Filippo Turati was an Italian sociologist, criminologist, poet and socialist politician.
Early life
Born in Canzo, province of Como, he graduated in law at the University of Bologna in 1877, and participated in the Scapigliatura movement with the most important artists of the period in Milan, publishing poetry. His Inno dei Lavoratori, adapted to music, became the most popular song of the nascent labor movement. Turati became interested in politics, being attracted to the democratic movement before joining the more specific Socialist groups. His most important sociological work of this period is Il Delitto e la Questione Sociale, in which he examines how social conditions affect crime. He met Anna Kulischov while working on a survey of social conditions in Naples. Kulischov was an exile from Russia who had become the companion of Andrea Costa, an Anarchist leader – when she converted to Socialism, Costa followed, sending an important letter to his anarchist comrades in which he abandoned the movement. Kulischov and Costa had split by the time she met Turati. The two immediately fell in love, and lived together until her death in 1925.
Turati and Anna Kulischov were the most instrumental intellectuals in the founding of the Italian Socialist Party in 1892. They were reformists, believing that Socialism would come about gradually, primarily through action in the Italian Parliament, labor organization, and education, spreading their ideas through their journal Critica Sociale – a review founded by their friend Arcangelo Ghisleri under the title Cuore e Critica. It was the most influential Marxist review in Italy before World War I. Shut down by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime, it was reestablished after World War II, and is still in print. In the years following the party's foundation, the Italian government attempted to suppress it. Turati advocated alliances with other Italian democratic forces, meant to defeat the government's reactionary policies, and to advance left-wing causes. In 1898 Turati was arrested and charged with being the inspirator of the popular riot that broke out in the whole country against the rise of the bread price. He was freed the following year. Under Prime MinisterLuigi Pelloux, the country was governed by a highly conservative politicians which were met with stiff resistance from the left, and in 1899 they were defeated thanks in large part to the PSI's policies. In 1901, Giuseppe Zanardelli, a Liberal, became Prime Minister – accompanied by Giovanni Giolitti as the Minister of the Interior – Giolitti who would dominate Italian politics until 1915. This Liberal cabinet risked losing a vote in Parliament, with the possibility that a more conservative politician, Sidney Sonnino, would come to power; Turati urged that the Socialist deputies vote for the Zanardelli government. When the party Directorate refused to sanction the vote, he convinced the deputies to do so anyway. The vote brought the incipient split in the party between right and left wings to a head, even if the Liberal government had allowed workers the right to strike, and despite the fact that the subsequent strike wave resulted in improved conditions in industry and on the land. Between 1901 and 1906, power in the party seesawed between the Turati-led reformists and the revolutionaries under various leaders. After 1906, splits surfaced among the reformists themselves. In 1912, as a result of Socialist reaction against the Italo-Turkish War, revolutionaries took over the party. Benito Mussolini, one of their leaders, became editor of the party newspaper Avanti!; Turati opposed Mussolini, but proved unable to dislodge him. He had opposed the conflict, and would oppose Italy's entrance into World War I – while Mussolini moved to an irredentist position. Despite the fact that he was a pacifist in June 1918 he strongly supported the Italian Army that was fighting the Battle of Solstizio.
