ABSTRACT: An essay on the nature and historical roots of the new Radicalism and a debate on the Radical problem with contributions from: Contributions by Gianni Baget-Bozzo, Giorgio Galli; Francesco Ciafaloni; Domenico Tarizzo; Ernesto Galli della Loggia; Brice Lalonde; Ugoberto Alfassio Grimaldi; Giuseppe Are; Alberto Asor Rosa; Silverio Corvisieri; Ruggero Orfei; Sergio Cotta; Federico Stame; Paolo Ungari; Giuliano Amato; Fabio Mussi; Giulio Savelli

(SAVELLI Publishers, October 1978)

Introduction (1375)

PART ONE

I. Politics and Society (1376)

II. The Accusations Against the Radicals (1377)

III. The Radicals As A Two-Front Party (1378)

IV. Radicalism And Socialism (1379)

V. Radicalism Or Marxism, Co-existence Or Techno-Fascism (1380)

PART TWO

A Debate On The Radical Problem (1381 > 1397)

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"Radical Anger"

For some time there has often been recourse to bestiaries to define like monstrous animals the parties and their abnormal claims. The giraffe, the hippogriff, the minotaur, have all been invoked. Perhaps, with a bit of imagination, one could come up with some animal fantasy capable of representing the Radical Party, the most monstrous of them all. The question that this "monster" excites in many people is: Where do the Radicals get the fundamental impulse for their actions?

One can imagine that one of the possible interpretations of

the basic reason for being on the left would be a sort of rebellion against the way things are. If one accepts this, among the many available interpretations, one must recognise that the distinguishing feature separating one kind of left from another is precisely the fact of directing this primordial rebellion against differing objects. Thus, in the particular case of the Radicals, this impulse basic to what they say and do, to what makes them act and fight, to what they detest and what they hope for is precisely their indignation about injustice, a kind of "revolutionary impulse" against today's way of living and the concrete organisation of society. Therefore the Radicals want to revolutionise, even before the institutions, the things that present themselves in everyday life; so much so that, to give only a few examples, causes like anti-militarism, sex, or ecology are taken up above all as part of their rejection of unsatisfactory human relations in today's society.

If a large part of the left directs its rebellion towards the economic reasons for this situation, the indignation of the Radicals concerns everything that treads on individual liberty and dignity: social oppression, clericalism, war, illegality, authoritarianism, corruption, the lack of respect for the rules of democracy.

And this essentially "subversive" attitude of the Radical adherents encounters several problems in the particular history and culture of radicalism that must be dealt with: the relations between man and man and those between man and nature. This is the basis on which the targets of political action are determined that we glimpse in both "customs" and "institutions": that is, the encrustations that, on the one hand, the expansion of freedom finds in the relations between man and man, and, on the other hand, the norms that regulate these relations.

To transform social and human relations and to influence customs is for the Radicals the imperative that originates directly in their anger, in their system of values. But the transformation of the institutions is equally important because the lack of consistency between written laws (the Constitution) and their functioning impedes the transformation of precisely those social and human relations within the framework of civil co-existence. In this way one discovers that the respecting of liberal principles is the only one that can guarantee liberty and dignity. For this reason in the PR one finds a strict connection between two apparently contradictory elements which, however, in political practice show themselves to be consistent and homogeneous: the anxiousness behind "legal extremism" and thus the goal of guarantees, and the anxiousness to affirm new values in customs with tools to break up the status quo.

The crucial importance that, on these premises, the Radicals give to the right not to be either the victims or perpetrators of violence and oppression also generates the ideal and practice of "non-violence" as a value per se, and thus its possible use for confronting conflicts with a tool which is not passive and which allows for strict consistency between means and ends.

Therefore civil disobedience and conscientious objection co-exist in the PR in a creative tension with the affirmation of the constitutional state and the demand for respecting the rules of the game. With the use of pacific methods for the individual and collective rebellion, the Radicals express their revolutionary and contest the current norms in the name of their own system of values which they will not give up trying to realise. While constantly committed to the respecting of the institutions, they affirm freedoms as final goals and not instruments, freedoms as defined by the dominant cultures as "formal", thus creating unyielding points of conflict with those who use the institutions for gaining power.

That is why the radicalism of the PR is something quite different from the liberal type of party. If, historically, liberalism does not allow the liberal-democratic forms to be modelled on new values and, thus, end up as adjuncts to the conservative movement, radicalism overcomes these limits by directing and setting up battles based on antagonistic values without denying the permanent positive significance of the framework of institutional guarantees.

The party that takes form from these factors is one that can be called a "two-front" party in which the co-existence of its two faces are strictly functional for each other, otherwise it would lose its special characteristics. In fact the "Radical Party for reforms" translates into specific projects for insertion into the liberal-democratic institutions the values of the "other" Radical Party which in themselves are subversive and antagonistic to the established order.

"The Party Of Reforms"

In the distortions made of the Radical's complexities, it is regularly underlined to the discredit of the new radicalism that it contains contradictory tendencies which bring about substantial "ambiguity". The reason for this ambiguity and these contradictions resides in the fact that on the one hand there is a side of the Radical Party that discovers the needs and impulses of popular democracy, expressing them with a civil rights action by means of the institutions, while profoundly respectful of the Constitutional values and the particular forms of traditional liberal-democracy and, on the other hand, there is a side whose forms are manifested in a piecemeal extra-constitutional action and whose contents echo the far-leftist anti-establishment rebelliousness.

