Umberto Cerroni

q:it:Umberto Cerroni (1926 - 2007) was an Italian jurist, philosopher, and essayist.

Quotes

• The Truth is what you seek when you do not yet know what it is, but you know it exists.
  • Norberto Bobbio, Umberto Cerroni, Umberto Eco, Italo Mancini, Paolo Rossi, Emanuele Severino, Gianni Vattimo, Che cosa fanno oggi i filosofi?, Bompiani, Milano 1982

• Frederick II's attempt was part of the European process of forming the first modern states, which culminated first in the Battle of Bouvines (1214) and then in the bitter clash between secular powers and the Church. In this conflict, which led to the conquest of full secular sovereignty by France and England, Frederick failed. He failed as emperor but also as unifier of Italy. He was, after all, Italian, the son of a Sicilian mother, heir to the Norman kingdom of the South, educated in the nascent Italian culture of which he was a promoter and also a protagonist.
  • Cerroni: caduto Federico non fummo più nazione, Corriere della sera, 8 December 1996

• Italian politics left the European stage, becoming vulgarised in partisan competitions, and culture was saved only by distancing itself from politics and living in a national political vacuum.
  • Cerroni: caduto Federico non fummo più nazione, Corriere della sera, 8 December 1996

Il pensiero politico del Novecento

Incipit

The socio-political history of the 20th century began with a general continuation of the trends that had dominated the economy and politics of the 19th century: capital accumulation, industrialisation, territorial expansion and competition for market share. These trends were marked by bitter power struggles over the redistribution of resources and domination of the planet. This resulted in recurring wars and economic crises that hit the most developed regions of the planet hardest and generated large mass movements. To address these social and political contradictions, European culture conducted a profound re-examination and updating of the political, economic and institutional models inherited from the past.

Quotes

• Based on the observation that the economic conditions of the proletariat had improved, thanks in part to political struggles, Eduard Bernstein set out to “revise” the entire Marxist tradition. He rejected the “theory of collapse” of capitalist society due to the impossibility of overcoming crises of underconsumption. From there, Bernstein went on to deny the need for a revolutionary transition to socialism and argued for the possibility of social transformation through reforms. Reformism and the introduction of universal suffrage would deliver power to the workers. (chap. 1, pp. 10-11)
• Controversial with populist traditionalism, Lenin argued that new social forces had to take the lead in the modernisation process by fighting for representative democracy and political freedoms. This analysis prompted the economist Lenin to devote himself to political action. And it was certainly this analysis that led to the development of his theory of socialist leadership of the democratic movement in a peasant country. (chap. 1, p. 13)
• Fascism in Italy brought together disparate social forces from a wide range of political backgrounds (socialists, anarchists, revolutionary syndicalists, clerical Catholics, nationalists, atheist republicans, former monarchist officers), united by their discontent with the agitation of workers and peasants and the peace treaty. There was also a lack of serious programmatic elaboration because fascism originated as a street movement organised by squadrist actions and “punitive expeditions” carried out in retaliation against leagues, chambers of labour, socialist sections and newspapers. (chap. 3, p. 36)
• A notable cultural impulse to Catholic political and social thought came from the Modernist movement (Adolf Harnack, Alfred Loisy, Ernesto Buonaiuti), which proposed a profound renewal of religious traditions in the face of new trends in science, liberalism and socialism. (chap. 3, p. 45)
• For Vyšinskij, the state remained a mere instrument of the party's political will, and the law could be nothing more than an expression of that will. Strongly opposing his theoretical adversaries, Vyšinskij did not fail to assert the argument of force as Attorney General in Stalin's trials. (chap. 4, p. 54)

Il pensiero politico italiano

Incipit

The debate surrounding the distinctive characteristics of Italian identity has often highlighted the anomalies in the historical and civil formation of Italy and Italians. Of course, Italy has specific characteristics and Italians have their own traits, but this does not mean that either are natural givens that cannot be traced back to general historical processes common to other countries in Western Europe. Moreover, even those who emphasise the peculiarity of the Italian nation and state, and therefore also of the “anthropological” identity of Italians, do so by comparing them “by difference” to the characteristics of other Western nations.

