“The Southern Revolution” by Guido Dorso – a southernist and anti-fascist politician from Avellino who passed away in 1947 – which celebrates one hundred years since its first publication, is one of those books that have contributed to forming the conscience of this country. A book, mind you, more “mythical” than real, because in my long journey as a scholar of the problems of the South I have only occasionally met scholars who had read and digested it thoroughly. Capturing essential directions and nuances, especially to understand a crucial historical period, such as the one that leads from the eve of the First World War to the first years of fascism. Or to reflect on the formidable cultural background that linked Dorso’s thought to the liberalism of Piero Gobetti.
Today, therefore, thanks to intuition, intellectual sensitivity and a “wide-angle” vision of the southern problem, four brave analysts propose to us a key to understanding Dorso which cannot fail to arouse great interest and stimulate its reuse as a model of reflection. With an agile little volume published by Feltrinelli, Luigi Fiorentino, Nicola Lagioia, Amedeo Lepore and Guido Melis, each in their own field of specialisation, offer an almost multidisciplinary analysis, capable of transforming a historical re-enactment into a sort of small anthropological fresco with flowing and understandable prose.
Yes, because this is essentially, first and foremost, the ability of the authors: remaining faithful to the imprint left by the character, managing to paint the context in which he moved. The result is a plot also made up of passions, disappointments, bitterness and many betrayed hopes. Frustrated feelings which the book is full of and which emerge as the authors’ analyzes unfold, they too in some way disappointed by a South that never manages to recover.
In his reference to Sciascia’s “line of the palm” theory, for example, Nicola Lagioia, Strega Prize writer, expresses all his dismay at the actual occurrence of the phenomenon: beyond all climate issues and speaking only of political-social problems, Italy is effectively “southernizing”. In what seems like a losing battle.
The chapter edited by Guido Melis, professor of History of Political Institutions, is dedicated to his first articles on Southern Italy. «Southernism – he writes – would instead manifest itself a few years later, between January and May 1915, in eight short articles that appeared in the “Popolo d’Italia”, which had just been founded on interventionist positions by Benito Mussolini. Anti-Giolittismo predominated, as often happened in his generation, as an ideology of the privilege of the North against the South of Italy. The passions and new ideas of an entire youth generation could be perceived there (and in his case above all the influences of Arturo Labriola, his professor in Naples».
In «Guido Dorso and the Southern Revolution» Amedeo Lepore, professor of Economic History, narrates, among other things, Dorso’s political parable after the Second World War. He entered the executive of Justice and Freedom; he also began his journalistic work again, going on to direct «Irpinia Libera» and collaborating on «Il Nuovo Risorgimento», «La Voce», «Rinascita» and «La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno». In those years, which constituted an epochal turning point for the whole country and especially for the South, the idea of a South destined to seize, by finally completing the Risorgimento path of formation of the unitary State, a “historic opportunity” for renewal and redemption, after an inglorious past of transformism and subordination, developed. This persuasion ideally motivated him to continue a battle that he had not been able to wage freely during the years of the regime.
In 1944 Dorso was elected councilor of the Avellino bar association, after his readmission to the bar. But his figure had now become very well known for the value of the man and the scholar, as well as for his intransigent coherence as a prominent exponent of the shareholder movement and, above all, of southernism. On 6 August 1944 he presented a report on the southern question at the first congress of the Action Party, in Cosenza; in December of that year, then, he gave a speech on “The Southern Ruling Class” at the party’s first study conference on the problems of the South in Bari. These contributions, together with the new 1945 edition of “The Southern Revolution”, with the opinions of Luigi Sturzo and Antonio Gramsci in the appendix, placed him on the national stage.
Finally, of extreme interest is the essay proposed by Luigi Fiorentino, Head of the Department for Information and Publishing at the Presidency of the Council, which offers a comparative analysis between the growth and strengthening of the dominant elites and the development, instead, of the balance of power within the new groups of political power. It is clear that all new systemic crises in the Western world will have to deal with a mix of political, economic and social factors that require innovative therapies to be addressed. And, paradoxically, the experience historically gained with crisis areas with a chronic deficit in production efficiency (such as those in the South) can be useful for improving governance policies. Especially those in Brussels, which focus and spend exorbitant resources on convergence programs. Precisely the need to optimize European target laws, maximizing their multiplier effect on induced wealth, could make Guido Dorso’s recipe relevant again for the whole of Europe.