Courtesy of Princeton University.
“Are great political struggles ever sustained without prophets?” asked Professor Emeritus of Politics Maurizio Viroli in a Dec. 9 lecture. The talk, co-sponsored by the James Madison Program and the Program in Italian Studies, was centered on Italy’s unification (Risorgimento), and the “voices which urged Italians to emancipate themselves from their servile mentality and fight to attain national independence and political liberty.”
In addition to his emeritus post at the University, Viroli is also a professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin and a professor of Political Communication at the University of Italian Switzerland. Viroli, who is deeply interested in questions of Italian political history, served as a consultant to the President of the Italian Republic under Carlo Azeglio Ciampi’s tenure and has been awarded the title of “Ufficiale della Repubblica” for his contribution to Italian culture.
The lecture previewed Viroli’s forthcoming project “Prophetic Times” where Viroli holds that the prophetic voices of poets and writers were the catalysts for Italian political unification.
“Italy became one, united, and independent thanks to these prophetic voices that appeared in Italy and were able to…inspire Italians…to commit themselves to the almost impossible task of becoming a nation,” Viroli explained.
For Viroli, the word “prophetic” refers to any idea that traces itself to “divine revelation or inspiration.” He identified several prominent Italian writers and poets, pointing to Giuseppe Mazzini and Gottfredo Mameli in particular.
Mazzini, who explicitly writes that he was following divine inspiration, was of particular interest to Viroli. Radically innovative, Mazzini insisted God wanted the emancipation of all people. For him, the only political system capable of facilitating was democracy, Viroli explained.
“[Mazzini] regarded the Italian resurrection as a revelation of divine assistance,” said Viroli, “For Mazzini, the people were a medium for divine revelation – in the people was divine reflection of God’s will.”
“God wants all peoples to be free and the best way for them to be free was to institute democracy,” Viroli added.
Goffredo Mameli, famous patriot of the Risorgimento and author of the Italian National Anthem, also echoed such prophetic cadences, Viroli explained.
“God wants our [national] redemption through our faith,” said Viroli, quoting Mameli.
Viroli also played a five-minute clip from a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco. Verdi, too, was a composer of the Risorgimento era. The performers, dressed as Israelites, sung of their yearning for their homeland. For Viroli, it was a clear metaphor of the burning passion for nationhood in nineteenth century Italy.
To buttress his thesis, Viroli argued that once Italy achieved unification, these nationalist prophetic voices dwindled. The absence of political struggle meant the absence of inspiring voices in the national conscience.
According to Viroli, it was only until socialism emerged in the twentieth century that a new set of prophetic voices came about. These voices invited Italians to the enterprise of radical social change using distinctly religious language.
Viroli also located prophetic successors in the twentieth-century Italian anti-fascist movement.
“The best minds of the anti-facist tradition…they also rediscovered the prophetic tradition,” Viroli explained, pointing to Piero Gobetti, who was killed by the fascists.
To Viroli, Gobetti’s characteristically prophetic language – like that of those before him, attests to the centrality of prophetic voices in driving Italian political history – even into the modern era.
The lecture was held in Bowen Hall 222 at 4:30 pm on Monday, Dec. 9, 2019.
Copyright © 2024 The Princeton Tory. All rights reserved.