Paul Piccone – Natural Born Intellectual … Terroni Surprise: 19th Century Neapolitan Origins of 20th Century Italian Philosophy
Paul Piccone – Natural Born Intellectual … Terroni Surprise: 19th Century Neapolitan Origins of 20th Century Italian Philosophy
(August 6, 2015)
Paul Piccone writes: “Antonio Gramsci’s … articulation of Marxism … finds its origins in nineteenth-century NEAPOLITIAN neo-Hegelianism…[which came to] DOMINATE twentieth-century ITALIAN CULTURE overwhelmingly." (“Italian Marxism”, p. 1 emp.+) /// Given this dominant “Neapolitan” role in Italian culture, one would expect that it would be a ‘dominant’ topic in scholarly discourse about Italian culture. Surprise – NOT SO! /// For example, Piccone writes: “Three recent [Italian] works attempting to map out the large and still growing number of Gramsci interpretations hardly mention this [Neapolitan] neo-Hegelian heritage (p.2 fn. 5) /// Piccone characterizes that failure to mention the Neapolitan tradition as “social amnesia”. He refers to: “…academics whose SOCIAL AMNESIA cripples their memory to the immediacy of the present …[and a] general EXHAUSTION OF THOUGHT, which in the desperate effort to hang onto a reef of pseudo-originality in a sea of conformity, exploits ambiguity and confusion to recycle worn-out ideas as fresh insight” (p. ix emp.+) /// To my mind the “social amnesia” Piccone refers to, in the case of Gramsci scholarship, is just one example of the more general manifestation of the northern Italian cultural hegemony over the South … to wit: Terroni-ism. Italian academics function within the hegemonic northern Italian cultural milieu. They simply do not know or care about the South’s history and culture! For example, apart from the philosophical issues associated with Neapolitan neo-Hegelian philosophy and Italian culture, students of the northern Italian Terroni- izing cultural hegemony of the South may recall: born, raised and educated Neapolitan Pino Aprile’s litany of things he did not know about the history and historical culture of his ‘Patria Meridionale’, and the misinformation he was taught in school and inundated with in mass-media. (“Terroni”, p. 1-4) /// Is it not interesting that a southern-Italian immigrant and American university reject [denied tenure at Washington University – St. Louis] should be the one who brings forth the historic fact of nineteenth century Neapolitan influence on twentieth century Italian philosophy and culture? While the northern Italy loving tenured ‘scholars’ in the American university system’s “Italian Studies” programs, quintessential examples of “crippled memories” and “social amnesia” about the South, endlessly write “pseudo-original” works “recycling worn-out ideas” about Dante, Manzoni and northern history and culture generally.
Paul Piccone
Southern-Italian American – “Natural Born Intellectual”
“ The eldest of five brothers, Paul emigrated at the age of fourteen [1954] with his family from L’Aquila, Italy [formerly the second city in the Kingdom of Naples] to the United States and settled in Rochester, NY.
His father was a tailor, and Paul grew up in a self-consciously working-class environment. Leaving high school before graduating, he worked factory jobs for several years until … [his natural born intellect would not be denied].
He completed undergraduate studies at Indiana University and entered the doctoral program in philosophy at SUNY Buffalo, where he received a PhD in 1970. Together with other graduate students at Buffalo, he founded Telos, which in 1968 became the leading New Left journal, attempting to come to terms with the political and intellectual turmoil of those years.
Granted a position in the sociology department at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, Paul published Telos out of his office. As always, he was able to surround himself with a coterie of like-minded students and colleagues to help him.
Owing to promotional problems and tenure in 1970 Paul became a “gypsy scholar” for a couple of years until he moved to New York City, bought an abandoned building in the East Village, and made it (largely by his own physical labor) into his home and office. For more than two decades thereafter, Paul guided his journal as its editor, mentor, and publisher.
Paul Piccone was one of this generation's most influential critical intellectuals, whose analytical work ranged from phenomenological Marxism to analyses of neo-Stalinism in Eastern Europe to Carl Schmitt's geopolitical visions for new modes of civic action.
(for more see http://www.telospress.com/paul-piccone/)
More specifically, regarding “promotional problems and tenure” at Washington University; Russell Jacoby in his book “The Last Intellectuals - American Culture In The Age Of Academe”, writes:
“To summarize one case of academic life outside the limelight … [Paul Piccone] translated, edited, and wrote on European social thought and Marxism; he published extensively not only in the journal he edited, Telos, but elsewhere; his essays, often anthologized, appeared in six languages. He was a veritable dynamo of a scholar and editor; he wrote a prize-winning book on Italian Marxism, which was published by the University of California Press.
