ABSTRACT
Words are the backbone of any political debate and historical interpretation. Reality is unbending, and words will conform sooner or later to the requirements of practical life. Yet words do have some free space. Those who use them, especially if they have some leverage in creating forms of public discourse, will try and stress one or the other aspect of the issues at stake in order to reorient the discussion according to their own agenda. This is indeed what happened in Italy in the nineteenth century. The notions that define the relationships between the civil and religious arenas, between the institutions based on a combination of bottom-up consent and accepted hegemony and the ecclesiastical institutions based solely on the top-down divine revelation have been forged as weapons in the struggle for power at the time of the political unification and still dominate the Italian political discourse and the allegedly scientific works in the political sciences. They still dominate public discussion in Italy and influence the international perception of contemporary Italy. Through an investigation of these notions it is possible to obtain critical access to some crucial problems at the core of Italian history. We may conveniently start from the discussion at the end of 2007 in the Italian newspapers and magazines and in TV talk shows that addresses a wide readership and an even wider audience: their use of the words relevant to these political and moral problems is crucial in the decision-making process that takes place both in the Parliament and in grass-roots representative institutions.
