Italian Citizenship and the Republican Tradition

Abstract

Some years ago, during the debate on German reunification, Jürgen Habermas pointed to the dangers of ‘a national identity not based, first of all, on a republican self-understanding of constitutional patriotism’ (1990, p. 217). As is well known, the republican tradition originated in Italy, or at least in the city-republics of the centre north of the country. This holds true whether its origins, following John Pocock’s account (1975), are traced to fifteenth-century Florentine ‘civic humanism’ or, following Skinner (1998), are located in fourteenth-century ‘neo-Roman’ political thought. An Italian is the eponymous champion of the ‘Machiavellian moment’ and it is in Italy where, following the establishment of national monarchies, some republican polities still persisted, if not flourished, during the eighteenth century. Venice long remained the paradigm of a republic, and when, in 1651, Hobbes introduced his deliberately anti-republican conception of negative liberty, his target was the word libertas on the turrets of the city-republic of Lucca (Hobbes, 1991, p. 149). Yet how far did republican political thought influence Italian national identity and the Italian concept of citizenship? And is it still relevant today?KeywordsNational IdentityPolitical CultureAction PartyNegative LibertyItalian CitizenshipThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.