Italian intellectuals and the European view

croce, nitti and chabod between dictatorship and democracy

Gert Sørensen

pp. 25-43

in: Lars K Bruun, Gert Srensen, Karl C. Lammers, Gert Sørensen (eds), European self-reflection between politics and religion, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

The First World War was not only a war between nation-states or alliances of nation-states. It also evidenced social conflicts and confrontation within the single nation-state to the extent that the elites that brought nation-states into the war were different from the elites that were in charge of the post-war rebuilding. We might say with Antonio Gramsci that "the war of 1914–18 represents a historical fracture, meaning that a series of problems which on a molecular level matured in the period before 1914 now formed a "heap of problems' modifying the general structure of the past" (Gramsci, 1975, p. 1824). Most significantly, this was the case in Russia, Italy and Germany, who developed different types of totalitarian regimes.