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Reviews of Books
concludes by finding some vindication for Rosmini's
thought in positions taken at Vatican 11.
Many of the attributions in this learned study are
hard to follow or difficult to pin down, and there may
be tendency here to conflate rhetorical tradition with
intellectual influence. No reader, however, could fail
to learn from the evidence De Giorgio provides of the
vitality of religious inspiration in the culture of the
period, of the extent to which a provincial, nineteenthcentury Italian philosopher was in touch with major
European intellectual currents, and of the ease with
which a serious and deep thinker of the early Risorgimento could share that era's optimistic dreams.
RAYMOND GREW
University of Michigan
SILVANA PATRIARCA. Numbers and Nationhood: Writing
Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy. (Cambridge Studies in Italian History and Culture.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1996. Pp. xii, 280. $49.95.
This carefully researched book explores an important
chapter of Italian intellectual history, namely the
development of statistics during the Risorgimento as a
complement to the "production" of the Italian nation.
As a primary avenue of investigation, Silvana Patriarca
focuses on the works of Italy's pioneering statistical
thinkers, from the restoration publications of Me1chiorre Gioia and Gian Domenico Romagnosi to the
post-unification works, both official and academic, of
Pietro Maestri, Cesare Correnti, and Angelo Messedaglia. Along this trajectory, she documents changes in
practice, from the descriptive statistics of Gioia to the
social physics of Messedaglia, and in ideology. The
fundamental transition she documents demonstrates
the malleability of the statistical enterprise, for the
statistics used by Risorgimento statisticians to present
an image of a unified (or unifiable) nation served after
unification instead to identify and codify Italian regional diversity.
A second and parallel avenue of investigation is the
production of official statistics, first in the pre-unification states and then in the newly united kingdom.
Variously influenced by French and German/Austrian
models, statistics collecting received differing degrees
of government encouragement after 1815 in the effort
to better know and administer the restoration states.
Italian statisticians themselves did not always share
official concerns, as they generally pursued statistical
investigations first to measure and encourage greater
civilization (incivilimento) , needless to say a problematic concept, and then, especially after 1848, in an
attempt to represent the politically divided Italian
nation as a statistical whole. Patriarca reviews the
statistical enterprises of several pre-unification states,
with the notable omission of the Papal States. The
apparent lack of interest in statistics shown by the
Vatican officials perhaps merits more comment.
Following unification in 1861, "patriotic" statistics
became "national" ones, and the earlier separate
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efforts were replaced by a single Direzione di statistica
that set immediately about measuring the new state,
especially its population. Ironically, although the intention of these statisticians had previously been to
represent a homogeneous Italian whole, the statistical
work of the 1860s, especially in the areas of demography and moral statistics (crime, literacy) emphasized
important differences apparently inherent-especially
between North and South-that were reified and
perpetuated by the logic of statistical comparison.
Patriarca devotes special attention to the compartimento (today's region), a political division of Italian
territory created by the statisticians. In contrast to the
intentionally arbitrary French departments created after the revolution, the compartimenti reproduced selected historical divisions and so, again, perpetuated
these as units of comparison. Patriarca presents their
articulation in the context of Carlo Cattaneo's federalist program losing out to the advocates of centralization. And, in fact, for all their statistical significance,
the compartimenti did not achieve political autonomy
until 1970.
By contrast, the smaller communes have enjoyed
varying degrees of political autonomy ever since unification, and it is to this topic that Patriarca finally
turns. In the work of the Italian statisticians, especially
as demonstrated in the 1867 International Statistical
Congress held in Florence, she identifies the articulation of a "statistics of communes." This particular
statistics originated in what appears to have been a
difficult equilibrium between continued federalist tendencies and caution against excessive regionalism.
Patriarca might have devoted more space to the apparent proliferation of local statistics and histories in
the 1860s as precedents of a persistent trend of
campanilismo or regionalism that continues in Italy to
this day. The "statistics of communes" instead sought
to establish a (northern) urban ideal of a well-run and
well-serviced medium-sized town-Italy's 100 citiesand the monitoring (by municipal physicians) of these
cities according to a uniform statistical analysis of
hygienic conditions. Needless to say, such an ideal
reflected Italian reality better in some areas than in
others, and Patriarca closes by returning to a more
macroscopic view; namely, the statistical magnification
and reinforcement of the (vague) "two Italies" division
between North and South as it would continue to be
represented in subsequent decades.
Patriarca's book makes a fine and useful contribution to scholarly understanding of the development of
statistics in the political world of unifying and unified
Italy.
CARL IpSEN
Indiana University
GEORGE F. BOTJER. Sideshow War: The Italian Campaign, 1943-1945. (Texas A&M University Military
History Series, number 49.) College Station: Texas
A&M University Press. 1996. Pp. xii, 226. $29.95.
