ABSTRACT: Ernesto Rossi [2] is the chief figure in the history of the radical party, ever since it was founded: but for the generation - or rather, the group - which in the early sixties assumed the responsibility of keeping alive and relaunching the political formation doomed to be abandoned by most of its leading class, Ernesto Rossi is a teacher and an irreplaceable example of that inflexibility, of that coherence between politics and morality, between political project and existential choices, which that group assumed as the necessary premise to relaunch a truly reformative political project. The "new" party and Marco Pannella [3] above all, constantly refer to the teaching of this extraordinary politician.

The "Politecnico" club and the magazine "Critica Liberale" held a meeting in Milan on 18-20 May 1984 on Ernesto Rossi. The meeting, endorsed by the President of the Republic and sponsored by the municipal authorities of Milan, was held thanks in particular to the commitment of Franco Corleone and Enzo Marzo. Among the speakers: Alessandro Galante Garrone [4], Giorgio Fuà, Angiolo Bandinelli, Giuseppe Armani, Enzo Forcella, Altiero Spinelli [5]. Important contributions were provided by: Paolo Sylos Labini, Gianfranco Spadaccia, Gianfranco Viesti, Enzo Tagliacozzo, Giuseppe Armani, Mario Boneschi, Ada Rossi and others.

In his report, Angiolo Bandinelli first of all rejects the widespread but inaccurate and limited image of Ernesto Rossi as an outstanding journalist and polemicist, incapable, however - in his ideological extremism and especially in his exasperated anticlericalism - of a true and modern political synthesis. According to Bandinelli, Ernesto Rossi on the contrary was a true politician, who succeeded in engaging in a difficult but fundamental struggle to attempt to reverse or at least modify the course of Italian history. According to Rossi, the latter was increasingly jeopardized, in terms of continuity with the structures inherited from fascism, by the pressure of the moderate clerical and corporative moderate forces but also by the mistakes committed by the left-wing (socialist and communist) opposition and by the weakness of the lay and liberal forces. The author then analyses Rossi's anticlericalism, outlining the reasons for his controversy against the ideal and moral crisis affecting culture and politics

in the thirties, when, in the encounter between the two ideologies - fascism and Catholicism - which both strongly opposed the liberal civilization and culture, the structures of the "modern" time and of Italian society were born and consolidated themselves, and which not even the war and the Resistance managed to change.

Unfortunately, the leading classes of the post-war period (but even the oppositions) inherited from fascism the moderate and submissive conception of the relation between State and Church, brought about by the fascist Concordat. Ernesto Rossi remained isolated in his inflexible opposition to the Concordat, and as a consequence he is now forgotten, and has been eliminated from historical reconstructions and analyses, especially from the more or less Marxist "left-wing" ones: Rossi's name is not even mentioned in the "History of Italy" published by Einaudi and directed by Alberto Asor Rosa, and a scholar of the importance of Eugenio Garin does not list him among the intellectuals and teachers who created modern Italy through their work.

Bandinelli's essay outlines some of Rossi's most famous controversies against protectionism, neo-corporatism, the DC's populism, but also against Togliatti's [6] policy, which aimed to that consociate administration of power which is the cause of the re-emerging institutional corruption. Ultimately, Bandinelli points out, Ernesto Rossi - while strongly influenced by the positivist culture - had a clear-cut and rare awareness of the liberal values and of their relation with the institutions.

(Note: the following text is contained in the book published by Comunità, and is the exact copy of the speech delivered at the meeting in Milan. A slightly different version was published in issue No. 2 of "La Prova", supplement to "Radical News" of 23 January 1985).

(ERNESTO ROSSI, UNA UTOPIA CONCRETA, edited by Piero Ignazi, Comunità, Milan 1991).

The title of this report - "Ernesto Rossi: opposition meant as heresy" - is no hagiographic formula; it reflects the contents and enunciates what it means to illustrate. I believe that the battles, the journalistic controversies, the incessant initiatives promoted after the war by Ernesto Rossi until the seventies and his death, outline a coherent, uninterrupted, entirely political course, characterized by a rigid opposition to the fundamental guidelines of the country's reconstruction (and not just the material reconstruction) as it was developed by leading classes that aimed at a precise, though not immediately apparent, project. A political opposition in terms of contents and methods, based on antagonist and alternative reasons and values, and which was defeated on the political field following an all-out political struggle, the traces, sediments and deep consequences of which are still visible today.

Thus, we want to immediately clear the field from a fundamental misunderstanding. The Ernesto Rossi who is often depicted has a different aspect, which we reject. Along with the politician engaged in a struggle for the alternative, there is also the intransigent moralist who aims to the affirmation of a sort of ethic otherness, incapable of compromises, and therefore unaffected by the dialogic richness of political action. But even this otherness can be interpreted in a more attentive and accurate way, reconsidering the definition Rossi often gave of himself, and which was often referred to him in a pejorative sense: the fact that he was, ultimately, an unyielding "melancholy fool". Today we can give a different interpretation, since - it is no chance - melancholy is once again viewed as the existential condition of those persons who see around them the affirmation of an increasing and widespread otherness and, at the same time, feel unyielding with respect to this diversity. This melancholy is the herald of

isolation and defeat; but the bitter catastrophe which Rossi had to give in to in the end in now way affects the strictly political sense, rich in strategic value, of his opposition.

Our interpretation of Rossi should therefore reject and dispel the picture which is given of him even today. Clearly, it is an appreciative picture: Rossi is described as the "rebellious democrat", endowed with an "almost childish freshness" and an "inflexible conscience", the polemicist with the spirit of the champion of idealism, who does not think of the consequences of his actions (1). Similar quotes are all too abundant these days, and create a grandiose moral portrait. But altogether, they sound misleading and limited. We cannot reduce Rossi to the role of the spokesman of noble but unproductive values, doomed 'per se' to a sterile failure. Unfortunately, it is a picture which emerged already in those cultural and political circles with which he collaborated for a long time in conditions of great creativity (think of "Il Mondo [7]") out of doubtless affinities and dialogue, but where they used to say of him: "Ernesto is such a good fellow, but he isn't an expert in politics". The opposer, the politicia

n, disappear in this picture; there remains the witness, the noble spirit, the brave champion of idealism. But the years elapsed and the events we have witnessed enable us to formulate a more accurate and deeper judgement. The climate is suitable because many current opinions relative to those moments of our history, are starting to show signs of wear, leaving space to other, even opposite interpretations. Ideologies are collapsing, major and triumphant certainties are showing their fragile basis; the institutions and the political forces are in a deep crisis. The history of the post-war period is being re-examined, and calls for a more complex interpretation. It has recently been said that our days mark the end of the cycle of ideologies of the thirties, leaving us - so it seems - at the dawn of conscience and political action. Today, therefore, unlike yesterday, it is possible to understand how Ernesto Rossi's work expressed a possible line of ethic and political development which has been opposed and defe

ated by forces that were determined to obtain this. It is these forces, which can easily be identified, that - united and victorious - kept silence and then even covered the name of Ernesto Rossi, who has literally been erased from the foundations of the historical memory of the country.

