Italy from Crisis to Crisis

‘The great national sport for the Italians for a century and a half has been complaining about their condition. Foreign observers have often encouraged this sport with critical narratives on Italy and Italians. The value of the most qualified comparative analysis is to reject this sport and to look at Italy for what it is, comparing it with the experiences of other countries. After the extraordinary economic and democratic miracle of the post-war era, since the 1970s Italy has taken a long break, but it hasn’t stopped. This book brings together a team of authoritative scholars who conduct a wide-ranging, accurate, and intriguing exploration of the peninsula’s society, economy, and politics of the last quarter century. What the work shows is a country undergoing profound change: Italy has changed and is still changing. It changes, after all, as the world around it changes, in some respects for the better, in some for the worse. But it changes. Isn’t it time to file away the idea of a crisis without a break?’ - Alfio Mastropaolo, University of Torino, Italy.

‘Other parts of the world, not least Italy, have often been viewed as "not normal" or idiosyncratic relative to an Anglo-American norm of socio-political stability and maturity. The model has recently suffered some obvious blows on home turf that thereby draw attention to its longstanding insufficiency. This welcome volume shows how useful and limited a crisis motif can be in understanding recent Italian history without recourse to dubious role models.’ - John Agnew, UCLA, USA.

‘With a cross-disciplinary approach and within a comparative perspective, this important volume helps us to understand the effects of the neoliberal crisis as it interacts with long lasting and multifarious crises.’ - Donatella della Porta, European University Institute, Italy.