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PARTISAN REVIEW
But despite some superficial changes on the Italian political landscape,
recent history seems to have had very little effect on the parochialism of
intellectuals here . The same might be said (and certainly should be said)
of American intellectuals. But while geography limits the damage of our
provincialism, the Italians are rooted in a continent that is feeling the fi–
nal , and perhaps most powerful, tremors of its twentieth-century history.
What makes political debate so discouraging in Italy today is that its in–
tellectuals seem utterly unaware of what is happening around them and
still act as if they were on the Siennese Campo.
*
The neighborhood rivalries of Italian intellectuals have been rigidly
fixed since World War II and are perfectly transparent to everyone in–
volved. It is simply taken for granted that the government will be domi–
nated by the right and that this obliges all thinking and feeling creatures
to remain loyal to the idea of
La sinistra.
Although there have been im–
portant anticommunist liberals and social democrats of the center (Croce
before the war, Chiaromonte, Silone, and Bobbio after it), the fact re–
mains that cultural life is almost the exclusive reserve of the left and is
likely to remain so. This array of political and intellectual forces was not
peculiar to Italy, of course; it developed throughout Europe after the
war and remained strong until recently. But there are special reasons why
the cultural canyon between institutional politics and intellectual politics
that is disappearing elsewhere (in France, in Spain) still remains wide
here .
The most important reason is that Italy's radically atomized system of
proportional representation has guaranteed the continuous dominance of
the Christian Democrats (DC), the most retrograde conservative party in
Europe. Italy has seen fifty governments come and go over the past forty–
three years, but all of them have been dominated by the same figures of
the
partitocrazia;
seven alone have been headed by the cynical and ruthless
Giulio Andreotti (DC), the country's current prime minister. The party
represents nothing - programatically, culturally, intellectually. Indeed, it
has never won a clear majority in any recent election. But the existence
of the Italian Communist Party always guaranteed it the right to form a
governing coalition. During most of the postwar period the Communists
garnered nearly as many votes as the DC, but the Party's unwillingness
either to break fully with its Stalinist past (even under Enrico Berlinguer),
or to condemn unequivocally the terrorism of the 1970s, left the small
centrist parties little choice but to hold their collective nose and join
with the DC. Culturally, this compromise encouraged most intellectuals
and artists to side with the left, if only to defend their independence
from the DC - and even at the risk of then sacrificing that independence
to the Party. As occurred under the French Fourth Repub
