Dante as a Modern Utopian Thinker: Origins and Metamorphosis of an Idea

Abstract

When, in a famous note about the origins of the modern state, Antonio Gramsci studied Dante’s politicaltheory, his judgment was lapidary. A “victim of class war,” Dante produced not a real political theory, buta personal, more autobiographical than philosophical dream anchored in the distant Roman times anddeprived of “any historical-cultural impact.” Gramsci’s conclusion was that “this was not a political theorybut a political utopia colored by reflections of the past.” These ideas were by no means new in the 1930s.In fact, they seem to have already become commonplace in 1858, when Francesco de Sanctis publishedhis famous essay on The Character of Dante and his Utopia, given that not just Cesare Balbo, in hisbestselling biography of the poet (Life of Dante, 1839), but also Vincenzo Gioberti, in an essay of no lesssuccess (On the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italian Race, 1843), had considered Dante’s politicalviews in a quite negative way as the expression of a modern utopian thinker. Yet, whereas thosenineteenth-century intellectuals, along with impracticality (the “utopian” features), stressed the modernityof Dante’s political ideas, Gramsci—and, with him, many others—considered Dante as a purelyanachronistic dreamer. They all agree that Dante’s political theories were impractical, but while some ofthem think that Dante’s universal monarchy was impractical because it was a modern utopia, othersconsider the reason for such impracticality to be the fact that Dante’s theoretical empire was the gothicdream of a defeated man, incapable of understanding his own present. Focusing on the links between theintertwined ideas of modernity and utopia, this paper will explore the different forms acquired by the ideaof Dante as either a modern or an anachronistic utopian thinker.