Bøger i A Colorni-Hirschman International Institute serien

The name of Eugenio Colorni is quite familiar among the many intellectuals who knew Albert Hirschman. This is not true, however, of his work. The reason for this is that while Albert often spoke about his brother-in-law and close friend and acknowledged his influence on his own thinking, until now Eugenio's work, with one notable exception, has not been translated into English. Recently, however, "A Colorni-Hirschman International Institute" has begun publishing excerpts in English as part of a yearly dossier, "Long is the Journey. . . ," which is included on its website: www.colornihirschman.org. Building on this, Nicoletta Stame and I are now editing an initial sampling that reflects Eugenio's brilliance and ingenuity: a mini-anthology (which I hope will prove interesting and enjoyable) of texts taken mainly from a selection of Eugenio's political writings.

In Discovering the Possible Luca Meldolesi recounts over half a century of Hirschman's work, exploring the motivations, methodology, and unexpected developments of his research. Published simultaneously in Italian, Spanish, and English, Discovering the Possible is the first book to probe the whole corpus of Hirschman's work and to highlight the wealth of his ideas and the sharp self-irony with which his intuitions are forged into thoughts. The book will interest students and professionals in economics, sociology, political science, and moral philosophy, as well as those who focus on the development sector of these disciplines.

Systems, love, philosophy, science, end-means, anthropomorphism, economy, action, success, separation: these are the main theoretical themes of "that strange and extraordinary dialogue" that developed between Eugenio Colorni and Altiero Spinelli in the Ventotene island (1939-42). They represent an easily accessible, interdisciplinary, iconoclastic, liberating, and fantastic intellectual feast under extreme conditions of confinement imposed by the fascist regime. They developed hand in hand with the political discussion that, with the contribution of Ernesto Rossi and Ursula Hirschmann, gradually unveiled the well-known political Manifesto for the unification of Europe.

"He was ready to let himself be pervaded by an idea and to experience it by compassionately living it, so as to possess it. Then sometimes he would turn it around and transform it into something rich and strong, in Shakespeare''s words. If I think of a baffling and miraculous intelligence, able even to absorb superstition, even astrology or magic, and transform them into an original treasure, I think of Eugenio Colorni." - Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue,"Ricordo di Colorni," Arethusa, July-August 1945Eugenio "detests a federation organized through state diplomacy for purposes of economics and power. He sees a federation in terms of a socialist movement - that is, born of the people. And therefore revolutionary (just as he detests arranged marriages or unions without love, in which one tends to exploit and reduce the other to oneself)." - Luisa Villani Usellini, "A Very Quick Note," undated"In short, Colorni''s thinking was an incandescent magma of colossal genius that would have assailed any sphere his intellectual interests had turned to." - Leo Solari, 18 May 2004"I remember Angelo, this great scientist, this great scholar, this great freedom fighter also as a man who was exquisitely political, exceptionally able in political activity and propaganda and in the lessons he was able to teach us even though he was only slightly older than we were." - Giuliano Vassalli, 18 May 2004

"The answer [Eugenio Colorni's, to a question of Ursula Hirschman's on the existence of "concentric circles" in explanations of reality] is this: that the philosophical illness is more difficult to eradicate than you think, and that it lurks in the most unimaginable places and people [. . .]. All these concentric explanations are in fact 'philosophies.' Each coherent in itself, each 'true' from a certain point of view, each 'beautiful,' 'satisfying,' 'habitable'; sometimes 'exciting' [. . .]. No wonder, then, if they turn out to be satisfying, calming and coherent. Now just take each of these concentric circles and ask yourself - what good are they beyond giving me all this satisfaction? And then you will see all this beautiful concentricity and coherence fall apart, and each of the circles will prove no longer to be a self-contained whole, but something detached and fragmentary. The utility of the dialectic is in interpreting some spiritual things and some historical phenomena, and that's all [. . . ]. Analytic psychology is useful in treating certain nervous disorders, and helping us understand certain mental processes even in healthy people, and that's all [. . .]. Kant helps physics deal with time and space and causality his way. And he's not good for anything else. You ask me if it also makes me nervous to see how easily our minds think in analogies - which we then take to be facts. Does it make me nervous?! I've been nervous for twelve years, and only now have I begun to sort this out."

. . . the shift from Eugeniös main student interest in science in favor of theoretical philosophy, on one hand, and his post-graduation "German period," on the other (along with the visible maturation of his political awareness), in the end led Colorni to pursue in depth the study of Leibniz¿s original texts. It is therefore possible that his postgraduate thesis, The Youthful Philosophy of Leibniz (1933), contained some foretaste of what would later become a key feature of Colorni¿s Leibniz studies-"translating" Leibniz¿s work into modern terms, so as to make it accessible to contemporary philosophers.-From the IntroductionThe Leibniz Compromise captures the intellectual shift in the thinking and writing of Eugenio Colorni, foreshadowing the work to come.