He came up for tenure at Washington University in St. Louis with enthusiastic support from a wide spectrum of scholars, including:
- Daniel Bell ("I would unhesitatingly recommend Mr. Piccone for promotion and tenure.... [He] has been in the forefront of a necessary effort to introduce a larger philosophical dimension in the thinking of American sociology"),
- Herbert Marcuse ("Professor Piccone's work has been of the greatest significance"),
- Jurgen Habermas ("He is one of the most influential among those philosophers who attempt to develop a social theory.... I highly respect the work and the inspiring influence of Paul Piccone").
His department evaluated the record and voted unanimously to recommend Piccone for tenure, noting: "he is one of the most eminent figures in his field of specialization and has both a nationwide and a worldwide reputation ... an especially effective scholar and researcher ... his publications . . . in many cases [are] brilliant .... Washington University is indeed fortunate to have a person of such high intellectual caliber and whose reputation is outstanding."
Washington University decided that it was not fortunate to have such a person. Piccone was turned down for tenure; he was turned down on the appeal and on the appeal of the appeal.” (e-book location 1443, emp.+)
For especially interesting and eloquent biography of this extraordinary fellow, see:
- “The Trek with Telos: A Remembrance of Paul Piccone” by Timothy Luke (http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/1_2/luke.html)
- “Paul Piccone: Outside Academe” by Russell Jacoby (http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/5_1/Jacoby.html)
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Preface
Knowing Past Cultures through Documents
Disciplines that study the past are differentiated by the nature of the remnants use to study the past: archeologist use cultural materials (e.g. pot shards, weapons, etc.); paleo-anthropologist use petrifications (e.g. bones, footprints, etc.); historians use documents (e.g. newspapers, diaries, etc.); etc.
Two Types of Information about the Past from Documents
The information about the past contained in historical documents may be classified into two generic categories: factual information and cultural. For example, Thucydides wrote “The History of the Peloponnesian War” with the specific intend of recording the factual characteristics of that war. Thus, today we ‘know’ ‘facts’ about that ancient Greek civil war based on this remnant document created almost 2,500 years ago.
However, there is much more information about the ancient Greeks in his book than ‘who’ did ‘what’ to ‘whom’, ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘why’. Indeed, perhaps more important than the facts of the war is the wealth of cultural information about the ancient Greeks that is conveyed implicitly in the book (e.g. religion, morality, philosophy).
By ‘implicitly’, I mean that it was not Thucydides’ intention to write a cultural history of ancient Greece. His purpose was to describe the war – factually. However, it is not possible to write a history about war without conveying cultural values of the societies at war.
Similarly, Paul Piccone’s book “Italian Marxism” is a ‘factual’ history of nineteenth and twentieth century Italian philosophy. However, implicitly it conveys much about Italian “Terroni” culture.
Piccone’s Factual History of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Italian Philosophy
Paul Piccone’s purpose in writing his book “Italian Marxism” is quite unequivocal. He writes:
“…the following pages seek to explain the distinctive character of the ‘Italian Marxism’ developed by Gramsci
… [this book] seeks to …locate the neo-Hegelian tradition within which Gramsci’s Marxism was systematized (p. x emp.+)
“… “Antonio Gramsci’s … articulation of Marxism … finds its origins in nineteenth-century Neapolitan neo-Hegelianism…[which came to] dominate twentieth-century Italian Culture overwhelmingly. (“Italian Marxism”, p. 1 emp.+)
The factual information he provides:
- “neo-Hegelianism” in Italy is unequivocally associated with Naples.
- “Neapolitan neo-Hegelianism came to dominate twentieth century Italian Culture.”
In short, Piccone’s intention is to write a history of Italian philosophy, specifically the role played by nineteenth Century Neapolitan thinkers in the development of twentieth century Italian national philosophy. Factually, he goes on:
“Pasquale Galluppi, a Neapolitan philosopher, in 1831 had translated French versions of Hegel into Italian. (p. 12, fn. 45)
“…the Italian Hegelians – especially the Neapolitans– immediately incorporated Hegel into their projects of cultural and national rejuvenation. In the words of Bertrando Spaventa, who became the most articulate member of the group,
‘Beginning in 1843 in Naples the Hegelian idea penetrated the minds of young cultivators of science … (p14)
“Francesco De Sanctis became a Hegelian during the middle 1840s while studying the other Neapolitan Hegelians. (p. 12 fn. 48)
“There has been an unbroken continuity between such major [Neapolitan] figures in the introduction of Hegelianism in Italy as:
- Francesco De Sanctis [rector university Naples]
- Spaventa brothers [esp. Bernardo, university of Naples]
- Donato Jaja [teacher in Naples]
- Antonil Labriola [student university Naples]
- as well as Gramsci” (p. 2 emp.+)
“Gramsci extends to Marxism the Neapolitan neo-Hegelians’ thesis of ‘the circulation of European thought’… (p. 3 fn 7)
Clearly, students of contemporary Italian philosophy/culture should be apprised of Hegel’s philosophy. However, the typical college student who sits through a lecture on Hegel runs out of the room screaming OMG!! (c’est moi). More generally, philosophy on American campuses is not widely embraced.
