‘Missed Revolutions’: Historical Narratives During Italian Fascism (from Delio Cantimori to Camillo Pellizzi)

This article analyses some examples of historical narratives that, long before the emergenceof so-called postmodern history, had a specific narrative character: the reconstructions of‘missed revolutions’ taking into account a possible alternative history and tracing back thereasons for a social, political, and economic crisis to an interrupted process, one that, had itbeen completed, would have triggered some sort of progress. Even if this kind of historicalrepresentation cannot properly be classified as a form of alternate history, it can be placedbetween traditional historical accounts of the past and a more innovative pattern, whichentails a more speculative argumentation, and therefore has been used to justify or suggestspecific political claims. One of the most obvious examples of this literature are thenarrations of the ‘unaccomplished Risorgimento’, which was a highly debated theme in thepolitical, intellectual, and historical discussion from the period of the Italian unificationuntil the economic and political reconstruction following the Second World War. Thisarticle will stress four possible functions of the ‘missed revolution’narratives: first, as a wayto discover some currents that have been underestimated by the official historiography ormainstream political discourse; second, to observe the role assigned to particular eventsin altering the destiny of a nation; third, to show how political and intellectual actorsuse history to justify political actions or events; and finally, to reveal how, conversely,by reconstructing ‘missed revolutions’ individual historians and, more generally, publicintellectuals can take up a specific political stance while writing history