The great Rousseau scholar Judith Shklar was usually more concerned with Rousseau's striking originality - as a psychologist, as a pre-Freudian group psychologist, as the very prototype of the homme revoke- than with his intellectual debts. “His enduring originality and fascination,” she urges in Men and Citizens, “are due entirely to the acute psychological insight with which he diagnosed the emotional diseases of modern civilization.”However, she made two large exceptions in favor of Locke and Fénelon: She thought that Rousseau's debt to the psychological theory of Locke's Essay was huge and central and that his debt to Fenelon's political and moral thought was equally massive. For Rousseau owed to Fénelon nothing less than the legitimation of his obsession with Graeco-Roman antiquity: If an early Genevan reading of Plutarch set off this propensity, it was Fenelon's Telemachus (1699) and Letter to the French Academy (1714) that confirmed and dignified it; thus Fénelon's “Roman” auctohtas and gravitas were worth a great deal. In Shklar's view, Rousseau owed to Fenelon (above all) the notion of seeing and using two ancient "models" of social perfection - a prepolitical “age of innocence” and a fully political age of legislator-caused civic virtue - as foils to modern egoism and corruption. Fenelon’s familiar Utopias of “Betique” (celebrating pastoral innocence) and of “Salente” (depicting legislator-shaped civisme) in Telemachus were, for Shklar, echoed in Rousseau's “happy family” (in La nouvelle Heloise and Lettre a d'Alembert) and in his Spartan-Roman “fantasies” (in Government of Poland and the Social Contract).

Had Rousseau not been centrally concerned with freedom - above all with the voluntariness of morally legitimate human actions - some of the structural features of his political thought would be (literally) unaccountable. Above all, the notion of “general will” would not have become the core idea of his political philosophy: He would just have spoken, á la Plato, of achieving perfect généralité through civic education, as in Republic462b (“do we know of any greater evil for a state than the thing that distracts it and makes it many instead of one, or a greater good than that which binds it together and makes it one?”), or would have settled for Montesquieu's republican esprit général; he would never have spoken of generalizing the will as something central but as difficult as squaring the circle - difficult because one must “denature” particularistic beings without destroying their (ultimate) autonomy. However, one must (for Rousseau) have volonté générale, not a mere esprit général: for “to deprive your will of all freedom is to deprive your actions of all morality,” and “civil association is the most voluntary act in the world.”

Introduction

It is almost inevitable for historians to look back upon the past with an eye on the present, partly because they are influenced by later developments, and partly because contemporary debates relating to culture, politics and society actively lead them to reconsider past events in a new light, bringing out analogies with and meanings for the present. The collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War have accentuated this tendency. This is not surprising, since the most pressing issues facing Italy today, namely, regional disparities, the need for electoral and institutional change (the creation of a 'Second Republic'), clientelism and corruption, and national unity itself, can be considered as the resurfacing of unresolved problems. Now that the period dominated by the Cold War can be encapsulated within a precise time span, and the transition to a Second Republic is proving less smooth than might have been expected in the early 1990s, it is as if Italy's political agenda is being directly linked to concerns which predate that period and go back to the process of unification. One of these debates focuses on questions of nationhood and identity, questions which Italy is asking together with the rest of Europe, since, almost inevitably, such matters become prominent at moments of great political change. Nevertheless, in Italy these questions seem to revolve specifically around the country’s failure to create a collective national identity. According to the sociologist Roberto Cartocci, Italy’s present-day task is still the one d’Azeglio succinctly summarized after unification in his famous saying: ‘Italy is made; now the Italians must be made.’

Introduction

Of what is one writing when one writes a history of Italy? What, if any, is the thread of continuity that allows us to mean the same thing when we refer to Italy at the fall of the Roman Empire, the death of Dante, the French invasions of 1494 or 1796, the Congress of Vienna, unification, the end of the First World War, the fall of Fascism, or the 1994 election? The first aim of this essay is to argue that there is no single thread of continuity, no common plane of analysis of Italian history. When we examine two of the elements that might serve as that thread or plane, geographical space and culture, what we find is that the historiographical utility of the concept of Italy has to be demonstrated rather than assumed. Italy has to be constructed; it is not given to us directly by the historical sources. My second aim is to show that the notion of Italy is an important dimension of Italian history itself. Using examples from the postunification era, I will suggest some of the ways in which varying notions of Italy have informed and been influenced by the key problem of nation- and state-formation.

