| The present dissertation is an exploration of the concept of legitimacy, conducted by means of a historical reconstruction of theoretical-political debates in Continental thought in the generation following the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune. The social transformations occasioned by the advent of an industrialized, urbanized society in nineteenth century Europe assumed a political dimension with the diffusion of universal suffrage parliamentary systems. Under these conditions, the survival of ruling elites was increasingly threatened by the pressures for the incorporation of the working class into national political institutions. The unrest and strife generated by such developments led to theoretical investigation of the modes of social intercourse appropriate to a new world, ultimately taking the methodological form of the nascent social sciences. In parallel, the progressive waning of the belief systems traditionally underpinning obedience to authority posed the problem of collective behavior in a historically unprecedented light. Technological and educational advances paved the way for a revolution in the speed and breadth of the diffusion of ideas, enabling the new social figure of the public intellectual. From a narrative point of view, the project can be seen as a contribution to research on the intellectual background of Max Weber and Antonio Gramsci, who developed the two arguably most important theories of legitimacy of the early twentieth century. The starting point is the practical and theoretical crisis of classical political economy and its conception of social order. The dissertation analyzes the interpretations of this crisis of modernity emerging from the revolutionary left, as well as from conservative critics of the status quo, in three countries (France, Italy, and Germany), facing comparable challenges in the grounding of new political orders. By means of a study of the dynamics of political engagement of intellectuals in the era of mass ideology, and the corresponding waning of purely normative accounts of legitimacy, the dissertation finally aims to shed light on the successive trajectory of European political development, once the catastrophe of World War I actualized the theoretical debates of the turn-of-the-century generation. |
