George Souvlis interviews Enzo Traverso on the emergence of far-right movements across the European continent, drawing on Traverso's extensive body of work since the 1990s.
“1) By way of introduction, could you explain what personal experiences strongly influenced you, politically and academically?
I belong to an Italian generation that discovered politics in the early 1970s: a rebellious age in which culture was extremely politicized. High schools and universities were bastions of the radical left and I became an activist almost naturally, without being confronted with moral or political dilemmas. Furthermore, my father was a member of the Communist party and my sisters were deeply engaged in the feminist movement.
At the time, universities had been transformed into realms of permanent assemblies and mobilization; students were often graded collectively; courses and seminars were troubled and the most popular courses were taught by professors who were politically engaged. But the atmosphere of freedom and freshness of 1968 was over. Very soon, the contiguity between collective movements and terrorism–the Red Brigades and other armed organizations–created a climate of violence and fear: more than a radical change, people were waiting for a violent confrontation with the state apparatus. In this context, many scholarly currents–structuralism and post-structuralism, existentialism, critical theory, psychanalysis, aesthetic avantgarde, formalism, feminism, and several historical “schools” such as those related to the French journal Annales, “history from below”, microhistory, oral history, etc.–were assimilated through an all-compassing Marxist framework, either Gramscian-historicist (the “organic” historians of the Communist party) or “operaista” (the current of Mario Tronti, Toni Negri among others). Thus, I discovered the tradition of conservative thought and classical liberalism a decade later, at the time of the “crisis of Marxism”.
In the 1980s, the cultural and political atmosphere in Italy had become suffocating and getting a research position in an Italian university was almost impossible (a situation that has not changed in the decades since). Thus, I decided to emigrate. I learned German and wished to move to Berlin, a city that was already powerfully attractive, but finally I opted for Paris, because I received a French fellowship and, in spite of a general cultural change in continental Europe, Marxism seemed to me more vibrant in France than in Germany.”
