Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution

This well-written and erudite book performs a valuable service for Anglophone readers in being the first full-length study of Gobetti in English. But its merits are far greater than that: this is an important assessment of a political thinker from a contemporary methodological viewpoint, one that employs various parallel techniques and perspectives in order to draw out maximum interpretative advantage. James Martin skillfully blends intellectual biography with attention to various contexts--some historical, some ideational, and some relating to the future reception of Gobetti's writings and his personal impact. This is an excellent study that will assist in giving some subtle aspects of early twentieth-century Italian thought the prominence they have not hitherto received outside Italy.