Italy’s failure to form a national state left the Papacy as its absolutist center

Evidence

Gramsci distinguishes between two quite distinct “Renaissances”: ”… the Renaissance was a vast movement, which started after the year 1000, and of which Humanism and the Renaissance (in the narrow sense of the word) were two closing moments-moments which were primarily located in Italy, whereas the more general historical process was European and not only Italian. Humanism and the Renaissance, as the literary expression of this European historical movement, were located primarily in Italy; but the progressive movement after the year 1000, although an important part of it took place in Italy with the Communes, precisely in Italy degenerated … while in the rest of Europe the general movement culminated in the national states and then in the world expansion of Spain, France, England, Portugal. In Italy what corresponded to the national states of these countries was the organisation of the Papacy as an absolute state … which divided the rest of Italy, etc… . The Renaissance may be viewed as the cultural expression of an historical process in which there was created in Italy a new intellectual class of European dimensions. This class divided into two branches: one exercised a cosmopolitan function in Italy, linked to the Papacy and reactionary in character; the other was formed outside Italy, from political and religious exiles, and exercised a progressive cosmopolitan function in the various countries where it existed, or participated in the organisation of the modern states as a technical element in the armed forces, in politics, in engineering, etc. ” Thus contained in the term “Renaissance” are a number of Gramsci’s key concerns: the failure of the Italian Communal bourgeoisie (see note 4 on p. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 372

Categorization

• XREF: The split cosmopolitan intellectual class anticipates Gramscian theory of intellectuals and hegemony, and connects to later discussions of the role of clerisy/intellectuals in the imagined community of the nation in Islamophobia readings.
• DEFINE: Explains Gramsci’s distinctive two-valence meaning of Renaissance as a European-class movement versus the narrow Italian literary moment.