{Note: The failure to embrace philosophy is not so much because philosophy is problematic or unappreciated per se. Rather, the “Queen of the Sciences” languishes like her sister disciplines foreign language and math education – victims of the pedagogic wasteland in which they are ‘taught’.
How often does one read in the mass media about how American students underperform in math and languages relative to other industrial countries? The emphasis is always on Students! – as though they are genetically different from their counterparts in other countries. There is never any mention of the profoundly ‘pedagogically challenged’ Teachers who build careers on the backs of failed students.
But that’s another story.}
Accordingly, give this aversion to philosophy; coupled with American paranoia about Marxism, Piccone’s book was destined to be read by few when published in 1983, and fewer still since the ‘fall of the wall’ and the dissolution of the Italian Communist Party – with all the fallacious implications those events have for the relevance of Marx’s ‘philosophy of history’ and Gramsci’s ‘cultural hegemony’.
However, his work is not limited to his explicit factual history of philosophy. It may also be read for the implicit glimpse into post-Risorgimento Terroni-izing cultural hegemony of northern Italy over the South.
Piccone’s ‘Implicit’ South-of-Rome Terroni ‘Cultural History’
While “Italian Marxism” may not be of particular interest for the philosophically unwashed (c’est moi) and anti-Marxist; consistent with the ideas posited above about cultural implication of works, Piccone tacitly provides insight into the southern Italian cultural hegemonic process that has recently and succinctly come to be characterized as “Terroni”.
Two Forms of Cultural Hegemony
There are two aspects to the cultural hegemonic process: aggressive and the sociological version of passive-aggressive.
In the aggressive mode, the operatives of the dominant culture (educators, entertainers, media-ista generally) saturate the dominated masses with the dominant’s class history and culture; i.e. what is taught in schools, shown on TV/movies and presented in mass media.
In the passive-aggressive mode, the dominant cultural operatives simply ignore the history and cultural history of the dominated masses. The history and culture of the dominated is never taught, never present in mass media – it is simply forgotten. (see Aprile’s “Terroni” pages 1-4 for excellent examples of both forms of hegemony)
A quintessential example of both forms of cultural hegemony at work in the Terroni-ization of southern Italian history, which Aprile mentions, is the de facto Garibaldi mythology that passes for history in southern Italy and southern-Italian Americana.
Whereas Garibaldi, a devotee of the Piedmont King (and eventual King of Italy) Victor Emmanuelle II, was the General leading the Piedmont Army’s invasion and conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the subsequent brutal de-humanized subjection of the people south of Rome; nevertheless, Garibaldi has come to be characterized, by dominate northern Italian cultural operatives, as a freedom fighter and liberator of the southern Italians and Sicilians (see “Related Articles# 2).
A similar example of both aggressive and passive aggressive northern Italian hegemon-ification of southern Italian culture can be seen in the i-Italy.org weekly videos “i-Italy TV” (see “Related Articles #1 for a content analysis of those videos)
Passive-Aggressive Gramsci Scholarship
A good example the passive-aggressive form of cultural hegemony in scholarship is the above Gramsci case. By ignoring the Neapolitan origins of Gramsci’s philosophy, it’s presented as de facto northern Italian philosophy, in which the South played no part in Gramsci’s thinking, and the broader Italian philosophical culture. The South is ignored and its cultural history is forgotten. For example, Piccone writes:
“Three recent [Italian] works attempting to map out the large and still growing number of Gramsci interpretation hardly mention this [Neapolitan] Hegelian heritage … Albertelli; Jocteau; Perlini… (p.2 fn. 5 emp.+)
Thus, both the Terroni-ized Southerners and the Terroni-izing Northerners come to believe that the Northern culture is the essence of Italian culture as a whole. Significantly the three books mentioned by Piccone were published in Turin and Milan.
