Marco Tarchi

File:Marco Tarchi.jpg

Tarchi during the presentation of "Anatomia del Populismo" at the "Libraccio" bookshop in Florence

Marco Tarchi (born October 11, 1952) is an Italian political scientist and full professor of Political Science, Political Theory and Political Communication at the Cesare Alfieri School of Political Sciences of the University of Florence., where he currently teaches Political Science, Political Communication and Political Analysis and Theory. His research is focused primarily on populism, democracy, political organization, and the New Italian Right.

Biography

Marco Tarchi was born in Rome. A political science graduate from the University of Florence, nephew of Angelo Tarchi, who was Minister of Corporate Economy of the RSI, he has been a militant in the youth organizations of the MSI since 1968. In December 1974 he founded the magazines La voce della fogna and, in 1975, Diorama letterario, which he continues to direct to this day.

In the 1970s he was a leading member of the Youth Front, within which he was a candidate for national secretary in 1977, becoming deputy national secretary until March 1979.

He has been in Italy since 1978 the ideologue of the current of thought, called Nouvelle Droite, (which traces back to the similar French experience of Alain de Benoist's GRECE) and which aimed to 'rejuvenate' the political and cultural debate in the Italian right. Tarchi would declare years later that "the Gramscian-style hegemony gave the impression that after the collapse of fascisms the right had not expressed anything culturally relevant. And the Italian neo-fascist world has done little to produce an autonomous culture."

The attempt of the New Right to "subject the right to a bath of innovation," was hindered primarily by the political right. Tarchi was expelled from the MSI in January 1981 after a satire article in La voce della fogna against the party's ruling class was deemed too heavy-handed. It was still the time, moreover, of the years of lead, and the MSI was collecting signatures for the introduction of the death penalty, an initiative to which Tarchi and other militants of the New Right were basically opposed. After his expulsion from the party Tarchi gradually abandoned political militancy in the strict sense, devoting himself to studies and teaching, as well as to editing the monthly Diorama letterario and the four-monthly political culture magazine Trasgressioni. Tarchi coined (and it is also the title of one of his essays), the expression exiles back home to define what was the human and political experience of neo-fascists in the postwar years. In his work of political popularization, the New Right ideologue Tarchi did not disdain, in the wake of what was done by coeval exponents such as Giano Accame, dialectical confrontation with exponents of the Left such as philosopher Massimo Cacciari and journalist Giampiero Mughini both by means of debates and through interventions in the reference newspapers of both areas.

Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Florence in 1987, research fellow in 1993, associate since 1998 and full professor since 2001, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Turku in Finland, collaborated on the ECPR research project on Crisis, Compromise, Collapse: Conditions for Democracy in Inter-War Europe and is a lecturer in the European inter-university higher education program "Eurolarg." He was also a visiting professor at the universities of Santiago and Viña del Mar (2004), and del Rosario (2008).

At the level of political studies, he is a profound scholar of the phenomenon of "populism," both that of historical matrix and the current one, which he believes is embodied in Italy by parties such as the Lega and the more media-driven Five Star Movement. Tarchi currently deals with the processes of crisis in democratic regimes, the organizational transformation of Italian parties, and the culture and strategic choices of the formations that have occupied the political space of the right in republican Italy. He has been engaged in research on the political and organizational evolution of the phenomenon of the Lega Nord and Italy of Values, which should constitute the first moment of a comparative study of the development of populist movements in Europe.

He served as president of the Bachelor of Arts in Political Science program at the University of Florence.

Works

• Doriot e il Partito popolare francese, Roma, Volpe, 1974.
• Diorama. Problemi dello spirito nell'etica fascista. Antologia della pagina speciale di Regime fascista diretta da Julius Evola, I, 1934-35, Roma, Europa, 1974.
• Degrelle e il rexismo, Volpe, 1978.
• Joseph Goebbels, La conquista di Berlino, Padova, Edizioni di Ar, 1978 (translator)
• Partito unico e dinamica autoritaria, Naples: Akropolis, 1981
• La "rivoluzione legale", Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993
• "Destra e sinistra: due essenze introvabili", in Democrazia e diritto, 1, 1994, pp. 381–396
• Cinquant'anni di nostalgia. La destra italiana dopo il fascismo. Milan: Rizzoli, 1995 (interview of Antonio Carioti)
• Esuli in patria. I fascisti nell'Italia repubblicana. Parma: Guanda, 1995
• The Dissatisfied Society. The Roots of Political Change in Italy, in European Journal of Political Research, 1, 1996, pp. 41–63
• Italy: the Northern League, in L. de Winter and H. Türsan (eds), Regionalist Parties in Western Europe. London: Routledge, 1998
• Estrema destra e neopopulismo in Europa, in Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, 2, 1998
• Italy: Early Crisis and Collapse, in D. Berg-Schlosser and J. Mitchell (eds), Conditions of Democracy in Europe, 1918–1938. London: Macmillan, 2000.
• L' Italia populista. Dal qualunquismo ai girotondi, il Mulino, 2003, ISBN 9788815094421
• Il fascismo. Teorie, interpretazioni, modelli, Bari: Laterza, 2003
• Contro l'americanismo, Laterza Bari: Laterza, 2004
• La rivoluzione impossibile. Dai Campi Hobbit alla nuova Destra, Florence: Vallecchi, 2010
• Italia populista. Dal qualunquismo a Beppe Grillo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2015
• Anatomia del populismo. Antologia dalla rivista Trasgressioni, Frattamaggiore, Diana, 2019

External links

• Personal page at University of Florence