In his essay - contained in the "history of Italy" - on Italian contemporary culture, Alberto Asor Rosa does not once mention (and I would really like to be mistaken) Ernesto Rossi (2). Nor did I notice any specific investigation on Rossi in the detailed researches with which Eugenio Garin has carried out an in-depth analysis on the formation of the fundamental ethic, political and cultural bases of Italian society since the crisis of the end of the century, through the tragedy first of World War I and then during and after fascism; neither in Garin's researches nor in those of his school, which cover an extremely wide period. Rossi seems to have disappeared, therefore, from the historical memory of the Left, and in particular from the Marxist or Marxian Left. But he has also disappeared from that which we will call the liberal, lay-liberal or, generically, democratic culture. In the preface to Manlio Del Bosco's essay on the Radical Party and "Il Mondo", Rosario Romeo, obviously referring to Rossi, says tha

t in order to carry out its function as an outstanding liberal magazine, Pannunzio's [8] weekly was "forced to pay" a relevant price in terms of space offered (...) to elements of generic radicalism and to forms of a priori anticlericalism, which have always been very distant from the inspiration of its founding group (...)" (3). This is not only a historiographic underestimation of Rossi: this is a precise choice in ideal terms. Partly, no doubt, the judgement is accurate; it is true that one cannot identify Rossi with Pannunzio and with the group of "Il Mondo". However, it is also true that without Rossi it would be hard to explain a consistent part of the importance of "Il Mondo" and of its journalistic and political campaigns. Rossi and Pannunzio complete each other in a considerable way, more than with others of the common group. And perhaps today it is easy to understand certain forms of ostracism against Rossi and his intransigence by comparing it to parallel forms of ostracism against Pannunzio. Pann

unzio is too often commemorated as the outstanding bourgeois, with an extraordinary intelligence but doomed to fail out of a lack of correspondence with his time. In Einaudi's history, the editor of "Il Mondo" is considered less important - judging on the role carried out in his time and on society - than Arrigo Benedetti [9], who supposedly oriented the lay, bourgeois and "radical" journalism toward more advanced left-wing solutions compared to the strictly, purely liberal vision Pannunzio remained attached to (4). Other quotes could help understand the forgetfulness surrounding Ernesto Rossi in the historical and political memory, in particular in the Left. It is here, in these circles, that the solid historiographic building is constructed, which calls for and justifies the ostracism Rossi was condemned to. For decades, until very recently, the debate in the Left concentrated on a well-defined subject, which everything else was subordinated to. The thesis of the "centrality" of the historical-cultural lin

e based on the names of De Sanctis, Gramsci [10] and Togliatti as the line that confirms and "overcomes" the line that privileges De Sanctis and Croce [11] is developed and consolidated in those years; of the line of the democratic-Marxist historicism, i.e. on that of the liberal historicism. This debate already appears incredibly remote for us and for our interests, consumed and void of the events of the last years. The political culture views those discussions with annoyance and haughtiness. Rather, it looks at the past with an attitude of vaunting generosity; it accepts and assimilates everything, indiscriminately lowering every critical threshold. For example, it refuses to come to terms with a subject which is, on the contrary, implicit in the whole of that debate, an unexploded bomb which threatens to shatter all that happens at the higher levels. The aspect it does not highlight, in the history of half a century, is the importance, for good or bad, of the third line, the third possible interpretative

model of the post-unity course, the line whose central axis runs (or should run) between De Sanctis and Giovanni Gentile [12]. The entire re-interpretation of fascism is still surrounded by excessive caution, not without devastating consequences. The story embodied by Ernesto Rossi is a further, painful evidence of this. Fundamentally, the interpretation of fascism, and therefore of the history after fascism - that of antifascism - refers once again either to the liberal interpretation, according to which fascism is simply a parenthesis in the history of contemporary Italy, or to the interpretation given by the Marxist historicism, which views the fascist experience as a degeneration of the bourgeois residue, a consequence or a result of the inadequate development of Italian capitalism.

The Marxist interpretation of fascism (which we are interested in for the moment) is based on Togliatti's definition of fascism as a "mass, reactionary regime"; in the light of the more recent historiography, this interpretation reveals many limits, since it does not sufficiently stress the operation of institutional and social reconstruction carried out by fascism, which placed at its centre not the bourgeoisie or "capitalism", but the emerging masses, the State bourgeoisie which it created and developed, and especially the intellectual bourgeoisie which in those years acquired a pattern of roles which was no longer purely superstructural. This new bourgeoisie allies with fascism almost completely, giving birth, around 1930, to the construction of a set of values which were solid in their own way, and even to an original Europeanization, albeit in forms that were opposite to those that were common beyond the Alps. This process reveals the intertwining of a complex range of factors which the Marxist culture,

like the liberal one, has insisted on minimizing or drastically ignoring for decades.

On this point - the interpretation of fascism - Rossi, the Rossi of the controversies on "Il Mondo", insists on advancing a stubborn reservation, and on this he bases his controversy as a heretic opposer. The dimension of his opposition makes this definition appropriate, though it must be said that a heretic never defines himself that way: it is the others who call him that way; if anything, the heretic believes he is the bearer of a rigorous and deep truth, deeper perhaps than that of his opponents, who brand him and expel him from the community of believers, erasing even his name and memory. And this is what happened to the work of Ernesto Rossi, and in particular to his anticlericalism.

Rossi's anticlerical controversy (setting aside for a moment the cultural component of positivist origin), contains historical elements which we can better recognize today as extremely pertinent, and from which we must draw the necessary consequences. Modern clericalism was clearly born of the widespread and far-reaching Catholic presence in the country; however, it becomes institutional and state with the fascist Concordat of 1929: a historical operation of inestimable importance, as even the countries other than Italy immediately sense. This operation is the starting point for the consolidation of the Catholic expansion, which becomes very strong in the following decade, based as it is on a culture which dialogues or claims to dialogue, without feelings of inferiority, with the "great" lay culture, and thus ultimately influences it considerably thanks to an autonomous and aggressive leading and political class, which builds its power on a confrontation with the fascist leading class which was clearly centr

ed on the issues of power and hegemony.

Both cultures claim to represent all-embracing, corporative, populist, national and conservative values, dominated by the category of "politics", consciously opposed to the liberal, lay and libertarian values. In 1928, Giovanni Gentile proposed to dissolve the fascist party, which he considered no longer necessary in the country's new reality. In a certain sense, the philosopher was right: for that vitally important decade, one can no longer speak of a fascist culture, but of a culture which was national, fascist and Catholic at the same time. In the name of the national values, the neo-scholasticism of Father Gemelli dialogues with actualism. But this multiform culture can also, in its own way and legitimately, claim to be the heir of liberalism, and emblematically embellish itself with the name of De Sanctis as an ancestor. The monument of such culture is the Italian Encyclopedia, where we can find all or almost all of the Italian intellectual class - physically, in its prestigious or emerging names - unit

ed in an effort to provide the nation with adequate means to clarify the achieved and proclaimed identity (5). This is the Italy that confronts the war of Africa united, albeit for the last time. On the occasion of this war, which is the climax of Mussolini's parenthesis before that change of front with respect to Europe and to democracies which will represent the fuse of World War II, most of the bourgeois-liberal leading class and the blessing Pope, in his hope to create a European block of order, support the government and the State; but so do the working masses of the industrial cities of Northern Italy, which have been conquered by the culture of consent. Only the Spanish civil war will spark the first, dramatic doubts.