Almost everyone believes they see the fragility of the Radical political culture in this presumed lack of inner consistency, some from one of the two poles, some from the other, some emphasising a mythical past and some the present. We have already referred to Giuliano Amato who has effectively schematized the two aspects of today's radicalism. Giulio Savelli, who has run an audacious political gamut from Trotskyism to the side of rigorously defending the values of the Western system, has polemicised thus from his <>: "The Radical Party, which appeared on the Italian political scene as almost the firmest supporter of the Anglo-Saxon type of liberal democracy and against our native distortions in the correct functioning of the institutions, has suddenly become converted to an extremist, not to say subversive political line" (Savelli, see Part Two).

It is true that the Radical Party is described in the political system as an institution with a double series of elements such as to make of it a "two-front" party: but these connotations are generally of a very different kind from what they are polemically said to be, and their substance contains the strength and originality of the new radicalism rather than its inconsistency. It is necessary to consider these questions in the proper light if one wants to understand without distortions the intentions and politico-cultural attitudes that in effect inspire Radical action. This is what we will subsequently try to do here in discussing point by point the presumed "two souls" of radicalism and to grasp the sense of their co-existence, or better, their existence one inside the other.

The first vow of the PR, the one generally indicated as the positive aspect of a policy that presumably was followed only until yesterday, is that of the "party of reform" which always acts on the basis of concrete and limited proposals that nevertheless appear as explosive inasmuch as they are direct actions. We have already noted this elsewhere: "<> understood as an idol on whose altar one must sacrifice the urgency of specific reforms, are opposed by the value, the urgency and the necessity of the reforms themselves. In a country used to living in immobility, action pushed to extremes to achieve reform has tended to appear even paranoid whereas it is purely the realisation of action for reform according to the rules of political democracy. Only that these rules are assumed to have their original value and processes and not the uses that they have been put to by the major Italian parties. Seen from this standpoint, the Radicals perform the role of a "party" that offers a poli

tical outlet to those appeals that arise from or are activated by civil society for ideal or political reasons and transforms into norms, laws and institutional changes the demands and needs manifested by the grass roots of the country.

Such a capacity for interpreting and transforming needs is achieved without insisting on putting all that into a system of more complex balances and alliances and of controlling whole sections of society. Therefore a party has taken form which operates fully in political society but which at the same time does not lead down to the depths of the political system's interests. From this standpoint, it differs from the new Marxist left in its faith in being able to transform society by means of the classical democratic procedures. It is the full and not merely instrumental adhesion to the constitutional state as a permanent value. Its differing stand from the historical left, as well as from the deep questions of content that regard the PCI [Communist Party, ed.], derives from the direct reformist impulses with their subordination to logic of gaining power, by which is also meant the fight for more room within the political system" (Massimo Teodori, speech to the conference on <The New, Socialist And Libertarian Party And The Statute And Experience Of The PR In Society And The Institutions>>, Rome, May 5,6,7, 1978).

The most complete example of the Radical's way of acting was the initiative to promote the referendums; and not for nothing did the debate that arose around the use they made of this institution end by illuminating in an exemplary way the value of the PR as a "party of reform". In fact, the referendums, which in the last five years have been the prime operative policy of the Radical strategy, fully correspond to the need for giving a concrete political outlet to specific reforms. Their abrogative nature, as foreseen by the Constitution, is a relative limitation in that by means of the referendum process it is not only possible to annul anti-democratic laws (or to confirm democratic ones) - something that in the Italian context constitutes a reform in itself - but it also exerts a stimulus and pressure which all the political parties must take into account.

It is not by chance if in the long process that led to the rejection of seven of the nine referendums requested in 1977-78 three new laws (on insane asylums, abortions and examiners) were passed by a Parliament that had long been inert (and it is of secondary importance whether or not they were good laws).

Amato has observed on several occasions whose use has a positive and appropriate democratic value to the degree in which they resolve single problems and are not charged with a general political significance of approval or disapproval of a particular political equilibrium. Of the same tender is the very ample press coverage of those who summarily repeated like a refrain that there are "right" referendums and "wrong" ones, that some moments are "opportune" and others "inopportune" ("the instrumental, exaggerated and distorted use of the referendum because of their exorbitant number, heterogeneous issues and the complexities of the abrogation proposals" Natta (PCI) in <> (1) January 13, 1978); and that a single referendum is one thing whereas many all proposed in a block is quite something else. Federico Stame is also of this opinion even while generally in agreement with the direction of Radical action: "The indeterminate abstractness of the referendum initiatives, the multiplicity of the nor

ms that, confusingly, are being given to public attention, according to me indicate a fundamental lack of attention to the political conditions in which the thing developed, an inadequate consideration of the relations between the PCI leaders and (...) their grass roots which is largely in favour of the abrogation of the matters with which the referendum took issue". (Stame, see Part Two).

All of these criticisms which are based on two kinds of arguments - the political opportuneness and the singleness or multiplicity of the norms to be abrogated - when they are not pretexts, are in reality loaded with a heavy dose of abstraction. In fact, the change in the significance of the referendum (both generally speaking and in particular those of '78) from a precise layman's test on specific norms to that of a general judgement on a particular political set-up does not primarily depend on the promoters but on just that political framework so frequently invoked. In 1974 too a good number of votes given for the maintenance of the divorce law meant - as afterwards was seen - not only the approval of that reform but also a way of condemning the political and cultural predominance of the Christian Democrats and the Catholic clerics quite aside from the merits of the norm itself. And in 1978 was it not perhaps the "new majority" to insist a priori on the "destabilising" nature of the referendums jus

t because it was feared that this would open a new constitutional channel to express the tensions in the country aside from the elections?

