Giuseppe Mazzini

The teaching

Taught from his own writings, above all The Duties of Man (1860) and Faith and the Future (1835).

God and the people

Mazzini's politics is a religion. Its watchwords are his own: God and the people, and thought and action. There is one God, the author of the moral law, and the people, humanity gathered into nations, is the means by which that law is worked out on earth. A political movement without that faith, he holds, is a quarrel of interests; with it, it is a duty.

Duties before rights

The Duties of Man is addressed to the working men of Italy, and its first lesson is that rights are not enough. The great revolution of the century before, he argues, preached the rights of the individual, and on rights alone the strong grew stronger and each person was left to fend for himself. A right is the fruit of a duty done. So he teaches the duties in their order: to humanity first, since all people are children of one God; then to one's country; then to the family; and then to oneself, to grow in mind and conscience so as to serve the rest.

The law of progress

God's law, for Mazzini, is the law of progress. Humanity is one collective being that lives and learns through the ages, and each age is given a part of the law to understand and carry out. A person learns what the law asks by two lights together: his own conscience, and the tradition of humanity, the common agreement of the peoples across history. Where the two agree there is truth; conscience alone may err, and tradition alone may harden. Revelation is never closed, for it goes on through the whole life of humanity.

The country as a workshop

A country, in this teaching, is not a piece of ground but a mission. God divided humanity into peoples so that each might do its part of the common work, and a person's country is his workshop, the field from which his labour goes out to the good of the whole earth. Without a country, he tells the workers, they are soldiers without a banner; but a country that oppresses another betrays its own reason for being. Italy's mission, as he saw it, was to rise as a free and united people and to open, after the Rome of the emperors and the Rome of the popes, a third Rome, the Rome of the people.

Association and equality

The way forward is association, not competition and not hatred between classes. Workers should join their savings and their labour in free associations, uniting capital and labour in the same hands, so that the wage, which keeps them dependent, gives way to a share in what they make. He asks for an education given by the nation to all, and for the equality of women: woman is the equal of man, his companion in the family and in the duties of the country, and a cause that leaves her out is unjust.

Education and insurrection

The rules of Young Italy set out how the faith is to be served. The society was to state its aims openly, as the old secret societies had not: a united, independent and republican Italy. Its means were two, to be used together and kept in harmony: education, to teach the people their duties and their rights, and insurrection, when the time came, made by the people themselves and not by a foreign power. A member was to teach by example, to live already as the free citizen he hoped to make, and to set the cause above himself.

A Europe of peoples

Young Europe carried the same faith across borders. Its pact, signed by exiles from Italy, Germany and Poland, takes for its watchwords liberty, equality and humanity: every people free to form its own nation, and all the nations bound together as brothers under one law of humanity. He looked for a Europe in which the peoples, each having found itself, would join in a common work, and he warned that a nation which won its freedom only to dominate others would have understood nothing of its own cause.