VIRGINIO P. GASTALDI

Carlo Cattaneo e lo specchio della storia

N. 153

Summary — Through all the historiographical and philosophical production of Carlo Cattaneo (but often also of the economic, political and literary) recurs the metaphor of the mirror, of which the great Italian thinker of the XIX century made use first of all for emphasizing the complete contemporaneity of every history of any people looking at each other through the mirror, discovered the profound uniqueness of mankind, a sense of generous humanism arose that recognized the equal moral dignity of all men, independently of differences in race, religion, cultural development and political power. But the mirror of history provided also an instrument for a comparative and experimental study of the events of humanity, so as to draw from them some useful constants to explain the reasons of the progress and of the decline. Cattaneo, in this way, refused the pessimistic anthropological concept of Machiavelli which denied to man any possibility of progress. He also refused the cyclic vision of history of G.B. Vico. With even greather hardness he argued over the progress theories of the rationalists like Condorcet, or the German idealistic theories, particularly by Hegel, because excessively optimistic or arrogantly eurocentric, or those providentialistic ready to justify historical evil attributing it to an unknownable higher divine design. They were all theories that, according to Cattaneo, had to be fought because they led to apathy and fatalism taking away "from man the responsibility and the care for his own future". Similar remarks he made about the deterministic theses that made the development of societies depending on the climate. According to Cattaneo the sole creator of progress was man for his free will and for the capacity to grow in science through solidarity and common efforts, against the prejudices and dogmatisms of knowledge. In such a sense pluralism became an indispensable element, and federalism was the most complete and mature forme of organization of national and international political institutions to guarantee pluralism, freedom and, in the end, man’s progress.