[Book review] Italy in transition, conflict and consensus

Abstract

The study of post-war Italian politics and society has produced a separate discipline and a language of its own. Italianists seem to work mostly on their own, and this includes anthropologists working there. What this book attempts to do, under the distinguished editorship of Lange and Tarrow, is to bridge the gap between political science and sociology. It has not been an easy task; some of the articles originally written in the 'language of the Gods' translate badly, and there is too much of what Schneider, Schneider and Hansen (1972) called "the optimism of the unilineal modernization thesis". But the effort is well worth it; the book has the merit of debunking the simplistic assumptions, so common in anthropological monographs, of the 'national alliance' between the Christian Democrat party and the Vatican, the belief that the party is merely a patronage machine (e.g. Allum, 1973), that religion is a guide to political behaviour (Kertzer 1979), and the oft-quoted journalistic assertion that the society is in 'decay', that it is 'a Republic without Government', etc., etc.