La crisi della politica classica nel Novecento (The Crisis of Classical Politics in the Twentieth Century), by Alberto Palazzi (Rubbettino 2007), treats the psychological reality of subversive policies of the twentieth century, and deals both with the fascist subversive politicizations and those of the extreme left. The analysis of the essay focuses on the anthropological notion of identity, meant as the absolute human need to understand the obligations which we must accept in order to live in the social context where we happened to be born. The twentieth century has witnessed subversive politicizations (usually said ideological, or totalitarian) of a special quality and unknown in the past because the complex of historical events generated a humanity that is emancipated from the obligations of traditional systems, and yet is unable to understand and feel the culture of its time as its own culture. That is, because it has generated social subjects that are devoid of identity and needing to find the way to acquire one.

The subversive politicizations, with all their aggressiveness and cruelty, exist because there are human subjects who need to qualify themselves through simplified cultural schemes, which are inadequate to describe realistically their experience of social life. Thus, as regards the nature of fascist forms, La crisi della politica classica nel Novecento states that much light still comes from the school of Frankfurt (especially from the sociology and philosophy of Theodor Adorno), which can be read purified by both Marxist prejudices and psychoanalitical assumptions, replacing the Marxist attitude with a simple political and historiographical realism, and the psychoanalysis with a mere observational psychology. The subject of political fascist forms is nothing but humanity whose horizon is locked up within kitsch, namely within appearances of acculturation that is achieved through the mere seizure of the outer involucre of the forms of culture.

As for the interpretation of extreme left politicizations, La crisi della politica classica nel Novecento does not proceed with the simple analogy to fascism, but develops an unprecedented hypothesis. The idea developed in the essay is that we need to reflect on an anthropological phenomenon which has never obtained any attention, despite being under the eyes of all of us who have experienced something of the politicizations of the twentieth century, at least as witnesses. The extreme left political subject receives typically from political militancy an acculturation that emancipates him inwardly from social constraints that firstly had been accepted as institutions, but does not receive a comprehensive culture that can enable him to know realistically the complexity of the social context in which he lives, and to compete inside it. The horizon of the extreme left political subject is not the kitsch, not the stereotype, but it is rather the naivety that comes from his experience of acculturation where something partial and specialized (some critical knowledge of the economic and political mechanisms in modern society) improperly takes the place of a complete culture, and therefore of a culture capable of tolerance, doubt and irony.

The thesis argued in the essay states that this particular species of acculturation makes the typical behaviour of the extreme left political subjects in the world of the twentieth century comprehensible to us: it makes their particular forms of aggressiveness such as their typical inconsistencies between values and practices clear to us. The attention to this particular kind of acculturation makes understandable even the historiographical mystery of the persecution of road fellows, politically faithful, in Stalin's Soviet Union and in other Communist regimes in the first period of their history.

Whilst the political fascist subject qualifies neurotically as his enemies those who, in his eyes, are a social unattainable Gotha, the extreme left political subject will form an imaginary enemy through a quite different kind of mental process. Where there is a communist political system, the extreme left political subject left has built a world fit to its specific and limited cultural ability to understand social structures, and what he can not tolerate is what tends to reconstitute the social values (and its implied hierarchies) that he subverted: therefore his most feared enemy is neither the weak, nor the marginalized man, nor the explicit bearer of traditional values, nor even the aware and declared opponent, but it is he who actually restores a traditional social hierarchy with his behaviour. When the communist regimes become stable as true political systems according to their principles, the one who actually restores the traditional social forms is not the self-aware opponent, but rather is the competent and politically trustworthy technician, or anyone who excels in any aspect of social life: even the one who is guilty of playing too well football does something that can be perceived as hostile (and in fact, for example, Stalin purges did not save the impolitic champions of the football club Spartak Moscow). The extreme left political subject elects neurotically the social hierarchy of his own world as his enemy, the hierarchy produced by his own political story: this new hierarchy was persecuted at the time of Stalin, and again in China during the time of the Cultural Revolution.

This motivation is never explicit, and it could never be expressed explicitly, because it is a human condition upon which no reflection falls either from those who live inside it, or by those who observe it from outside. The hypothesis of La crisi della politica classica nel Novecento, documented through fragments of unaware witness isolated in the great mass of documents and chronicles, is that considering this dimension can make us understand the social consensus around Stalin system, and even the apparently unjustified persecutions that occurred at that time.

Through the definition of the mental forms that are specific to fascist and extreme left political actors, La crisi della politica classica nel Novecento gives us an objective rationalization of what has happened on the European soil in the era of the great eclipse of the capacity to act politically, the eclipse that began with the assassination of Sarajevo and began to be solved with the return to reason in the spring of 1945. Without moralism and without apology, the book helps us to think of the tragedy of the generation between 1914 and 1945 as something belonging to the past, and no longer to the present.

Biographic Note

Alberto Palazzi was born in 1959 in Bolzano (Northern Italy), and has lived for a long time in Rome, where he works in information technology. Independent scholar after graduating in philosophy, he deals with the philosophical issue of the relationship between the corporeity of thought and the objectivity of logical judgements. La crisi della politica classica nel Novecento is a contribution to the philosophy of politics, but also an application of his research about the conditions in which the human judgement becomes real in the conditions of existence.