March 2014, Year VI, n. 3
Fernando Bruno
Dossetti’s legacy: the State shall not be neutral
Telos: In nearly any account of the history of the Italian Republic, the Christian-Democrat Party (DC) plays the part of a culprit. In your book devoted to Giuseppe Dossetti, you did not only reconstruct the story of a politician and his faction, but you appear to depict that story as an unfulfilled promise of a party, and of a country, that never came to light. Was Dossetti the prophet of a different DC and a different Italian society?
Fernando Bruno: No doubt, Dossetti was the forerunner of a different Christian-Democrat party and a different Italian society. His young age and his cultural upbringing had a decisive impact on his political positions. Think of his views on Fascism. Like Gobetti and Gramsci, Dossetti rejected the interpretation prevailing in his party, influenced by Benedetto Croce, according to which Fascism was a rupture in the history of modern Europe; instead, he thought that Fascism was the inevitable authoritarian ... more
Editorial
Fernando Bruno’s essay gives an account of the political life of Giuseppe Dossetti and of the harsh confrontation between his faction within Democrazia Cristiana (DC) and the party’s majority, led by Alcide De Gasperi. Dossetti and his group brought into the Italian catholic political environment a new sense of what its mission was: not to perpetuate the forms in which power was managed in the XIX century’s liberal parliamentary regime, but to educate the masses to participate ... more
SocialTelos