Rosario Forlenza

Rosario Forlenza is an Associate Professor in History and Political Anthropology in the department of Political Sciences at Luiss University, Rome. He specializes in the history of modern Europe and Italy in its global implications and focuses particularly on democracy and authoritarianism, political revolutions, nationalism and the politics of memory, politics and religion, symbolic politics, and the Cold War. He has written On the Edge of Demoracy : Italy, 1943-1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) and  published over forty peer-reviewed articles and chapters, most notably in The American Historical Review, Past & Present, and Journal of Contemporary History.

The project

Title: The totalitarian experience in interwar Europe

"This project explores the political transformation of Germany, France, and Italy after World War II – the lost step between the calamities of the 1930s and the democratic transition in southern and eastern Europe (from the 1970s to the 1990s). The main aim of the project is to understand how democracy, that in the 1930s seemed doomed to extinction, became the standard model of political organization and method of government in post-war western Europe. It is to link the emergence of postwar democracy to human experiences and the symbolic formation of meaning in a time of political and existential uncertainty. Its main claim is that the nature, character, and institutional outcomes of democracy were shaped by the lived experiences of people, and by the modification of meanings, beliefs, and ideas that these experiences engendered. Following the social and cultural anthropology of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, Europe’s Democratic Age conceptualizes the emergence of democracy as a liminal social drama, played out differently in different contexts but always following the same pattern of ritual passage consisting of phases of separation, liminality, and re-aggregation. This highly interdisciplinary and ground-breaking project is not only of historical interest—it also speaks to the present and the future, highlighting what democracy means and how can be given new meanings in a time of crisis."

Hosting institution: Sciences Po Paris

Selective Bibliography

• Italy’s Christian Democracy: The Catholic Encounter with Political Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), with Bjørn Thomassen
• On the Edge of Democracy: Italy, 1943-1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)
• “The Soviet Myth and the Making of Communist Lives in Italy, 1943-56,” Journal of Contemporary History 57, no. 3 (2022): 645-68
• “Europe’s Forgotten Unfinished Revolution: Peasant Power, Social Mobilization and Communism in the Southern Italian Countryside, 1943-45,” The American Historical Review 126, vol. 2 (2021): 504-29
• “Antonio Gramsci on Religion,” Journal of Classical Sociology 21, no. 1 (2021): 38-60