Oltre Malaparte: Silvano Tosi dalla tecnica alla teoria del colpo di Stato

The essay reconstructs and biographically frames Silvano Tosi's political reflection on the topic of the coup d'état, developed in his volume of 1951 (Il colpo di Stato) but dating back to the degree thesis discussed in 1948 at the "Cesare Alfieri" Faculty of Political Sciences in Florence and, before that, born from the comparison with the Téchnique du coup d'État published in 1931 by Curzio Malaparte. From this work the young Tosi, intellectually formed in the twilight of the fascist regime, derived the notion of coup d'état as a political category defined by specific methods of conquest of power. Tosi's theoretical rethinking, however, went beyond Malaparte's technical approach and brought the relationship between the institutional dimension and the subversive illegality back into focus. The path of integration undertaken by Tosi in the academic and journalistic world of post fascist Italy pushed him to convert his theory of the coup d'état into that of defense from the coup d'état and to embrace, in this sense, the proposal of control of the "partitocracy" advanced by Giuseppe Maranini to contain democratically legitimized antisystem forces.