It is the block of the broad agreement among 94% of the parties that inevitably transforms the referendums into instruments of political dialectics when this starts to be missing in the institutions that should have it. The Communists have been maintaining that the referendum on the [public, ed.] financing of parties means giving a judgement on the whole political system - except for the rectification of that judgement "after" the results - while the one on the Reale Law (2) is the supreme test on questions of public order in our country.

The distinction between the referendum where in full knowledge a decision is made "only" on a question (the American and the Swiss use of this institution) and the kind that is charged with "general judgements", is not a problem of institutional regulation. It originates directly in the specific political context in which the test takes place and the way in which the majority allow it to be set up: that is to say, from that political climate which is the result, among other things, of the use of the mass media and of the direction given to the election campaign, either dramatising the situation or giving information about it.

The more the normal channels of political dialectic were maltreated, the more the referendums acquired the function of an alternative verification of the existing political equilibrium.

And with regard to the multiplicity and lack of homogeneousness of the norms being tested - which according to some was the case in the 1977-78 nine referendums - the discussion is open. In a situation of an almost total non-observance of the Constitution, the abrogation of laws that, while belonging to different sectors, are all opposed to the spirit of the supreme law of the country is inspired by and obtains a politically united result: that of restoring or establishing a constitutional republic altered by outgrowths that have been kept alive for too long.

In the particular situation of these last years, the referendums have been constantly blocked, not at all because of their number and presumed lack of homogeneousness, but "only" because of their significance as tools of political mediation that by-pass the parties. Even if the 1977 referendum had been a single one, the opposition to it would have been of the same type as was the case in the 1976 abortion referendum which was certainly not the least of the reasons for the early dissolving of Parliament.

There is no doubt that a minority, which wants to play the role of opposition and critic in a constitutional way to a government it wants to defeat and in which it sees authoritarian features originating precisely in the effective lack of pluralism and alternatives, will tend to use the referendum, as do the Radicals, both on "specific issues" as well as in the general "democratic battle". But, we repeat, which of the two aspects elicits the greater response in the referendum does not depend upon its promoters but on the objective political conditions and the subjective intentions of the parliamentary majority. Whether to broaden or to narrow the meaning of the referendum, whether to work for informing and thus maturing [the voters] or for dramatising the situation, whether to admit things to take place regularly or to upset the entire political and constitutional agenda - this choice of the second horn of the dilemma (the exception in place of the democratic norm) has depended since 1972 (two early ele

ctions...) on all those parties who, while claiming to belong to the "democratic ranks", overthrew schedules, ways and procedures of the democratic game primarily in order to safeguard their own positions and projects which were always more within the framework of the party system and "against" the broadening of the forms of open democracy.

"The <> Party"

Aside from the referendums and for its presence in Parliament, the Radical Party is known and recognised - above all, by some - for being something different in its politics from the usual party organisations. It is the party - as is usually said - that gathers into itself the diverse elements, the outsiders, the minorities of every kind and which also takes on commitments on issues of conflict such as sex, drugs and existential questions. After having been cultivated for a long time in silence as eccentricities, these "revolutionary" issues made contact in the seventies with the great social phenomena so that the Radicals were sometimes able to become their spokesmen, at other times their organisers and yet again resonance chambers for these realities in their encounters with politics.

Many were the factors that contributed to creating the image and the reality of the PR as a "different party" that expresses pre-political and post-political values and prefigures in itself the traits of a different society: a certain type of non-violent culture; a standing away from the politics of the politicians; an instinctive diffidence of the kind of development that brings degradation and crises; the issues dear to those who feel the need of establishing a different relationship between man and nature, between the individual and history that does not pass by way of the great bureaucratic aggregates; the demand for sexual liberty; the diffidence towards the great totalitarian ideological systems; the general opposition to the characteristics of the techno-democracy installed in the state and the parties; the libertarian aspiration to life which comes very long before the questions relative to the organisation of libertarian politics.

On such issues there have gathered within and around the PR a group of people who feel them as deep needs or as part of their own sensibilities or who in some have way participated in experiences connected to them. What favoured these counter-cultural or "subversive" circles entering the orbit of the PR may perhaps have been the latter's natural adoption of a way of being, of a language, or perhaps of the gestures that facilitated the tie between forms of political action and needs and impulses felt to be non-political.

But it would be a mistake to think that the Radicals in some way colonised the other movements. The relationship in their politics is established by a deep similarity that makes Radical subversiveness and libertarianism a fertile ground for a meeting of minds. And even when there was an organisational relationship as in the case of the federated movements, some successful, some not, several in a phase of development, others petering out, these were based on a clear distinction between the autonomous factors of the movement and that part of them that could be included in a political battle waged by the entire party. Thus it happened that, in general, the relationship of the Radicals with the feminists and the women's movement, with the ecologists and the ecological and anti-nuclear movements, with the homosexual question and its movement, with conscientious objectors and the pacifist movement made sense because it was based on values and not on the desire to exploit.

The true and in many ways inimitable tie between the PR and all that has to do with alternative culture and ways of life that have grown up in Italy during these years is based on this harmony which made the Radicals assign these elements a pre-eminent place in the image and the reality of their party. They loaded the party with that conflictual impulse from which ways of life and of behaviour take on substance that elsewhere were considered to be marginal or irrelevant.

It has not always been easy to reach a balance between the political and the non-political, between the necessity of political action and a way of life consonant with the quality of counter-cultural living, between the search for consistency, wholeness and the rejection of totalitarianism.

