Italian history is driven by the city-countryside relation as its fundamental motor force
Evidence
The relation between city and countryside is the necessary starting-point for the study of the fundamental motor forces of Italian history, and of the programmatic points in the light of which the Action Party’s policies during the Risorgimento should be considered and judged. Schematically, one might have this picture: 1. the Northern urban force; 2. the Southern rural force; 3. the Northern-Central rural force; 4. the rural force of Sicily; 5. that of Sardinia. The first of these forces retains its function of “locomotive” in any case; what is needed, therefore, is an examination of the various “most advantageous” combinations for building a “train” to move forward through history as fast as possible. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 530
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Introduces the city-countryside relation as the analytic starting-point for Italian history, with a schematic five-force map.
- XREF: The urban-locomotive/indirect-hegemony idea connects to later hegemony concepts and colonial urban-rural divides in postcolonial theory.
Related
- Italian urbanism cannot be read as a simple index of industrialisation (similarity 0.82)
- Pre-capitalist cities sustain an ideological unity against the countryside (similarity 0.81)
- Urban and rural population types are not homogeneous or schematically opposed (similarity 0.79)
- An urban republic fell because it neglected the countryside and threatened its income sources (similarity 0.79)