Mazzini and Marx: Thoughts upon Democracy in Europe

Between August 1846 and April 1847, Guiseppe Mazzini, in London exile, published six articles in English in the People’s Journal, the last of which was on Communism. With these articles, which became known in his native country in an 1852 Italian reworking, Mazzini powerfully inserted himself into the debate on the nature of democracy, alongside the most illustrious intellectuals of the time, Tocqueville, Blanc, Cabet, and Proudon.

In two of his pieces, Mazzini answered the democratic communists-the Fraternal Democrats-who in 1847 invited the twenty-eight year old Karl Marx to London to rebut Mazzini’s perceptive criticisms of communism and to explore a new possible elaboration of the ideology. Mastellone confronts the English text of Mazzini with the German text of Marx and traces an almost forgotten theoretical contest that has been ignored, but remains crucial for an understanding of two fundamental movements of the modern world: communism and democracy.

SALVO MASTELLONE is Professor of Political Doctrines at Florence University, where he directs the Cultural Centre for Foreigners. A former president of the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions, he is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Il Pensiero Politico. His publications range from studies on Victor Cousin and on Mazzini and the Giovine Italia to works on the Venality of Offices in France, and on the Regency of Maria de’ Medici. He is the author of an Ideological History of Europe from the 15th to the 20th Century in three volumes and a History of European Political Thought in two volumes.