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‘Italy’s Sad Primacy’: Crime and the Social Question

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Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Italy

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Abstract

A Decade before achieving prominence as leader of the newly formed Italian Socialist Party, Filippo Turati published an essay entitled ‘Crime and the Social Question’. The title vividly captured what had become one of the most burning issues of the day, indeed of the decade, and at the same time neatly turned one of the most famous slogans of Risorgimento liberalism on its head. Gioberti had predicted that Unification and independence would restore the international primacy of Italy and of the Italians. Italy had indeed achieved a primacy, Turati observed, yet hardly the one to which Gioberti had aspired, and it was only in the ‘miserable matter’ of crime that Italy had achieved its ‘sad primacy’ amongst the European nations.1

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Notes

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  1. John A. Davis
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© 1988 John A. Davis

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Davis, J.A. (1988). ‘Italy’s Sad Primacy’: Crime and the Social Question. In: Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Italy. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19277-9_13

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