INVESTIGADORES
PEREZ CARRASCO Mariano
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Dante as a Modern Utopian Thinker
Autor/es:
MARIANO PÉREZ CARRASCO
Lugar:
Rochester, New York
Reunión:
Simposio; Dante Politico at the Crossroad of Arts and Sciences; 2020
Institución organizadora:
University of Rochester, Cornell University, Syracuse University, Central New York Humanities Corridor
Resumen:
When, in a famous note about the origins of the modern state, Antonio Gramsci studied Dante?s political theory, his judgment was lapidary. A ?victim of class war,? Dante produced not a real political theory, but a personal, more autobiographical than philosophical dream anchored in the distant Roman times and deprived of ?any historical-cultural impact.? Gramsci?s conclusion was that ?this was not a political theory but a political utopia colored by reflections of the past.? These ideas were by no means new in the 1930s. In fact, they seem to have already become commonplace in 1858, when Francesco de Sanctis published his famous essay on The Character of Dante and his Utopia, given that not just Cesare Balbo, in his bestselling biography of the poet (Life of Dante, 1839), but also Vincenzo Gioberti, in an essay of no less success (On the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italian Race, 1843), had considered Dante?s political views in a quite negative way as the expression of a modern utopian thinker. Yet, whereas those nineteenth-century intellectuals, along with impracticality (the ?utopian? features), stressed the modernity of Dante?s political ideas, Gramsci?and, with him, many others?considered Dante as a purely anachronistic dreamer. They all agree that Dante?s political theories were impractical, but while some of them think that Dante?s universal monarchy was impractical because it was a modern utopia, others consider the reason for such impracticality to be the fact that Dante?s theoretical empire was the gothic dream of a defeated man, incapable of understanding his own present. Focusing on the links between the intertwined ideas of modernity and utopia, this paper will explore the different forms acquired by the ideaof Dante as either a modern or an anachronistic utopian thinker.