Ernesto Rossi's anticlericalism is based on this historical atmosphere, which the war, the Resistance and antifascism have left intact in its cultural and political roots. In the years of the reconstruction, of the reappearance and consolidation of the parties, Rossi perceives around him the compact, persistent presence of a cultural and political atmosphere which has not changed compared to the thirties on the subject of the role of the Church. Everyone has adapted to it: everyone, including the parties of the Left, even the communist party. They have not only accepted the Concordat, but also absorbed a culture. The entire left has introjected the values of the Concordat assimilated by the great cultural storm of national-fascism in the thirties. Rossi's anti-Concordat and anti-Pope anticlericalism is not, therefore, the relic of a past too remote to come back; it is not an obsolete eccentricity. It is a historical intelligence which looks past immediate and apparent facts. The validity of its anticlericali

sm is buttressed by the events that occur in the period separating our time and his: divorce and abortion on the one hand, the Vatican Council and the revival of a Church of believers which affirms the right to conscientious objection on the other; lastly, the great radical referendums which mark not the response of the lay laissez-faire attitude of the old bourgeois world (which had built its public acquiescence to clericalism precisely on the "private" sphere of laicism), but rather the overturning of the old block, which had lasted over forty years.

We think these are extraordinary events. Today, a posteriori, it is easy to pinpoint elements in the events that occurred enabling to interpret them in a determinist way. The structuralist and sociological interpretation of the past has resources such as these. In a number of recent commemorations, the victory of 1974 appeared like a predictable and inevitable event, the geometric consequence of the linear progress of converging routes. This is not the only or the first "apologetic" interpretation of certain historicisms. The interpretation of Marxian origin the postwar events has tried to do away with the hypothesis of a liberal, lay (lay, civil rights-oriented) development of the country. It has instead supported the opposite thesis, which stressed the need and the imperativeness of the process outlined in the aforementioned De Sanctis-Gramsci-Togliatti line. Only this line supposedly had the capacity to embrace all the elements, facts, impulses, hypotheses, tensions and indications of freedom which were v

ariously present in the country. The interpretation of the events is extremely simplified: on the one hand there is the bourgeoisie, the capital, the hated middle classes which were instrumental in other people's schemes, etc.; on the other, there are the progressivist forces, the class-conscious forces, with the parties that interpret their needs and express their policy. At the centre there is the communist party. Everything is judged according to this hegemonic and exclusive axis of interpretation. The DC itself is good or bad according to whether it underlines its popular soul or obeys the schemes of a leading class which is subordinated to the capital of Costa or of the other "lords". However, too many things are forgotten this way, starting from the interpretation of Rossi's work and even of "Il Mondo". The experience of Pannunzio's magazine is reduced to an extreme, elegant fruit of a bourgeoisie that thinks it can achieve a third reformative force according to an enlightened program, precisely at a m

oment in which the country, its real progressivist forces, organize along new, major mass parties; a deception, therefore, doomed to fail out of a patent anti-historicity. In the seventies, this interpretation still circulated without too many resistances. However, we forget that as of 1962, there has also been, in an uninterrupted continuity with the ideal party which "Il Mondo" referred to, and with Rossi himself, a lively and vital reformist party; so much, in fact, that it succeeded in coagulating, for the referendum of 1974, a pro-alternative majority with respect to the "regime" of the block of clerical power which formed itself after the Concordat of 1929. Therefore, neither Rossi's anticlerical line nor Pannunzio's reformative one were backward.

Unlike their line, the interpretative line we referred to above, that of the De Sanctis-Gramsci-Togliatti axis, expressed no alternative capacity. It did not want to. The reference to the concept of "class", which it made constantly, covered an ephemeral project, as we are now entitled to say in the light of the failure of all its projects. The culture which was called in those years "class" culture, was an ideological building erected by an "emerging" intellectual bourgeoisie that aimed at occupying spaces of power offered by the social transformations, but with origins that were parallel to those proper of fascism. We say this without acrimony. In fact, it continued a cultural and ideological operation which, in terms of tone and means, was started in our country precisely in the thirties. Someone has already set the great adventure of the ideologies of commitment that flourished in Europe in the thirties in a period of time which ends with our days. Those where the years marked by the birth of many of the

models of the left-wing ideology which are today agonizing and in decay. Here we find the "overcoming" of the liberal culture, for example, and the quest for the "corporative" and "organicist" "third way" as opposed to the hated fragmentariness of the modern world as an industrial model. This culture has a strong inclination for dialogue with the culture of Catholic origin, which also seeks its identity and new paths to the detriment of the hated enlightened capitalism; but not in the quest and in the development of liberal, democratic values. The object of the controversy remains power; the model is the one of the Concordat, with the quest for a hypothetical third solution between capitalism and communism; therefore corporatism and "participation", State welfare, refusal of dialogue as confrontation, organic relation between intellectuals and society (a subject which Bobbio [13] called the problem of "immature societies"). And, also, primacy of "politics", "Italian case", etc. After the war, until very rec

ently, the debate was fundamentally this: especially through Gramsci's thought, which channeled sparks of revolt and hopes of revolution, laborism and proletarian dictatorship on the peaceful path of the problem of hegemony. There was a return or a consolidation of bases laid down in the thirties. Once again, the Italian leading class, now antifascist, continued a process whose origins are remote; since when, as Valerio Castronovo pointed out, as far back as in the beginning of the century it "achieved the passage from a fundamentally agricultural economy to a capitalist productive structure, basing itself on a traditional vision of social relations, or on the most straightforward reason of State..." (6).

"The first major political-cultural operation of the postwar period" - warns the great "history" published by Einaudi - "consisted (...) in obtaining the adhesion or consent vis-à-vis communism, from this vast sector of the antifascist intellectual class". The operation was judged not as consequent to the premises which, nonetheless, did not lack ("...the Marxism of the Italian communists was...well-disposed by its tradition, which considered its source precisely philosophical idealism...") (7), but as an operation with a strong voluntaristic tension and with a strong political force both in the priority of confronting the crisis of the years of cold war and in the interest of conquering an intellectuality which, in the dislocation of the social structures which were already strongly tertiarized, had become necessary to the management of society. Hence the birth of the bureaucratic structures of the parties, with their complex and organic connection with the media, culture and show business, the publishing t

rade, etc. The De Sanctis-Gramsci-Togliatti line (with the variance of Croce) was the ideological banner of an operation which was neither casual nor superstructural in terms of depth and specificity. One can trace the first demonstration of this in the appeal which Togliatti addressed the fascist youth at the time of the war of Africa for a convergence in the communist area of the revolutionary hopes which had been betrayed by fascism. It is the left-wing side of the mythology of the "pure" revolutionaries, typical of the right-wing movements of the time.

