Carlo Rosselli

Carlo Rosselli--one of the most courageous and interesting figures of Italian antifascism--is a rich and overdue subject for a biography...Pugliese has chosen to write a primarily intellectual biography and has done a commendable job of explaining Rosselli's maverick position within European Socialism. -- Alexander Stille * New York Times Book Review * Thank you for your book which I found interesting to read. I particularly appreciate the sober style with which you have traced Carlo Rosselli's noble political and human portrait, underlining his extreme refusal to bend to the ideological premises of a regime, and his rejection of its moral and intellectual baseness. -- Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, President of Italy The reception that Stanislao Pugliese's recent biography of the antifascist leader Carlo Rosselli has received makes it apparent that few doubt the subject's importance or its potential contribution to current understanding of oppressive forces and those who resisted them during WWII. It is a biography that revives for the reader not just the few who fought openly for liberty in the fascist years of Italy, but for their leader as well...Pugliese's numerous skills will probably be what strike most readers initially. The most evident of these skills is his capacity for detail and extensive research. The footnotes alone--which include police reports, personal letters, press conferences, and private interviews, as well as locations of foundations and archives that are crucial yet obscure to the general public--are almost varied and engaging enough to be published on their own...Pugliese's attentive scholarship also illuminates, word by word, Rosselli's masterful use of persuasive language. -- Ann Snodgrass * Boston Book Review * [A] fine intellectual biography...Pugliese's crisp prose delves evenhandedly into every side of Rosselli's life and thought...[It is] available to a general readership while also displaying the utmost academic rigor...In admirable straightforward and chronological manner, Pugliese's crisp prose delves evenhandedly into every side of Rosselli's life and thought--his critical engagements with the two dominant ideologies of his day, liberalism and socialism; the creation of Justice and Liberty; his relationship with the more left-wing communist antifascists; the revolutionary role of the enlightened bourgeoisie; his view of Italian history. It is to be hoped that this study, available to a general readership while also displaying the utmost academic rigor, will once again, as in the 1930s, open the question of the role of liberalism and socialism in the contemporary world that the writings of Carlo Rosselli and other like-minded thinkers raised. -- David Ward * Philadelphia Inquirer * By the time of his assassination in 1937, Rosselli had already set the foundations for new ways of imagining modern liberal democracies. -- Michael Bronski * Boston Phoenix * A clearly written account of the life and times of a non-doctrinaire socialist thinker and antifascist hero...through a doctrinal miasma of Marxist orthodoxy, revisionism, and heresy, Pugliese steers with a sure hand and with a lucidity that the subject matter, so vexed and acrimonious, fails to confound. This is, indeed, a scholarly book, but one that is perfectly accessible to the general public...a wonderful exception. -- Katherine A. Powers * Boston Sunday Globe * Pugliese's study does much to shore up a forgotten legacy: Rosselli is presented as a significant intellectual and political maverick whose vision of a 'liberal socialism' has much to offer today's dispirited transatlantic left. -- Matthew Price * Lingua Franca * Except for experts in European history, most Americans are no doubt unfamiliar with Carlo Rosselli. This is too bad. For in our age of pseudo-celebrities and worthies famous for being famous, it's salutary to be reminded that real heroes once existed,

Stanislao G. Pugliese is Professor of Modern European History at Hofstra University.

Acknowledgments Introduction Younger Brothers Autocritica Liberal Socialism Justice and Liberty The Tragic Hero Conclusion Abbreviations Notes Select Bibliography Index