Subversives and their feelings. An analysis of the power of emotions in the history of Italian anarchism

Abstract

The text analyses the origins of Italian socialism in the last three decades of the 19th century, highlighting the value that emotions played in it. It does so by analysing a number of books, among which The strength of sentiments by Elena Papadia, which hold together the social and political dimension of subversives’s lives with the psychological and mental one. An awareness emerges from this analysis: the need to use a complex approach to examine biographical events, family histories, inter-generational relationships and women’s point of view. Hence the emergence of the primacy of the ethical datum in early socialism, a movement which, in its plurality of practices, attaches importance to sentiment — understood as both an instrument of propaganda and a sense of belonging to a community of values,
opposed to an external world often considered hostile.