‘Rock’ is a term that is instantly evocative and frustratingly vague. Rock may mean rebellion in musical form, distorted guitars, aggressive drumming, and bad attitude. But rock has also stood for much more than a single style of musical performance. Very diverse sounds and stars, including country blues, early Bob Dylan, Motown, Otis Redding, Kraftwerk, P-Funk, salsa, Run-DMC, Garth Brooks and Squirrel Nut Zippers, have all been called ‘rock’ at one time or another, even though they are also equally describable as non-rock. If this eclectic set of performers and sounds can be grouped under the heading ‘rock’, it is not because of some shared, timeless, musical essence; rather, specific historical contexts, audiences, critical discourses, and industrial practices have worked to shape particular perceptions of this or that music or musician as belonging to ‘rock’. At the same time, no style or performer is automatically entitled to the ‘rock’ mantle, since rock culture has also been defined historically by its processes of exclusion. The idea of rock involves a rejection of those aspects of mass-distributed music which are believed to be soft, safe or trivial, those things which may be dismissed as worthless ‘pop’ – the very opposite of rock. Instead, the styles, genres and performers that are thought to merit the name ‘rock’ must be seen as serious, significant and legitimate in some way. These various conceptions of rock are made more complicated by the ways in which the meanings of ‘rock’ have shifted over the past four decades, and by how those meanings have been understood in different contexts or by different communities.

Italian silent cinema

On 11 November 1895, Filoteo Albertini applied for a patent on the Albertini Kinetograph, and between 1909 and 1916, the Italian silent cinema represented a major force in world cinema before the hegemony of Hollywood was firmly established. Albertini produced the first feature film with a complex plot - La presa di Roma ('The Taking of Rome', 1905) - a treatment of a patriotic theme, the annexation of the Eternal City to the new Italian state in 1870. The next year, a major production company, CINES, was founded, which enabled Italian films to capture the world market for a brief period. While Italian silent films reflected a variety of genres - Roman costume dramas, adventure films, comedies, filmed drama, even experimental, avant-garde works - the industry's most popular product was the costumed film set in classical antiquity. The period's greatest director was Giovanni Pastrone (1883-1959), whose majestic silent classic Cabiria (1914) established the popularity of the feature film with its depiction of the Second Punic War and influenced D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916).

Introduction

In the second half of the nineteenth century the face of Italy was transformed in a number of different ways. The political effects of national unification, combined with the economic, social and cultural ramifications of industrialization, engendered a new country complete with a new programme of action designed to take it into the twentieth century. The idea of 'newness' permeated many aspects of Italian life, underpinning numerous efforts to define the character of the new nation. The concept of 'Italianness' was also given renewed impetus in this period. A key theme in its formation was the appeal to past strengths: for example, to moments of high cultural achievement when Italy had made a unique impact in the international arena. Nowhere was this Janus-faced orientation - a simultaneous relationship both with the past and with the future - more apparent than in the design of Italy's objects and environments in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth. For five hundred years, through their artistic achievement and their high cultural significance, Italian decorative arts had been preeminent.

Before the second half of the nineteenth century, there was no Socialist movement in Italy, for the conditions that would enhance its development had yet to come into being. Socialist concerns for justice and equality were not lacking in the writings of reformers and patriots of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but they remained, with few exceptions, universal ideals largely untested in concrete, historical arenas of struggle. It was not until the Risorgimento had borne the fruits of Italian unity, providing the stimulus and the basis for the development of capitalism on a national scale, that the Socialist movement could find its channels of political development and ideological growth.

