"Golia, marcia del fascismo". Politica e letteratura nell’utopia universalista di Giuseppe Antonio Borgese

Giuseppe Antonio Borgese (Polizzi Generosa 1882 – Fiesole 1952), émigrés in the United States to escape fascist intimidations, during 1934 and 1935 devotes himself to the writing of an historical and political essay about the rise of fascism in Italy. "Goliath, the March of Fascism", published in 1937 in English language by Viking Press of New York, has indeed the main purpose of calling the attention of the Italian and International public opinion about the moral and political decadence of the Mussolini era. This article provides a deep analysis of Goliath, both from a thematic and ideological perspective, aiming to focus the correspondences between the exile’s book and the intellectual’s path, in terms of formal structures and literary results. The analysis reveal how the political and the literary level are mutually connected and determined; the research about the fascist intrinsic essence drives Borgese to retrace the history of the Italian Spirit and its literary roots with an historiographic method that finds the origin in the romantic idealism and in Francesco De Sanctis teachings. The result is an hybrid, “hermaphrodite art-work” with a disharmonic style and not homogenous argumentative structures, but that deserves the merit to attribute an educational role to the literature and restitute at the intellectuals the power to influence people’s choices and actions. In this set of perspectives, Goliath has a central importance for Borgese’ s literary and politic route. It’s a synthesis and a balance of his previous thought and in the meanwhile a step forward the Utopia of the World Republic, the core of his next works.