By Danilo Breschi · Thursday, July 25, 2013 Danilo Breschi’s “From Politics to Lifestyle and/or Anti-Politics: Political Culture and the Sense for the State in Post-Communist Italy” appears in Telos 163 (Summer 2013). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
 In Italy, the transition from communism to post-communism, from the PCI to today’s Democratic Party, has been determined and strongly influenced not only by the collapse of ideologies and by the changes in the international political scene after 1989, but also by the profound changes that have invested the customs, lifestyles, and collective mentality from the end of the 1960s and, ever more rapidly, from the 1970s. Mass individualism and consumer society are the factors that more than others have undermined the myth of the anthropological “diversity” and the claim to moral superiority cultivated for decades by the Italian communists. Moreover, they help explain the passage of many of them from the utopia revolutionary and the dream of a “new world” to the liberal-bourgeois radicalism that seems to characterize today’s Italian left. Is there anything left of the communist tradition in today’s Italian political and cultural scenario? There is probably one attitude shared by many Communist militants but that belongs to the entire Italian political tradition, i.e., the deeply rooted aversion to public institutions and a poor sense of the state as embodying the rule of law. The greatest and most negative legacy of the long hegemony, on the left, of a communist party narrowly loyal to the Soviet Union was and still is the lack of legitimacy of the state and its institutions. The Soviet experiment having failed, there remains a populist cultural capital that has passed on to the Lega Nord in the 1990s and that has recently migrated to the Five Stars Movement of Beppe Grillo.
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By Danilo Breschi · Friday, December 14, 2012 This paper was presented at Telos in Europe: The L’Aquila Conference, held on September 7-9, 2012, in L’Aquila, Italy.
 It is with Tocqueville that the term democracy acquires a positive connotation. When the first part of Democracy in America appeared in 1835, the very title came as a surprise. It was radically new, and it struck people like a bolt from the blue. Tocqueville took another unprecedented step when he associated democracy and equality. According to Aristotle, equality is an aspect of justice, not democracy. The equality that Tocqueville had in mind was not political or economic, but social; it referred to a social condition arising from equality of condition and from a pervasive egalitarian ethos. The latter reflected, in turn, the absence of a feudal past in the New World. Back in Europe and France, Tocqueville lived through the events of 1848, when the notion of “revolution” gained a socialist character. It is at such point that Tocqueville perceives a conflict between socialism and liberty: socialism means equality without liberty, while democracy stands for equality and freedom. He thus starts a new debate, that of the problematic relationship between equality and liberty, which draws on his dual political experiences in Europe and America. He discovers that it is through their synthesis that a political system capable of combining the best aspects of liberty and equality might emerge. Liberal democracy could therefore be born of the encounter between Europe and America, that is to say, the two main parts of the Western World.
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By Danilo Breschi · Wednesday, April 4, 2012 There seems to be a need for a book like this amid the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. Pensare l’Italia (2011, Einaudi) is the title of a tightly organized and explosive dialogue between Ernesto Galli della Loggia and Aldo Schiavone, two conversationalists who relate to each other like night and day. At times their dialogue seems to be a conversation between the deaf or a juxtaposition of two monologues. Although they rarely agree, it may benefit the reader to have access to two books instead of one.
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By Danilo Breschi · Thursday, July 29, 2010 From the beginning of the 1960s to the end of the 1970s, Italian Communism—represented by the biggest Communist political party in the West—lost its propulsive force. The myth of “revolution” expired; the crucial social and economic role of the industrial working class disappeared; the capitalistic system consolidated itself as a mass consumerist society. In addition, there were important sociological changes in the leadership of the Italian Communist Party. First, we must specify who the Italian Communist militants were at the beginning, especially in the immediate years after World War II and in the first twenty years of the Republican period (1945-1965). During these years the Communist Party presented itself as an organization with a clearly defined identity and sense of purpose toward both outsiders and its own militants: the militant’s everyday life was dominated by the so-called “Stalinist metaphor” (“metafora staliniana,” a term coined by the Italian scholar Giuseppe Carlo Marino). What does that mean? To Communists, words such as “Stalin” and “USSR” signified an “ideal of absolute happiness, synthesis of moral standards and welfare, in opposition to the disturbing and corrupting promises of the American capitalism.”
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By Danilo Breschi · Wednesday, April 9, 2008 It is important to remember that Italy was probably the first country in Europe involved in that worldwide generational protest cycle which came to be called “1968.” The occupation of universities and the student mobilization had already begun in the autumn of 1967. In addition, the famous battle of “Valle Giulia” in Rome between students and police took place on March 1, 1968, before the most famous joli Mai.
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By Danilo Breschi · Monday, August 27, 2007 An international conference took place on June 22 at the Libera Università degli Studi “San Pio V” in Rome to consider the nature and evolution of “European political thought after 1989 between globalization and new humanism.” Among the issues discussed, the most important was an examination of how the various political and philosophical cultures have come back to questions about God or, at least, religions’ role in public sphere. Together with the problem of identity, this is the central intellectual question of our times. Major events during the last twenty years, such as the fall of Soviet Empire and the 9/11 attacks on the United States, encouraged such a deep change. Reporting on some of the papers presented at the conference is a way to contribute to the examination of religion recently discussed on the Telos blog and in the journal.
Michael Novak (American Enterprise Institute, Washington D.C.) talked about “The End of the Secular Era.” The starting point of his analysis was that 9/11 marked the collapse not only of the Twin Towers but also of secularism to the extent that it represents a way to use reason as an autonomous instrument of knowledge without any reference to other perspectives. On the contrary, both individual existence and group life, that is politics and society, display a profound need for new foundations and answers, probably as ancient as the questions about human destiny. Arguing for a transformation of secular thinking, Novak predicts a coming end to secularism.
In Novak’s opinion, after Jacques Derrida’s death in 2004, Jürgen Habermas must be considered as the most important philosopher in the world. After decades of professed atheism, during the last seven years Habermas has started to raise questions about the limits of secularism, while also conceding some appreciation for aspects of religions that offer a dimension of transcendence and which, at the same time, defend every human being’s dignity, liberty, and responsibility. He seems to reference, implicitly and not often expressly, religions such as Judaism and Christianity. Habermas is more and more sceptical about the thesis of an unstoppable secularization of the West, if not of the entire world. On the contrary, the last years have shown how secularized Europe is much more of an exception than a rule.
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