It is a political and cultural line which had great ambitions: dismissing every liberal, liberal-democratic, libertarian and radical prospect. Precisely like fascism. This is why we cannot agree on Ragionieri's negative judgement when he speaks of that episode as an "expedient", as a "serious symptom of lack of confidence" (8). It was neither tactics nor lack of confidence; it was a deeply significant choice, which had effects almost until our days. At the moment of the most intense political initiative of the postwar period, Togliatti seems to be even more deeply rooted in the themes and problems of the thirties. What he achieves is a process of historical importance, on which he has long meditated and on which he has no doubts. In acknowledging it, understanding the reasons and the roots, we can say today that apart from the democratic corrections represented by the pluralism of the parties ensued from the Resistance, these were the parameters, the deep persistences with which Ernesto Rossi was forced to c

onfront himself, opposing to it all the ideal and political force he had.

Why him? Why not others? Because of an extraordinary, superior intellectual capacity? Clearly, a book such as "I padroni del vapore" (9), despite the fact that it is unequal and forced, whereas more pondered, meditated and documented studies make more subtle distinctions, remains a unique work in terms of enlightening force in the postwar culture. But the point is that Rossi is the heir of that political cultural which immediately sensed, in the scenario of antifascism, the need to challenge Mussolini and fascism on an ethic level even more than in terms of politics and power, carrying out an action capable of interrupting the solidarity and the class-determined inertia. "Non mollare" is not a slogan; its necessary reasons are underlined in that "Elogio della galera" which is a treasure of intense moral resistance, determined to oppose fascism's apparently triumphant values with boldness, with an action which represented a visible alternative (10). His controversies and battles in the forties and fifties are

still imbibed with this atmosphere, they represent the last effort for a verification of that ethic and political opposition, the dramatic and isolated attempt to carry it out on the field of an effective political confrontation and to the much-hoped for victory.

Rossi opposed the proposals advanced by the more or less Marxist left, consisting in an increasing and loud denunciation of capitalism as such with a problem such as that of succeeding in concretely breaking, in everyday life, the coagulation of corporative interests which, shattered by the war and by the collapse of the dictatorship as well as by the subsequent, forced inclusion in the circuit of the world market and by fear, were ready to re-organize themselves in that they were constitutional to a system which was not merely super-structural, the system created by fascism. In "Aria fritta" there's a chapter, already published on "Il Mondo" in 1955, where Rossi lists the mistakes in economic and union politics committed in those years by Togliatti and by his party, which not only actively supported all the corporative requests of the ministerial bureaucracies, but had always associated to the "great barons": in the tax policy in defence of "national labour", in opposing the CECA and every other form of lib

eralization of trade, in upholding the "most extreme economic nationalism" to the advantage of the protected and highly unionized workers of the large industry but to the detriment of the less protected as well as of the majority of consumers. Also, Rossi writes that the communists offered themselves as "helpful" allies of the "large monopolistic industries" in pressing the governments for the "socialization of the losses, the bans on imports, the boosting of exports, public procurements at increased prices, the allotment of raw material at lower prices, privileged credits, annulment of fines and taxes..." (11) and so on.

Liberist controversies? At the time, and even now, Rossi is accused of an excessive liberalism, of an obsolete theorization. Clearly, the Rossi who already in prison had lost his hope in the golden laws of the market, did not like Keynes for this reason. He did not understand him; he said his ideas, like those of Croce, escaped his hands "like eels". But he was right when he remarked that the State-oriented economy was, in Italy, an economy at the mercy of great corrupted bureaucrats, of swindlers and pirates of all sorts. That which he could not see and understand - and which made him anti-historic - was that such structure of the decisional and administrative process of the economy was not a degeneration to blame on the fascist "mismanagement" (even this phenomenon, the spread of corruption, is rooted in the thirties, and is already understood at the time in its scandalmongering aspects), but represented the specific way in which a deep transformation of the structural pattern of society and the State expr

essed itself, in the gradual passage of power from the Roman centre, the "political" centre, to the various corporative/administrative centres that developed in years in which fascism achieved the welfare state as an Italian and fascist response to the crisis of the thirties, which the U.S. and Russia gave the other alternative and competitive answers. Inside this pattern, there arose and thrived the first nucleus of that "State bourgeoisie" which was rediscovered at the end of the sixties, with its necessary corruption, in the Christian Democratic system of power.

Facts showed that the old liberalist was right. But there's more. In the fifties, no doubt, the party that administered the neo-corporatism was the Christian democratic party. On examining the Federconsorzi scandal, precisely Ragionieri remarks that the Federconsorzi was boosted at the time by the DC until it became "one of the most powerful lobbies of Italy in the '50s". The Federconsorzi's task was administering the ERP aid which was - Ragionieri says - the system through which "....the union between the Catholic party and the large national industry was operatively achieved...continuing the policy based on public support to the private industry started by fascism..." (12). Continuity. We must always speak of continuity when recalling the conquest of the corporative centres of power on the part of the catholic party, the party of De Gasperi [14] but especially the party of Fanfani [15]. According to Ragionieri, "precisely on this ground and in this period we can measure the true defeat suffered by the inno

vative forces in the period immediately after the war: the fact of having almost completely neglected...the problem of the institutions..."(13). "In this way", the historian continues, "the division existing superficially between the catholic party and the consistent capitalist interests, represented only partly by the Confindustria, which, under the leadership of Angelo Costa, kept to rigid class-discriminating positions in social conflicts and, in political terms, openly supported the liberal party, was gradually overcome in facts, through a series of direct contacts between the single large corporations and the State apparatus" (14). It is possible, or rather certain, that the Confindustria [16] wavered in its political choices. The support given to Malagodi [17] proves it. But the DC was the ideal candidate, historically speaking, to occupy the State. This corporative occupation was not the result - we repeat it - of a degeneration. The Christian democratic populism is the ideological aspect of a dense a

nd deep history which still affects us with its problems. It is a fact that De Gasperi's moderateness did not resist the defeat of 1953, and the development process of corporatism immediately resumes according to a well-known pattern, which the pause represented by the war and the postwar period gives only an illusion of recovery, on the one hand of populism and on the other (in the lay world) of imitators of the pre-fascist liberal world, who in vain tried to give effective force to the third-force illusions. We believe this tardy liberalism, slave to its rituals, has a great responsibility in isolating Ernesto Rossi when he shouted in their faces his own lucid forecasts, his far-seeing pessimism. The decisive turnabout toward the assumption on the part of the DC of the management of the State occurs at the Congress of Naples in 1954, when the faction of democratic Initiative assumes power. This group aims to conquer the party in order to make it into the hegemony of society and the State through the admini