It is in the way the relationship was set up between the two poles of the question that a balance was reached little by little: on the one hand the movements were not necessarily enclosed in strict organisational formulas that would in some way constitute an imperialist hegemony of the party over the movement; on the other hand, in the PR the movement is not condemned to remain a pure social phenomenon without the possibility of taking action on its individual demands. Thus the PR has always lived in an imbalance more than in a balance reached once and for all, as is proved by the way in which up to now the relationship between the personal and the political has been dealt with.

Around this question has arisen one of the great problems that trouble the Radicals as, in a different way, it troubles the entire left in its relations with the new generations with the movement. In the PR itself two different tendencies appear.

On the one hand there is the "movement-oriented" demand of many militants for political action, and thus party action, on behalf of the collective movement in which personal life too is expressed and resolved (contrary to the Marx-Lenin tradition in which the private is suppressed and dissolved in the political, but still with the two terms reduced to one).

On the other hand there is the demand for the total freedom of the personal to find its own place of expression guaranteed by the liberty it gained through party action: where the relationship between the personal and the political fully exists

indeed, but to the degree that the dimensions of the personal are known and the political is charged with safeguarding its independence.

Still today these two tendencies exist within the party, but whereas the first leads to re-travelling the route of those processes that have led so many "alternative" experiences to reflection (feminist self-knowledge, small counter-cultural groups, community...) or else to the illusory resolution of the contradictions in revolutionary militantism, the second seems to be the only one which watches over the deep needs of all those who make endeavours on the issues of the personal and the political. And not only that, but it more broadly welcomes the great need of liberation that in so many different forms expresses itself in the "revolution against politics" or in the presumed <> of which we have spoken.

Certainly the question of the personal/political is not an easy on to solve, not only for the Radicals, but more generally for all the movements that have taken the problem under consideration. This has also been noticed by a militant American feminist who has long considered this issue with reference to the relationship of the feminist movement and the left. Barbara Ehrenreich has written: "A moral person in a political sense not only doesn't dirty the floor but also works to convert the social order to her own moral ideas (...). A few years ago one could have hoped that the interaction between feminism and the left would have led to the propagation of this kind of political morality throughout the movement... The slogan <> did not have the reductive meaning that it has today according to which everything one does is a form of political action. It meant that personal choices had to correspond to noble political principles (... But) radical politics does not offer any easy ans

wers. We cannot promise that acting in politics will make us feel well, nor even that it will help us to understand exactly what to do tomorrow. But I know that if we could integrate our politics with our morality we could at least offer people what political movements have always offered as long as they were vital: that is the sense of belonging politically and of the individual's importance which is one of the bases of political morality". (Barbara Ehrenreich, <>, in <> 3-4 August-November 1977).

"The Party Of Projects"

So singular a reality as that of the Radical Party which we have described, in which there co-exist diverse and in many ways

heterogeneous elements - can it be and be considered a party? Or is it not rather just a temporary and accidental tool through which pass and have passed disparate initiatives that do not combine solidly into a general viewpoint? The "Radical thing" then, is it really a party or just the false front of a movement?

The Radicals have been listening to these questions for fifteen years, and still today they hover among the politically and non-politically oriented, as questions that regard the very nature of what insists on calling itself a party. Still other objections were raised when the Radicals entered Parliament, when many observed that the PR had a valid function as long as it remained a stimulus, a thorn in the country's flesh, but that it then perverted its own strength by going into electoral competition with the rest of the left... "Ten years after its refoundation, after having led and united - more as a movement than a party - (...) several important battles (...) the PR has gone into an identity (...) crisis. Almost certainly it will pay for the error of having entered (...) Parliament" (Mino Monicelli, <>, 1968-1978, Bari, Laterza, 1978, p.207).

In reality, even if in a singular way, the PR has always been a party, if one does not give a mechanical, organisational and reductive interpretation to this category. In another place, in the book <> there was an analysis of the affairs and the particular type of inter-weavings among the subjective elements that the Radicals gathered together and revitalised at the beginning of the Sixties, and the subsequent repercussions in the Italian reality. But among all the reasons that testify in favour of the Radicals as a party in the full sense of the word, the essential one is that there exists a "general political project" on which its single actions are based. Those observers who had insisted that the PR had the character of a movement never stopped to ask themselves if the various bits and pieces which presented themselves from time to time did not fit into a general view of the Italian regime which permitted the Radicals to identify contradictions and to act upon them. Even when the Ra

dicals were a group of not more than fifty people it had felt itself to be acting as a total political force, even if in a sense rejected by those who confuse the political project with the organisation and ideology.

The political design underpinning the Radicals in all these years has been the "alternative, the unity and the renewal of the leftist parties". It was certainly all based at first purely on a subjective intuition and its expression in words, in a moment when the other forces of the left were moving - all of them, even if from different standpoints - in other directions and did not judge the three terms of this strategy as being either possible or desirable.

The word "alternative" was not even pronounced, or at best it was confused with well-remembered frontism. And unity was just as little considered to be an issue at a time when the Socialists were pursuing collaboration with the DC [Christian Democrats, ed.] as a means and perhaps an end. And it did not even occur to the Communists that the great historic compromise (3) demanded of them by the reform movement was meant to be with the parties and unions of the European Socialist and Social Democratic tradition. Even the factor of renewal before '68 seemed an abstraction compared with the regular habits and the bureaucratic security that had pervaded the PCI's, the PSI's and so also the PSIUP's (4) relationship with the social realities. Certainly, if taken literally, that project which underlay Radical action for fifteen years might have seemed ridiculous. And there were not a few internal contradictions and difficulties either (relations with the PCI, leftist traditions, the international picture) whic

h interposed themselves in passing from words to actions. When, for example, one spoke of anti-militarism, there was no lack of conceptual problems ones to be resolved before facing the political ones.

