From Wrath to Utopia: G. A. Borgese’s American Interpretation of Dante (1931-1952)

This paper describes the influence exerted by Dante on the Italian antifascist exile Giuseppe Antonio Borgese (1882-1952), who fled from Mussolini’s Italy in 1931 to find refuge in the United States. In the 1930s and 1940s, Borgese made relevant contributions to the field of Italian Studies modernizing the American reception of Dante: his original interpretation—a blend of literary criticism and political theory, centered on the concept of «structural beauty»— was destined to generate unexpected outcomes in the post-war era, as the philosophical viewpoints stressed in Dante’s De Monarchia were to be planted, somehow unexpectedly, in the newborn ideology of world federalism.

Keywords: Dante, Borgese, World Government, Monarchia, Exile, Fascism