Sei libera sii grande. Giuseppe Mazzini e il suo insegnamento

This book is an invitation to take Mazzini seriously and to go beyond the stale and dusty image of him as a prophet, apostle, mystic, believer in the utopia of unity, and believer in the republican idea delivered to us by the manuals and the bias of certain publicists. Mazzini was also this. What is lacking is a deep understanding of his teaching, capable of restoring its unity as a thinker attempting to bridge the modern chasm that, at least from Thomas Hobbes onward, separates auctoritas and veritas. Mazzini was a conservative reformer, an insurrectionalist who preached a peaceful revolution based on love and concord, a conspirator and tactician who, while knowing the art of Machiavellianism, rose to it in the name of a mission dictated by a transcendent regulative entity that, guiding history, gives a perspective of universal and humanitarian significance to the action of the religious citizen, committed to realizing and respecting the rights and duties of the res publica, to striving for freedom and national self-determination in the name of the spiritual perfection of the world. This paper aims to accompany the reader in rediscovering the theoretical power of a vision capable of embracing a multiplicity of discursive planes: religion, politics, theology, morality. Mazzini’s theoretical device never ceases to be propulsive and stimulating, especially in eras of crisis of political representation and loss of sense of collective living. Especially for those who intend to begin again to attribute non-random meanings to ‘civil living.’