But if one considers politics as the dialectics of forces and positions, one notes that this project has worked, perhaps through the contribution of a thousand rivulets or hands other than Radical ones, and that somehow it has gained a central role in the debates of the last few years.

With more direct regard to Radical action, that design has constituted the basis of the single battles, erroneously considered by observers as the work of a pressure group and not, as in fact they were, the partial and realistic achievements of a project for governing society.

If one were to list, one after the other, the targets of Radical battles for fifteen years - corporativism, the clerical function in the power structure, the role of the state-owned sector in the economy quite aside from the myths, the turn towards authoritarian of the institutions, parties and the state, the role of the military complex in the political battle - one discovers that they all grow out of an analysis of Italian realities neither so fragmentary nor so unrealistic if the issues raised punctually became after a time the focal points of current issues and political battles.

The fact that today all of these things are under discussion, and the other political forces have to come to terms with them, is also the indication of a process of laicization - making evident issues that in other times were ignored or hidden - which have been opened up and brought to maturity with the help of the PR, sometimes in a decisive way.

From the early Sixties the Radical analysis of the Italian situation focused on the central role the Christian Democratic regime had come to assume as a strongly corporative power system consonant with the clerical attitudes of its leaders rooted in the party, the state and state capitalism (Fanfani-ism [5] and Dorotean [6] practice).

The characteristics of that situation appeared to be the resolution of political conflicts through dividing up political fiefs, the practice of irremovability within an immobile situation, and the total lack of any prospects for alternation in the government. With its occupation of power, the new Christian Democratic class had worked for the expansion of state intervention and the reduction of every aspect of collective life to the logic of private hands taking control through the auspices of the public arm. The non-application of the Constitution was the corollary of that situation in which the institutional "superstructures" also had to be in function of the dissolution of the constitutional state.

In this kind of Italian reality the Radicals, on one hand, identified the elements of a meshing of the economy and politics as the outcome of the candidacy for management by an authoritarian-corporative-populist complex in its modern form which had begun under Fascism and had been perfected by the DC. And on the other hand, it underlined the permanent importance of old conservative and authoritarian factors (which the technocratic, neo-positivist optimism of the left had held to be overcome), such as clericalism and the clerical power apparatus, parasitical habits, the tradition of corruption of politicians and bureaucrats, and the interference of the military in state institutions. Therefore the Radicals opposed the network of old conservative elements and new authoritarian ones with not only an alternative political project, but also different and opposing values whose strong point was just in their rejecting the optimism that rationalised away state interventions as well as the myth of an apparent an

d fragile well-off consumer society that many thought could overcome basic conflicts.

In this sense one saw in the DC regime the continuation of many of the fundamental traits of the Fascist regime: above all the true realisation of corporatism and the reduction of a Parliament, in which clashes over alternation of power languished, to a corporative chamber for the working out of reciprocal concessions. This analysis had already been formulated in 1963, even if by now several of the elements on which it was based have changed.

The Radical reply was based on a project whose contents were those battles and values which alone could be alternatives irreducible to all the negative and authoritarian aspects of that regime - both the old and the neo-corporative ones - which is to say "civil rights".

From the very beginning the Radicals had seen civil rights as the instrument suited to produce in Italy a series of old and new liberties for the citizen. This propagated the expansion of individual rights and liberties against all the bonds on society by the over-regulation imposed by government and the corporatising of the organised groups. Already before the great social impulses of '68, the Radicals had guessed that one of the authoritarian traits of contemporary society lay in the way in which the great organisations exercise their power, putting de facto limits on individual action.

For this reason the promotion of battles for liberty and civil rights meant, according to the Radicals , setting in motion a mechanism that could liberate energies from old clerical influences and, at the same time, provoke a political conflict that it would be hard to contain within the practice of corporative negotiations. By guaranteeing human and civil rights, aside from their place within a specific aggregate of guaranteed interests, Radical action tended to create antagonism to the regime's rules of the game and to accelerate the process of laicization of society.

For the rest, with civil rights as their central proposal, the Radicals intended to help give substance to the hypothesis of an alternative looked for by the entire left. This fact of operating within the leftist ambit and at the same time independently of its prevalent political tacks, is what made it necessary to take a hard polemical line with it. In fact, on the whole, the left was considered to be timid and subservient on the one hand, keeping within the limits that the political system had reserved for it and in all cases recognising the DC's predominance as legitimate; and on the other hand, culturally and theoretically incapable of understanding fully (with its Leninism and its Jacobinism) the needs of Italian society and the dangers hovering over it. These, finally, were the reasons why the Radicals proposed the renewal of the leftists and, in this way, the rediscovery of a non-frontist unity which could also offer its candidacy for an alternative leadership in the country.

"The Ideal Bases Of The PR"

If the existence of a consolidated political project makes a party of the PR in the most authentic sense of the word, one must ask oneself if it also is based on theoretical first principles that put it into a relationship with a cultural tradition. And if so, where are they to be found?

In fact, the Radicals have developed and kept alive in an original key, not reducible except in part to past tradition, the great Karstic stream of Radical liberal thought. In certain respects Baget-Bozzo is right when he says that the Radicals are very much more attentive to individual than to collective values. And that in contrast to the collectivism of the Catholic tradition (solidarity) or the Marxist one (class). Not that the collective experience (socialisation of the private into a group) is an unessential value for new Radical thought and customs, but what is indispensable for them is the recognition of the individual, and not abstract and collective entities, as the true protagonists of life and history.