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551
Modern Europe
For a year and ten months of World War 11, Allied and
Axis forces fought in Italy. Much of Italy was devastated, many thousands of soldiers and civilians died,
both contending alliances were strained, and, ultimately, a new Italian regime emerged out of the ruins.
This book by George F. Botjer attempts to recount the
events of the war in Italy, including not only the
planning and conduct of military operations but their
impact on the people involved.
Some aspects of the account are carefully written
and give the reader a sense of what was going on at the
front as well as inside Italy, especially the portion
occupied by the Germans. There is a fair presentation of the terrible food shortage in the area under
Allied control and of the dilemmas faced as both
sides confronted the problem of how to deal with the
cultural treasures of cities such as Rome and Florence. Botjer offers a general picture of the resistance movement in German-occupied Italy and the
ideological and tactical problems its various factions
faced.
In spite of these strengths, several major defects
must be noted. Most striking is Botjer's failure to
utilize some of the important recent literature on the
war in Italy. Although Richard Lamb's War in Italy
1943-1945 (1994) probably appeared too late for
consideration, the reader will look in vain for any use
of Carlo d'Este's major books, Gerhard Schreiber's
definitive work on the fate of Italian soldiers after the
surrender of September 1943 (Die italischen militiirinternierten im deutschen Machtbereich 1943 bis 1945
[1990]), or Lutz Klinkhammer's similarly exhaustive
study of German policy toward Benito Mussolini's
puppet government (Zwischen Bundnis und Besetzung
[1993]). The detailed review of such portions of the
campaign as the fighting on Sicily and the Allied
assault on the German defenses called the Gothic
Line, as well as the planned German annexation of
large portions of northern Italy, simply cannot be
understood in the absence of relevant maps.
Botjer unfortunately also fails to throw much light
on two of the most intriguing puzzles of this part of
World War 11: the almost unbelievable clumsiness of
Italy's exit from the war in 1943 and the equally
unbelievable dilatoriness of General Bernard Montgomery in moving from his landing in the extreme
south of Italy to the endangered Allied landing at
Salerno-at least at the speed of newspaper reporters.
Because of his utilization of some unpublished Italian documents and substantial Italian-language literature, Botjer provides some new insights into a campaign that is frequently overlooked in discussions of
the war. The significance of first Naples and then
Livorno as major supply bases of the Allies and the
complicated divisions within the resistance in the
North and their relations with the Allied command are
detailed especially well. But this is hardly the compre-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
hensive one-volume work on the Italian campaign that
readers are led to expect.
L. WEINBERG
University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill
GERHARD
RUDOLF L. Takes. Hungary's Negotiated Revolution:
Economic Reform, Social Change, and Political Succession, 1957-1990. (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and PostSoviet Studies, number 101.) New York: Cambridge
University Press. 1996. Pp. xxiii, 544. Cloth $64.95,
paper $24.95.
This well-written and well-argued book by Rudolf L.
Takes may be compared to Aylmer C. Macartney's
October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary 19291945 (1956-1957), generally regarded as the best political history of the country in the English language.
Macartney's book focuses on Hungary's ill-fated participation in World War 11, culminating in the collapse
of the "old order" on the date that appears in its title.
Takes's study targets another period of high drama in
Hungarian history culminating in the demise of the
Socialist Workers' (Communist) Party in 1989. Like
Macartney, Takes starts his story with a counterrevolution (that of 1956-1957), and he devotes a good
part of his work to the consolidation of Hungarian
politics under lanos Kadar. But whereas Macartney
was a historian with fine-tuned political sensibilities,
Takes is a political scientist with the detective instincts
of a first-rate historian.
Using the political scientist's frame of reference,
Takes tells us that his story is grounded in a set of
constants and imponderables. The most important
constants were Hungary's status as a small power and
its political culture of compromise shaped by historical
necessity and precedence. The imponderable in the
flow of history was the personality of the leader thrust
upon the political stage. This was Kadar, a homegrown communist whose early dedication to Stalinist
principles was rewarded by torture and imprisonment
at the hands of his own comrades. Thus steeled in the
political milieu of Stalinism, Kadar also had a chance
to learn about the limitations of this method of rule.
His version of the "normalization" of Hungary progressed through two stages. First (1957-1962), he
imposed an iron-fisted rule of terror on post-revolutionary Hungary; then he relaxed it and himself turned
into one of the champions of East European liberal
communism.
If the first part of the book is devoted to the inner
workings of this regime, the second part is devoted to
the unraveling of the communist idyll. In this respect,
Takes rightly puts great emphasis on the diffi&lties
experienced by Hungary's hybrid, market-simulating
economy. But the story of demise unfolds in a larger
international context, for as the economy became
increasingly mired in foreign debt in order to maintain
an artificially high standard of living, the Soviet Union
itself became entangled in its own luckless political
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