THE LIBERAL IDEA IN 19TH CENTURY ITALY: BUILDING A NEW SCIENCE OF POLITICS by Filippo Sabetti Department of Political Science McGill University
[email protected] Paper prepared for Panel "Varieties of Liberal Thought In Nineteenth-Century Europe," American Political Science Association Meetings, San Francisco, August 30-September 2,2001. THE LIBERAL IDEA IN 19TH CENTURY ITALY: BUILDING A NEW SCIENCE OF POLITICS Filippo Sabetti Liberal ideas in France grew within a long-established state, with the result that they sought either to reconceptualize political power (Guizot) or to challenge the very entrenched view of that state (Tocqueville). By contrast, liberal ideas in Italy combined with nationalism to generate a variety of ways to achieve national as well as individual liberation. The prospect of a single political regime for the entire Italian peninsula and islands generated considerable debate as to what kind of liberal, constitutional design or model of government was best suited to a population that had lived under separate and diverse political regimes for more than thirteen hundred years. This debate gave rise to two broad currents of thought and action known as moderate liberalism and radical, or democratic, liberalism. Both were intended to realize, promote and advance what has been called "the liberal conception of European history" (Tilly 1975, 37). But the two differed on some fundamental aspects. The first derived from notions of constitutional monarchy and representative government, drawing support from the British experience and particularly the work of John Stuart Mill; the other rejected constitutional monarchy and went beyond representative government to include principles for a self-governing, as opposed to state-governed, society, drawing support from Tocqueville's analysis of democracy in America.