Böcker av Eugenio Colorni

Art, aesthetics, literary criticism, and political science are fields that are today scarcely recognized (though they were originally long pursued) among the truly extraordinary intellectual exploits of the great Italian philosopher and political activist Eugenio Colorni. The present volume intends, at least in part, to fill this gap. It reveals first and foremost the anti-fascist inspiration which from the beginning animated Colorni in the pages of the Genoese Gobettian young-people's review Pietre, especially in its second series edited by Lelio Basso. It presents three of Colorni's essays on aesthetics (two of them unpublished and rediscovered by Mario Quaranta), initially developed in the framework of the teachings of G.A. Borgese, which respectively concern the work of Roberto Ardig¿, Bergsonism, and Benedetto Croce (the latter in the definitive version - L'estetica di Benedetto Croce. Studio Critico - published as a monograph as early as 1932). It brings together many of the young Colorni's reviews of articles concerning these disciplines and others, such as law and philosophy. Through the courtesy of Signora Eva Hirschmann Monteforte, it also includes many of Colorni's opinions as an involuntary literary critic, taken from his correspondence with his wife Ursula Hirschmann during his imprisonment and confinement. Finally, the volume closes with two novellas that he wrote as an adult.

"The answer [Eugenio Colorni's, to a question of Ursula Hirschman's on the existence of "concentric circles" in explanations of reality] is this: that the philosophical illness is more difficult to eradicate than you think, and that it lurks in the most unimaginable places and people [. . .]. All these concentric explanations are in fact 'philosophies.' Each coherent in itself, each 'true' from a certain point of view, each 'beautiful,' 'satisfying,' 'habitable'; sometimes 'exciting' [. . .]. No wonder, then, if they turn out to be satisfying, calming and coherent. Now just take each of these concentric circles and ask yourself - what good are they beyond giving me all this satisfaction? And then you will see all this beautiful concentricity and coherence fall apart, and each of the circles will prove no longer to be a self-contained whole, but something detached and fragmentary. The utility of the dialectic is in interpreting some spiritual things and some historical phenomena, and that's all [. . . ]. Analytic psychology is useful in treating certain nervous disorders, and helping us understand certain mental processes even in healthy people, and that's all [. . .]. Kant helps physics deal with time and space and causality his way. And he's not good for anything else. You ask me if it also makes me nervous to see how easily our minds think in analogies - which we then take to be facts. Does it make me nervous?! I've been nervous for twelve years, and only now have I begun to sort this out."

"He was ready to let himself be pervaded by an idea and to experience it by compassionately living it, so as to possess it. Then sometimes he would turn it around and transform it into something rich and strong, in Shakespeare''s words. If I think of a baffling and miraculous intelligence, able even to absorb superstition, even astrology or magic, and transform them into an original treasure, I think of Eugenio Colorni." - Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue,"Ricordo di Colorni," Arethusa, July-August 1945Eugenio "detests a federation organized through state diplomacy for purposes of economics and power. He sees a federation in terms of a socialist movement - that is, born of the people. And therefore revolutionary (just as he detests arranged marriages or unions without love, in which one tends to exploit and reduce the other to oneself)." - Luisa Villani Usellini, "A Very Quick Note," undated"In short, Colorni''s thinking was an incandescent magma of colossal genius that would have assailed any sphere his intellectual interests had turned to." - Leo Solari, 18 May 2004"I remember Angelo, this great scientist, this great scholar, this great freedom fighter also as a man who was exquisitely political, exceptionally able in political activity and propaganda and in the lessons he was able to teach us even though he was only slightly older than we were." - Giuliano Vassalli, 18 May 2004

In Discovering the Possible Luca Meldolesi recounts over half a century of Hirschman's work, exploring the motivations, methodology, and unexpected developments of his research. Published simultaneously in Italian, Spanish, and English, Discovering the Possible is the first book to probe the whole corpus of Hirschman's work and to highlight the wealth of his ideas and the sharp self-irony with which his intuitions are forged into thoughts. The book will interest students and professionals in economics, sociology, political science, and moral philosophy, as well as those who focus on the development sector of these disciplines.