Introduction

No word occurs more frequently in any discussion of Italian affairs than 'anomalous'. Italy is conventionally held to be anomalous in many spheres: in the nature of its party system; in the democratic but oneparty government which held power throughout the life of the First Republic; in its inability to suppress the systematic use of violence in its territory and to secure for the state what Durkheim termed a 'monopoly of violence'; in its incapacity to construct trusted and efficient institutions; in the mixture of covert and public forces by which the country has been governed; and, underlying all of these, in its idiosyncratic attribution of legitimacy. The process of gaining and conceding legitimacy was, for Max Weber, fundamental to the acceptance of the operation of power in any body politic. Legitimacy is the validation and normalization in a given time and culture of the right to rule. Since it exists at the level of perceptions, ideas, ethics and culture, legitimacy is a relative notion subject to change, not an objective standard to be weighed empirically. Nor is it an absolute, transcendent concept which remains unaltered in time. The self-image of individuals or groups in society alters, and with it the limits of their willingness to underwrite the legitimacy of a particular system of governance. It is a mere cliché to assert that women in the 1990s do not see their social role in the same terms as did their forebears and that, as a consequence, the nature of the polity which they are prepared to view as legitimate has inevitably undergone change. The same is true, if in less dramatic form, of other constituent parts of the Italian body politic.