Much more so than in the recent past, the eyes of Europe and even of the world are on Italy. This attention does not derive from any innovative solutions that Italy may have offered to the grave problems which today face modern states: those of environmental pollution, of unemployment, of racism, of declining political legitimacy. Rather, Italy has attracted intense scrutiny for two principal reasons. First, because certain courageous magistrates, both in Palermo and Milan, have waged an unprecedented and dramatic war against criminal organizations and political corruption, and this in one of the most corrupt democracies in Europe. Their lead has been taken up in France and Spain, and their actions studied by colleagues as far away as Japan and Argentina. Unexpectedly, the Italian state has produced and allowed space for a group of public servants who have earned admiration on a global scale.

It is now generally accepted that the members of the Constituent Assembly who were charged with drafting the Constitution concentrated their efforts on formulating the ideals to be expressed in it at the expense of the institutional arrangements of the new Republic. This has generally been viewed as resulting from a combination of two factors: their weak grasp of the liberal principles underpinning liberal parliamentary democracy, and a concomitant error of judgement in assuming that sufficient stress on the ideals of the Constitution would guarantee the basis of a healthy democracy. This article sets out to examine the input of the most influential Catholic group, the dossettiani, and argues, against the error of judgement thesis, that in fact their rejection of the concept of the secular state was a more fundamental denial of important principles of a pluralist democracy than has usually been supposed. The article also places their contribution within the context of the Church's aim to create a ‘Christian civilization’, and further suggests that the model of Catholic Action which inspired its collateral vision of Catholic forces was corrosive of a pluralist vision of correct institutional arrangements. The article ends by suggesting that these factors may have weighed more heavily on subsequent distortions of Italian democracy than has so far been supposed.

The Christian Democrat Party (DC) is at the centre of the current Italian political crisis. It was in some measure responsible for precipitating it and is now suffering the backlash. Unless we take account of the central role that the DC played for so long within the Italian political system, we shall not be able to explain its centrality in the current crisis.

This paper addresses the question of the demise or resilience of political subcultures in Italy today, focusing on two areas, Sesto San Giovanni and Erba, characterized until recently by a socialist/communist subculture and a Catholic/interclassist one. The voting behaviour and political values of key social groups, above all industrial workers, in these two towns provides evidence of the persistence and indeed revival of political subcultures in Italy. The paper argues that their function has changed, though. Whereas in the past a political subculture encompassed the whole spatial community, nowadays it appears to represent the interests and needs of specific groups within a territory, thus becoming one of many political instruments and choices open to social actors and voters.

This article explores the reasons for the failure of the Fascist attempts to raise the Italian birth rate through an examination of the pro-natalist campaign in the great industrial and commercial city of Milan and its surrounding province. It then considers one of the specific ways in which the birth rate was kept down - illegal abortion - focusing in particular on the dramatic events surrounding the arrest of an illegal abortionist in the small textile town of Rho in 1928.

From the perspective of the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) and the left generally, the 1989-1994 period can be viewed as a political failure in as far as there was a right-wing outcome (albeit ephemeral) to Italy's transition. Yet, it is a failure which has to be viewed in the context of the deep undercurrents of change at work in Italy in this period and the constraints within which the PDS and its leader, Achille Occhetto, were operating

This article charts the establishment and expansion of the ready-to-wear Max Mara label before the birth of the Max Mara group in 1967. Until recently, little consideration has been given to the evolution of Italian fashion, and few histories of dress or Italian culture even mention its presence before the 1970s. Still fewer acknowledge the crucial emergence of fashionable ready-to-wear in Italy in the 1960s, in which Max Mara played a key role, and which anticipated the international success of ‘Italian style’ in the 1970s and 1980s.

In an interview with William Rees-Mogg, Berlusconi revealed that he had two portraits hanging in his office—those of Mrs Thatcher and of the Emperor Justinian. The place allotted to Mrs Thatcher, the prime exponent of free market economics of our times, can hardly cause surprise, but that given to Justinian is less easily explicable. Berlusconi is not known for his passion for the history and politics of the Byzantine Empire, so the Justinian on whom Berlusconi rests his eyes at critical moments must be the Justinian of Dante, whom Berlusconi would have studied in school. Dante gave Justinian a place in Paradiso as the very prototype of the law-giver and founder of a new political and legal order, so Berlusconi's cult of Justinian can be taken as indicative of a self-image as founder of new order. But there is another, more covert factor. Democracy in any sense was alien to Justinian, who as Emperor of the East enjoyed a sway unknown to any leader of a modern democratic state, and one paralleled in western societies only by the absolute power afforded to the owner of a contemporary business empire, like Ford Corporation, ICI or indeed Fininvest; or the leader of an idiosyncratic, autocratic political movement like Forza Italia.

The southern question has been posed at the key moments in the history of the Italian state. Today we face a moment of comparable importance which urges that the southern question be re-thought. It is not an unchanging question, yet it concerns issues fundamental to the state and has been treated by the country's greatest intellectuals as a national issue. The meridionalisti have been Italy's critical conscience yet, at the same time, stereotypes of a uniformly backward South have taken hold. The post-war intervention in the Mezzogiorno should not be seen through such stereotypes as a wholly negative experience. Its successes and failures fit into an Italian pattern of state-led modernization and it cannot be understood in isolation from the Italian state's weaknesses. Today, a new pact between the weakest and strongest sectors is essential. The South's economic and political leadership will be a central object of study if intellectuals are to help inform new policy.

Wholesale party system transformation is exceedingly rare. Indeed, in taking place within a broadly democratic framework and independently of constitutional change Italy's experience is probably unique. This paper argues that the referendums of 1991 and 1993, and the mobilization of the electorate from early 1990 associated with them, played a significant and not always well understood role in the transformation of the Italian party system.

The satirical film, Un americano a Roma is examined as a commentary on the absorption by Italians, and especially Italian youth, of fads and fashions deriving from America during the economic boom. Although no masterpiece, the film is an important reflection on Italian identity at a time of rapid and bewildering change. It reveals that, while America became ‘everyone's second culture’, loyalty to domestic traditions and customs remained strong.

Many Italian institutions deteriorated in the 1980s as the struggle to consolidate and extend party influence led to the spoils system (lottizzazione) becoming the norm throughout virtually the whole of the public sector. Yet perhaps none was more affected than the public broadcasting company RAI. Once an organization with a strong corporate identity and sense of mission, it lost its sense of purpose as it faced the unprecedented challenge of competition from an unregulated private sector and simultaneously became a resource in the unceasing battle for position between parties and factions. By the early 1990s RAI's credibility had declined dramatically, it was riddled with debts, it lacked a strategy, and it was faring badly in the ratings. Yet the full extent of its crisis was revealed only with the collapse of the parties that had for so long ‘protected’ it from serious scrutiny and genuine public accountability.

An examination of the problem of the ‘Italian crises’ from the perspective of the transformations in Italian capitalism will allow this article to develop a theme particularly dear to me: namely the irreducibility of capitalism to economics. The market cannot be seen simply as a series of interpersonal relations governed by prices; it must instead be seen as a relationship between people distorted by the fetishism of commodities.

Political corruption can be considered as a means by which money influences politics. In the classic studies the causes of corruption have usually been identified in the characteristics of the principal actor in the political system: the party. Samuel Huntington, in particular, has linked the development of corruption to party weakness during phases of growing political participation. Corruption spreads in those specific paths to modernization in which popular participation in political decision-making is not immediately accompanied by a strengthening of those institutions, such as political parties, which should filter and direct collective demands: ‘the weaker and less accepted the political parties, the greater the likelihood of corruption’.