Gonzaga in Florence

being interested in the question whether and to what extent socialIy inclusive strategies would be positively correlated to what we believed to represent "good environrnental governance", we picked up participation as the most conspicuous candidate -not least because of its high politic al salience in current debates. At least at the time of our conference, participation clearly has been the core notion in the preliminary work on governance by the Commission's Forward Studies Unit (see, in particular, Lebessis and Paterson 1997). The fact that this issue now figures only as one among others in the White Paper on Governance and, thus, appears to be somehow less valued, only underlines the relevance of our endeveour. The contributions to this book, today, may turn out to help refocussing the discussion and giving more "coherence"l to the very debate on governance.

The main objective of this book has been to review the theoretical, politic al and societal implications of participatory govemance. Before tuming to the latter two of these, let us first try to come up with some preliminary theoretical conclusions. We have found participatory govemance to be located somewhere between theories of democratic govemment and theories of govemance. On the one hand, participatory govemance makes mandatory an extension of the theory of democracy taking account of both the format and the logics of the new type of polity shaping the European politic al space. Klaus-Dieter W olr s discussion of the legitimacy of govemance beyond the state brought us towards the idea that the specific milieu of govemance beyond the state is more conducive to deliberative democracy than to majority voting. However, the question of how to operationalize the idea of deliberative democracy is far from being solved. On the other hand, the notion of participatory govemance has confronted us with the need to change our ideas about citizenship. More precisely, the transition from a traditional context of democratic control towards a context which almost unavoidably suffers accountability deficits involves a parallei transition from the concept of citizen to something else. At this point, we have elaborated on the notion of holder as the collective embodiment of participatory govemance arrangements at the European and at other levels.

Largely forgotten nowadays, Antonio Labriola (1843-1904) is the initiator of an original line of Marxist reflection, whose most celebrated figure remains Antonio Gramsci. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, Labriola elaborated, in his three Essays on historical materialism, a heterodox understanding of Marxism, whose essential philosophical structures were to influence not only Gramsci, but also Croce, Gentile, and Georges Sorel.

The lecture examines the genesis of Labriola’s Marxism through the unorthodox lens of intellectual space. In other words, it addresses the question of the extent to which the production and circulation of Labriola’s ideas was shaped by the cultural, linguistic, and political hierarchies which carved up the intellectual field of Western Europe at the time. The picture that emerges is that the originality of Labriola’s work was largely made possible by the peripherality – both real and perceived – of Italy in these spaces. By examining how interactions with France and Germany shaped Labriola’s readings, publication and teaching strategies, an attempt is made to de-provincialize this important thinker and to show that the history of his thought is not just an Italian one, but one that involves a much wider space.

https://pasts.ceu.edu/node/321#sthash.kYcpGol0.dpuf

Taking issue against an established view which reduces the interactions between Bergson and Sorel to a shared ‘irrationalism’, the article reconstructs successive phases of engagement between the two, focussing on the question of the effective impact of Bergsonian ideas on
Sorel’s Reflections on Violence. It identifies two complementary dynamics of engagement: a first one dictated by a philosophical affinity on the conceptualization of human agency and a second, more instrumental one, determined by Sorel’s need to find an established and popular philosophical support to his syndicalism. This latter issue was particularly urgent for Sorel, since his previous attempt to implant in France Labriola’s and Croce’s non-deterministic "materialismo storico" – the original theoretical foundation of Sorelian revisionism – had ended in failure.

The article consists in a critical overview of the work of Zeev Sternhell, complemented by an attempt to historicize his contributions. It argues that, more than his well-known theses on fascist ideology, it is the long investigation of the Anti-Enlightenment tradition which constitutes the core of the Israeli historian’s oeuvre. Embedding the rise of fascist political movements in a larger, diachronic narrative concerning the dominant axes of European intellectual life in the last two centuries allows Sternhell to develop an understanding of fascism which, though still historical, is able to accommodate numerous instantiations of the fascist phenomenon in different contexts. By way of historical contextualisation, we suggest that Sternhell’s political involvement in Israel goes to some length in explaining not only the tone of urgency characterizing his writings, but also his understanding of fascism as a recurring possibility of European modernity.

Taking issue against an established view, which reduces the interactions between Bergson and Sorel to a shared 'irrationalism', the article reconstructs successive phases of engagement between the two, focussing on the question of the effective impact of Bergsonian ideas on Sorel's <em>Reflections on violence</em>. It identifies two complementary dynamics of engagement: a first one dictated by a philosophical affinity on the conceptualization of human agency and a second, more instrumental one, determined by Sorel's need to find an established and popular philosophical support to his syndicalism. This latter issue was particularly urgent for Sorel, since his previous attempt to implant in France Labriola's and Croce's non-deterministic <em>materialismo storico </em>– the original theoretical foundation of Sorelian revisionism – had ended up in failure.

In his 1896 study on Giambattista Vico, Georges Sorel commented on the modern impracticability of the philosophy of history. 'Technical necessities', he argued, have had the same consequences in the human sciences as in the physical sciences. The chemist or naturalist does not ask the finalist question of why. .. . If the old philosophy of nature is deadat least for scientists [savants]-philosophy of history no longer exists for scholars. 1 What Sorel wanted to exclude from the social sciences of the fin de siècle were not only different theories of progress, whether articulated in a religious, providential language, or in more secular terms. He aimed at challenging something bigger: the idea of being able to derive a unity of meaning from the manifold materials unearthed by historical studies. Over a century after this declaration of death, we are confronted with a book whose genre is the philosophy of history, and which goes as far as telling us, in one of its most remarkable chapters, that a revamped philosophy of history is an 'indispensable' (p. 72) enterprise for our times. However, as we shall see, the main target of the book is not so dissimilar from what Sorel had attacked at the turn of the twentieth century. The real unifying thread of this thoroughly multidisciplinary collection of essays is, in fact, a similar declaration of death: that of the 'historicist or modern notion of time' (p. 4). Drawing from a large number of assertions to this effect from across the social sciences, the introductory essay to the volume makes the case that this notion has at present become unsustainable, and that it is imperative to go beyond it. But what does historicist/modern time consist of? Essentially, in a specific configuration of the past-present-future triad in which the past is separated from both present and future, the present is seen as the time of human agency, while the future as that of possibility and expectation. It postulates, consequently, a linear, necessary, and unidirectional flow of time, in which 'no phenomena can escape their own transformation' (p. 4). This configuration is not presented as a mere conceptual type, but is, on the contrary, historicized in a recognizably Koselleckian way: a manner of conceptualizing time which arose sometime during the end of the eighteenth century and whose first serious contestations occurred in the aftermath of the Great War. This rejection of historicist time, the book suggests, accelerated after the end of the Cold War and is reaching its peak only in the present, which is thus framed as a period of temporal reconfiguration. Starting from this assertion of the present untenability of modern understandings of time, the book sets forth to explore various conceptual, historiographical, and methodological possibilities now open. The central question which the book tries to answer concerns the consequences, for history and other social sciences, of the current shift in understandings of time. What happens to the practice of history, anthropology, or archaeology once they EUROPEAN REVIEW OF HISTORY: REVUE EUROPÉENNE D'HISTOIRE 8 BOOK REVIEW