The Italian Socialist Party was formed at the time of the Second Congress of the Italian Workers’Party, held in Genoa in August 1892.The principal decisions taken included the definitive separation between Anarchists and Marxists, and the constitution of a party with a distinctly proletarian base and committed to Marxist principles. The programme voted in 1892 would remain the party’s official platform until 1919. It proclaimed as its end ‘the socialization of the means of work [. . .] and [the] collective control of production’ which could only be achieved by the ‘action of all the proletariat organized in a “class party”.

Today, ownership and control of the media in Italy (the press and television broadcasting in particular) are so important as to determine the outcome of elections, and are a burning issue on the Italian political agenda. For this reason, rather than tell the story of the development of the media chronologically through the twentieth century, this chapter will start by outlining the institutional situation in the 1990s, which is illustrated with some facts and figures, and then proceed to discuss the chronological development of radio.

Who and what are the media for?

Firstly, it is generally agreed that the closer a state approaches to the ideal of democracy, the greater the need of the voters for information on which to base their choice of representatives. They need to know what exactly is happening in the country, what measures the elected representatives are enacting, and what policies candidates for election are proposing. Secondly, a nation coheres partly through values and beliefs concerning the history of its society, the meanings that have been given to life and to both personal and communal activity, as well as a common ‘language’ (verbal, visual, dress-codes, eating habits, etc.) shared or at least discussed by the community. Thirdly, people need to relax and laugh together; solitary people (like the elderly) need contact with others; and creative talent needs to find expression.

Introduction

In the Italy of the second half of the eighteenth century comedy had prevailed over tragedy, with authors such as Carlo Goldoni, Pietro Chiari and Carlo Gozzi. This was superseded by the tragic drama of Vittorio Alfieri, Vincenzo Monti, Ippolito Pindemonte, Ugo Foscolo, Silvio Pellico and Alessandro Manzoni. By the mid-nineteenth century the dearth of original texts for the theatre (the emphasis having shifted to opera) was compensated by the skill of 'great actors' such as Gustavo Modena, Adelaide Ristori, Tommaso Salvini and Ernesto Rossi. This has been referred to as drammaturgia dell'attore, the actor's drama, and it is notable that later, when in the rest of Europe the producer had taken over, in Italy the actor still predominated until at least the 1930s. Indeed, the term regista, 'director', was only coined by the linguist Bruno Migliorini in 1932. Alongside the early nineteenth-century tragedies, in response to the expectations of the emerging bourgeoisie, there was a post-Goldonian vein (as in Augusto Bon, Alberto Nota and others) which took the eighteenth-century dramatist’s realism and regionalism into the following century. Overlapping with this trend, and spreading into the period of verismo, is the first group of playwrights I shall discuss: they belong to the unification period and are representative of teatro a tesi, a theatre primarily concerned with ideas.

The relationship of the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ in popular music is one of the most complex, controversial and significant issues of the new millennium. Scholars have been drawn into the debate from across disciplines and with reference to work on musics from around the world. Arguments are not just academic; they are emotional and political, and concern the personal and the political, the micro and macro. Indeed, in straightforward analytic terms, as descriptions of networks and power relations, ‘global’ and ‘local’ are ill-defined terms, offering multiple vantage points. Whatever else, though, they have become vital for re-assessing questions of cultural imperialism, and that is what I am interested in here. I want to consider the creative and commercial relationships of the ‘local’ and ‘global’ in terms of ‘world’ music: how were these categories established, upon what terms; how are they maintained, to whose advantage (or disadvantage)? For most musicians, the creation and performance of music means involvement in a process : relationships produce music, relationships between musicians, relationships between musicians and their publics. It is in relationships that communication happens, and meanings are produced and felt. The question that interests me, then, is the nature of the local and global networks which motivate and propel the ‘world’ music scene and the relationship processes involved.

Everyone with an interest in pop has opinions about it - about its meanings, value, effects and significance. But some opinions - those of critics and academics, for example - claim more attention than others, largely because they have access to the public ear; and, actually, surprisingly little is known about ordinary fans’ interpretations. Does this matter? Articulate description of musical responses is always rare; but more is at stake here than the familiar ‘mystery’ of music.

