“The idea of a people is formed from a common memory, one that must be critical in order to look lucidly at the past”, and a common memory, in turn, rests on manifold institutions. Among these the most significant is perhaps literature: “the institution that preserves the past through the word”.
Bakhtin holds that, truly to understand the present, one needs the “great time” of literature, and Hannah Arendt, referring to Benjamin’s works, wrote that the past “has authority if fixed as tradition; authority, insofar as it presents itself historically, becomes tradition”.
If, then, we wish to reflect on our identity, we must retrace the founding lines of Italian literature.
Literature is, in fact, the place where a country’s identity is created and its traditions are preserved. For A. Arbasino (Fratelli d’Italia) authors such as Leopardi, Manzoni, De Sanctis, Croce and Gramsci represent some of the fundamental stages of modern Italian literature, also in comparison with those of other countries, apt to give us the image of our identity.
Ezio Raimondi explains that in our literary tradition, beginning with Dante, the common memory of Italians is preserved.
National identity, to be sure, opens a series of complex problems, to which recent history too is tied. With the events following the Second World War and after the adoption of the republican Constitution, the new democratic society necessarily associates the idea of nation with the theme of identity, but it does so by putting on “trial” terms such as nation or homeland, understood in a sense opposite to the meaning they had in the preceding twenty years inspired by the model of the totalitarian State.
It is therefore a matter of grasping this national identity while avoiding the drifts proper to every ethnic particularism, so as instead to rediscover the deepest values and draw upon them.
In the democratic sense, then, national identity must represent a body of citizens who establish relations of mutual respect, commitment, loyalty and trust, and who take it upon themselves to keep them alive, even beyond specific contingent circumstances.
For this to come about, there must be the formation of a common memory, of a common history, one that captures the notion of the citizen, an expression quite different from so-called “nationalism”.
What, then, does it mean to be Italian?
To be Italian means to know and to be able to recognize the literary paths that found a shared cultural identity.
In that great “novel” which is De Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana, the author, in concluding his work, asks whether, starting from the history of literature, understood as common memory, it is possible to understand what Italy has yet to become.
Tradition, in practice, is used not only in terms of preservation, but as a spur to grow and transform; it is, in short, the root of the “new”.
The study of literature shows itself as a whole capable of offering us a modern national consciousness able to converse with the “consciousness” of modern Europe.
For De Sanctis we have the historical novel, but we lack history and the novel. One must therefore search within oneself, evoking Leopardi’s testamentary motto of “exploring our own breast”.

