flourished in Florence during the first years of the century...
...Rosselli went to war in 1917, after his oldest brother had already been killed...
...The deep connection that Rosselli perceived between liberty and justice was certainly the 114 • DISSENT Liberal Socialism result of his reflections on fascism...
...Rosselli's first explicit adherence to socialist ideas goes back to 1921, when he attended the Congress of the Italian Socialist party in Livorno (where the communist wing led by Antonio Gramsci and Amedeo Bordiga seceded...
...From 1925 on Rosselli's life was an impressive odyssey of clandestine initiatives...
...Thus, as Rosselli stressed, socialism needs political and civil liberties...
...Echoes of this religious travail may still be heard in this book, particularly in Rosselli's effort to present the liberal socialist ideal, its longing for freedom and justice, as part of Western historical and cultural traditions...
...Here a long and hard season of strikes was ending (1919-1921...
...In a postcard to his mother he wrote that he "felt a new being vibrating within [him]self...
...After his graduation, Rosselli taught economics at the University of Turin, then at the Bocconi University of Milan (where he became acquainted with Piero Sraffa, who influenced his economic thought), and finally in Genoa...
...The suffering and fear in the trenches had the power to equalize soldiers, who came from social classes that had never had the chance to interact before...
...Ens...
...On Lipari, between 1928 and 1929, he wrote Socialismo liberale...
...Carlo Rosselli was thirty-seven years old...
...In 1927 (the year after Gramsci was jailed), having made possible the emigration of Filippo Turati, the father of Italian socialism, Rosselli and his comrades were captured and confined first to Ustica, then Lipari, two small Mediterranean islands...
...In 1936 Rosselli left Paris to fight in Spain...
...Amelia had deeply absorbed Ibsen's heroic morality of modern times: a defiance of all forms of social convention, and every moralistic restriction on individual expression, a belief in women's liberation and in the centrality of individual consciousness, and, finally, a deep devotion to voluntarism and idealism...
...It was June 9, 1937, several weeks after Gramsci's death in prison...
...Introduction by Nadia Urbinati Carlo Rosselli has been known for some time in the English-speaking world as a hero of the Italian resistance to fascism—a larger-than-life figure in memoirs and histories of the 1920s and 1930s...
...From his mother Carlo also inherited a strong attachment to liberal ideals...
...He discovered he had only one certainty: the young generation could no longer accept the way of life, politics, and ideals of the period before the war—neither the old liberalism with its conservative paternalism nor the old socialism with its messianic expectation for a new humanity...
...We present here excerpts from Nadia Urbinati's introduction to her edition of Rosselli's Liberal Socialism and then a central section of that extraordinary book...
...NADIA URBINATI 116 • DISSENT...
...Life is not too bad...
...Even a superficial reading of Socialismo liberale," wrote Aldo Garosci, "is enough to prove Rosselli's fate will not be to finish his days in Lipari...
...It had branches in France, Germany, the United States, and England...
...Departing with an abstract ideal . . . they have been placed in a position of understanding many things that otherwise, given the isolation of their class and profession, would certainly have eluded them," wrote Rosselli...
...Her influence on her three male children was profound, particularly after she left her husband and moved from Rome to Florence in 1903...
...It was not Gramsci, however, who interested Rosselli the most, but the intellectuals gathered around Piero Gobetti and his journal La rivoluzione liberale (Liberal revolution), an unorthodox group that, contrary to the traditional interpretation of liberalism, considered the working class, then aiming to become an autonomous political actor, as the modern expression of the "liberal spirit...
...Given his faith in will and action, his Mazzinian sense of duty, his intoxication with the masses, he could have become anything: fascist or socialist, nationalist or democrat...
...Giustizia e Libertä, however, survived the persecutions, and even after the war, when the movement no longer existed, its ideals persisted in various intellectuals who, in spite of different experiences and allegiances, never ceased searching for a cooperative modus vivendi between liberalism and socialism...
...At the beginning of 1930 several activists were captured in various Italian cities...
...This would be the last of Rosselli's enterprises...
...In Paris, in October 1929, Rosselli and his friends founded Giustizia e Liberta, which he described as "among all the Italian anti-Fascist movements . . . the only one that was born and grew up after the advent of fascism...
...Among them I mention Carlo Levi, Luigi Salvatorelli, Vittorio Foa, Norberto Bobbio, the literary critic Leone Ginsburg, the musical critic Massimo Mila, the writer Cesare Pavese (all of them active in Turin), Nicola WINTER • 1994 • 115 Liberal Socialism Chiaromonte, the jurist Silvio Trentin, and Gaetano Salvemini (already in exile...
...Giustizia e Liberta intended to be a national (in the sense of nonpartisan) organization, the inspiration for a second Risorgimento, this time able to unify and involve all social classes in the struggle for liberty and justice...
...Why not instead, answered his mother, combine the best of both religions—the universalism of Catholicism and the inwardness of Judaism...
...Regarding the economic and social sector, their aim was to combine different solutions, like the nationalization of the most vital services, cooperation, and free enterprise: civil society was conceived as a sort of federation of federations...
...In May 1935 the whole Turinese group (the most active one) was arrested...
...But I am sick, already sick of the island, sick to death of this chicken-coop existence, of this false appearance of liberty...
...Within the individual will—Rosselli learned in his youth—is the origin of both evil and good...
