This is a catalogue of statements from Marx, Engels, Bakunin, related socialist and communist currents and Italian Fascists that attacked, dismissed, or subordinated Mazzini and the classical and civic republican tradition. But I also answer the maddened Marx, Engels and Bakunin, showing how Mazzini exposed the limits of Marxism, and why Marxists needed to supplant Mazzini’s ideal to survive. These illustrate the systematic displacement of republicanism (especially its moral-spiritual, duty-based, non-class-struggle form), treated as an obsolete, idealist, petty-bourgeois, or theological stage that materialism and class struggle must supersede.
The materialist claim to supersede republican moral formation repeatedly produced systems that could not sustain the freedom they promised, while Mazzini’s insistence on inner duty and association identified a permanent condition of republican liberty that no structural rearrangement alone can supply.
I. KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS, THE FOUNDATIONAL MATERIALISTS
MARX ON MAZZINI’S STYLE AND IDEALISM (1858)
Marx reviewed a Mazzini letter while still acknowledging some tactical value in anti-Bonapartist positions but immediately undercuts the entire republican-idealist method as empty of material analysis. You will find this a recurring pattern to credit the man for national agitation while dismissing the philosophical core.
“M. Mazzini has recently addressed a letter to the French Emperor, which, in a literary point of view, must hold, perhaps, the first place among his productions. There are but few traces left of that false sublimity, puffy grandeur, verbosity and prophetic mysticism so characteristic of many of his writings, and almost forming the distinctive features of that school of Italian literature of which he is the founder… Boasting of a false idealism, they have considered it beneath their dignity to become acquainted with economical realities. Nothing is easier than to be an idealist on behalf of other people.” (Karl Marx, “Mazzini and Napoleon,” New York Daily Tribune, 11 May 1858, MECW Vol. 15).
Marx here attempts to reduce moral and spiritual language to rhetorical inflation while treating economic structure as the sole reality. This is itself a form of dogmatic reductionism. Mazzini’s insistence on duty, virtue, and a higher moral law was not an evasion of material conditions; it was a recognition that no rearrangement of property or institutions can produce free citizens if the inner life remains unformed and self-interested. Historical outcomes vindicate Mazzini more than Marx. Regimes built on pure materialist analysis repeatedly generated new hierarchies, corruption, and moral collapse precisely because they treated character as secondary or epiphenomenal. Idealism that demands self-government of the soul is not “false.” Materialist systems that ignore it however prove fragile and oppressive.
MARX IN 1871 INTERVIEW DISMISSING MAZZINIANISM AS OBSOLETE MIDDLE-CLASS REPUBLICANISM
In an interview conducted shortly after the Paris Commune, which Mazzini had condemned, Marx explicitly positions Mazzinian republicanism as a superseded stage that the modern proletarian movement has left behind. The proletariat “no longer knows” such figures.
“Ah non! Nous n’aurions guère fait de progrès si nous n’avions dépassé la sphère de ses idées… Il ne représente rien de mieux que la vieille idée d’une république petite-bourgeoisie. Nous ne marchons pas avec la petite bourgeoisie.” (“He represents nothing better than the old idea of a middle-class republic. We do not go along with the petty bourgeoisie.”). (Interview with Karl Marx, The World, New York, 18 July 1871.
This is a classic stage-theory claim that treats republicanism as a temporary bourgeois form to be superseded. It fails on both historical and anthropological grounds. Mazzini’s republicanism was never merely formal or middle-class; and it demanded universal moral education, association, and duty across classes, explicitly rejecting class war as destructive of the national and human community. Marx’s “supersession” produced, in practice, party dictatorships that liquidated independent civic institutions, free association, and the very republican forms he claimed to advance beyond. He attempted to discard and erase the continuing relevance of civic virtue and moral agency that pure class analysis cannot generate.
MARX ON THE INITIAL INTERNATIONAL DRAFT
During the founding of the International Working Men’s Association (1864), Mazzinian elements tried to shape the programme in a republican-democratic direction. Marx immediately rewrote it to center class struggle and the economic emancipation of the working class, treating the Mazzinian version as a confused bourgeois-democratic leftover.
Marx described the first programme draft influenced by Mazzini’s circle as “il solito minestrone di Mazzini” (“the usual Mazzini hotchpotch/minestrone”).
Take note of Marx’s attitude towards Mazzini, because others would adopt this same attitude. Marx’s contemptuous framing reveals the will to monopolize the workers’ movement under a single materialist orthodoxy. Mazzini’s emphasis on association, education, and moral regeneration was not a “hotchpotch”; it was a coherent alternative anthropology that prioritized the formation of free persons over the conquest of state power by a class. Marx’s rewrite centered economic emancipation through class struggle; the subsequent history of Marxist organizations showed repeated centralization, intolerance of rivals, and subordination of moral and national questions to party control, which were precisely the outcomes Mazzini warned against when he rejected both atheistic materialism and class war as foundations for politics.
