Giuseppe Mazzini

Works

• 1860The Duties of Man

  Addressed to Italian workers: rights follow from duties to humanity, country and family, and the emancipation of labour is to come through association and education.

Position

Mazzini is on the map as a theorist of democratic nationalism whose ideas travelled far beyond Italy. For him nations were not ends in themselves but organs of humanity: each people had a mission, and only free, equal, republican nations could join in a peaceful association of Europe. Against the individualism he found in the French Revolution and in utilitarianism he set duties before rights, grounded in a religious faith without a church, summed up in the motto “God and the People”; against socialist class struggle he proposed the association of capital and labour, cooperatives and popular education, and he called for equal rights for women. “Thought and action” meant that ideas had to prove themselves in practice, including insurrection. Marx, who replaced the Mazzinian drafts with his own address at the founding of the International in 1864, rejected his programme as idealist; Bakunin attacked his “political theology” after Mazzini condemned the Paris Commune (1871). Gandhi admired him and in “Hind Swaraj” (1909) contrasted his aims with the Italy that came into being; Liang Qichao portrayed him in 1902 as one of three founders of modern Italy. In the twentieth century Gentile and the fascist regime claimed him, and so did antifascists of the Partito d’Azione. Critics point to the human cost of the failed uprisings and to the messianic tone of his nationalism; Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati (2009) read him as a theorist of a “cosmopolitanism of nations”.

Life & context

Giuseppe Mazzini was born in Genoa on 22 June 1805, the son of a physician and professor of medicine. He took a law degree in Genoa in 1827, wrote literary criticism and joined the Carbonari. Arrested in 1830 and held in the fortress of Savona, he went into exile in 1831 and founded “Young Italy” in Marseille, a society for a united, independent and republican Italy; in 1834 he founded “Young Europe” in Bern. Sentenced to death in absentia by a Piedmontese court in 1833 and expelled from France and then from Switzerland, he lived from 1837 mainly in London, where he wrote, organised Italian workers and opened a school for poor Italian children. In 1849 he was one of the three triumvirs of the Roman Republic, which fell to French troops in July. Later uprisings he promoted, in Milan in 1853 and Genoa in 1857, failed. He supported Garibaldi’s expedition of 1860 but rejected the monarchy under which Italy was united in 1861; elected to parliament in 1866, he did not take his seat. Arrested in 1870 and held at Gaeta, he was released under an amnesty. He died in Pisa on 10 March 1872, where he was living under a false name.

Further main works

• General Instructions for the Members of Young Italy (Istruzione generale per gli affratellati nella Giovine Italia, 1831)
• Faith and the Future (Foi et avenir, 1835)
• Thoughts upon Democracy in Europe (1846–47)
• From the Council to God (Dal Concilio a Dio, 1870)