Cattaneo, Carlo (1801–1869)

Carlo Cattaneo, a disciple of Gian Domenico Romagnosi (1761–1835), graduated in both Roman [Page 162]and canon laws from the University of Pavia in 1824. Coming from a middle-class family, he was a federalist, a republican, and a liberal. On several occasions, his intransigence caused him to resign from public and private positions, to abandon professorial chairs, and to engage in personal conflict. Yet this same harsh character earned him the reputation of being the critical conscience of Italy's Risorgimento, or Italian unification.

Positivist in education and background, Cattaneo transfused this philosophical vision into his numerous writings, drawing inspiration from a firm belief in technical and scientific progress as a means of moral and material improvement in a whole population. His interests ranged from customs duties, agricultural development projects, and works of public charity to finances, geography, history, art, trade, railway construction, linguistics, and legislation. He always looked at laws in their context and was a pioneer in this respect.

A contributor to the Annali Universali di Statistica (Universal Statistical Annals) from 1832, in 1839, he and a small group of friends founded Il Politecnico, a monthly journal of “studies applied to social culture and prosperity.” The journal, suspended during the wars that followed, resumed publication on his instigation in 1859.

Cattaneo's renown as a scholar spread beyond the borders of Lombardy, not only to the neighboring Swiss Confederation, where he took refuge as a political exile, but also to the United Kingdom, whose government asked him in 1837 to undertake studies of British policy in India and irrigation systems in Ireland.

Cattaneo's political thinking reflected a federal dream drawn from a North American and Swiss matrix, a dream that was to be shattered on the rocks of what he called “the Asiatic, centralist, bureaucratic and totalitarian ideal” of the Papal and Savoy monarchies. He cherished the idea of a great Central European Commonwealth in which LombardyVeneto would have the dignity of a state. In this aspiration, he differed from other Italian intellectuals, especially those who held fast to a feeling of confidence for the Catholic Church, which for Cattaneo was the secret cause of Italy's weakness.

Cattaneo believed that Italy's freedom and national independence should develop from education of the masses and their conscious ability to govern themselves, which the people would exercise through the autonomy of the communes. In particular, he saw federalism as the means for safeguarding the poorer areas of the peninsula. Cattaneo put his ideas into practice as a philosophy professor in Switzerland, resulting in his persecution by Catholics in that country.