Rediscovering History in the face of “fast thinking” and making space for the values of European democracy
Rediscovering and studying history more and better. Not only because it is magistra vitae (life’s teacher) and can teach us something pragmatic, but above all because understanding the tensions of the past and the strength of roots increases awareness of the importance of choice and of the main cultural, social and political options by which values, passions and interests should be guided.
In such controversial times, when the rhetoric of force and the arrogance of interests triumph over the cultures of respect and dialogue and the values of diversity (the essence of liberal democracy, the “good soul” of the difficult twentieth century), learning to deal with history and its truths helps us to understand how we can continue to be responsible and conscious citizens. Citizens of a society in which we can cultivate the best legacies of the past and bequeath to our own children and grandchildren a social capital of democratic culture, without ideologies, but above all without authoritarian tendencies and without forgetting the failures of totalitarian regimes that have passed but are far from having disappeared.
Which history? Political and military history. Economic and social history. Public history and global history. The history of great events. Not only “high” culture, but also material culture (food, the home, clothing, crafts and industry, consumption and customs, the simplicity of which was documented by the French school of the Annales). Homeland history. And its connections with the histories of other peoples and other countries. Because no man is an island, as the great English poet John Donne taught us. No valley is isolated. And no one is enough on their own.
Identity, the best, the most fruitful, is not in the subject but in relationships, according to the philosophical lesson of Emmanuel Lévinas. And especially for us Italians and Europeans, our history, the history of the Mediterranean, of conflicts and confrontation, of clashes and trade, shows how, in the long course of our history, the harshness of wars has been balanced and overcome by the intelligence of dialogue and exchange. To gain an understanding of this, it is worth rereading the lucid works of Fernand Braudel and the equally wise and profoundly poetic writings of Predrag Matvevic, starting with his “Mediterranean – A Cultural Landscape”, one of the most important books of the twentieth century.
Read about history. Write about history, knowing that this means following the strict discipline of “giving dates their physiognomy” (Walter Benjamin), with great respect for facts and data, avoiding unscrupulous manipulation and falsification. And write history, with a sense of responsibility. Constantly seeking links with other disciplines, literature and art, philosophy and mathematics, sociology, psychology, law, physics and chemistry. Humanistic knowledge and scientific knowledge. Anthropology and economics.
The professors at the Catholic University of Milan who are advocating a “Doctorate in Economic History: Firms, Institutions, Cultures” are right. As are the historians, lawyers and economists, such as Giuliano Amato, Piero Barucci, Pierluigi Ciocca, Claudio De Vincenti, Elsa Fornero, Giorgio La Malfa, Romano Prodi, Alberto Quadrio Curzio, Paolo Savona and Ignazio Visco, who published an appeal (Il Sole24Ore, 29 January) to political and academic forces to “save the doctorate in economic history” and restore it to the place it deserves in the educational and research contexts of our universities.
History, in short, as a pillar of “polytechnic culture” and of business culture. Working broadly and, at the same time, deeply. Quite the opposite of the bad habits so fashionable on social media and the unfortunately successful propaganda inspired by the “simplification of fast thinking” (“the wise admonition of Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, demonstrating the profound impact of psychological aspects on economic decisions”).
These attitudes, on the other hand, are an essential part of the cultural and moral heritage of our Europe, which today is uncertain and perhaps even lost in the face of the challenges of a geopolitical framework dominated by imperious giants, from the United States to Russia and China, and by Big Tech, which despises democracy. A Europe that must rediscover its pride, its power and its awareness of its strengths (democracy and the market, the values of individual enterprise and the spread of prosperity, the capacity for scientific discovery and the simplicity of critical thinking). A Europe that, in spite of everything, is the master of its own destiny. A better Europe than the one we have seen at work.
In this context, Giulio Tremonti is right, as a critic of the regulatory and bureaucratic distortions of the EU (“twenty lost years”) and as a politician with a solid liberal culture. He insists on the need to re-read carefully one of the historic founding documents of the Europe to which we belong, the “Ventotene Manifesto”, and from there to start talking again about the single currency and the single army, development policies and the continent’s geopolitical role (Il Foglio, 18 February).