stration of development, with the defeat of De Gasperi's (and Einaudi's) Malthusianism and of the Confindustria itself, tardily defending the private industry. Fanfani gives the authorization for the metal works of Sinigaglia and for the aggressive energetic and oil policy of the ENI [18] headed by Mattei [19] and Cefis [20]. The centre-left is the victory, through the public industry and the ENI, of the State bourgeoisie and of its mediation between productive structures and state apparatus. The transformation is organized by the DC: not the DC of the Tridentine Catholicism, or of the petty liberties of Don Sturzo [21]; this is new DC, outlined by the professors who have learnt the mechanisms of left-wing "dialectics" from the fascist power, allies of the State bourgeois; productivists, modern, efficient, but ignorant of the fundamental rules of liberalism. The responsibility of the turnabout belongs not only to the catholics and to the managers, however. The entire political culture of those years is centr

ipetal, all the political forces - including the PCI - aim to a compromise, to an agreement with the power achieved closest possible to the centre, where the State industry and its lords of the war thrive. In Parliament, a unanimous vote authorizes an increases in funds; outside, the tones become softer and integrate each other, and in practice there is no difference between them. The subject, orchestrated unanimously, is the occupation of power through its division. There is no alternative proposal, not even in terms of controls. The plan according to which the DC and the satellite allies are entitled to the government, the PCI to the co-management of the procedures plus consistent sectors of the local government and the monopoly of the parallel sector of the cooperativist capitalism, necessary to maintain the huge political machine, the "new" mass party, the collective "intellectual", matures and is perfected. The division of powers which is achieved is entirely inside the political system which becomes a

regime.

Few are excluded; almost no one correctly interprets the process which is going on beneath the cover obtained with the silence and the corruption of the media. Ernesto Rossi expresses perplexities when there are talks of a Montecatini-Edison merge (it is 1966). To those who state (including Scalfari) that the operation, albeit hazardous, went in the direction of history, he asked to explain to him why all data pointed to the fact that managerial giantism did not appear convenient, was clearly neither correct nor transparent in its procedures, while the healthiest results were provided by the small and medium industry. No one, at the time, accepted those doubts, but the country paid a high price for the operation. Who could deny today that that merge was achieved having calculated with superficiality the data at stake, the managerial parameters? In order to explain what was going on in this period, it is useful to read a passage from the "white paper" which the Radical party published in 1967. "The left risks

finding itself implicated in the defence of a form of State capitalism with very strong corporativist characteristics which, in practice, is an essential ring of the technocratic, capitalist, tendentially authoritarian construction. This State capitalism, the Corporations it embodies, are always the protagonists of scandals and corruption: from a potential and objective victim...the left risks appearing like the advocate of forms of management of the State which, here in Italy today, are instruments of the regime". (15).

There is, obviously, a complete continuity between this page and Rossi's campaigns. And there is more than syntony on an issue which is barely mentioned in the above text. Rossi was inflexible in denouncing the ill-doings of the OVRA, the fascist political police. The controversy at the time appeared to be secondary, the fruit of a stubborn moralism. It was more than that. In the Ovra, Rossi attacked the core of the fascist regime, but he also pinpointed a necessary structure of the power which the involutional drive would have soon after activated. Few years elapsed and precisely around the ENI we will find the SIFAR [22] and the secret services in a plot which sheds sinister light on the spheres of the new power, of the new (or old?) State bourgeoisies.

In 1964, the centre-left started its involution caused by the drive and counter-drive triggered by an "announced coup", the organizers of which are believed to be the Sifar, the president of the Republic, Segni, the ENI with Cefis, Moro [23] himself...

Through those secret services, the ENI managed to carry out an awkward attempt to corrupt sectors of the Republican party that did not want to accept the equilibriums of the upcoming and necessary centre-left, and promoted (though the AGIP [24]) a vast campaign to corrupt the press, including the party and the left-wing press. At the time, the radicals spoke of approximately Lit. 20 billion, deviated for the operation in which the paper "Paese Sera" [25] was also implicated. The ENI - says the "white paper" - is becoming a centre of "dangerous and obscure attempts on the part of the faction of the Dorotei" [26], aimed at ensuring "solutions of change" in case of failure of the centre-left, which then appeared like a "reformist" project or program (16).

This continuity, this re-emergence of political structures and lines, of institutional developments, prove that interpreting the fascist twenty-year period simply as the period of the single party is simplistic. The most recent historiography has started to understand this, and to understand that having given the Resistance the merit of having wiped away what we call "fascism" is a gross mistake, a mystification. The return of the parties on the political scene does not erode fascism's state and institutional structure, marked, as is clear today, by the supremacy of the political sphere, of the "political" on civil society and on the rules and norms of the law. The "political" is not by chance the discovery of Italian scientists early in the century. Fascism makes the "political" into an almost perfect technique. The instrumentalism of the sphere of the "political", which has become independent and self-justifying, expresses itself as ideology and propaganda. However, the parties that appear after the war ge

t hold of these techniques, and thanks to them they establish their absolute dominion on the real, on society and institutions, forcing them to the management which makes them into bureaucracies of parties and politicians by profession, united in the most rigid mutual co-optation, guarantied by the "correct" use of ideology. This is what is currently denounced as party power.

The liberal culture was a culture of divisions, of semantic distinctions, of an incessant relation between meaning and subject. Isnenghi has showed us how, under the fascist regime, every word, the entire speech, is at the service of the "supersense", i.e. instrumental in the service of the power (17). The "supersense" (i.e. propaganda) is the very core of ideology, which exerts its dominion on the world and on things because it mediates them and "constitutes" them in its own representation, loyal to the indications of the establishment. It is the power that literally "creates" things and reality, even before reality occurs. If the media will be able to achieve the artificiality of language, of communication, instrumental in the centres of emission of the power(s), this process becomes possible because, previously, the power has opened the path, has indicated the ways and the models on which to construct reality and the essentiality of the artifice. The word-dialogue decays, and is replaced with the irrelati

ve word. It is the modern violence, the one that replaces the rod. Also in this respect, Rossi remains at the opposition. The style of his works appears to be linked to the positivist model. According to Rossi, words remain (and must remain) linked to their referent, in a mirror-like

relation which cannot accept dialectic games. For him the hypothesis, in a entirely positivist and scientist logic, is constantly aimed to a verification. In the languages of the ideologies of the century, this rigorous attention is on the contrary absent; in fact, it is denied and rejected; the language of the new form of the "political" is instrumental, in the sophisticated forms of dialectics: nothing must be established, everything can and must remain interchangeable, beyond control, because the procedures of control are also in the hands of those who detain the power, with the exclusion of the "masses", which are called only to give their consent; possibly through participation, but in the weakening of the exercise of democratic powers. The relation between word and thing in Rossi is scrupulous, even exaggerated. This fact of style (or stylistics) is far but secondary: Rossi is culturally incapable of the sophisticated and ambiguous art of "mediation", which he ignores even the existence of, stubborn a

s he is in asking the interlocutor for an inflexible, fiscal, account in the budget. It is one of the most typical, even irritating characteristics of a culture which no longer exists.

