Piero Gobetti's New World

What Gobetti did understand about fascism before most of the intellectuals involved in the campaign for a new, improved Italy did, was that fascism, neither would nor could lead towards the kind of renewal they desired. Gobetti saw clearly that fascism could never offer that which he held most dear: namely, self-emancipation, self-regulation, and autonomy...It was, in fact, His realization that fascism was antithetical to any vestige of self-emancipation that gave him and his thinking a precise direction and identity. Everything that Gobetti stood and argues for is resolutely and thoroughly antifascist. The intransigence of his stance is the greatest strength of his antifascism, but it is also one of its greatest limitations.-From Piero Gobetti's New World

Piero Gobetti (1901-1926) was one of twentieth-century Lily's most innovative political thinkers. A noted intellectual, radical liberal, and antifascist, he founded two cultural reviews that attracted the attention of many Kahan intellectuals of the time, including Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. However; Gobetti and his editorial activities also quickly drew the attention of the fascist regime, resulting in the banning of his publications, and in his persecution, physical beating, and death in exile.

Piero Gobetti's New World is an introduction to Gobetti's thought on the intellectual's role in Italian cultural renewal. It is also an in-depth study of the three main questions on which his writings focus: the relationship between Italian history and fascism, the nature of a genuine antifascist political culture, and the crisis of Italian liberalism in his day. While providing important historical and cultural context, David Ward follows Gobetti's attempts to carve out an oppositional role for the liberal intellectual during the fascist regime. Ward suggests that the eighteenth-century Piedmont patriot Vittorio Alfieri was Gobetli's greatest source of inspiration, especially in regard to his own writing practice. Gobetti, Ward argues played a pivotal role in Italian intellectual life of the time. He was above all a persuader and propagator of ideas, militant antifascist intellectual who sought to form and reform hearts and minds, and to this end his writing was his most effective resource