Politics without Intellectuals

This book by Giorgio Caravale not only reconstructs with great narrative effectiveness the increasingly problematic relationship between politics and intellectuals. It constitutes an original interpretation of the history of contemporary Italy, its resources and its fragilities, its vitality and its lacerations. After helping to form the Italian ruling class, culture is at the crossroads between a possible decline and a new identity. (Roberto Esposito, philosopher, author of Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy)

The book is the first historical reconstruction of Italian political events over the last thirty years, that is, the period from the Tangentopoli crisis of the early 1990s to the present day. In particular, the book examines, for the first time in a systematic and documented way, the controversial relationship between parties and intellectuals, highlighting the distance, not to say the unbridgeable gap, created between politics and culture in Italy in the last three decades, the decades of the so-called Second Republic. In other words, it tries to explain why the close link between politics and culture that was the hallmark of twentieth-century politics has dissolved in Italy, and through what stages we have come to a substantial incommunicability between these two worlds in the last three decades.

Giorgio Caravale is a Professor of Early Modern History at the University Roma Tre, Rome, Italy. He is the author, among other volumes, of Libri pericolosi (Laterza, 2022), A suon di polemiche (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2024), George L. Mosse’s Italy (with L. Benadusi) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and Censorship and Heresy in Revolutionary England and Counter-Reformation Rome (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).