Storia della cultura e culture giuridiche: il problema dello Stato come metafora della crisi

The essay attempts a survey on Luisa Mangoni’s particular brand of history of culture, by focusing on three broad and intertwined topics, whose relevance has been detected mainly across scattered journal essays and books chapters, but considering in the background also the main books (L’interventismo della cultura, Una crisi fine secolo, In partibus infidelium, with the sole exception of Pensare i libri). The first topic is Mangoni’s own reflection on the work of fellows historians of culture, as Delio Cantimori or Leone Ginzburg, from which can be drawn a main theme in Mangoni’s views since the very beginnings of her studies: that the efforts to achieve philological precision in the analysis and interpretation of texts, by connecting them to the historical context, ought to be intended as a form of commitment, albeit unaffected by ideological motives. The second topic is her conception of culture as very characterised field of knowledge, in which pressing social and political questions are reflected, and which produces very pertinent answers to them. In this perspective is considered Mangoni’s reading of Antonio Gramsci, conveyed in four essays, where it is pointed out the central importance of the State in Gramsci’s meditation of Fascism after 1929. And also in this perspective – this being the third topic – are considered Mangoni’s essays on the Italian juridical culture during the 1920s and 1930s where she was able to prove how even in a very technical field as the law, jurist were considering causes and effects of the crisis of the State, and the transformations it was undergoing through the Fascist regime.