Quotes

• The role played by the Catholic Church in Italian history and culture has generally been assessed from a highly ideological perspective. The main emphasis has been on the spiritual role played by the Church in inspiring Italian culture and art. Less attention has been paid to analysing the political and institutional role played by the Church. In particular, the role played by the “'Papal States”', the only case of temporal power in the West, has been completely overlooked. Instead, emphasis is placed on the balancing function that it is said to have played in Italy, which was in fact inspired by the Church's desire to protect itself from any attempt to unify the Italian peninsula. (chap. 1, p. 11)
• [...] Machiavelli is the first great Italian political thinker completely and definitively freed from any cultural dependence on theology and Catholic culture: he is also the first entirely secular European political thinker, who no longer refers to the sacred scriptures, to which Hobbes and Locke will still refer. (chap. 4, p. 35)
• Poised between a last, desperate attempt to outline a strategy for the construction of a unified state and the dramatic awareness of the political impotence to which the Italians are reduced, Machiavelli is a great, solitary witness to the political decline of a highly intellectual civilisation. He has something of Dante in him, a passionate politician and disdainful exile, and of Luther. He is the last great voice of our realistic tradition and the first modern reformer of Italian consciousness. (chap. 4, p. 36)
• Overall, the three great figures of Bruno, Campanella and Sarpi attest that in Italy the distinction between civis and fidelis, opposed by the Church, had established itself in the highest consciences, laying the foundations for the sovereignty of modern states and also for freedom of conscience and religion. (chap. 5, p. 47)
• The idea of national unification matured in Italian political thought at the end of the 18th century and in the early decades of the 19th century under the weight of new foreign invasions and the failure of new political experiments such as the Neapolitan Republic and the Napoleonic Republic. These new disappointments eroded the remnants of the rhetorical tradition and put political speculation and reflection on the customs and public spirit of Italians to the test of realism. (chap. 6, p. 60)
• Resistance to political unification was not Italy's only problem. This was certainly the primary problem, but it was also the result of a profound process of disintegration following centuries of fragmentation. Literary culture had long been sterile and remained so at least until Parini; philosophical and scientific culture was more a constellation of individual personalities, sometimes brilliant but almost always isolated and persecuted. In many respects, the condition of culture was the same as that of the Italian language: refined, but little connected to the everyday communication of Italians. (chap. 6, p. 62)

Reflecting on the victory of Fascism as the conclusion of a particular evolution of national history, (Antonio Gramsci) analysed the causes of the profound divide that had occurred in Italy between politics and culture, between the people and the intellectuals. For Gramsci, the reasons for the weakness of the Risorgimento and the Italian state lay in this failure to achieve political unity in the Italian nation. In reality, the Italian state remains dominated by “two forms of subversion”: “subversion from above” by the uneducated, conservative and authoritarian ruling classes, and “subversion from below” by the subordinate classes reduced to ignorance and non-participation. (chap. 7, p. 82)

• The Cold War created serious ideological divisions, and the growing intrusiveness of political parties, encouraged by the proportional electoral system and the lack of alternative governments, led to clientelism, corruption and inefficiency. Land parcelling, hidden financing and parliamentary consociationalism led to a regression of the parties, prompting the intervention of the judiciary. Almost all parties, subjected to serious ideological erosion, had to change their names, symbols and leadership as a difficult transition to a new majority political system began. (chap. 7, pp. 83-84)

Explicit

Italian democracy is now called upon to stimulate, above all, the growth of culture in a state that has recently been formed politically and in a country that administers a significant portion of the world's cultural heritage and acts as a bridge between the West and the East. Italy's great intellectual traditions give us hope for the definitive stabilisation of democracy and a further contribution to European unification and the international democratic system.

Bibliography

• Umberto Cerroni, Il pensiero politico del Novecento, Il sapere, Tascabili Economici Newton, Roma, 1995. ISBN 88-7983-971-3.
• Umberto Cerroni, Il pensiero politico italiano, Il sapere, Tascabili Economici Newton, Roma, 1995. ISBN 88-8183-265-8.

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