My name is Marc Mulholland. I am a Fellow (lecturer and tutor) in the History Faculty of Oxford University. My College is St Catherine's. I come from Ireland.

This is a blog relating to my book published in 2012 by Oxford University Press, Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear: From Absolutism to Neo-Conservativism. Now on sale here and here. If you want 20 per cent off the price, I can arrange that! Send me a message or leave a comment, and I'll tell you how.

The thesis my book is examining was rather pithily summarised by Leon Trotsky in 1939: "Wherever the proletariat appeared as an independent force, the bourgeoisie shifted to the camp of the counter-revolution. The bolder the struggle of the masses, the quicker the reactionary transformation of liberalism." [Context is here]

However, my book isn't a defence of Trotskyism, or indeed any particular ideology. It's a study of an idea that took shape in Left, Right, and Centre variations.

This blog has tid-bits not included in the book, and other thoughts that occur.

You can see book details at the OUP website.



Thursday 26 July 2012

Eating Italy

A quote that gets trotted out a lot by students writing about nineteenth-century nationalism is Massimo d’Azeglio in 1861 remarking to king Victor Emmanuel on the Risorgimento “We have made Italy; now we must make the Italians.” We may as well know the popular jibe in response: the elites had “made Italy only to devour her”.

[As recorded by Benedetto Croce, A History of Italy, 1871 – 1915, trans. Cecilia M. Ady (New York: Russell & Russell Inc., 1929, 1963), p. 97.]
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1 comment:

  1. Jim Monaghan26 July 2012 at 04:36

    One of my best friends, from Turin, regards Italy as an artificial construct. She says it would be better off as separate nations. While the languages are of Latin descent, they are not Italian dialects.

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