Marisa Mangoni: A Reflection on Her Historiography

In the broad scope of Marisa Mangoni’s research on contemporary history, the author highlights the presence of some tendencies and concerns that accompany her work, and that together gradually inspire and urge important changes in how the theme being dealt with is constructed and presented. Within the setting of a contemporary Italian historiography deeply subordinated to prevailing political orientations and therefore conditioned by the demands of political battles and propaganda, Marisa Mangoni, in her work as actually carried out, proposes and claims the full autonomy of historical research as an essential condition for arriving at real knowledge of the past, unfettered by the likes and dislikes of both the researcher and those he or she works for. The increasingly analytic nature of her writing also responds to this need and this perspective.

The “Party of Intellectuals” and the Organization of Culture. From “La Voce” to Einaudi

This essay examines Luisa Mangoni’s studies on the history of Italian intellectuals and of cultural organization in the 1900s. The common thread is the “partito intellettuale”, according to a definition provided by Giovanni Papini in 1902. From the turn of the century, intellectuals were not limited to being merely writers or artists, but rather became organizers of culture who used new instruments to spread their work, gave life to journals and publishing houses, and expressed their opinions on social and political issues. The complex relationship between intellectuals and politics and the events in the various fields of culture are at the centre of important texts written by Luisa Mangoni, dedicated to the journals of the early years of the 1900s, to fascism and the second post-war period (L’interventismo della cultura. Intellettuali e riviste del fascismo, 1974; Civiltà della crisi. Cultura e politica in Italia tra Otto e Novecento, 2013), and to the Einaudi publishing house (Pensare i libri. La casa editrice Einaudi dagli anni trenta agli anni sessanta, 1999).

The Late Nineteenth Century as a “Place of Memory” of French Political Culture

In the early 1890s, immediately after the Centennial of the French Revolution and the International Expo in Paris, French culture and political society were in a deep crisis. Before the Dreyfus Affair, the event with so profound an impact on public opinion, political scandals, new forms of trade-union organization and socialist movements, and the end of the “orderly” society were to usher in a new age and herald the social anxiety – the “fièvre française” – that marked the entire history of the Third Republic until its final collapse in June 1940.

Luisa Mangoni and Interpretative Categories for the Study of Fascism

Luisa Mangoni dealt with the historical problem of Fascism both in her studies on culture and intellectuals in Fascist Italy, and in an essay series on some interpretative categories employed by contemporaries and historians to explain the Fascist phenomenon. Regarding the latter perspective, on which this paper is focused, Mangoni concentrated particularly upon the concepts of “Bonapartism” and “Caesarism”, as well as on the typical Gramscian issue of “passive revolution”. Mangoni emphasizes the value of these categories as food for thought, and as the means to identify Fascism as the product of the crisis of Liberal State and society and to understand the connection between crisis and transformation characterizing the first half of the twentieth century.

“Ideas as Facts”. Didactics and Research in Luisa Mangoni’s Lectures on Fascism

This essay focuses on a course on Fascism, culture and the Catholic Church held by Luisa Mangoni at Venice’s Ca’ Foscari University in 1984-85, and attended by the author. It aims to provide insight on the unique way of combining research experience and teaching methods that Mangoni practiced in her lectures, by identifying some of the topics she dealt with, and finding their sources in her research, published or still unpublished at the time (from L’interventismo della cultura to Una crisi fine secolo, and beyond), alongside fresh material and original comments delivered during classes. This characteristic combination allows Mangoni’s own conception of the history of culture to be discerned, intertwined as it was with a still unreleased profile of Italian fascism, whose features are suggested in the final paragraphs.

“A Continuous Line of Research”. Some Words and Trends in the Historiography of Luisa Mangoni

An analysis of a few key words, and the role assigned to certain kinds of sources, can be helpful in understanding some general aspects of the historical work of Luisa Mangoni. Words like “generation”, adjectives like “underground”, and the intensive use of private letters characterize the history of culture devised by Mangoni. In cultural history of this kind, intellectual networks play a key role; dialogues, projects, and the interplay between people and groups are as important as the institutional and public dimension of intellectual history.