...Like Rosselli's liberal socialism, Giustizia e Liberta was based on voluntarism (the "moral factor"), freedom, and pluralism...
...it must be kept "within the heart" and have a uniquely moral character: "This was the only religious education I gave my children...
...As Arturo Labriola, one of the protagonists of Italian revisionism, wrote in 1923, Marxism underestimated the importance of human rights and human liberty, which is either individual liberty or merely a "new mockery that follows the many others suffered by the individual throughout history...
...From this his critique of Marxist socialism originated as well...
...This is a book that leads naturally to action...
...In 1932 the movement started to publish its own journal, Quaderni di "Giustizia e Liberty" (Papers of "Justice and Freedom"), which expressed the inner pluralism of the movement...
...His efforts bore fruit during the opposition to fascism, but their roots have to be sought elsewhere, in his family, in the cultural life of Florence in the 1910s and 1920s, and in the experience of the First World War...
...To Trotsky, whom Rosselli met in 1934, he tried in vain to explain that "our revolutionary liberalism has nothing to do with bourgeois liberalism, that the struggle against a Fascist dictatorship compels even the Communists to put the passwords liberty and democracy first...
...To this group—whose first act was to organize the flight from Lipari—Rosselli brought "his impetuous nature," and above all his patrimony, without which the organization could not have survived...
...But Giustizia e Liberty also survived abroad...
...During these years (1924 to 1926) he wrote several important essays against free-market ideology, which he distinguished from liberalism...
...It left him in a deep spiritual crisis, tired of the "old swollen world" and casting about for an ideal, shocked by so much violence and blood...
...But was it not Christianity that instilled this formidable faith...
...Many intellectuals discovered the existence of another nation, extremely poor and illiterate, a nation of which only the socialists had spoken...
...The flight was memorable, worthy of the best tradition of romantic adventure...
...As Rosselli himself said of his days in Lipari, "Here I have many friends...
...It was Rosselli, however, who put his stamp on the journal with his polemic against the dogmatism and sectarianism that were widespread among the anti-Fascists and his desire to escape the old ideological labels: "Instead of aiming at a 'renaissance' [of the political values of pre-Fascist Italy], Giustizia e Liberty must venture to give life within itself to the movements of tomorrow...
...We are Jewish," Amelia wrote to Carlo, "but first of all Italian...
...Its propaganda materials were written for, and distributed to, "soldiers, priests, students, workers," "white-collar employees," small industrialists, and farmers...
...He was a sui generis socialist, because from the beginning socialism for him was a moral ideal totally free of Marxist orthodoxy...
...What made Italian socialism original—and this may also be true for the Communist party after World War II—was the fact that its renaissance in the twentieth century was deeply marked by reflection on the fascist phenomenon and the understanding that the defeat of liberal democracy was also a defeat for socialism...
...Rosselli and his friends escaped in the summer of 1929...
...No, no, I wasn't born to live in a chicken coop...
...I read, study and, in secret, write...
...Giustizia e Liberta's project to create a clandestine insurrectional movement in Italy failed after a few years...
...To subordinate the future to any existing political groups—all of them an expression of a reality deeply marked by fascism—would be a mistake...
...the latter he interpreted as an "ethical conception" able to have an emancipatory effect on the working class...
...Carlo Rosselli was born in Rome on November 16, 1899, to a Jewish family with strong Mazzinian and liberal traditions...
...The war did not turn Rosselli into a socialist...
...The war was for him—as for many Italians of his generation— a decisive and terrible experience that converted hope into disillusion, passion into skepticism...
...Carlo's mother, Amelia Pincherle, brought into the family the liberal tradition of the Risorgimento...
...The group's program, Rosselli wrote, "was based on the concepts of autonomy and councils inherited by the Ordine Nuovo and by La rivoluzione liberale," that is, by Gramsci and Gobetti...
...With other friends (among them Sandro Pertini, who in the late 1970s became president of the Italian republic, and Ferruccio Parri, the prime minister of the first government after the Second World War) he led a clandestine organization with the purpose of helping the most prominent antiFascist leaders to escape from Italy...
...Immediately after the Fascists had destroyed the Circolo di Cultura, the cultural association to which Rosselli belonged, he founded two journals, Non mollare (Don't Give Up) and Il Quarto Stato (The Fourth Estate), the latter with Pietro Nenni, the future leader of the Italian Socialist party...
...According to Amelia Rosselli, the Hebrew religion had to remain an inner and private experience...
...His stay in Turin (then the major Italian industrial city) between 1922 and 1923, years of great social and political tension, was particularly important...
...arlo Rosselli was a socialist before becoming a liberal socialist...
...Her patriotism was affected by the liberation of the ghettos, which was promoted by the government of Rome...
...Some members of his father's family, the RosselliNathans, had been exiled to London, where they became close collaborators of Giuseppe Mazzini, who died in Pisa in 1872, in the house of Rosselli's great-uncle Pellegrino Rosselli...
...So why, Carlo asked his mother, should we still be Jewish when Hebraism preaches "a differentiation among human beings...
...From that point on, Rosselli devoted his intellectual and political efforts to providing the socialist movement with a new perspective, one that would replace the deterministic vision of Marxism, largely adopted by the continental socialist leaders at the end of the nineteenth century...
...He refused to identify himself and the movement with any party: after the collapse of fascism the new reality would bring forth new problems and new parties...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