MARX TO ENGELS CLAIMS MAZZINI NEGLECTED MATERIAL PEASANT INTERESTS IN 1851
Marx criticized Mazzini for remaining within the horizon of urban liberal nobility and bourgeoisie, ignoring the material conditions of the rural majority. This is classic materialist subordination: republican nationalism without class analysis of property relations is politically blind.
“If Mazzini or anyone else who heads the Italian agitation does not this time openly and immediately transform the peasants from métayers into free landowners… the Austrian government will, in case of a revolution, take refuge in Galician methods… If Mazzini’s eyes have still not been opened he is an ox.” (Marx to Engels, 13 September 1851, MECW correspondence).
Marx’s 1851 criticism that Mazzini ignored the material interests of the peasantry is revealing. Marx correctly noted the importance of the agrarian question, but his solution remained trapped in a narrow economic calculus. Mazzini’s broader framework focused on education, association, moral elevation of the entire people, and gradual social reform within a republican nation aimed at creating the civic capacity without which land reform alone produces new forms of dependence or clientelism. Purely materialist approaches to the peasantry in later Marxist practice often treated rural populations as backward obstacles to be coerced or liquidated rather than as moral agents to be formed. Mazzini’s insistence on the inner life and collective duty offered a more durable basis for genuine independence than economic expropriation alone.
After the Commune, Marx referred to Mazzini as a reactionary relative to the new proletarian movement and, in one reported interview, as “that everlasting old ass.”
The “reactionary” framing is standard in Marxist historiography of the period.
Engels shared the same framework, treating Mazzinian republicanism as a form of bourgeois or petty-bourgeois democracy that the proletariat must outgrow.
II. MIKHAIL BAKUNIN, ANARCHIST SOCIALIST AND MAJOR POLEMICIST AGAINST MAZZINI
Bakunin’s 1871 pamphlet The Political Theology of Mazzini and the International is the most sustained attack. Written in defense of the Paris Commune and the International against Mazzini’s condemnation of them.
After Mazzini publicly denounced the Commune and the International as atheistic, anti-national, and destructive of morality and property, Bakunin replied by portraying Mazzini’s entire system as theological authoritarianism masquerading as republicanism. Bakunin argues that Mazzini’s “God and the People” formula and emphasis on moral duty from above necessarily lead to hierarchy and reaction once the national question is settled.
“Mazzini is the last high priest of an obsolescent religious, metaphysical and political idealism… Unfortunately, from the very outset, the Italian patriot’s revolutionary programme had at its core an essentially false principle which… was bound sooner or later to lure him into the ranks of reaction. That principle is a dual idealism, both metaphysical and mystical, grafted on to the patriotic ambition of the statesman. It is the cult of God and of divine and human authority…”
“Mazzini reproaches us for not believing in God. We, on the other hand, reproach him for believing… We infinitely regret that, as a result of this intrusion of mystical sentiment and ideas into his awareness, activity and life, he should have been impelled to take his stand against us in the ranks of all the enemies of popular emancipation.”
“What will Mazzini do, then, with his new idealism, with his eclectic medley of traditions fallen into disuse and of Platonic absurdities revived…?”
(Mikhail Bakunin, The Political Theology of Mazzini and the International, 1871).
Bakunin repeatedly framed Mazzini’s republicanism as a form of political theology that the materialist, atheist, federalist socialist movement must overcome.
Bakunin’s atheism and anti-statism do correctly identify the dangers of any claim to divine authority that becomes hierarchical. Yet his own solution, that of materialist atheism plus spontaneous federalism, proved unstable and was rapidly overshadowed by more centralizing Marxist currents. Mazzini’s “God and the People” formula was not a theocratic programme, but an attempt to ground republican duty and human association in a transcendent moral law that neither state nor class could monopolize. Bakunin’s pure negation of divinity and authority left no positive source of obligation beyond the will of the revolutionary or the group, which historically facilitated both factional chaos and later authoritarian capture. Mazzini’s framework, whatever its theological language, aimed to form citizens capable of self-limitation, while Bakunin’s left that formation underspecified.
III. LATER MARXISTS, LENINISTS, AND RELATED CURRENTS ENGAGED IN THE SUBORDINATION OF REPUBLICANISM AS A STAGE
Critiques of Mazzini become rarer after the 1870s as the Italian left shifted, but the pattern of subordinating the republican tradition remained consistent.