Where Baget-Bozzo perhaps does not fully grasp the character of PR radicals - even if his analyses do hit on some true aspects and elements - is in speaking of the individual as completely reduced to his corporeality (...<>, Baget-Bozzo, see Part Two); whereas almost instinctively the Radicals base their thoughts and actions on an idea of the individual as having rights.

(Is this a question of a revival of natural law? Are the many philosophical advances on these positions that have been made in the last two centuries being ignored? Perhaps. But it is necessary to realise that the PR does not derive from a philosophical school and does not demand ideological and philosophical consistency from itself, but, if at all, is inspired by the claims of a morality thus inspired).

This sensibility and these attitudes in reality are grounded in the mainstream of the liberal civilisation tradition. It is in this sense that one can understand the fundamental aspects of Radical "culture". "The positive value of conflict" as a permanent element of history, life and of the change from conceptions that see conflict as wounds to be healed and sins to be purified (Catholics); the understanding and, even more, the validating of the multiplicity (and complexity) of social and historical reality.

In other words, the Radicals reject the value - ideally mediated by Franco Rodano - that unifies Catholic and Communist cultures and which has been imposed politically and culturally on almost all Italian political and cultural expressions: that is, to consider a reduction to unity as something positive in itself, the totally organic and consistent composition of every social reality. Politically, such a conception leads, for example, to that vision that has dominated the political scene from the historic compromise to the broad agreements, from the unified recompositions to the convergences, and which is also the fundamental ideology of the party, the Church and the great organisations into which all kinds of impulses are to be absorbed and homogenised.

In short, in opposition to all the political traditions that want, through mediation, to arrive at the worship of a single god, the Radicals profess themselves "polytheists": recognising and praising diversity, they affirm the legitimacy, the validity and the existence of many gods. Here is the origin of the "scandal" of the Radicals approach to politics, so alien to the kind universally practised on the left: the lack of interest in doctrine, in ideological debate as the foundation of action, the lack of aspiration to revamp an entire social system according to a single principle.

Which is what explains the fact that the Radicals have debated, have agreed, and have clashed over political issues alone and never over ideological issues; it clarifies the way in which the Radicals have often managed to realise a "lay unity" among men and groups of different ideological directions and have been able to affirm as a cardinal element of their actions a lay coalition consisting of "diverse" groups, adversaries, but never tenacious enemies, demons to be exorcised. In these terms, the great value of the "laity", a key factor for two centuries in the democratic and liberal revolutionary struggles, has been revived with a new accepted meaning in Italian political culture. And by now it has become the protagonist of a hard confrontation with other values and systems of the traditional and the new left.

Thus emerges the image of a "culture", a way of thinking, ingrained attitudes that have little to do with those that prevailed in Italy from the Fifties on. It is probably this "foreign" quality that for five years made the Radicals hard or even impossible to understand for those who reasoned with the parameters of the dominant political culture - to such a degree that even non-hostile observers did not manage to grasp the basic motives that inspired them, but, as has already been mentioned, have often only taken notice of individual Radical battles, of single gestures, and not of what bound them to each other and explained things: that is of the political project. They noticed the Radicals and their struggles, but they did not notice radicalism.

What a fundamental difference there is between the logic and the motivations that inspire the Radicals and the more common varieties can be seen in examining their attitudes towards "economic problems". A basic difference: whereas almost everyone, at least in words, gives the economic aspects first place on the list of worrisome problems and, truly moving from failure to failure, discusses proposals, models and plans, and boasts of representing the primary interests of the workers, the radicals in fact show very little interest for all that. One has to admit it: except for single moments or episodes, in the practice and political considerations of the PR there has been almost no original contribution, and not even a constant and effective presence in the field of economics.

As is well known, this has been for a long time a motive not only for polemics towards the Radicals, but even more for irony and haughty or paternal commiseration. And in various cases it has provoked a certain inferiority complex in some of them. The party as such has never set up a thorough debate on this issue. The answer it has normally given to its critics has been that, in reality, in a situation like the Italian one, in which the economic crisis is broadly provoked for political reasons, to give battle on the level of the political power system is the most effective way of striking at the economic problems.

If this answer undoubtedly contains much truth, it can hardly be entirely satisfactory - not even if one adds to it the more substantial notation that, in a society like the contemporary Italian one, the economic battle is politically unproductive of qualifying clashes because the interests are organised rigidly and very often corporatively. Therefore a political force that wants to remain outside the negotiatory practices must give rather more attention to the way in which the economy and politics are woven into the power structure and thus into the institutions, rather than to mere economic mechanisms.

Thus, in our opinion, it is necessary to look further in order to understand the truer motive of this "disengagement" from the economic aspect; a motive of which the Radicals themselves - conditioned by the dominant ideologies - are probably little aware in general, and of which they therefore cannot sufficiently judge the importance. So it is necessary to search precisely in the sphere of basic values of which we were speaking.

There are two roads, if it is legitimate to schematise, by which the economic element imposes itself and predominates in Italy's common sense of politics, at least on the level of the theoretical rationalisations (because on the behavioural level things are quite different: because of the influence of various Marxist-Socialist ideologies, especially in their vulgate and on the basis of "common sense", which is in reality cynical, conservative and "shopkeeperish" (should we too say qualunquista?), which sees in all things and actions, even cultural, political or religious, only the thrust of pure and simple material interests. In both cases, even if in different

ways, the attempt is to explain and systematise reality on the basis of a single essential, fundamental and "structural" principle: it is that of reducing reality to unity by means of a principle and decisive interpretation.

The Radical attitude, diffident towards all "monotheisms", must instinctively come into conflict with such conceptions. All the more so as they seriously cripple values that are vital for the Radical sensibility.

