MAZZINI

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28158, 22 December 1956, Page 3

MAZZINI

SALVEMINI’S STANDARD WORK REISSUED Mazzini. By Gaetano Salvemini. Jonathan Cape. 192 pp. To read Mazzini’s religious and political theorising is to encounter much in the way of confused thinking. The main tenets of his system of thought are unravelled with difficulty—so much are they hedged about with assertions as arbitrary as they are abstruse The truth of the matter is that he does not always show a proper regard for the canons of ordinary logic. “With his passionate nature.” states Professor Salvemini, “he was unable to subject himself to the effort of logical clarification and organisation which the scientific and philosophic method demands.” What more devastating charge than this could be brought against any one wishing a j taken seriously as a philosopher? yet Professor Salvemini’s strictures go further than this. “Generally speaking”—he writes—“the greater part of Mazzini’s assertions are arbitrary and impossible to prove: while those that, individually, correspond with historical facts and tendencies are deduced from dubious principles, from an integral part of a questionable system, and interpret real facts in such a way as to make them, too, appear suspect; they may be true, but not for the reasons adduced by Mazzini.” This is not to deny that Mazzini’s w r?r in £ s . often reveal a most acute critical judgment. Divorced from the context of his grandiose plans which they were meant to support, many of his ideas would find general acceptance among socialist thinkers. Fourfifth of his ideas, in Salvemini’s view, were Saint-Simonist in origin. As indicative of the considerable influence his political writings had both upon his contemporaries and upon those who followed him. the following passage from the book under review is worth quoting: “The first book on socialism to be published in Japan, by Tomoyoshi Murai. is deeply influenced by the teaching of Mazzini, whom the author considers one of the initiators of coming social revolution. Sun YatSen. too, the founder of the Chinese Republic, was a fervent admirer of Mazzini, from whom he drew many of his political ideas. The Indian nationalists used Mazzini’s biography and translations of his works in making their own propaganda. In an issue of the ‘lndian Socialist’ (November. 1912), the nationalist Savarkar, who was threatened with the death penalty by the English Courts, was described as ‘Mazzini’s martyr in India.’ ” The analogies that Mazzini’s teaching bore to socialism are carefully noted in this book, and the differences between the two philosophies are no less carefully examined in a chapter which, as a piece of critical analysis, is nothing short of brilliant. Mazzini’s life, especially the last 20 years of it, was—states the author—“a continual battle against the socialists”—the growing revolutionary character of socialism as well as its increasing identification with the class struggle being particularly repugnant to his way of thinking.

The failure of Mazzini’s religious teaching to find a following among his fellow countrymen was something that greatly disheartened him. Just how inevitable was that failure is made convincingly apparent in Professor Salvemini’s treatment of this question. The political unification of Italy to which Mazzini dedicated his life appeared as a remote and impossible dream to many of his compatriots. But he himself would never rest until that dream became a reality. “He, and he alone,” states Professor Salvemini, “was responsible for that psychological preparation from which in 1859 sprang the annexations in Central Italy, in 1860 the expedition of the Thousand, and in 1861 and 1867, Aspromonte and Bentana; from which, in a word, sprang Italian unity.”

In short, this book constitutes a most searching and scholarly study both of Mazzini’s teaching and of the part he played in the affairs of his time. First published in 1905. revised and republished in 1925, it has long been recognised as a standard work on Mazzini. In its present English translation the book will be widely sought after.