British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism 1805-2005
Abstract
The Religion of the Nation: Mazzini and Nationalism as Political Religion
Simon Levis Sullam, Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia
The paper explores the genealogy of Mazzini's nationalism in the context of the European thought of the post-revolutionary period, Romanticism and the age of Restauration. It traces back its origins particularly to Saint-Simonianism, Catholic Liberalism and the romantic and religious tendencies they inherit and synthesize. It emphasizes particularly the authoritarian and irrationalistic elements of Mazzini's thought. Concentrating on key concepts such as 'nationality' and 'national mission', it shows through a genalogy that reaches back to De Maistre and counter-revolutionary thought, that Mazzini's conception of the nation implies a relevant role of God or the Divinity in the genesis and existence of the nation. This conception partly vanifies the democratic notion of the revolutionary nation founded on popular sovereignity. Mazzini's ideas and his new "political style" appear within nineteenth-century political thought as one of the most explicit attempts to make of nationalism a political religion, that is a set of myths and symbols which subordinate individual and collective existence to the realization of a supreme aim: the nation. These tendencies belong to a broader context in which national myths, the roles and destinies of nations and their histories represent the texture of a political culture of nationalism, developing between 1797 and 1848 as the new collective faith of Europe.