This “Manifesto for a Free and United Europe” was written in 1941 by three young intellectuals, Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi and Eugenio Colorni, who were imprisoned by the Fascist regime on the island of Ventotene during one of the darkest moments in history (when the Nazi armies occupied a large part of the continent). Published in 1944, before the end of the war, and disseminated thanks to the initiative of an extraordinary woman, Ursula Hirshmann, the Ventotene Manifesto became one of the founding texts of European integration, thanks to the planning intelligence and generous political vision of a ruling class (Adenauer, De Gasperi, Schuman, Monnet and Spaak, the “Fathers of Europe”) capable of integrating national interests and European values. And many of those inspirations are still relevant today: the single market, the single currency, the single tax, the single army: “the currency” and “the sword”, economic relations and political democracy.
The recent Letta and Draghi reports on the single market and European investment (worth a trillion a year over ten years, with debt instruments on the markets from an EU that is finally cohesive and therefore authoritative) provide important pointers on what to do and how to do it, in order to respond promptly to US pressure, which in the Trump era has never been so unfriendly, and to the machinations of other great and powerful actors on the international scene. A Europe that, to quote Draghi’s words before the European Parliament, must finally “act as a single state” (Corriere della Sera, 19 February).
Italy, the founding country of the EU, has a fundamental role to play. And the underlying cultures that inspired the Quirinal, from president to president, can help in this process of recovery and redemption. They include the democratic socialism of Sandro Pertini, the Christian Democratic thought of Oscar Luigi Scalfaro (who accompanied the leader Alcide De Gasperi and the young Aldo Moro from the Constituent Assembly), the activism and liberal democracy of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the profoundly Italian and constitutional communism of Giorgio Napolitano, the depth of Catholic social values and the institutional passion of Costantino Mortati (who taught constitutional law to the generations that entered university at the end of the 1960s), so dear to Sergio Mattarella. Diversity in the unity of the Republic’s institutional culture. Deep democratic values. The strength of the historical roots of our essential democracies and the cornerstones of a better future, which we owe our children and grandchildren. Europeans.
(Photo Getty Images)
Rediscovering and studying history more and better. Not only because it is magistra vitae (life’s teacher) and can teach us something pragmatic, but above all because understanding the tensions of the past and the strength of roots increases awareness of the importance of choice and of the main cultural, social and political options by which values, passions and interests should be guided.
In such controversial times, when the rhetoric of force and the arrogance of interests triumph over the cultures of respect and dialogue and the values of diversity (the essence of liberal democracy, the “good soul” of the difficult twentieth century), learning to deal with history and its truths helps us to understand how we can continue to be responsible and conscious citizens. Citizens of a society in which we can cultivate the best legacies of the past and bequeath to our own children and grandchildren a social capital of democratic culture, without ideologies, but above all without authoritarian tendencies and without forgetting the failures of totalitarian regimes that have passed but are far from having disappeared.
Which history? Political and military history. Economic and social history. Public history and global history. The history of great events. Not only “high” culture, but also material culture (food, the home, clothing, crafts and industry, consumption and customs, the simplicity of which was documented by the French school of the Annales). Homeland history. And its connections with the histories of other peoples and other countries. Because no man is an island, as the great English poet John Donne taught us. No valley is isolated. And no one is enough on their own.
Identity, the best, the most fruitful, is not in the subject but in relationships, according to the philosophical lesson of Emmanuel Lévinas. And especially for us Italians and Europeans, our history, the history of the Mediterranean, of conflicts and confrontation, of clashes and trade, shows how, in the long course of our history, the harshness of wars has been balanced and overcome by the intelligence of dialogue and exchange. To gain an understanding of this, it is worth rereading the lucid works of Fernand Braudel and the equally wise and profoundly poetic writings of Predrag Matvevic, starting with his “Mediterranean – A Cultural Landscape”, one of the most important books of the twentieth century.
Read about history. Write about history, knowing that this means following the strict discipline of “giving dates their physiognomy” (Walter Benjamin), with great respect for facts and data, avoiding unscrupulous manipulation and falsification. And write history, with a sense of responsibility. Constantly seeking links with other disciplines, literature and art, philosophy and mathematics, sociology, psychology, law, physics and chemistry. Humanistic knowledge and scientific knowledge. Anthropology and economics.
