"Italian history and the core - periphery distinction"

Journal title SOCIETÀ E STORIA
Author/s Georgios Varouxakis
Publishing Year 2020 Issue 2020/168 Language English
Pages 6 P. 375-380 File size 31 KB
DOI 10.3280/SS2020-168009
DOI is like a bar code for intellectual property: to have more infomation click here

Below, you can see the article first page

If you want to buy this article in PDF format, you can do it, following the instructions to buy download credits

Article preview

FrancoAngeli is member of Publishers International Linking Association, Inc (PILA), a not-for-profit association which run the CrossRef service enabling links to and from online scholarly content.

The article commends the very fruitful pairing of cultural and intellectual history in Axe Körner’s America in Italy. It also praises the transnational character of the history represented by the book. It then focuses on the historiographical question of studying particular countries and their historical development in terms of centres and peripheries. Using some examples from the attitudes towards Italy displayed in the mid-nineteenth century by highly influential thinkers in Britain and France (Matthew Arnold and Auguste Comte respectively) it suggests that, either such distinctions have to be abolished altogether, or, if they are employed, then Italy certainly was part of the core/centre of European and world history.

Keywords: Italy, core-periphery, "great nations", Matthew Arnold, Auguste Comte

  1. Arnold M. (1859), England and the Italian Question, in Id., On the Classical Tradition [The Complete Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. I], edited by R. H. Super, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1960, pp. 65-96.
  2. Comte A. (1875-1877), System of Positive Policy: Or Treatise on Sociology, Instituting the Religion of Humanity, London, Longmans, Green, and Co. (1851-54).
  3. Comte A. (1877), The Synthetical Presentation of the Future of Man, in Id. (1875-1877), vol. 4.
  4. Comte A. (1975), Cours de Philosophie Positive, ed. by Jean-Paul Enthoven, 2 vols., Paris, Hermann. Pickering M. (2018), Conclusion: The Legacy of Auguste Comte, in Bourdeau M., Pickering M., Schmaus W. (eds.), Love, Order, & Progress: The Science, Philosophy, & Politics of Auguste Comte, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 250-304.
  5. Varouxakis G. (2007), “Great” versus “small” nations: size and national greatness in Victorian political thought, in Bell D. (ed.), Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 136-158.
  6. Varouxakis G. (2019), The Godfather of “Occidentality”: Auguste Comte and the Idea of “the West”, in «Modern Intellectual History», vol. 16, n. 2, pp. 411-441.
  7. Vernon R. (1986), Comte and the Withering Away of the State, in Id., Citizenship and Order: Studies in French Political Thought, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, pp. 125- 245.
  8. Vernon R. (2005), Friends, Citizens, Strangers: Essays on Where We Belong, Toronto, University of Toronto Press.

Georgios Varouxakis, "Italian history and the core - periphery distinction" in "SOCIETÀ E STORIA " 168/2020, pp 375-380, DOI: 10.3280/SS2020-168009