Catholic Culture and Political Modernity
This article analyses Luisa Mangoni’s research work on twentieth-century Catholic culture, and in particular on Don Giuseppe De Luca and the journal “Il Frontespizio”, underlining how it decisively contributed both to the debate on Italian Catholicism’s relationship with modernity and to that on the existence of a Fascist culture (and Catholicism’s role in it). On both issues, Mangoni’s interpretations suggest original and complex results, avoiding dichotomy and clear-cut alternatives between adhesion and refusal. Above all, they highlight Catholic participation in the idea of “interventionism of culture” that was one of the decisive marks of modernity: like Gramsci, Bottai, or Gentile, De Luca and Agostino Gemelli were also convinced that the destiny of politics was decided at the table of culture.

Leone Ginzburg in the Work of Marisa Mangoni

Luisa Mangoni was a true historian: she could bring the dead back to life, with their ideas, their inspiration, their work. Through sheer empathy with the individuals that were the subject of her research, she could shed new light on their lives and motivations. This was the case with her studies on Leone Ginzburg: an encounter determined by an ideal intellectual affinity, both intellectual and human. Better than anyone else, Luisa Mangoni has investigated Ginzburg’s multi-faceted personality: as founder and very soul of the Einaudi publishing house; as anti-fascist militant; and as scholar of the historical tradition of the two countries he could call his own: Italy and Russia. Mangoni has pieced together with painstaking care Ginzburg’s letters from internal exile and has looked more than once into his biography and oeuvre. Her essays on Ginzburg all shine with her unparalleled ability of combining extreme competence and acuity with a special gift of hers: “Einfühlung”, deep empathy, tinged by the sense of the unbridgeable gap that lies between historians and the human beings who are object of their research.

Italy’s Twentieth-Century Heretics. Delio Cantimori in Luisa Mangoni’s Research
This essay deals with the relationship between Mangoni’s historical research and the figure of Delio Cantimori, starting with the writing of L’interventismo della cultura. In addition to focusing on the 1930s as a time of elaboration of Cantimori’s political and historiographical approach, with the 1992 collection of his writings Mangoni undertook an investigation that reconstructed with great refinement Cantimori’s role as reader of books and “organizer of culture” after the War, especially as advisor to the Einaudi publishing house. Part of the paper is devoted to Mangoni’s judgments on this aspect of Cantimori’s activity.

History of Culture and Juridical Cultures: The 1930s and the State Issue as a Metaphor for Crisis

This essay attempts to survey Luisa Mangoni’s particular brand of history of culture by focusing on three broad and intertwined topics whose relevance has been seen mainly in scattered journal essays and books chapters, while also considering the main books in the background (L’interventismo della cultura, Una crisi fine secolo, In partibus infidelium, with the sole exception of Pensare i libri). The first topic is Mangoni’s own reflection on the work of fellow historians of culture, such as Delio Cantimori or Leone Ginzburg, from which a main theme in Mangoni’s views starting from the very beginning of her studies can be drawn: that the efforts to achieve philological precision in the analysis and interpretation of texts, by connecting them to the historical context, ought to be intended as a form of commitment, albeit unaffected by ideological motives. The second topic is her conception of culture as a highly characterized field of knowledge, in which pressing social and political questions are reflected, and which produces very pertinent answers to them. Mangoni’s reading of Antonio Gramsci is to be seen in this perspective: conveyed in four essays, they point out the central importance of the State in Gramsci’s meditation of Fascism after 1929. Also to be considered from this perspective – and this is the third topic – are Mangoni’s essays on Italian juridical culture during the 1920s and 1930s, where she was able to prove how even in a very technical field like the law, jurists were considering the causes and effects of the crisis of the State, and the transformations it was undergoing through the Fascist regime.

