The Italian Maze

...It is perhaps unfair to ask a historian to delve into this mirror-world of pretense and play-acting, but that is Italy, the heart of the matter, and if there is one important failing in this excellent book it is Smith's refusal to enter this shadowy realm...

...while Croce was...

...So that, for example, Mussolini's charm convinced both the King and Giolitti that he didn't really mean business, that he was not as tough a revolutionary as he pretended to be...

...But there is one disturbing element—the personal factor, which, indeed, Smith gives its due, but which, it seems to me, he does not document sufficiently...

...it is precisely the phrasemongers of Right and Left whom Smith regards as his legitimate prey...

...Written during Fascism and with a subtle polemical intent...

...On the other hand, if one compares Smith's history with Hughes', it becomes apparent that though Hughes is intelligent and well-informed, he tends to adopt a rather pious attitude toward the Left parties and, in fact, seems to have been taken in by the atmosphere that prevailed among Italian intellectual circles right after the last war...

...If one compares it to Croce's modern history, which ends at World War I, or H. Stewart Hughes' admirable survey of postwar Italy, The United States and Italy, one immediately sees the value of this new history...

...Camillo Cavour and Giovanni Giolitti, the liberal architects of the Italian state, were his heroes, and, by implication, Fascism's hooliganism and appeal to irrational violence were his chief targets...

...Reviewed by Raymond Rosenthal Contributor, "Commentary," New York "Times Book Review" THIS IS without doubt the best history of modern Italy which has yet been written...

...Smith does not make the slightest obeisance to any myth, even if it comes decked in the brightest of Utopian phraseology...

...Why do they really despise political thought and inevitably replace political thinking with the nuances, often so deceptive, of personal contact...

...as all know, a stubborn and sometimes short-sighted liberal...

...Denis Mack Smith, an Englishman, has tackled and tried to solve a series of delicate problems which, curiously enough...

...Why do Italians refuse to act impersonally in politics...

...One can hardly expect Americans or Englishmen to feel as strongly about Italy's tangled past as Italians...

...Accustomed to annulling the effectiveness of his opponents' programs by including them, minus their programs, in his governments, Giolitti misunderstood Fascism to such a disastrous extent that he actually pursued the same policy with Mussolini and his Black Shirts...

...Croce's book had an ax to grind, a perfectly noble ax, but still an ax...

...In Italy Smith has a field day, for Left, Right and Center of the political spectrum were all, at various times, at fault, and his arraignment of them seems impeccable...

...Giolitti, the shrewd, yet uninspired manipulator of majorities—he kept a file of the personal weaknesses and defects of all members of the Senate and the Chamber, in order to be able to blackmail them at crucial points in the political game— is exposed by Smith as the unwitting accomplice of Mussolini's coup d'etat and autarchic state...

...This must be stressed, for it is quite evident that although Italy has many aficionados, few have deigned to take its recent past seriously enough to study and understand it...

...Liberalism, as Smith has shown, was not as spotless and uninvolved in the Fascist victory as Croce hoped to prove...

...Though in England and America Smiths book has passed almost without a murmur, except that polite murmur of dutiful praise which attends the demise of so many really worthwhile books, in Italy its publication has stirred up a minor earthquake of polemical response...

...And this, in itself, is a notable achievement...

...Denis Mack Smith is a member of that modern school of historians which refuses to cut its facts to fit a predetermined ideological pattern...

...Which is, of course, as it should be...

...The appropriateness, however, is not due to a similarity of conception and ideology...

...In page after page he details the mistakes, factional stupidities and personal rancors—in Italy everything soon ends in the personal— which accounted for the ignoble defeat of the Leftist forces at the hands of the Fascists...

...and, furthermore, Fascism itself came to power precisely because of inherent faults in the parliamentary system which liberalism and the Italian character had evolved since the foundation of the Italian state...

...Smith is perhaps the most unideological of historians...

...and was astonished when the very people he hoped to take into camp disrupted the camp of parliamentary maneuvering and outlawed his party...

...Croce's history served its purpose, but also suffered from the limitations of such books with a thesis...

...Even the most cultured and informed of these writers exhibits a rather modish disdain for the economic and political facts that form the background to that spectacle they enjoy so much...

...With its meticulous scholarship and free-swinging lack of dogmatism, a book like this will soon become an obligatory part of the equipment of all those—newspapermen, travel writers, scholars, and just plain Fulbrights— who embark on the Italian adventure...

...Just recently his book has been published in Italy, appropriately by Laterza, the same publishing house whose name is connected with all Benedetto Croce's works...

...It will be difficult to do so in the future...

...Italian historians have tended to steer clear of...

...One cannot expect really to know Italy without the sort of guidance through its modern maze that Smith has so ably provided...

...Smith's Italy: A Modern History fills a gap and furnishes the student with many links which until now both historians and cultural tourists ignored...

...When reading even the best of books by foreigners about Italy one often gets the feeling that they either are ill-at-ease with the subject, or tend to locate all Italy's interest either in the immediate foreground—that swarming, too-delightful spectacle put on by its people—or in the remote, unpolemical past...