What has been premised thus far finds important confirmation in some of Giacomo Leopardi’s works and emerges also from the correspondence the poet kept with Vieusseux (cofounder, with the marquis Gino Capponi, of the Antologia). But one of the works from which what we might call Leopardi’s “social philosophy” emerges with great clarity is the Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degli italiani. In the correspondence with Vieusseux the poet praises the merits of the journal, which promotes progress and the propagation of the moral sciences, while at the same time, with ill-concealed modesty, he signals his own personal ignorance of the themes involving social behavior, even casting doubt on the philosophical relevance of his thought, little inclined to follow “that genre which is prized and welcome in this century”.
In reality, as we shall try to show, it is precisely thanks to certain significant writings by the poet himself that there comes into relief the absence, in the Italy of those years, of that part of philosophy which is of sociological inspiration, of a theory of society, which then, toward the end of the nineteenth century, would so greatly influence Italian public-law scholarship itself.
The Discorso sopra il costume degli italiani, for its ample reflection on the humanity of the age, ought to bear a subtitle: Quadro dell’Italia nel suo attuale stato morale, politico e letterario; this, in fact, is the request that the son of the publisher Stella makes to Leopardi by letter in 1826.
The volume requested by the publisher would in fact never come into being, but the Discorso is the product of that proposal which Leopardi himself received from Stella, so much so that traces of these elements can be found in the Zibaldone, in the Operette Morali themselves, in the Canti (and among these in particular in the Palinodia) and in the Paralipomeni (Paralipomena = things left out) of the Batracomiomachia, which is the attempt to demonstrate the existence of an antisocial system that places the intrigues of the palace and the politics of the time above the well-being of citizens.
The Discorso sui costumi has its own peculiar background, namely the comparison between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century; and it is in this latter century that a kind of levelling arises, tending to bring closer the reputation of the peoples of Europe on the literary, civil and military plane.
This analysis is in reality the opposite of the one made in his youth by the twenty-year-old Leopardi in the Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica (1818), steeped in emotion and pathos before Italy and evocative of the past, as a stimulus for the rebirth of the nation.
In the Canto ad Angelo Mai, (composed, according to Carducci, between 10 and 20 January 1820, published on 8 July of the same year) Leopardi anticipates some themes that can then be found in the Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi.
Indeed, to the sincere enthusiasm for Mai’s great discovery (an example of the scholar who rediscovers Cicero’s manuscript in order to celebrate those who search in the past to find what is lacking in the present), to the admiration for the ancient models that ennobled the homeland, to the disdain for present disgraces, there is mixed a gloomy skepticism about the condition of life, such as to make the Canto an example of poetic opposition between feeling and reason, which De Sanctis would signal as a benchmark of a “powerful revelation of a new poetry”.
But in the Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degli italiani, to the pathos of the earlier works Leopardi prefers a very different and decidedly detached tone, typical of one who is called to “read within his own breast” and bent on analyzing the behaviors of social living.
There is, and one perceives, the sense of the process of modern civilization, of the epochal passage, but in the key of the extinction or weakening of the beliefs on which moral principles can be founded.
The preservation of society, then, seems the work of chance. So that the present arises from the loss of “beliefs”, that is, from that faith in the past capable of generating the moral principles themselves.
The search for the “just” and the “honest”, of Ciceronian memory, is the search for a public and private morality widespread in society.
Leopardi seems to hark back to the great moralists of the seventeenth century, Italian and French, but the context is profoundly different. In the so-called golden century those authors had as their referent of power the Court, the absolute State, whereas the poet found himself before the so-called new constitutions.
In this different post-revolutionary social perspective, what then determined modernity in the civilized nations Leopardi takes into consideration, namely France, England and Germany, is the idea of a “close-knit society” capable of privileging the development, within the customs of those countries’ citizens, of a genuine associated life.
The possibility given to men of conversing sincerely with one another, of having daily and authentic relations, living together and creating a context which Leopardi defines a «commercio più intimo degli individui fra loro» (which stands for the constant exchange of experiences and opinions), is the symptom of the search for behaviors held to be more authentic, real and honest, which in Italy, according to the poet, do not develop and perhaps are wholly lacking.
Lacking is ambition understood as an ethics of public life, to which private life itself is subordinate, a value which, after the Renaissance, tends to dissolve into concepts such as honor and reputation, which in the close-knit society generate and permeate public opinion, which does not exist without a close-knit society. There is, in the Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi, a kind of sociological analysis of the daily life of the Italian world.
Indeed, the very term costumi is comparable to Voltaire’s well-known essay on customs, which, with that verbal expression, defines precisely social life.
It is then through public opinion that men are evaluated, and this, in turn, becomes the measure by which such judgment is carried out.
In “those nations”, in fact, for Leopardi, men are ashamed to do evil as to appear in a conversation with a stain on their clothes or with a threadbare garment.
By contrast Italian society “…has no foundation of morality…” and is devoid of every true bond and informing principle of society, and this because it lacks a close-knit society.
In such a scenario, whoever is not occupied with the primary needs concerning his direct survival, and can devote himself to secondary needs, devotes himself to what are the cultural occasions of Italians, namely «passeggiate, spettacoli ed andando per Chiese»; these are the occupations of the non-needy classes of Italy.
The pursuit of amusement is, as in Pascal, the attempt to escape man’s true condition, which is thought. It is reflection that counts in experience, whereas the spectacle is appearance, a single experience that does not create a close-knit society; it is a surrogate, the mask of an absence.
In any case, for Leopardi, Italians have no center and do not even form an “Italian public” corresponding to the dimension of culture as a spectacle of public opinion. What is therefore truly lacking is a “modern national literature” which instead, in developed nations, generates conformity, homogeneity, a set of opinions and tastes, which in turn generate identity: «ciascuna città italiana non solo, ma ciascun italiano, fa tuono e maniera da se» and «…siccome non esiste un "buon tuono" non esiste nemmeno convenienza di società…»; there is lacking the beuséances (social rules of good breeding) to which all, in civilized countries, conform.
From the absence of a close-knit society is born a profound, rooted and effective indifference toward oneself and toward others, which constitutes also «…la maggior peste dei costumi, del carattere e della morale».
Italians laugh at life more than in any other nation; this is our surrogate for the close-knit society, but one that generates cynicism, egoism, misanthropy and, at bottom, “social and national unhappiness”.
This holds both in the upper classes and in the “rabble” and becomes a habit of cynicism that permeates the country and springs from the fact that, by not respecting others, one cannot be respected.
Giacomo Leopardi, then, as an example to be followed by all Italians, in order to “rediscover Italy”.
A singular choice, to tell the truth, because he is after all represented as “the poet of despair”, and yet a coherent choice, because Leopardi precisely, though in a life laden with ills, was able to teach “the peremptory necessity and the incomparable beauty of the struggle”, without yielding (as he himself wrote in a well-known letter to De Sinner of 24 May 1832) either to the «frivoles espérances d’une prétendue félicité future et inconnue» or to «lâche résignation».

Through the Leopardian itinerary there shows through, as in a watermark, a theme of great relevance also for legal method: the topos of the control of public opinion.
In Max Rheinsten’s classic essay (Who Watches the Wacthmen?) it is affirmed that public opinion is perhaps the most effective of the systems of control, but the illustrious author warned that its correct functioning depended in large part on the existence of a community of shared values in society. We might say, to use the metaphor of the Discorso sopra lo stato presente del costume degli italiani, that the control of public opinion works only in the presence of a close-knit society. When this is lacking, when customs (id est social life) are not marked by the sharing of common rules of “good tone”, then one ends up pervaded by the sum of all the half-philosophies founded on the “vanity of all things”. Hence the greatest harm to customs, namely the birth of a profound, rooted and most effective indifference toward oneself and toward others: «…che è la maggior peste dé costumi, dei caratteri e della morale».
Terrible considerations that do not seem written almost two centuries ago and that trace a pitiless picture of Italian customs still dramatically current, and in part they connect with Gramsci’s considerations in his writing Letteratura e vita nazionale.
Here the cultivated militant politician feels the absence, in our tradition, of a literary model open to all social classes. In its place stands a literary cosmopolitanism which, however, sets us before a different sensibility between writers and people. The new instrument, anticipating the modern mass-media means, is thus the newspaper, a guide capable of creating and orienting public opinion.
But from here, as can be intuited, there unfolds a different and perhaps still more problematic thematic strand which entirely escapes the economy of these brief notes, aimed only at celebrating the impressive timeliness of Leopardi’s political testament.

Carlo Calvieri, lawyer, lecturer in Institutions of Public Law at the University of Perugia, is the author of numerous scholarly publications concerning legal matters. He provides consultancy for public bodies and private companies.