Rocco Rubini. Posterity: Inventing Tradition from Petrarch to Gramsci

In his 2014 work, The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger, Rocco Rubini reassessed Italian thought by examining the twentiethcentury debate about Renaissance humanism.While other national philosophical cultures questioned its emphasis on the individual, Italian thinkers defended its value and, in doing so, developed their ideas through an examination of their own intellectual origins.Rubini's meticulously researched study characterized Italian thought as a rejection of the investigation of ahistorical first principles-as was done in France, for example-in favour of an active and intentional engagement with the intellectual tradition.He concluded The Other Renaissance by suggesting that this characteristic of Italian thought extends beyond the twentieth century.In his new work, Posterity: Inventing Tradition from Petrarch to Gramsci, he gives content to this claim.In five interwoven chapters, Rubini analyzes five different authors: Petrarch, Francesco De Sanctis, Carlo Goldoni, Giambattista Vico, and finally Antonio Gramsci, specifically in relation to Benedetto Croce.His interpretative approach is based on a rich conception of how each thinker addressed the entire temporal horizon of the intellectual tradition.Drawing heavily on autobiographies and letters, Rubini shows how Italian authors reassessed the origins of humanism in the past, engaged in conversation with contemporaries in the present, and deliberately wrote to influence audiences in the future.