Marxism, it is true, posed the problem of liberating man, the proletariat, from being at the mercy of the capitalists. But the Marxist vulgate, that considers the economic aspects "structural" and all other aspects "superstructural", claiming to reduce all social life, in the last analysis, to the economic level, ends by recognising the right to first place for the value system that centres on economic exchange. In other words, on this basis the worker must convince himself that, at least until the coming of Communism, what counts most of all is his condition of subordination, that it is only on that level that he can conduct battles and win truly important victories, and all the rest is supplemental (see the mythologising of the union battles and events as always and everywhere more important than any others).

The Radicals rebel against this idea. Their deep-down reflexes induce them to believe that other aspects can have at least as much basic importance as economic ones. The claims of law, in which sphere there is a radical affirmation of the equality among men, and in those of culture, artistic and religious freedom, are institutionally in conflict with the logic of economic profit, again become primary values equal to those of human dignity and the dignity of each individual human being. The Radicals look to this value and refuse to consider it subordinate or subordinable to others. They affirm the need to give it this place here and now without waiting for any mythical coming of a revolution of practices. And their way of being Socialists originates in the consciousness that capitalism tends precisely, in fact and not theory, to tread on this value in the name of economic profit.

On the basis of these motivations the Radicals, confronting political attitudes that declare favour the economic factor, end by going to extremes in their own "aloofness" from it. This, without doubt, is a limitation as are all other unilateral positions. But it is a precious and fecund limitation in a political climate such as Italy's. In fact it is on the same wave length as that of millions and millions of men and women who do not want to let themselves be reduced to mere economic factors and do not want to be defined only according to their economic and class category. To such as these, the Radicals' capacity to impose clashes on issues of rights and freedoms, violating the priority of economics, have offered and do offer the chance to express themselves and to count for something.

Probably it will be able to offer more now that with the growth of its influence and responsibilities, the PR is about to confront in its particular way the heavy realities of the economy, of production and of exchange. But in its own way, as we have said, which is that of raising the ecological problem. Once again it is the same important demand that emerges: in opposition to the logic of profits, development and production growth, the Radicals are committed to imposing the antagonistic values of the human right to health and a balanced and healthy relationship with nature.

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As a direct consequence of the theoretical basis of the PR (the individual as the subject of law, the acceptance of the many and the diverse without their reduction to a unity, a lay viewpoint), there is also the conception of the party with regard to the structure of political organisation. It was given an institutional form towards the middle of the Sixties when the Radicals adopted a new statutory charter in which they indicated the structural lines of what was intended to be a lay party, non-ideological, capable of offering an alternative to a mass party in the version that then and now was prevalent: bureaucratic, centralised, of Social Democratic and Communist inspiration or else in some way returning to the avant-garde Leninist model.

That statute, which still today is the basis of the PR, contains an implicit quarrel with the way the leftist mass parties have ended up by assimilating their own structures in those of the corporative society, strictly encompassed to reduce all differences and conflicts to an organisational unity or an ideological discipline. To project instead an organisation capable of combining autonomy with the operational agility restricted to a few actions considered to be qualifying, means to reject, not only in society but also in the way the left organises itself, the ecclesiastical and illiberal models that are generally accepted as a tribute to that type of efficiency considered essential to the mass society. But let us see what are the principle characteristics of this alternative idea of a party.

An open and federative organisation is based on a few key points: the regional parties are autonomous and sovereign bodies who delegate temporarily only a limited part of their prerogatives for political initiatives to the national party; the basic association formulas bear the marks of maximum liberty so that the membership in the party can be collective or individual, by functional or territorial groups, and in all cases limited to specific periods and aims; the federative national congresses deliberate a few points considered binding on all registered members when they are approved by a qualified majority of three quarters of those present; those elected to representative assemblies (from the municipalities to the Parliament) are not bound to the party or its executives; the congress only elects people to offices regarding a specific policy for the period of one year: the secretary who must actuate the mandate given by the congress; the treasurer who is responsible for administering the finances in a

rigorously public way; as well as a federative council that represents the plurality of the elements constituting the political organisation, an emanation, in part direct, in part indirect, of the elements themselves.

Behind this structure one glimpses a few conceptual lines of force that try to transform a lay, pluralistic and libertarian vision of society and the party into the form of an organisation. The need of assuring the contemporaneous presence in an institution of autonomous and associated grass roots elements who have a common commitment to a few battles, requires the elimination of all ideological and systematic and permanent motives for adhering to the party. The value of common political action even while maintaining the ideal diversity of origins and the individual visions of the world is not to be found in the party-cum-church, but in the private sector, in the reciprocal autonomy of the political and cultural factors.

To make the most of autonomous experiences and the consequent rejection of all party discipline imposed from above as something antithetical to the centralising processes typical of modern society has also filtered into the ideology and practice of left. The regaining of individual freedom in elected assemblies - the independence of the member of Parliament - was certainly a feature of the liberal state, but it assumes a new meaning in the fight against the party-power system during the current displacement of power which is moving in the direction of an "elitist" domination of the parties.

The refusal to delegate authority totally and permanently to the party and its bureaucracy is part of a vision that tends to annul the professionalism of politics as a separate activity and to see the party only as a lay instrument able to give limited and specific answers, not global ones, to all aspects of the political battle. In short it is not only a vision antithetical to that of the party-cum-institution which reproduces in itself all the bureaucratic traits of the society it wants to fight against, but it is also that of the avante-garde that is given the task of accomplishing a political and historical mission.