Lastly: while it is true that the most visible and significant product of the cultural policy of the movements of the left after the war - neorealism - discovers today (also thanks to critics of the "new" left) all the sweetish rubbish which it was mingled with, nothing was more remote from Rossi than this soppiness, with its underlying respectability. Rossi's language is detached from that respectability which denounces the petit bourgeois origin of so many intellectualisms of the time. Also, in this way, Rossi rejects the new mass culture; good feelings are the cover beneath which the leading classes, the movements of the left in particular, have managed to soften the contrast, the conflict between class and culture, and to achieve that organic fusion which pervades and invades the entire history of the progressivism imbibed with populist solidarism. In the vast sea of good feelings (which even the reading of Gramsci is subjected to) in the last part of fascism as in post-fascism which is its heir, thrive

neorealism, Casa del Fascio and Casa del Popolo. These are are only summary subjects and indications, which it is not possible to develop and document here (18).

No one ignores the level of decay of those European institutions the architecture of which Rossi gave such a great contribution. Old and new nationalisms are eroding the last traces of their already scarce credibility. In this desolate scenery, my advice is to meditate a little on that open text which is the "Manifesto of Ventotene". For those who are interested in institutional and constitutional reforms, a minimum of attention toward this rigorous reflexion on the value of the institutions and of the normative and prescriptive force they have in determining the life of the peoples, will not be fruitless. Without, obviously, having a minimum knowledge of so many contemporary works that focus on the crisis of the welfare State and revisit its birth around the '30s, Rossi and Spinelli trace in that "Manifesto", in the shape of a political program and therefore with that touch of voluntarism which is typical of the literary genre, a "structural" analysis which remains the forefather of some of the fundamental

reasons of this crisis: they miraculously sense its advent and outline its characteristics. That book already contains the entire tragedy of Europe, which was (already at the time) experiencing a crisis of identity, already threatened more by itself and by its history - the history of its power, so legitimately but so vainly present in particular in the great culture of the continental movements of the right - than by the comparison with the other emerging world powers (19).

As I said above, Rossi was imbibed with a culture and a language of positivist origin: it was a limit of his, partial but not unimportant. But when he tackles the theoretic subject of the institutions in particular, the federal institutions to propose for the united Europe - which he sees as liberating, civil-rights oriented structures which guarantee the only possible development of the liberties of our concrete and real time - Rossi is immediately removed from the limitations of positivism, as from the sediments of Salvemini [27], for example. It is a mistake to reduce Rossi to his concrete attitude, which nonetheless existed. According to the logic of concretism, good achievements make good institutions and a good society. It is a belief that is oddly re-

emerging, albeit with corrected outlines in homage to modernity, to the modern. Many extol the theory of pure development, the so-called (and advocated) second industrial revolution as the bearer of postmodernism; in pure development, these people see the model capable of producing independently, from inside it, from its very propulsive mechanisms, from the logics that are intrinsic to its operation, the correct system of government. A system of government correct in itself (for the corporation) but also for society which forms itself and develops itself accordingly. The good government of the corporative revolution is such, is good, because and to the extent in which it opposes, it is antithetic compared to the emptiness of the ideologies of the recent past.

Industrialism, or post-industrialism, is the emerging modernity that wipes away ideologies, guaranteeing, in their place, the advent of Weber's "disillusion", laicization, the functional interpretation of the events, and therefore teaching the correct technique of government, of the good government tout court. This is also positivism, in a modern and attractive shape. I don't think Ernesto Rossi would have liked it. In a letter from his prison, addressed to his dear Pig, his wife Ada, he once wrote - I think - that if he had to choose between Cavour and Ford as the creator of wealth, he would have chosen Cavour: the person who, in the shape of a statesman, a man of government, created the civil institutions apt to promote a coherent development of the country, far better than Ford did, the technocrat, the man of profit.

Ernesto Rossi looked at profit with the concern of a person who knew that this engine of society has an ambivalent and demonic core. He knew it, just like Keynes and Tocqueville did. And, perhaps, he knew that there is nothing more apt to dominate the demonic than a Good Government.

Notes:

1) See publications published in the press on Rossi's death (1967) and for the commemorations of 1977. In particular: "L'Astrolabio" N. 8, 19 February 1967 (issue dedicated to Ernesto Rossi);

"L'Astrolabio" N.9, 26 February 1967. Gianfranco Spadaccia, "Ernesto Rossi, la battaglia federalista" (conversation with Altiero Spinelli);

"Resistenza" N.4, April 1967 (issue dedicated to Ernesto Rossi);

"Il Mondo", 18 September 1975. Critical essay by Arrigo Benedetti on the anthology of works by E. Rossi, "Un democratico ribelle", edited by Giuseppe Armani, Parma, Guanda 1975;

"Radical News", December 1977, Angiolo Bandinelli, "Ernesto Rossi: ci ha insegnato a 'non mollare'";

"Quaderni del Salvemini" N.25, 1977: "Ernesto Rossi a dieci anni dalla scomparsa", papers of the round table of 23 January and of 5 April 1977.

2) Alberto Asor Rosa, "La cultura", in "Storia d'Italia dall'unità ad oggi", Turin, Einaudi, 1975, Vol. IV, t. 2. In fact, Asor Rosa mentions him once, at page 1542, among the founders of the "clandestine pamphlet" "Non mollare".

3) Rosario Romeo, preface to: Manlio Del Bosco, "Il partito radicale e 'Il Mondo'", ERI, Turin, 1980.

4) Alberto Asor Rosa, "Intellettuali e potere", in "Storia d'Italian, cit., Annali, vol. 14, page 1251.

5) In particular, see Gabriele Turi, "Il fascismo e il consenso degli intellettuali", Bologna, Il Mulino, 1980.

6) Valerio Castronovo, "La storia economica" in "Storia d'Italia", cit., col. IV, t.1, page 352.

7) Alberto Asor Rosa, "La cultura", in "Storia d'Italia", cit., col. IV, t.2, page 1592.

8) Ernesto Ragionieri, "Storia politica e sociale", in "Storia d'Italia", cit., vol. IV, t.3, page 2267.

9) Ernesto Rossi, "I padroni del vapore", Bari, Laterza, 1955.

10) Ernesto Rossi, "Elogio della galera", Bari, Laterza, 1968.

11) Ernesto Rossi, "Aria fritta", Bari, Laterza, pages 166-175.

12) Ernesto Ragionieri, "Storia political e sociale" in "Storia d'Italia", cit., vol. IV, t.3, page 2502-2503.

13) Ibid., page 2502.

14) Ibid., page 2504.

15) "Libro bianco del Partito Radicale", edited by A. Bandinelli, S. Pergameno, M. Teodori, Rome, Ed. Radicali, 1967, page 38 (the chapter was written by Marco Pannella).

16) Ibid., page 40.