LENIN ON DEMOCRACY
Lenin routinely treated “bourgeois-democratic” or “republican” stages as necessary but temporary forms that must be transcended by proletarian dictatorship. In writings on the Russian Revolution and national questions he insists that consistent democracy (including republican forms) is only fully realized under proletarian leadership and is otherwise a mask for bourgeois rule. Classical republican language of civic virtue and moral duty is absent, and the framework is purely class and power.
TROTSKY ON THE IMPERIALIST EPOCH
Trotsky is explicit that a “democratic republic” in the imperialist epoch is typically “a counter-revolution with a democratic face” or a masked form of the bourgeois state. In texts on Italy and Spain he rejects any independent progressive role for bourgeois or petty-bourgeois republicanism once the proletariat is on the scene. The republican tradition is subordinated to the permanent revolution perspective.
GENERAL MARXIST-LENINIST AND STALINIST HISTORIOGRAPHY
General Marxist-Leninist and Stalinist historiography (e.g., treatments of the Risorgimento) routinely classifies Mazzini as a representative of the radical petty bourgeoisie or “bourgeois democrats” whose historical role was progressive only up to the point of national unification, after which it became an obstacle to proletarian organization. The spiritual-moral anthropology is dismissed as idealist mystification.
Later Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist subordination of “bourgeois republicanism” or democratic republican forms as transitional stages to be transcended by proletarian dictatorship represents the most systematic displacement. It treats the classical republican emphasis on virtue, civic education, and moral freedom under law as an incomplete bourgeois phase. In practice, the “transcendence” routinely destroyed the institutional and cultural preconditions of republican liberty — independent associations, free speech, rule of law, and the expectation of citizen character. The result was not higher freedom, but new forms of domination justified by historical necessity. Mazzini’s warning that freedom without duty and moral formation collapses into license or tyranny proved more accurate than the stage-theory that claimed to supersede him.
EARLY SHARED HOSTILITY TO FREEMASONRY, MASONIC REPUBLICANISM AND MAZZINIAN REPUBLICANISM
Mussolini’s anti-Masonry predated Fascism. As a socialist in 1912 he already pushed the Italian Socialist Party to declare membership in Freemasonry incompatible with socialism. Once in power, Fascism moved quickly. The Grand Council of Fascism declared incompatibility with Freemasonry in 1923. Secret societies were outlawed, and Freemasonry was effectively banned by 1925-26. Fascists viewed the lodges as cosmopolitan, liberal-bourgeois, anti-national, secretive, and tied to the old parliamentary-republican order of the Risorgimento and post-unification liberalism. Mussolini repeatedly attacked them as foreign-influenced and hostile to the new Fascist state.
Marx and Engels were consistently critical of secret societies, including Masonic-style ones, as authoritarian, mystical, and diversionary from open class struggle and proletarian education. Later Marxist parties (Second International currents, the Italian Socialist Party in 1914, and the Communist International) treated Freemasonry as incompatible with membership. It was seen as a bourgeois, careerist, or ruling-class network that mixed rationalism with mysticism and undermined proletarian independence. Trotsky and others enforced expulsions of Masons from communist parties in the early 1920s.
Both currents rejected Freemasonry. Fascists emphasized its anti-national and liberal character; and Marxists emphasized its “bourgeois” and secretive character. In both cases, Masonic networks were associated with the older liberal-republican world that each movement claimed to supersede.
Marxists (as documented earlier) repeatedly framed Mazzinian republicanism as prophetic mysticism, false idealism, middle-class republicanism, or a theological residual that materialism and class struggle had rendered obsolete. Early Fascists were more ambiguous and selective, but both Mussolini mocked it, while appropriating the legacy of Mazzini.
Mario Palmieri quotes Mussolini (from the 17th of November 1922) in The Philosophy of Fascism:
“We want to uplift the people materially and spiritually, but not because we think that number, mass, quantity may create some special types of civilization in the future. We leave this type of ideology to those who profess themselves priests of this mysterious religion.”
Many early Fascists (including some with socialist or syndicalist backgrounds) invoked Mazzini’s language of duty, nation, and moral seriousness. Giovanni Gentile and others reinterpreted him in an idealist key that could be made compatible with the Fascist state. At the same time, pure nineteenth-century republicanism, with its emphasis on popular sovereignty, anti-clerical liberalism, internationalist “Young Europe” federalism, and individual moral autonomy, was treated as incomplete, outdated, or needing to be absorbed and transcended by the new totalizing national synthesis. Fascism both appropriated and violently displaced the republican tradition, much as Marxism subordinated it.
