Fin de Siècle Crisis in Italy and Great Britain as narrated by intellectuals

A “presentiment of crisis” began to dawn on the intellectual/political debate from the mid 1890’s on, stemming basically from one question: would the parliamentary system devised by the nineteenth century manage to adapt to the new social and economic conditions on the horizon? Would it find new equilibriums and modern mechanisms to absorb the pressures of an increasingly complex and politicised society? The idea was indeed going the rounds of Europe that the “era of parliaments” was coming to an end; like all things, it had known its “golden age” and had started on the downward slope ever since “the absent third party, the people proper, had entered the scene” . Entry of the ‘third party’ to the circles of political and economic life was a severe test of the nineteenth-century constitutional system’s delicate equilibrium, with all the trappings of liberal economy and mechanisms for forging and distributing political power.