The Liberty of Servants: Berlusconi's Italy by Maurizio Viroli & Antony Shugaar

Author:Maurizio Viroli & Antony Shugaar [Viroli, Maurizio & Shugaar, Antony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Leadership, History & Theory, Political Science, Political Process, Executive Branch, American Government, General
ISBN: 9781400840274
Google: IfjXSsebs3QC
Goodreads: 12657553
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

THE PATH TO FREEDOM

The Italians, at least the better individuals among that people, succeeded in being reborn from servitude to liberty when they developed a healthy scorn for the life of a courtier. It is during the Risorgimento that we find the most impassioned invectives against the court. Even as moderate a political thinker as Vincenzo Gioberti wrote that in the court,

you see “spite in the hearts, falsehood in the faces, sweetness in the words, venom in the desires: contempt for simplicity and a celebration of cunning, an undermining of innocence and shrinking before evil, favor elevated to the stars and merit ground down,” as a Jesuit said. . . . Thus the name of courtier is nowadays taken to signify in men a quality that is less than entirely honorable, and in women a shameful position. The courts not only pervert ideas, render effeminate and corrupt the mores, encourage ignorance, false and frivolous learning, idleness, pleasure, pride, and greed on the part of the prince, as well as segregating him from the life of the citizens, but they often hinder and lead astray the business of the public, creating in opposition to an open and juridical government a concealed and illegal government, altering the distributive justice of ranks and splendors, unseating good ministers, elevating the worthless over the worthy, swindlers over the honest, the wicked over the virtuous, preparing national revolutions with palace coups, and scheming in short to lay the foundations of an incessant, tireless, effective conspiracy against the better nature of the prince and the happiness of the fatherland. But to reform and abolish all courts (although it is not impossible) is far easier to wish than to execute.1

A few years later, Giuseppe Verdi, adding to his words the immense power of music, had Rigoletto swear the following curse: “My hate upon you, sneering courtiers!” (Cortigiani vil razza dannata!). Benedetto Croce—and the coincidence truly is one of those that make us stop and think—reminded his compatriots, as the long night of Fascism was drawing to an end, that the rebirth began with contempt for the court. The “new Italians” who had fought and suffered for national redemption, detested the Italy of the courtiers, the Italy in which “the body of political precepts did not go beyond the recommendation of cunning, not even crowned, as in Machiavelli, by the poetic vision of a man of cunning and violence, who might expel foreigners from Italy and unite the country into a powerful state. The citizen had been succeeded by the courtier, the desire to command and govern had been replaced by the desire to serve to one’s own private profit, the capital virtue towards that end being prudence with the other allied shrewdnesses and simulations.”2

Although predictions are always chancy things in the field of politics, it appears unlikely that the enormous power that has been established in Italy can be replaced by a power that is other than that of the court. There is no political leader on the horizon who truly wishes to, or would be capable of, freeing Italy from the courts.

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