The Interventionism of Culture

L’interventismo della cultura is Luisa Mangoni’s first volume, appearing in 1974. It was the result of research she began while a university student in the Humanities, and then continued at Istituto italiano per gli studi storici in Naples and lastly within the group of young scholars who gathered around Renzo De Felice in the late 1960s. Tracing the history of intellectual groups and magazines in twentieth-century Italy, the book overcame the traditional cleavage between fascist and anti-fascist culture, proposing a new approach based on the theme of Gramsci’s “Cultural Organization.”

Civilization of Crisis: Writers and Crowds in the Work of Luisa Mangoni

In this essay, Michele Battini seeks to pay his intellectual debt to Luisa Mangoni, by commenting upon and reinterpreting a masterpiece of hers: Una crisi di fine secolo. He deepens his analysis through a reading of texts, sources and evidence from the twentieth-century European and Italian literature on the emerging question of industrial mass society and the so-called “psychology of crowds”. The author also shows how, in Italy’s political and intellectual history, this problem became crucial in defining the relationships between politics and the intelligentsia during Fascism starting from the first decades of the twentieth century, and it remained so in redefining these relationships after Fascism.

Don Giuseppe De Luca between “L’interventismo della cultura” and “In partibus infidelium”

The methodology of cultural history penetrates throughout Luisa Mangoni’s research on twentieth-century Italy and Europe; the figure and work of Don Giuseppe De Luca were the essential standard of comparison. From this vantage point, her In partibus infidelium. Don Giuseppe De luca: il mondo cattolico e la cultura italiana del Novecento (Einaudi, 1989) appears to be a periodizing book: the initial categorization of the history of intellectuals, centred upon the connections between the State and civil society, approaches the concept of the “civilization of crisis” that embraces a century of European history (from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries). This concept defines a specific temporality for the history of culture, of particular effect for investigating the events and the cultural “exchanges” between liberal Italy, fascist Italy, and republican Italy.

A Crossroads between the Catholic World and Fascism: Don Giuseppe De Luca “in partibus infidelium”

This article helps place Luisa Mangoni’s In partibus infidelium. Don Giuseppe De Luca: il mondo cattolico e la cultura italiana del Novecento (Einaudi, 1989) on the broader path of the author’s research. Standing at the centre of the author’s investigation was her measured critical reconstruction of the particular project of Catholic Restoration of Italy promoted by De Luca in the season ushered in by the 1929 Concordat between the Holy See and the Kingdom of Italy during the fascist regime. This project was characterized by the centrality of “piety” as an element capable of satisfying popular devotion, the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church, and a culture with broad vision at the service of Roman Catholicism. The article also offers some thoughts on issues and problems in Mangoni’s book, some of which were then further developed by historians: the relationship between De Luca and modernists; his opposition to the idealists; and the attitudes he held after World War II.

Luisa Mangoni and Her Epic of Books. Towards a Historiography of Friendship

In this short essay, an old friend of Luisa Mangoni attempts to restore the meaning of many encounters and dialogues not only in Naples and in the setting of Istituto Croce, but also in Venice or Trieste, and above all in Rome, on the editorial staff of “Studi Storici”. But the main focus of the essay is her magnificent book, Pensare i libri. La casa editrice Einaudi fra gli anni Trenta e Sessanta, published by Boringhieri, Turin, 1999, born from a deep and passionate exploration of the Archives of the Einaudi publishing house, and one of the best Italian contributions to contemporary and cultural history.

Marisa Mangoni on the Steering Committee of “Studi Storici”

The essay describes Marisa Mangoni’s long participation in the life of “Studi Storici”, starting with the redefinition of the magazine’s tasks in 1982-83. Since then, the scholar, already known for her contributions on Gramsci, joined the magazine’s editorial staff, where she would remain until the end. In 1988-89, Marisa Mangoni also took an active part in conceiving the project that resulted in Storia dell’Italia repubblicana published by Einaudi, to which she contributed an important essay entitled Civiltà della crisi. Gli intellettuali tra fascismo e antifascismo. For the next twenty years, Mangoni was to continue to offer her valuable contribution to planning the magazine, with an ever-present wealth of proposals and subtle analysis.

No Abstract

No abstract

No Abstract