I repeat here the same acknowledgments as in Volume 1, with a few modifications and additions. This book is part of a project that took shape during the course of a long and difficult intellectual journey that lasted thirty years. It is simply impossible for me to recall all those who influenced my work in one way or another during these thirty years, whether through teaching, stimulating conversations, friendly advice, or support of one type or another. Moreover, this book, including these acknowledgments, were written in the time of covid, under time constraints made worse by financial constraints, with no time to sit down and carefully try to remember the names of all those I should acknowledge. Therefore, I limit myself here to acknowledging only those who just cannot be left out. Flora Dura, my mother, just cannot be left out. As a mother, she was my Prime Mover, as it were, the beginning of all things, because a child is borne by his mother and first socialized by his mother. Moreover, while I was growing up, and later as I tried to build my own nest, she had an uncanny and unfailing ability to be there at important times, especially all difficult times, in my intellectual journey. It was only later in life that I understood the level of commitment, single-mindedness, and intelligence, that it takes to be such a presence in the life of a son. Renato and Renzo Olsaretti, my two paternal uncles, also just cannot be left out. Renato was my actual godfather, who died as I was a child, while Renzo was my number one fan, and the real godfather to me, who helped me financially while I was finishing my PhD and later as I searched for a new career, despite the fact that he often jokingly described himself as a Pantalone, after the character in Italian popular theater known for his stinginess, similar in some ways to Moliere’s character Harpagon.
I had to go my own way to pursue my principles and ideals, and this required cutting some bridges and devoting myself to research rather than pieties. With these acknowledgments I want to spell out my appreciation of what my mother and my two paternal uncles have done, an appreciation that I only came to in the last few years, especially as I wrote this book, down to this day, as I completed this second volume. In particular, I have learned my mother’s lessons in tough love, and put them to good use, although I am sure it is not the use that she expected, since my education ended up being so different than hers. It is true that I have wondered, tongue in cheek of course, about the meaning of the Latin phrase nomen est omen, which suggests that one’s name presages one’s future, since dura in Latin and in Italian means ‘hard’. But it is also true that I gained through her an appreciation of Latin and the subtleties of grammar, which she instilled in me as a child by teaching me clever
I had to go my own way to pursue my principles and ideals, simply because there are turning points in life after which, without any drama or doubt on my part, it is better to be independent than not to be independent. One such turning point for me was my research trip to Italy in 2010, other turning points came while I was writing up my dissertation and searching for a new career. In 2010 Maurilio Buffone, a school friend of mine who had been in touch with me, died after a long fight with cancer. As a youth I had been struck by the irony in another sibylline phrase I had been taught, ‘he whom the gods love dies young,’ but this marked for me the beginning of maturity. We all act recklessly when we are young, to a greater or lesser extent, because we feel invulnerable, or because we think we have such a long time ahead of us. Maturity brings the realization that it is important to make the most of the time we have especially if the ‘gods’ are against us. In my 2010 trip to Italy my mother and Renzo showed me hospitality, also through my mother’s childhood friends Claudia and Salvatore Esposito and their children Luciana, Valeria, and Luca Esposito, all bright professionals, and through Silvia Olsaretti and Egidio Podda, all of whom bemusedly put up with my efforts to formulate a theory, which must have seemed so distant from their concerns, or even foreign. There is one other person not tied to me by institutional ties who just cannot be left out, Fabio Frosini, an Italian philosopher I met by chance, who is a leading expert on Gramsci, and who was very generous with his time while I was a graduate student and influenced everything I have written on Gramsci, except this book. This book is outside his area of expertise, as I have ventured to extend Gramsci’s theory introducing concepts from contemporary sociology, and in the index I refer to Gramscian concepts, rather than to Gramsci, in order to avoid entering into a debate as to whether the interpretation that I provide is really supported by Gramsci’s text.