The professors at the Catholic University of Milan who are advocating a “Doctorate in Economic History: Firms, Institutions, Cultures” are right. As are the historians, lawyers and economists, such as Giuliano Amato, Piero Barucci, Pierluigi Ciocca, Claudio De Vincenti, Elsa Fornero, Giorgio La Malfa, Romano Prodi, Alberto Quadrio Curzio, Paolo Savona and Ignazio Visco, who published an appeal (Il Sole24Ore, 29 January) to political and academic forces to “save the doctorate in economic history” and restore it to the place it deserves in the educational and research contexts of our universities.
History, in short, as a pillar of “polytechnic culture” and of business culture. Working broadly and, at the same time, deeply. Quite the opposite of the bad habits so fashionable on social media and the unfortunately successful propaganda inspired by the “simplification of fast thinking” (“the wise admonition of Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, demonstrating the profound impact of psychological aspects on economic decisions”).
These attitudes, on the other hand, are an essential part of the cultural and moral heritage of our Europe, which today is uncertain and perhaps even lost in the face of the challenges of a geopolitical framework dominated by imperious giants, from the United States to Russia and China, and by Big Tech, which despises democracy. A Europe that must rediscover its pride, its power and its awareness of its strengths (democracy and the market, the values of individual enterprise and the spread of prosperity, the capacity for scientific discovery and the simplicity of critical thinking). A Europe that, in spite of everything, is the master of its own destiny. A better Europe than the one we have seen at work.
In this context, Giulio Tremonti is right, as a critic of the regulatory and bureaucratic distortions of the EU (“twenty lost years”) and as a politician with a solid liberal culture. He insists on the need to re-read carefully one of the historic founding documents of the Europe to which we belong, the “Ventotene Manifesto”, and from there to start talking again about the single currency and the single army, development policies and the continent’s geopolitical role (Il Foglio, 18 February).
This “Manifesto for a Free and United Europe” was written in 1941 by three young intellectuals, Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi and Eugenio Colorni, who were imprisoned by the Fascist regime on the island of Ventotene during one of the darkest moments in history (when the Nazi armies occupied a large part of the continent). Published in 1944, before the end of the war, and disseminated thanks to the initiative of an extraordinary woman, Ursula Hirshmann, the Ventotene Manifesto became one of the founding texts of European integration, thanks to the planning intelligence and generous political vision of a ruling class (Adenauer, De Gasperi, Schuman, Monnet and Spaak, the “Fathers of Europe”) capable of integrating national interests and European values. And many of those inspirations are still relevant today: the single market, the single currency, the single tax, the single army: “the currency” and “the sword”, economic relations and political democracy.
The recent Letta and Draghi reports on the single market and European investment (worth a trillion a year over ten years, with debt instruments on the markets from an EU that is finally cohesive and therefore authoritative) provide important pointers on what to do and how to do it, in order to respond promptly to US pressure, which in the Trump era has never been so unfriendly, and to the machinations of other great and powerful actors on the international scene. A Europe that, to quote Draghi’s words before the European Parliament, must finally “act as a single state” (Corriere della Sera, 19 February).
Italy, the founding country of the EU, has a fundamental role to play. And the underlying cultures that inspired the Quirinal, from president to president, can help in this process of recovery and redemption. They include the democratic socialism of Sandro Pertini, the Christian Democratic thought of Oscar Luigi Scalfaro (who accompanied the leader Alcide De Gasperi and the young Aldo Moro from the Constituent Assembly), the activism and liberal democracy of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the profoundly Italian and constitutional communism of Giorgio Napolitano, the depth of Catholic social values and the institutional passion of Costantino Mortati (who taught constitutional law to the generations that entered university at the end of the 1960s), so dear to Sergio Mattarella. Diversity in the unity of the Republic’s institutional culture. Deep democratic values. The strength of the historical roots of our essential democracies and the cornerstones of a better future, which we owe our children and grandchildren. Europeans.
(Photo Getty Images)