MIRELLA LARIZZA

Il Burke di  Vittorio Beonio-Brocchieri

N. 157

Summary — The article illustrates the reading of Burke’s masterpiece proposed by Beonio-Brocchieri in 1930, on the occasion of the Italian translation of the Reflections taken care by him for the Editori Cappelli of Bologna. After recollecting how Beonio’s interest for Burke collocated coherently with his intellectual itinerary and got its nourishment from suggestions arising from the international historiographic debate, the a. points out how such reading places the Reflections in the picture of the intellectual and life experiences of their author making of it the landing of orientations gradually matured thanks to them. Beonio would break with that diffused interpretative criterion, which tended to see in the great pamphlet of 1790 a moment of caesure hardly explainable in the intellectual and political event of its author. But it is not only the continuistic perspective from which Beonio-Brocchieri looks at Burke’s work to characterize his interpretation. There is in Beonio, remarks the a., a critical detachment from the studied thinker, that allows him to point out the "limits of historical intelligence" of Burke’s judgement on the French situation (it would sin of that dogmatic abstractionism that Burke imputed to the revolutionaries across the Channel), stressing at the same time the importance of the Reflections in the history of our culture. According to Beonio such work would have called the attention on a combination of institutions, beliefs, traditions, prejudices in which would be expressed the life of the peoples, that, till then neglected, would have been turned to advantage by the great romantic movement. Beonio’s Burke on the whole appears as a great pre-Romantic, from whose thought, not casually, German culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century would get its nourishment.