Political History in Italy

This review essay is fundamentally devoted to the analysis of the numerous contributions on political history in Italy published after 1945. It focuses attention on some specific actors, problems, and events, particularly the impact of Fascism on postwar Italian politics, the evolution of the Italian Communist party, the role of the Christian Democrats, and the debate on the Italian identity in order to provide an evaluation of the overall evolution of the Italian parliamentary Republic, including its transformation and its incomplete and ongoing political and institutional transition. Although obviously Italian politics was affected by the Cold War in a way that remains difficult to properly assess, I will not deal with foreign policy issues because it is a topic that has its own autonomy and would require a different essay and a different approach. Finally, I will refer the reader essentially to books, with few notable exceptions, and not to articles published in Italian by Italian historians with the aim of conveying the essentials of the historical debate and production, which has been quite intense in Italy. I will make only a few references to foreign historians and even less to works published by sociologists and political scientists, unless they have affected the historical debate. In general, the large number of books devoted to the analysis of Italian history reveals the existence of many unsolved problems concerning the periodization, that is, the identification of different political phases; the evaluation of several factors, for instance, the weight of the past and the type of continuity, if any, with the fascist period; the existence and, if possible, the construction of a common and shared memory, and the transformation of the political system that has characterized Italy in the postwar period. While the historical debate is undoubtedly quite rich, it has also become considerably politicized, even more so in the past decade.