Carlo Ginzburg

Find more information on Carlo Ginzburg by searching Wikiquote's sister projects
	Encyclopedia articles from Wikipedia
	Dictionary definitions from Wiktionary
	Textbooks from Wikibooks
	Source texts from Wikisource
	Images and media from Commons
	News stories from Wikinews
	Learning resources from Wikiversity

Carlo Ginzburg (15 April 1939 – 17 June 2026) was an Italian historian and a proponent of the field of microhistory. He is best known for The Cheese and the Worms (1976), which examined the beliefs of Italian heretic Menocchio from Friuli.

Quotes

Rather than political theology, I prefer to speak of "secularization", which is a process that is far from concluded and has no obvious outcome, through which the State seizes the weapons of religion. In this trajectory, which has very ancient roots, Machiavelli had a decisive importance.

From an interview by Antonio Gnoli, "E' Machiavelli l'unico antidoto ai Gattopardi", Rep.repubblica.it, 23 November 2018.

Miti emblemi spie. Morfologia e storia

Carlo Ginzburg, Miti emblemi spie. Morfologia e storia, Einaudi, 1986, new edition 2000

Mauss fully approved of the connection suggested by Halévi between Bolshevism on the one hand and Fascism and Nazism on the other, signaling the importance, in this context, of the writings of Sorel, to which Lenin had referred, Mussolini and indirectly (referring to Mussolini) also Hitler. (p. 228)
In "Mythes et dieux des Germains", which as we have seen explicitly referred to Mauss's teaching, the juxtaposition between Nazi paramilitary organizations and archaic "youth societies" was taken up and developed, but in a completely different spirit. Among the meshes of Dumézil's speech, barely concealed sympathy ideological for Nazi culture emerged at times, as Momigliano has clearly seen (and as has been tried to demonstrate here).» (p. 229)
In 1937 the Collège de sociologie was born in Paris, a very singular grafting of Maussian themes onto a institution which, beyond the explicit references to avant-garde groups (Dada, surrealists) aimed to resurrect a secret society or a religious order. But more than Maussian themes one can speak of Dumézilian themes. One of the main animators of the Collège, Roger Caillois (the other was Georges Bataille) was then in very close collaborative and friendly relations with Dumézil. Dumézil's still unpublished research was inspired by various contributions by Caillois to the Collège's activity, later collected in the volume "L'homme et le sacré", the third in a collection that had been opened by "Mythes et Dieux des Germains". (p. 229)
The themes of Dumézil's research are easily recognized, translated into the concerns (or obsessions) that dominated the protagonists of Collége, Bataille and Caillois. Schematizing we could say that for Bataile it was the connection between death (and sexuality) and sacred, for Caillois that between the sacred and power. In both of these themes, they implied an extremely ambiguous attitude towards fascist and Nazi ideologies. (p. 230)
Caillois's ramblings about an aristocratic community composed of ruthless, tyrannical individuals, ready to face the rigors of an impending Ice Age that would provoke relentless selection, had an even more watery sound. The fascist connotations of these speeches were promptly pointed out by critics of left socialists and communists, as well as by a frequent listener of the Collège conferences such as Walter Benjamin. (p. 230)
Already in a letter written to Raymond Queneau in Rome, in 1934, immediately after visiting the exhibition on the fascist revolution, Bataille confessed the fascination exerted on him by that exhibition of symbols mortuaries, of black drapes, of skulls, observing that it was nevertheless something serious, which was not to remain the exclusive domain of fascist propaganda. In a lecture on «Le pouvoir», given at the Collège da Bataille on 19 February 1938, replacing the sick Caillois, the fascination exerted by fascist symbolism even translated into the contrast between the bundle depicted in Italy «sur le ventre de toutes les locomotives» and the cruficix connected frazerianly to a «représentation obsessionnelle de la mise à mort du roi». The axe littoria, Bataille commented, as an instrument of capital executions, «est opposé ostensiblement à l'image du roi supplicié». The same murky atmosphere, an intimately guilty attraction to the mortuary rites of Nazism, forms the background to the novel Le blue du ciel, written in 1935 and published more than twenty years later. (p. 230)
The text of the Bataille conference on «Hitler et l'ordre teutonique» (24 January 1939) does not remain: we can only conjecture its probable divergences from Hans Mayer's very lucid historical reconstruction on «Les rites des associations politiques dans l'Allemagne romantique» (18 April 1939) and their relationship with the Protonazi and Nazi associations. (p. 231)
Alexandre Kojève, who also gave a lecture at the Collège on «Les conceptions hégéliennes», had ironically observed that the program of Bataille and Caillois was comparable to a magician's attempt to believe in magic through his own tricks. (p. 231)
In fact, in the two years of the Collège's activity (from November 1937 to July 1939), between the eve of the Munich Pact and the eve of the war, shamanic apprentices such as Bataille and rigorous shamanologists such as Lewitzky, aspiring founders of secret societies such as Caillois and historians of sects such as Mayer, found common ground for discussion. Retrospectively viewers are particularly struck by the ambiguity of the frame and the heterogeneity of the participants. It is, however, the ambiguous project of a «sacred sociology» of contemporary realities, rightly criticized by Leiris, that had to attract, at that moment, even detached observers, not inclined to mystical and aestheticizing confusions. (p. 231)

Il filo e le tracce

Carlo Ginzburg, Il filo e le tracce. Vero falso finto, Feltrinelli, 2006, ISBN 9788807886942

Joly's attitude towards Napoleon III's regime was decidedly hostile. But the "Dialogue in the Underworld between Machiavelli and Montesquieu" is much more than a polemical pamphlet. Joly attacked Louis Napoleon and his cynical use of power, but at the same time tried to understand a regime that appeared to him as an unprecedented historical formation. (p. 231)
Someone wrote that in the world bestseller list the "Protocols" occupy second place, right after the Bible. This is probably an exaggeration; what is certain, however, is that new editions of the "Protocols" appear every year, in the Middle East, Latin America, Japan, and Europe (I remember seeing them in the window of a bookstore in central Budapest). (p. 234)
In 1921 Philip Graves, correspondent for the "Times" from Istanbul, wrote three articles proving that the "Protocols" were a forgery, since many passages closely followed passages from a forgotten book, which had appeared more than half a century earlier: Maurice Joly's "Dialogue in the Underworld between Machiavelli and Montesquieu". Graves had learned of the connection between the two texts from a character he did not name, a Russian émigré, later identified as Mikhail Raslovlev. Although some "sources" of the "Protocols" had been previously reported, Graves's articles caused a stir. But the spread of the "Protocols" continued uninterrupted. (p. 234-235)
Whoever made the "Protocols" used the "Dialogue to the Underworld" as a model, often falling into some sloppiness, as shown by the reappearance in another chapter of the "Protocols" of the metaphor centered on Vishnu. There is a strong structural similarity between the strategies aimed at controlling society described, respectively, by the Elders of Zion and Joly's Machiavelli: for example, it is said that anti-Semitism will end up strengthening the occult power of the Jews, just as political opponents would end up becoming an instrument of Napoleon III's regime. (p.235)
Those who packaged the "Protocols" poured the materials from Joly's writing into a pre-existing mold: the phantom Jewish plot. But elements that were part of the formal model used by Joly also contributed to this operation. All ambiguity disappeared. A refined political parable turned into a crude falsification. (p. 241)

External links