Other persons who just cannot be left out are the scholars who taught me at McGill University. Most importantly, these scholars are John Anthony Hall, Axel van den Berg, Steven Rytina, and also Matthew Lange, Suzanne Staggenborg, Rodney Nelson, Alberto Cambrosio, and to some extent Lucia Benacquisto, who supervised my dissertation or the readings and research that contributed to my dissertation. These scholars are also Uner Turgay, and Wael Hallaq, who were once at the Institute of Islamic Studies, and Elizabeth Elbourne, and Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert in the department of history, and also other historians at McGill University who showed an interest in my work, most importantly James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, Malek Abisaab and Rula Abisaab Jordi. The history tutors who taught me at St Anne’s College, Oxford University, namely, Gill Lewis, Jean Dunbabin, and Peter Ghosh, also just cannot be left out. They supervised my readings for a degree in modern history that I never completed, and yet which greatly influenced my later research. Ghosh also supervised my first research on Gramsci.
As for references to others’ work, this book was written in the time of covid and under many constraints, one of which was that I did not have access to libraries and books. Another one is that I am still working under strict time constraints, made even worse by mounting financial constraints. I have cited sources for all the important concepts conveyed to me in conversation that I could remember, by Hall and by other scholars at McGill University of course, since I know their work well. However, during the past thirty years I have read very widely, and it is possible that I derived some concepts from a book that I have long forgotten. If anyone has a genuine case to have arrived at a key concept that I discuss in this book before me, I will gladly acknowledge them, if they contact me and point me to the work that they published. In any case, the originality of this book lies not so much in a ground-breaking new concept, which is what makes an academic star or an eminent scholar, who can seize upon a new concept and fly with it, as it were. This book is first and foremost a work of analysis, critique, and synthesis, based on long and painstaking work on the existing literature, and on informal observation of culture in all different walks of life. This is humble work that does not make one an academic star, but can provide a very important synthesis. There are some original concepts and diagrams that I came up with, by combining sociology and engineering as part of a social engineering for democracy, but these are part of another book. I believe these concepts and diagrams constitute a significantly new approach to development and democracy, that I begin
As it turned out, I was able to make this synthesis also because I was willing to learn from all different walks of life, and from popular culture as much as from high culture, in a difficult process that I describe in my novel The Caravaggio Code, and that I begin to explain in a forthcoming series of essays titled Towards a Humanist Social Science. Another friend of mine, Colin Goldin, classically trained but with an interest in film, introduced me many years ago to work by the Taviani brothers, especially The Night of the Shooting Stars, which uses imagery from Italian popular culture and from Italian history that I related to. The Italian title of the film refers to the night of Saint Lawrence, and the film uses a frame story whereby a mother narrates to her child memories from the Second World War, which constitute the main story. The narration of memories from one generation to another is an important part of popular culture, and the imagery of the night of Saint Lawrence is an integral part of Italian popular culture. Every child in Italy knows that if you are patient and look at the sky long enough and hard enough on that night you might see a shooting star, or even more than one. They might not make your wishes come true, but seeing those shooting stars might be a wish in itself. Such imagery and such timeless human wishes were also a source for Dante’s Divine Comedy, which although considered today a canonical text, once challenged high culture because it was written in Italian, or the Tuscan dialect that is the source of Italian, rather than Latin. I had an opportunity to re-read passages from the Divine Comedy recently, including passages from the Inferno, after Setrag and Claudia Manoukian thoughtfully gave me a copy of it as a present at my graduation party. Dante follows the conventional Catholic wisdom of the Middle Ages, which I presume was sanctioned by Vatican doctrine, and frames his description of Odysseus as a condemnation of a fraudulent advisor who led his men away from ordained truth. But the form of the text and its poetic imagery tell a different story. In Dante’s memorable phrase, ‘O frati […] considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza’. This is hard to translate, because of inherent difficulties in cross-cultural communications that I sketch in The Caravaggio Code, but the phrase essentially constitutes a sympathetic depiction of Odysseus’ thirst for knowledge.