Piero Gobetti's New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing (review)

There are few figures in the intellectual history of Italy that are as striking or confusing as Piero Gobetti, the boy wonder of inter-war Turin. It's difficult to know what to make of Gobetti, the precocious yet influential child genius who founded his first journal when he was still a teenager, carving out a role for himself as a "revolutionary liberal" and antifascist intellectual, and who died at the age of twenty-six following a beating by fascist thugs. Gobetti's liberalism was far from straightforward, drawing inspiration from figures as diverse as Marx and Mazzini, Sorel and Salvemini, Gramsci and Gentile, and combining them in strange and surprising ways. None of this is made any easier by the fact that Gobetti's legacy has been hotly and frequently contested: a dizzying array of left and even right-wing actors have attempted to lay claim to his mantle, while modern liberals have largely disowned him on the grounds of his apparent turn to the left. Although a catalog of Gobetti criticism exists in Italian, making contradictory and often confusing claims, he has only recently made his debut in Anglophone academia, with a selection of his writings from his review La Rivoluzione liberale translated into English in 2000 and the first monograph to be dedicated to him in English, James Martin's Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution, appearing in 2008.¹

What Ward offers us here is a guided tour of Gobetti's "new world," complete with a detailed sketch of Turin and Italy at the turn of the century and a series of portraits (a very Gobettian technique) of the intellectuals that influenced and were influenced by him. Rather than attempting a chronological narrative of the often surprising evolution of Gobetti's thought (as Martin has done), Ward opts for a thematic structure that splits the book into three major sections, the first two of which give an account of Gobetti's antifascism and liberalism. Although this leads to occasional anachronisms, it has the major advantage of contextualizing Gobetti's work against the ongoing dialogs that dominated Italy in the early twentieth century. Gobetti, writing largely in journals, was constantly reacting to something, constantly in conversation with a wide variety of interlocutors; to take him out of the context of these discussions renders his work incomprehensible. Each of the elements of Gobetti's "revolutionary liberalism" make sense only as a reaction to a specific stimulus: his "intransigence" is a response to Giolitti and the politics of trasformismo; his theory of liberalism as a dialectical struggle is a response to the positivism that dominated Turin. In particular, Ward does an excellent job of explaining Gobetti's controversial discovery of liberal values in revolutionary marxism not as a turn to the left, nor as the result of a failure to understand these movements, but as a result of the stagnation of Italian liberalism, which forced him to look for liberal values in unusual places. Although Ward's approach might not be innovative, it offers an Anglophone audience a competent, lucid, and above all sympathetic overview of Gobetti's ideas in context that, rather than trying to delineate a consistent political program in his work, locates the coherence of Gobetti's thought in the kind of intervention he constantly sought to make in the political life of Italy, in the "new world" he was always interested in creating.

Ward is able to draw on a wealth of material from his own career as a seasoned Italianist, and as a result his rendering of the intellectual landscape that Gobetti occupied is rich in detail. At times, however, his magpie-like borrowing from his own work distracts the focus from Gobetti himself, and there are moments in which he disappears from view completely. This is most apparent in the concluding chapter, "Gobetti after Gobetti," in which the author leaves himself only ten pages to deal with the thorny issue of Gobetti's legacy...