Both movements therefore treated the older civic-republican form as something that had to be left behind, whether as a bourgeois-idealist stage (Marxists) or as an insufficiently vital and national form by early Fascists.
WHY THIS MATTERS FOR AMERICAN READERS
Across these currents the consistent move is the same. Classical and civic republicanism (virtue, duty, moral self-government, spiritual anthropology of the sort Mazzini embodied) is reclassified as “bourgeois,” “petty-bourgeois,” “idealist,” or “theological.” It is granted a limited historical role (national unification, formal democracy) and then declared superseded by materialist class analysis and the dictatorship of the proletariat, or in Bakunin’s variant, by federalist anarchist socialism. The inner moral life and collective duty under a higher law are replaced by structural-economic determination and class interest.
The rationalist-materialist logic that runs through Marxism and its descendants has an inherent tendency to displace the republican tradition, and its contemporary variants follow that same pattern.
Materialist rationalism begins from the premise that the decisive realities are economic structures, class relations, and historical stages. Moral character, civic virtue, duty, and the inner formation of the citizen are treated as secondary, derivative, or ideological. Once that premise is accepted, classical or civic republicanism, the tradition that insists freedom requires moral self-government, shared duties, and a higher law of association can only appear as a transitional “bourgeois” stage to be superseded, an idealist mystification that distracts from material struggle, or a form of “centrism” that fails to confront power at the root.
This is not accidental. It is the consistent outcome of the anthropology. Mazzini’s insistence on duty, moral education, and a non-class conception of the people was therefore not a minor disagreement; it was a rival foundation that had to be subordinated or dismissed. The same logic reappears whenever a socialist current treats any politics that is not explicitly socialist as insufficiently radical.
In the United States, leftist currents frequently frame the entire Democratic Party as “neoliberal centrism” or “corporate liberalism.” This creates a simplified ternary, which many Americans today, as statistics have proven, are fighting psychologically against. This is a false pole between the Right (reaction, hierarchy, market fundamentalism), Center (Democratic Party establishment, incrementalism, managed capitalism) and Left (DSA-aligned socialism, structural transformation, class politics).
Within that map there is no conceptual space for a republican politics that is neither right-wing traditionalism, nor procedural liberalism, nor socialist materialism. Civic republicanism is either absorbed into a vague “progressive” rhetoric or dismissed as insufficiently anti-systemic. The result is a false polarization that flattens the actual historical options. Americans are looking for other options, and the economic conditions have produced their desperation.
However, the republican tradition, whether in its classical, Atlantic, or Mazzinian forms does not sit on that spectrum. It is defined by a different axis: the cultivation of civic virtue, the moral capacity for self-government, the priority of duties over pure rights claims, and the insistence that political freedom requires the formation of character rather than the mere rearrangement of material conditions. It can criticize concentrated economic power without adopting class war as the motor of history; and it can defend republican institutions without collapsing into conservative nostalgia or technocratic liberalism.
This displacement is part of why both the American right and left often remain ignorant of the republican tradition in its fuller form. The right frequently reduces it to procedural constitutionalism or nationalism; and the left inherits the Marxist framing that treats it as an intermediate bourgeois stage. The result is a narrowed political imagination in which the older republican insistence on character formation, civic virtue, and a non-materialist anthropology of freedom has been largely erased from mainstream debate.
When politics is reduced to a contest between reaction, managed centrism, and structural leftism, any tradition that refuses those terms appears either naïve or reactionary. That is the same mechanism visible in the nineteenth-century Marxist treatment of Mazzini: his moral and spiritual republicanism was reclassified as outdated, middle-class, or theological so that the materialist project could claim the future. The contemporary American left’s tendency to treat the Democratic Party as a single centrist bloc and itself as the only authentic alternative reproduces the same exclusion.
The republican tradition is not a “center.” It is a distinct political anthropology that has been progressively crowded out by the very rationalist frameworks that claim to supersede it. Recognizing that exclusion is the first step toward recovering the space it once occupied.
REFERENCES
- Arthur Lehning (ed.), Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings (Jonathan Cape, 1973).
- Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini (Yale University Press, 1994).
- Karl Marx, “Mazzini and Napoleon,” New York Daily Tribune, 11 May 1858, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 15 (Progress Publishers, 1980).
- Karl Marx, Letter to Friedrich Engels, 13 September 1851, in Marx-Engels Collected Works (correspondence volumes).
- Karl Marx, Interview in The World (New York), 18 July 1871.
- Mikhail Bakunin, The Political Theology of Mazzini and the International (1871), English translation by Sarah E. Holmes.
- Salvo Mastellone, Mazzini and Marx: Thoughts upon Democracy in Europe (Praeger, 2003).