The announcement of the 1994 Mercury Music Award, by a panel chaired by noted pop music scholar Simon Frith, led trade magazine Music Week (6 August 1994) to bemoan the involvement of ‘egghead academics and journalists who think too much for their own good’. Thirteen years earlier, the first international conference of the recently formed International Association for the Study of Popular Music was greeted with mocking incredulity in a London Times feature (16 June 1981), as was the first issue of the Cambridge University Press journal Popular Music. There seemed, evidently, to be an obvious incongruity here - high-value educational capital invested in the study of worthless music, rationality applied to the obstinately irrational, articulate discourse to the wantonly dumb; and this incongruity runs deep through the academy's involvement with pop. There are often suspicions that pop is being used. Thus male leftists, with the radical political commitments of the ‘1968 generation’, largely drive the shape of the early waves of scholarship, ‘rockist’, ‘masculinist’ and anti-establishment as it is.

There is a scene in Il Gattopardo ('The Leopard', 1958), the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957), in which the character of Don Calogero, who represents the new aspiring bourgeois class, is invited for the first time to dinner at the Prince of Salina's summer residence. The Prince, who is also the narrator of the novel, describes Don Calogero's arrival with a high degree of stylistic virtuosity. Don Calogero - we are told - is the only guest who is not appropriately dressed for the occasion. In fact,he is wearing a formal frock-coat since he wants to show the aristocratic Salina family that he is wealthy enough to afford one. The Prince, however, is wearing an afternoon suit, as he has always done at his rural retreat in order not to embarrass the locals. Don Calogero's outfit is a real 'catastrophe' not so much for its fine fabric as for its cut, which reveals his stinginess and lack of style as he has chosen an incompetent local tailor instead of relying, as the true aristocrats did, on a more expert and expensive tailor based in England. In addition to this fault, the Prince remarks that not only are Don Calogero's shoes wrong but his shirt-collar is shapeless, details which act as clues to his defining trait: his hopeless lack of refined manners and elegance, despite his newly acquired wealth.

In 1954, when the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax (1915- ) took a six-month trip to Italy together with Diego Carpitella to record original folk music, the country that he found was scarred by the Second World War and still dominated, in large areas of the southern countryside, by a rural and archaic culture. For the purpose of his research, however, Italy was an untouched paradise, as precious to an ethnomusicologist as Hungary had been to Bartó and Kodály.' ‘The tradition of Italian folk music is arguably one of the least spoiled, most vigorous, and varied of Western Europe’, he wrote. And yet Lomax realized that the situation was changing:

It is true that, as Italy underwent a major transformation from rural economy to city-based industry, folk music reminded urban people of the oppressive peasant life that they were eager to leave behind. In his massive study of the origins of the tarantella as a medicine ritual, the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino (1908–65) could still experience the richness of southern lore in connection with music. But in the new soundscape provided by radios, the jukebox and public television (which was introduced in 1954), folk music was non-existent.

On a cold winter evening in the mid-1990s a three-piece indie rock band named Kyzer Sozer performed at Liverpool's Lomax venue. There were around twenty or so people in the audience and most of them stood far back from the stage, clustering around the bar with pint glasses in hand and leaving the area in front of the stage quiet and deserted. This did not appear to bother the members of Kyzer Sozer and they launched energetically into a song entitled ‘Girls’. The band were well-rehearsed and ‘tight’ and the song revolved around a strong melody and dynamic variations in volume and pace, beginning with a softly strummed electric guitar accompanied by the deep throbbing beat of a Fender bass and bass drum, and then shifting to a slightly distorted riff-driven guitar sound that built up to a crescendo for the finale. Darren altered his powerful and resonant singing voice accordingly, varying its pitch and timbre. He had a shaved head and wore a feather boa and silver trousers which accentuated the twists of his body as he played the guitar and stretched towards the microphone. Chris stood beside him in training shoes, black jeans and a leather jacket that swung open to reveal a scarlet bra and bare stomach. Her hair flopped over one side of her face and shone as she accompanied her basslines with nods of her head. Sam sat at the back of the stage in a black shirt and purple velvet trousers that were largely obscured from view by his drum kit.