17) Mario Isnenghi, "Intellettuali militanti e funzionari", Turin, Einaudi, 1979.

18) Alberto Asor Rosa, "Scrittori e popolo", Roma, Savelli, 1966.

19) A.S. and E.R., "Problemi della Federazione europea", edizioni del Movimento Ital. per la Fed. Europea, s.d.

Translator's notes

[1] BANDINELLI ANGIOLO. (Chianciano 1927). Writer. Former member of the Partito d'Azione; secretary of the Radical Party in 1969, 1971 and 1972; he was also treasurer of the party for five years. In 1979 local councillor in Rome, deputy in the ninth legislature. For many years, editor of several radical publications ("La Prova Radicale", "Notizie Radicali", etc), author of essays and articles relative to the history and the theory of the party, many of which are contained in the book "Il radicale impunito". Writes for newspapers and magazines and for Radio Radicale with notes and editorials.

[2] ROSSI ERNESTO. (Caserta 1897 - Rome 1967). Italian journalist and politician. Leader of "Giustizia e Libertà", in 1930 he was arrested by the fascist regime and remained in prison or exiled until the end of the war. Author, together with Spinelli, of the "Manifesto di Ventotene", and leader of the European Federalist Movement and of the battle for a united Europe. Among the founders of the Radical Party. Essayist and journalist, from "Il Mondo" he promoted vehement campaigns against clerical interference in the political life, against economic trusts, industrial and agrarian protectionism, private and public concentrations of power, etc. His articles were collected in famous books ("I padroni del vapore", etc). After the dissolution of the Radical Party in 1962, and the consequent split from the editor of "Il Mondo", M.Pannunzio, he founded "L'Astrolabio", whence he continued his polemics. In his last years he joined the "new" radical party, with which in 1967 he launched the "Anticlerical Year".

[3] PANNELLA MARCO. Pannella Giacinto, known as Marco. (Teramo 1930). Currently President of the Radical Party's Federal Council, which he is one of the founders of. At twenty national university representative of the Liberal Party, at twenty-two President of the UGI, the union of lay university students, at twenty-three President of the UNURI, national union of Italian university students. At twenty-four he advocates, in the context of the students' movement and of the Liberal party, the foundation of the new radical party, which arises in 1954 following the confluence of prestigious intellectuals and minor democratic political groups. He is active in the party, except for a period (1960-1963) in which he is correspondent for "Il Giorno" in Paris, where he established contacts with the Algerian resistance. Back in Italy, he commits himself to the reconstruction of the radical Party, dissolved by its leadership following the advent of the centre-left. Under his indisputable leadership, the party succeeds in

promoting (and winning) relevant civil rights battles, working for the introduction of divorce, conscientious objection, important reforms of family law, etc, in Italy. He struggles for the abrogation of the Concordat between Church and State. Arrested in Sofia in 1968 as he is demonstrating in defence of Czechoslovakia, which has been invaded by Stalin. He opens the party to the newly-born homosexual organizations (FUORI), promotes the formation of the first environmentalist groups. The new radical party organizes difficult campaigns, proposing several referendums (about twenty throughout the years) for the moralization of the country and of politics, against public funds to the parties, against nuclear plants, etc., but in particular for a deep renewal of the administration of justice. Because of these battles, all carried out with strictly nonviolent methods according to the Gandhian model - but Pannella's Gandhi is neither a mystic nor an ideologue; rather, an intransigent and yet flexible politician - h

e has been through trials which he has for the most part won. As of 1976, year in which he first runs for Parliament, he is always elected at the Chamber of Deputies, twice at the Senate, twice at the European Parliament. Several times candidates and local councillor in Rome, Naples, Trieste, Catania, where he carried out exemplary and demonstrative campaigns and initiatives. Whenever necessary, he has resorted to the weapon of the hunger strike, not only in Italy but also in Europe, in particular during the major campaign against world hunger, for which he mobilized one hundred Nobel laureates and preeminent personalities in the fields of science and culture in order to obtain a radical change in the management of the funds allotted to developing countries. On 30 September 1981 he obtains at the European parliament the passage of a resolution in this sense, and after it several other similar laws in the Italian and Belgian Parliament. In January 1987 he runs for President of the European Parliament, obtaini

ng 61 votes. Currently, as the radical party has pledged to no longer compete with its own lists in national elections, he is striving for the creation of a "transnational" cross-party, in view of a federal development of the United States of Europe and with the objective of promoting civil rights throughout the world.

[4] GALANTE GARRONE ALESSANDRO. Jurist, writer, historian, exponent of the "Independent Left". Writes for the Turin-based paper "La Stampa".

[5] SPINELLI ALTIERO. ( Rome 1907 - 1982). Italian politician. During fascism, from 1929 to 1942, he was imprisoned as leader of the Italian Communist Youth. In 1942 co-author, with Ernesto Rossi, of the "Manifesto of Ventotene", which states that only a federal Europe can remove the return of fratricide wars in the European continent and give it back an international role. At the end of the war he founded, with Rossi, Eugenio Colorni and others, the European federalist Movement. After the crisis of the European Defence Community (1956), he became member of the European Commission, and followed the evolution of the Community structures. In 1979 he was elected member of the European Parliament on the ticket of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), becoming the directive mind in the realization of the draft treaty adopted by that parliament in 1984 and known as the "Spinelli Project".

[6] TOGLIATTI PALMIRO. (Genua 1893 - Yalta 1964). In Turin he cooperated with A. Gramsci, among the founders of the Italian Communist Party, which he was secretary of from 1927 until his death. Exiled in Russia, he was member of the secretariat of the Comintern, and played an important role in Spain during the civil war. Back in Italy in 1944, he launched a "national" policy based on the fact of voting the Lateran pacts, clashing with the lay forces of the country. Member of government from 1944 to 1947, also as minister. After the elections of 1948, he monopolized the opposition's role, but he also favoured a "dialogue" with the Christian Democracy and the Catholic world, without ever breaking with the Vatican. His project of an "Italian way to socialism" did not achieve its fundamental objective, and on the contrary lead to a stalemate in the political system, preventing the Left from acquiring any "alternation" in power from the Christian Democratic Party.

[7] IL MONDO. Political and cultural weekly magazine, established in Rome by Mario Pannunzio. For seventeen years it was the expression and the symbol of the best lay, liberal, radical and democratic Italian tradition. Most of its journalists participated in the foundation of the radical Party. Ceased publications in 1966, was taken over by Arrigo Benedetti in 1969. Subsequently became an economic magazine.

[8] PANNUNZIO MARIO. (Lucca 1910 - Rome 1968). Italian journalist, liberal. Editor of the daily newspaper "Risorgimento Liberale" between 1943 and 1947, he then established (1949) the newsmagazine "Il Mondo", which he was editor of for seventeen years, making into an unchallenged example of modern European journalism. Member of the Italian Liberal party, he was one of the founders of the Radical party, which he contributed to dissolving when the centre-left was formed.

