Across Italy in the nineteenth century, a generation of intellectuals engaged with Hegel's philosophy while actively participating in Italian political life. Hegel and Italian Political Thought traces the reception and transformation of these ideas, exploring how Hegelian concepts were reworked into political practices by Italians who had participated in the 1848 revolution, who would lead the new Italian State after unification, and who would continue to play a central role in Italian politics until the end of the century. Fernanda Gallo investigates the particular features of Italian Hegelianism, demonstrating how intellectuals insisted on the historical and political dimension of Hegel's idealism. Set apart from the broader European reception, these thinkers presented a critical Hegelianism closer to practice than ideas, to history than metaphysics. This study challenges conventional hierarchies in the study of Italian political thought, exploring how the ideas of Hegel acquired newfound political power when brought into connection with their specific historical context.

‘Fernanda Gallo’s perceptive and sophisticated analysis brings to life the ‘concrete dimension’ of a great European philosophical tradition. In the process, she also sheds new light on a group of scholars and politicians who played a key role in the shaping of modern Italy.’

Eugenio Biagini - University of Cambridge

‘This scholarly study is essential reading for anyone interested in the theoretical and practical influence of Hegelianism beyond the German-speaking world. Gallo combines a philosopher’s grasp of Hegel’s political thought with a historian’s familiarity with political movements and intellectual achievements in Italy from the Renaissance to the modern nation-state. An exquisite contribution to our grasp of European intellectual and political history.’

Allegra de Laurentiis - SUNY-Stony Brook

‘Fernanda Gallo’s impressively erudite book teaches scholars of Hegel about a philosopher they did not know; and it presents modern Italiansists with an acount of Italian political thought most of them ignored. Deeply rooted in two hundred years of debates on Hegel, and carefully balancing the boundaries between intellectual history, political theory and philosophy, Gallo’s book makes a major contribution to scholarship on Hegel, as well as to the history of modern Italy. Her transnational approach to the history of political thought will serve a generation of scholars as a model for reading political ideas beyond national categories.’

Axel Körner - Universität Leipzig

‘An engaging account of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Italian receptions of Hegel and of the transmission of philosophical ideas across national frontiers. The book draws vivid portraits of its selected authors, including important woman philosophers, and brings these figures originally and readably to the attention of English-speaking audiences.’

Douglas Moggach - University of Ottawa and University of Sydney