ARTURO COLOMBO

Un bilancio degli studi su Cattaneo da Gobetti a Bobbio

N. 199

Summary - Re-reading the most important of Carlo Cattaneo's interpretative essays, the author provides a historiographical account of the literature of the last eighty years on Cattaneo, his political works and his activities as a writer in a great variety of fields (including economics, law, and comparative institutional analysis). The author divides this secondary literature into three periods. First, in the Fascist era one finds above all a "political" reading of Cattaneo. In the case of his most important interpreters (Gaetano Salvemini, Piero Gobetti and Alessandro Levi), this meant insisting on certain guiding principles in Cattaneo’s program (the primacy of liberty, the development of democracy as participation in the exercise of state powers, the goal of a United States of Europe), which represent the antithesis of the slogan "believe obey, fight" dear to Mussolini. After the war, the study of Cattaneo was given a new lease of life, both through the publication of his texts, which were carefully and philologically edited (sec the Edizione Nazionale, the new anthologies, and the editions of the Archivio Triennale and of Il Politecnico on the part of Luigi Ambrosoli), and through a "reexamination" of his entire work, including not only his production in Italy but also that of the subsequent, so-called Swiss period (in particular on the part of Bianca Maria Frabotta, Mariachiara Fugazza and Carlos Moos). Here, the conclusions of the various interpreters are often opposed to one another: on the one hand, there are those of the Gramscian-Marxist tendency (Puccio, Castelnuovo Frigessi, etc.) who see Cattaneo as an "enlightened" representative of the nineteenth century bourgeousie; on the other hand, there are those, like Norberto Bobbio, who emphasize not only his cultural breadth and modernity (of which the journal Il Politecnico is testimony), but also the rigour of an intellectual who believed in the "politics of reform" as indispensable for the transformation of society without over-hasty revolutionary solutions. Finally, as well as analyses of the philosophical, scientific and technical aspects of Cattaneo’s work, his "political" proposals have been further studied, in particular in connection with his federalism, variously interpreted by Giuseppe Galasso, Carlo Lacaita, Ettore Albertoni and Paolo Gastaldi, down to the latest work by Franco Della Peruta, which underlines the way Cattaneo paid particular attention to the poorer classes - to the workers and the peasants - defending the indispensable role of the "fourth estate".