[9] BENEDETTI ARRIGO. (Lucca 1910 - Rome 1976). Italian journalist, an innovator of journalistic models from the time of fascism, he developed the editorial technique and policy of the "tabloid" with the weekly "Omnibus", which was subjected to Mussolini's censorship. After the war he was editor of "L'Europeo" and, above all, was the founder and the editor of "L'Espresso" (1955-1963).

[10] GRAMSCI ANTONIO. (Ales, Cagliari 1891 - Rome 1937). Italian thinker and politician, socialist at first, editor of "Ordine Nuovo" and promoter of the experiments on "factory councils", in 1921 he was among the founders of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which he was appointed secretary general of in 1924. Deputy, he was sentenced by the fascist regime to 20 years of prison, where he died. His "Quaderni dal carcere" represent an original contribution to the theoretic development of Marxism in a Western sense. He also founded "L'Unità", organ of the communist party.

[11] CROCE BENEDETTO. (Pescasseroli 1866 - Naples 1952). Italian philosopher, historian and writer. After a short period in which he was attracted by the ideas of Marx, together with Giovanni Gentile he was responsible for the idealistic and Hegelian revival of the end of the past century. Antifascist, fundamentally a liberal-conservative, after the war he joined the Liberal Party and was part of one of the first governments formed after fascism. During fascism, he had a great influence on important sectors of the youth. As a philosopher, he has a claim to fame for his studies of aesthetics and logics as well as for his reform of Hegelian dialectic. Author of important historical works ("Storia d'Europa nel secolo XIX", "Storia d'Italia dal 1871 and 1915", etc), in which he supports the liberal development of Europe before the war, versus the "crisis" of post-war totalitarianisms.

[12] GENTILE GIOVANNI. (Castelvetrano 1875 - Florence 1944). Italian philosopher. Together with Benedetto Croce he developed the theory of Hegelian neo-idealism, contributing to the Italian philosophical revival. He joined the fascist party and provided the regime with ideological bases. Detained important roles until the mid thirties. The mastermind of the reform of the schooling system. Was killed by the partisans during the Resistance.

[13] BOBBIO NORBERTO. (Turin 1909). Italian jurist and philosopher. Theorist of the bases of the juridical science from a standpoint which is very close to juridical neopositivism, exponent of a liberalism which perceives the rigorous respect of the procedures as the very basis of freedom. Senator for life. Writes for "La Stampa".

[14] DE GASPERI ALCIDE. (Pieve Tesino 1881 - Sella di Valsugana 1954). From Trentino, Catholic deputy at the Austrian Parliament in 1911. After World War I, the region passed to Italy, and De Gasperi became member of the Italian Party in 1921 in the Popular Party, which he was secretary of from 1923 to 1925. During fascism he worked in the Biblioteca Vaticana. He reorganized the Christian Democratic Party and became secretary of it in 1944. Prime Minister in 1945, signed the peace treaty of 1947. Once he obtained the confirmation of the Lateran Pacts, he managed to exclude the parties of the Left from the government, which assumed a stable centrist form.

[15] FANFANI AMINTORE. (Arezzo 1908). Italian politician, professor of economic history, eminent personality of the Christian Democrat Party which he was secretary of from 1954 to 1959 and from 1973 to 1975. He gave a strong corporative impulse to the party with the use of public industry as a key element of economic development. Prime Minister (1958-'59; 1960-'62; 1982-'83), foreign minister on several occasions, president of the Senate from 1958 to 1973 and from 1976 to 1982.

[16] CONFINDUSTRIA. Italian Manufacturers' Association.

[17] MALAGODI GIOVANNI. (London 1904 - Rome 1991). Secretary of the Italian Liberal Party (PLI) from 1954 to 1972. Conservative.

[18] ENI. National Hydrocarbon Corporation. Public holding established in 1953 to coordinate the Italian energy industry. With its subsidiary companies AGIP, SNAM, SAIPEM, ANIC, in 1980 it became the third greatest European industrial group. Its presidents Enrico Mattei and Eugenio Cefis were involved in Italian politics, occasionally with roles that went beyond their functions.

[19] MATTEI ENRICO. (Acqualagna 1906 - Bascapé 1962). President of the ENI (National Hydrocarbon Corporation) as of 1953, he extended its activity, jeopardizing the powers of the so-called "seven sisters", the seven greatest oil companies, trying to establish direct contacts with the oil-producing countries, Iran in particular. He died in a plane crash, the causes of which have remained mysterious. He had reached power by heading Catholic partisan formations during the Resistance, which he then used as a force to maneuvre politically. Those partisan group were the origin of the first nucleuses of "Gladio".

[20] CEFIS EUGENIO. (Cividale del Friuli 1921). President of the National Hydrocarbon Corporation (ENI) from 1967 to 1971 and of the Montedison chemical company (1971-77). Promoter of the Italian economic reconstruction, favoured by his policy based on the use of oil and methane, he used ruthless systems of power and corruption to achieve his objectives.

[21] STURZO LUIGI. (Caltagirone 1871 - Rome 1959). Priest, politician, founder, in 1919, of the Italian Popular Party, which he was secretary of until July 1923. Exiled since 1924, first in London and then in the United States. Back in Italy in 1946, in 1952, urged by Pius XII, he tried to create a centre-right electoral block which was unsuccessful.

[22] SIFAR. Information Service for the Italian Armed Forces, established in 1949 at the orders of the Defence Chief of Staff. In 1966 it was dissolved because of serious "deviations" and replaced with the SID (Defence Information Service), which was abolished in 1977 and replaced by the SISMI (Military Security Service).

[23] MORO ALDO. (Maglie 1916 - Rome 1978). Italian politician. Secretary of the Christian Democratic Party (1959-65), mastermind of the Centre-Left policy. Several times minister as of 1956, Prime Minister (1963-68, 1974-76) president of the Christian Democratic Party as of 1956, he favoured the participation of the Communist Party (PCI) in the government, outlining the hypothesis of a so-called "third stage" (after those of "centrism" and "centre-left") of the political system. He was kidnapped by the Red Brigades on 16 March 1978 in Rome and found dead on 9 May of the same year.

[24] AGIP. National Hydrocarbons Authority. Established in 1926, it was assimilated in the ENI (National Hydrocarbon Corporation) in 1956 as one of the group's operative enterprises.

[25] PAESE SERA. Rome-based daily paper, established 1950, subsequently shifted to the communist area. Its publication has been discontinuous and is currently in a deep crisis.

[26] DOROTEI. A faction of the Italian Christian Democratic party. Born in 1959 during meetings held at the convent of S. Dorotea (hence the name), the group expresses the party's conservative and governmental "centre".

[27] SALVEMINI GAETANO. (Molfetta 1873 - Sorrento 1957). Italian historian and politician. Socialist since 1893, he founded the weekly "L'Unità", which soon became an important seat of debates. In 1925 in Florence, together with the Rosselli brothers, he founded the clandestine antifascist publication "Non mollare". Subsequently he fled abroad (to the U.S.), where he promoted antifascist information campaigns.