This purging of the South from Gramsci-ism is not limited to Italy. As would be expected, it clearly carries over to English language scholarship as well. For example, Professor James Martin of Goldsmiths, University of London comment on Piccone’s work:
“Recently, Paul Piccone has offered an intriguing exploration of the Hegelian and 'culturist' emphases in Gramsci ... he tries to assimilate Gramsci to a native Italian Hegelian tradition rooted as far back as the 1820s.
“The difficulty here is that the inclusion of Gramsci in this 'tradition' remains problematical given Gramsci’s lack of self-consciousness about Italian Hegelian tradition and his relative lack of attention to these sources.” (“Antonio Gramsci: Intellectual and Political Context”, p 315, fn 13, emp+)
{note: “Native Italian” – a stand-in for Naples and Neapolitan; the words Piccone relentlessly uses.}
Importantly, Ironically and Inadvertently: James here is substantiating the Terroni cultural hegemony argument.
This is to say: Gramsci’s “lack of self-consciousness about Neapolitan Hegelian tradition” and his “lack of attention to Hegelian sources” are precisely what one would expect inasmuch as the history (in this case history of philosophy) of the South had been systematically suppressed and distorted by the Northern hegemonist for at least sixty years (three or more generations) at the time Gramsci was writing.
The historic South to Gramsci is a foreign entity implied by his seminal work “The Southern Question”. The “Question” implies that southern Italy and Sicily are distinct and enigmatic to Northerners.
Thus, it is to be expected that Gramsci would either not be aware of the Neapolitan tradition or not consider it significant; i.e. “lack of attention …lack of self-consciousness.”
However, even though Gramsci “lacks self-consciousness” about the Neapolitan neo-Hegelian philosophic concepts, it does not logically follow that those concepts were not assimilated into his thinking inadvertently.
Piccone notes that Gramsci embraced much of Croce’s philosophy, and Croce much of the Neapolitan Hegelianism. Consistent with James’ Gramsci’s “lacks self-consciousness” thesis, Piccone writes:
“When Gramsci undertook his reconstruction of Italian history … he did not pay any special attention to his 19th century Hegelian heritage …
However Piccone also notes:
“… by [Gramsci’s] time [the Hegelian heritage] had been fully appropriated and ideologically defuse by Croce and Gentile.
[Gramsci’s] account follows the mainlines of contemporary historiography [which] is continuous with [the Neapolitan philosopher] Spaventa’s general analysis.” (“Confronting the Crisis – Writings of Paul Piccone”, p 105 emp.+)
This is to say:
Philosopher A (Gramsci) is a student of philosopher B (Croce)
Philosopher B (Croce) is a student of philosopher C (Spaventa)
Therefore: just because A (Gramsci) did not study (lacked awareness of) C (Spaventa), it does not logically follow that A (Gramsci) has not adopted the concepts of C (Spaventa) via his reading of B (Croce).
On the contrary: it logically and factually follows that Gramscs' philosophy is influenced by the Neapolitian Spaventa.
On the contrary: it logically and factually follows that Gramscs' philosophy is influenced by the Neapolitian Spaventa.
Further, that Neapolitan philosophical/cultural tradition continued to remained unknown for another sixty years after Gramsci, until a southern-Italian American, à la Nietzsche “philosophizing with a hammer”, smashed the northern Italian hegemonic idolatry with impeccable scholarly methods; demonstrating that nineteenth century Neapolitan neo-Hegelian philosophy in fact laid the basis of twentieth century Italian philosophy/culture, to include Gramsci’s own (“lack of conscious”) work.
Moreover, by noting Gramsci’s “lack of awareness” of his Neapolitan intellectual heritage, and the failure of recent scholarship to acknowledge the Neapolitan role in Italian national culture, Piccone has provided implicit evidence of the Terroni-izing cultural hegemon-ification of the South by the North.
Conclusion
How is it: that recent Italian scholars, of no small reputation, such as Gianfranco Albertelli, Gian Carlo Jocteau, and Tito Perlini fail to mention the Neapolitan origins of Gramsci’s and Italian national philosophy?
How is it: that a University of London scholar, when presented with voluminous documentary evidence, still refuses, based on obvious fallacious reasoning, to accept the Neapolitan origins of Gramsci’s and Italian national philosophy?
How is it: that the ‘scholars’ in the American university system’s Italian Studies programs, quintessential examples of “crippled memories” and “social amnesia” about the South, writing“pseudo-original” works “recycling worn-out ideas” about Dante, Manzoni, etc., have nothing to say about the Neapolitan origins of Gramsci’s and Italian national philosophy?
How is it: that a southern-Italian immigrant and American university reject should be the one who brings forth the historic fact of the Neapolitan origins of Gramsci’s and Italian national philosophy and the cultural implication of Terroni-ism?
Good Questions … No?
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