But if these are the theoretical elements of that political organisation that the Radicals have adopted for themselves, one must ask oneself in what ways they are more generally relevant and what are their contradictions. In fact, that statutory charter approved in 1967 has only partially been transformed into a mature political corps, above all because the organisational proposal it contains represented then and represents now a political proposal for the entire left - or, better, for that part of it that takes Socialist and libertarian values for its own - more than a formula suitable to a party of slender dimensions. A very tiny group the Radicals are certainly not and have never been, but the conditions of an extreme minority in which it has worked has not allowed it to become fully that party of federated autonomous groups and movements, nor, as it could have been and still could become today, a renewed, broad and modern Socialist force.

Insofar as it is a theoretical proposal made to the libertarian left, the Radical idea thus conserves its power as an alternative capable, perhaps, of giving form and a political outlet to those very process of the search for social identity that are going on and which is being discussed as one of the phenomena in the crisis of the relationship between society and the parties.

It seems that today we are only at the beginning of a process of the liberation of political energies that are moving in this direction, and the results of the referendum are one of its first consistent signs. The full success of a project for political organisation such as the Radicals' can thus take place only at the moment that there arise in society aggregating factors capable of giving their substance to the true, great Radical or Socialist-libertarian organisation; and at the same time in the degree to which they put into action subjective intentions among the political forces that fully accept the federative, autonomistic and libertarian hypothesis contained in the PR's statute as the valid one and find new, adequate and alternative solutions to the old models of the new and the traditional left. That too, shortly, will be a measure of the effective capacity of the PSI to pass from ideological debate to political and politico-organisational experiments.

That much being said, there are yet not a few difficulties and contradictions that the Radical Party is going through today in its very nature, and overcoming them doesn't present itself as easy. There is a debate going on about the regionalisation of the party - that is to say, the way in which it is possible to transform the regional structures that have been theoretically foreseen into independent, operating realities.

In reality, one cannot ignore the fact that up until now the PR has lived prevalently on the impulse coming from the centre, and that therefore the initiatives and the mechanisms of independent regional intervention have been sacrificed to it. But the problem is not so much in the conflict between the centre and the periphery as in the fact that the attack on power and the battles for liberty, that the Radicals have conducted until now, have all referred to the elements of the national centre and so these have been the terrain on which the functioning of the Radical Party's organisation has grown.

Passing from a centre that sends impulses to the periphery, to a multiplicity of impulses coming from different areas - not only territorial ones but above all institutional and social ones - also means knowing to identify the multiplicity and complexity of the power structures and, with respect to them, increase the battles, the activists and the relative groups of leaders able to lead them as well as the tools of battle suitable to the people who live daily on the scene of these battles.

The contradiction between, on the one hand, the centralisation inherent in political life and struggle today, beginning with the instruments it is indispensable to use if one is going to get effective results also in widening the struggle, and, on the other hand, the Radicals' anti-centralist aspirations is also the true key to understanding of the relation ship between the PR and its leader Marco Pannella. Many have brought forth objections to the pre-eminent role - with its charismatic tones - the old leader exerts on the party and its meaning. The objection is not without some foundation, but it fails to take into consideration the specific historical and political context in which the Radical minority acts.

There are historical and subjective reasons of totally absorbing continuity of commitment, of political intelligence of the situation and of personal gifts capable of arousing men and situations which might be enough to explain in themselves the relationship of an individual and a group whenever this group is not very large and finds itself working in isolation, in a climate of hostility and difficulties like the one in which the Radicals have been operating for fifteen years. But aside from all this, which is part of the normal political dialectics, one must look elsewhere to understand the question better: that would be to the relation between politics and the mass media.

Today there is no real democratic process without information. And a political force that rejects the models of social establishment and being bound to an organisation has "communication" as the central problem of its actions and its very possibilities of survival. The spreading of the struggle itself depends on points of reference and messages the arrive directly from the centre to the individual citizens: television with its intrinsically authoritarian and centralising connotations of an instrument that sends one-way messages is also - whether one accepts it or not - the essential channel for being able to communicate values adverse to those of the centre. Politically speaking, today the following paradox has taken shape: the inextricable tie between the slavery that the communication media impose in order to propagate specific values which are also antagonistic to the instrument and the very use of it.

So then the kind of role Pannella plays in the PR and in the country also originates in this paradox. It was not possible during these years to fight for a process of laicization by spreading the struggle in society and inciting the liberation of energies in many parts of the country - thus to aim at exercising a decisive role in political life - without having recourse to the centralised message of television. And this medium, because of its particular character and the image it creates, has need of personalities and personages who personify, unify and symbolise a specific political image and make it immediately comprehensible. And this is the force that the Radical message has had, and which is by now recognisable well beyond the politicised circles, by means of Pannella who certainly possesses substantially all the requisites for representing in his person the heritage of values, struggles and achievements gained by the PR in recent political times.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

* Qualunquisti - a much-used term in Italian political parlance referring to an attitude of mistrust towards political parties and the party system in general.

1) Rinascita - A prominent Communist periodical

2) The Reale Law - A liberty-restricting public order law promulgated with the excuse of fighting terrorism.

3) A Communist strategy of collaboration with the DC.

4) PCI, PSI, and PSIUP are respectively the Communist, Socialist and Socialist Proletarian Unity parties.

5) Fanfani-sim - referring to the DC leader Amintore Fanfani (1908 - ), an economic historian who has held many posts from party secretary to prime minister.

6) Dorotean practice - refers to the Dorotean faction of the DC, so called because its first meeting took place in Rome in the convent of St. Dorotea. Its main leaders were Rumor, Bisaglia and Piccoli.