A trajetória intelectual de Delio Cantimori: escritos políticos, história e historiografia (1904-1966)

Abstract

This work is scoped to approach the complex political and intellectual trajectory of Delio Cantimori (1904-1966), from his Mazzinian family education, their adherence to Fascism and the precepts of idealism actualist as paradigmatic background reading Renaissance and contemporary Italian and European politics. So follow the theoretical turning process experienced by the Italian scholar during the 1930s, when their experience of research about the heretics in Europe of Cinquecento and his contacts with new perspectives and intellectual and political environments mingled with the modifications of the plans of the fascist government, the decline of faith in the corporatism, the popular prestige over the regime, the Italian expansionist project, the German historical progress and the influence of Nazi Germany over Italy. These factors led Cantimori to close the Italian Communist Party and theoretical precepts of historical materialism. Thus, I conclude with his second political disillusionment with the ideological cultural policies of the Italian Communist Party, which led the intellectual to a deep nostalgia for his generation of historians, committed to ethical and political historical readings, guided methods and philological interpretations, incompatible with party ideological presuppositions, the approach of the cultural-history tradition of Jacob Burckhardt, in his pessimism, his scientism and his conception of history as a propaedeutic subject.