Italian Intellectuals and International Politics, 1945–1992

Italian intellectuals played an important role in the shaping of international politics during the Cold War. The visions of the world that they promulgated, their influence on public opinion and their ability to shape collective speech, whether in agreement with or in opposition to those in power, have been underestimated and understudied. This volume marks one of the first serious attempts to assess how Italian intellectuals understood and influenced Italy’s place in the post–World War II world. The protagonists represent the three key post-war political cultures: Catholic, Marxist and Liberal Democratic. Together, these essays uncover the role of such intellectuals in institutional networks, their impact on the national and transnational circulation of ideas and the relationships they established with a variety of international associations and movements. 

1. Introduction: Italian intellectuals and international politics.- I. Liberal Democrat political culture.- 2. The “blood of others”: Mao’s China in the discourse of Liberal Democrat Intellectuals during the Fifties.- 3. Telling the truth: From socialist towards democratic antifascism and anti-totalitarianism in the 1950s.- 4. Il Mulino and the East-West ideological confrontation: From destalinization to 1968.- 5. Guido Carli: A liberal technician and the making of Europe.- II. Catholic political culture.- 6. Italian Catholic intellectuals and indigenous Latin Americans: Transnational networks and violence at the end of the Cold War.- 7. Catholic culture put to the test of Détente: The case of Augusto Del Noce.- 8. The international politics of a Christian realist: Beniamino Andreatta and Europe.- III. Socialists and Communists.- 9. Antisemitism and the Arab-Israeli question: The Italian left in the first ten years of the Republic.- 10. An Italian communist in the Spain of the ‘60s: The worthless journey of Rossana Rossanda.- 11. The debate on post-colonial Africa on the pages of “Mondoperaio”: The reflection of socialists on decolonization (1955-1987).- 12. Solidarity and Italian labor movement culture: CGIL intellectuals and revision of the CGIL’s International relations (1980-1982).- 13. PCI intellectuals and the image of “Reagan’s America”.