85105 - ITALIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT (1) (LM)

Conoscenze e abilità da conseguire

At the end of the course, students will have the tools for gaining a basic understanding of the theoretical and practical issues debated in the history of Italian political thought in the modern and contemporary ages. By directly analysing the sources, students will define the theoretical specificities of the main authors of the history of Italian political thought and relate these to one another, communicating them in an effective, coherent way.

Contenuti

This course will examine how in different historical moments ranging from the 16th century to the end of the 20th century some of the most renowned Italian thinkers have figured out the people and the multiple facets this notion has assumed in modern politics.

After a short theoretical and methodological introduction, the course will be structured in four parts, respectively focused on:

- Niccolò Machiavelli's ideas on civil principality and popular republic, which emphasize the collective virtù and the conflictual agency of the people, and Giovanni Botero's theories on the reason of state intended as a tool for achieving a firm domination over peoples through a careful government of the population;

- The way in which 19th century writers such as Giacomo Leopardi and especially Alessandro Manzoni have represented the Italian people and envisioned the role of literature in the development of a modern and national consciousness in the aftermath of the French Revolution;

- Antonio Gramsci's analysis of the shortcomings of the Italian process of national unification and its efforts to reckon with the emergence of modern mass societies and develop new strategies aimed at the involvement of the subaltern classes in political life;

- The critical positions of contemporary thinkers such as Mario Tronti and Giorgio Agamben, who have both challenged the image of the people intended as a unitary and homogeneous political subject in one case from an heterodox marxist viewpoint, in the other from a biopolitical perspective.

Testi/Bibliografia

A reading list including selected passages or chapters from Machiavelli's Prince and Discourses on Livy; Botero's Reason of State; Leopardi's Zibaldone; Manzoni's Bethroted; Gramsci's Prison  Notebooks and Tronti's and Agamben's essays will be presented to the students attending classes during the course and will constitute the basic bibliography for the final examination.

The bibliography for non attending students will be indicatively based on the following groups of texts (including sources and at least a critical essay that can serve as a guide):

Group A

N. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (any edition, Book I, chapters 1-13, 16-20, 37, 55, 58; Book II, chapters 1-2, 17-18, 20, 29; Book III, chapter 1, 8-9)

N. Machiavelli, The Prince (any edition)

F. Del Lucchese, The Political Philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2015 (pp. 1-113).

Group B

G. Botero, The Reason of State, Cambridge University Press

M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2007 (particularly pp. 87-134; 227-361)

Group C

A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. by Q. Hoare - G. Nowell Smith, New York, New York International Publisher, 2014 (pp. 1-276).

J. Schwarzmantel, The Routledge Guidebook to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, London-New York, Routledge, 2015 (pp. 1-212).

Group D

M. Tronti, selections from Workers and Capital [a partial English online translation is available at http://libcom.org/library/operai-e-capitale-mario-tronti, a complete book translation is about to be published by Verso Books].

S. Wright, Storming Heaven. Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, London, Pluto Press, 2002.

Group E

G. Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998.

G. Agamben, Means without End, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

R. ten Bos, Giorgio Agamben and the Community Without Identity, «The sociological Review", n. 53 (supplement 1), 2005: 16-29.

A. Norris, Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead, «Diacritics», vol. 30, n. 4, Winter 2000: 38-58

K. Attel, Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power, «Diacritics», vol. 39, n. 3, Fall 2009: 35-53.

Metodi didattici

Classwork will be structured in part as lectures aimed at introducing the different authors, their context and their fundamental arguments, in part as a reading and collective discussion of their texts.

Modalità di verifica e valutazione dell'apprendimento

Attending students may choose either to take a full oral exam based on the texts analyzed in class and aimed at testing their ability to read the sources and illustrate and connect their fundamental arguments or to propose a paper on a specific topic and discuss it as part of the oral exam, during which it will be in any case necessary to display an overall understanding of the topics discussed during the lectures.

Non attending students will have to choose at least two of the groups of texts listed above.

At any rate, non attending students or students who cannot attend classes with regularity are strongly recommended to get in touch with the professor before the exam in order to have more detailed information and set a specific program according to the necessities.

In order to receive a high final grade, students should show their capacity to correctly analyze the sources and to clearly and critically discuss about the issues that we will address during classes. An acceptable knowledge of the texts and the capacity of grasping the basic content of the lectures will receive a lower or sufficient assessment. An unclear or significantly inaccurate exposition of the texts and the course's contents will be evaluated as insufficient to pass the examination.

Strumenti a supporto della didattica

Slides

Orario di ricevimento

Consulta il sito web di Antonio Del Vecchio