The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice [Paperback]

Carlo Ginzburg (Author), Antony Shugaar (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 2002

Carlo Ginzburg draws on his work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witchcraft trials to dissect the weaknesses and contradictions of Italy's case against Adriano Sofri, figurehead of the Italian Left, demonstrating the importance of intellectual rigor and passion against political opportunism and dishonesty at the end of the twentieth-century.

A bomb, an anarchist's 'accidental death', the murder of a police commissar, and the confession of a former member of Lotta Continua led to seven dubious court cases and a tale of political opportunism and dishonesty. Standing in the tradition of Emile Zola's famous J'accuse polemic against the Dreyfus trial at the end of the nineteenth-century, the historian Carlo Ginzburg draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries to dissect the weaknesses and contradictions of the state's case in this late-twentieth-century political show-trial and reflects more generally on the similarities and differences between the roles of the historian and the judge.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The importance of some books cannot be understated: They help place ourselves in the world, ask the right questions, and maintain useful, strategic credulity in the face of brutal empiricism. Sometimes they shed light on those facts, contextualize them, interrogate them, and so hold them up as empty, mendacious, vicious. The Judge and the Historian does this. As well as a concise and persuasive meditation on the convergence and divergence of the roles of its eponymous professionals, the book offers us a path through the tortuous proceedings that led to what the author portrays as a dreadful miscarriage of justice in a modern European state.

Italy has always had a particularly active political Left and in the late '60s and early '70s an extraparliamentary faction that descended into propagandist violence. In the so-called Hot Autumn of 1969, a bomb exploded in the Agricultural Bank in Milan, killing 16 people. An anarchist railway man, Giuseppe Pinelli, was taken in for questioning by the police. Three days later, Pinelli (immortalized in Dario Fo's play The Accidental Death of an Anarchist) fell to his death from the window of the police commissioner Luigi Calabresi's office. The police claimed suicide but the Left accused them of murder. In 1972 Calabresi was shot dead in front of his home. The far-left Lotta Continua claimed it was an act of proletarian justice but many think right-wing extremists were involved. After almost 16 years of silence, an ex-militant of Lotta, riven with guilt, gave himself up, claiming responsibility for the murder. Leonardo Marino then implicated the leadership of Lotta in the affair.

Carlo Ginzburg, a noted and respected historian, draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the 16th and 17th centuries to dissect the state's case in this late-20th-century show trial. He has written a provocative and passionate book that casts a detailed look at the facts of the case, facts that when presented here cast serious doubt on the judgments reached in Italy early in 1999. Justice is inevitably contextual, and we should consider ourselves lucky to have someone as skilled as Ginzburg in deconstructing its various questionable manifestations. --Mark Thwaite, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

In the tradition of Ginzburg's work as a narrative historian, sculpting story-like shapes out of ancient and unexamined pasts, he offers the reader the evidence, giving the public the tools to examine this modern ongoing history. (Bomb )

In its brilliance and force, Ginzburg's attack on magisterial malfeasance equals the war of Emile Zola one hundred years ago. (Choice )

Italy's foremost historian, Carlo Ginzburg – and the publication of his book – has rocked the foundations of the Italian legal system ... Ginzburg is the type of historian who revels in detective work ... he has sleuthed and deduced with tenacity and the finely tuned sensory apparatus of a bloodhound. (Financial Times )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Verso (August 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859843719
• ISBN-13: 978-1859843710
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #543,312 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An Italian Dreyfus Case?, May 28, 2000

By 

Antonio Calabria "Cavaglione" (San Antonio, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice (Hardcover)

This little book by Carlo Ginzburg is another J'accuse, Zola's powerful indictment of the "investigation" which framed Captain Dreyfus for the espionage he had not committed. The case Ginzburg exposes here is that of three Italian leftists accused of having commissioned (and committed) the murder of a notorious right-wing police investigator in 1972. As Ginzburg makes amply clear, the case at hand is extremely weak and the conviction of the three former leftists a clear miscarriage of justice. The case rests entirely on the plea bargaining representations of someone who in the 1970s had been a close comrade of the three men, and who claims to have been the getaway driver in the murder. Allegedly overcome by guilt, this man decided to tell all to the police, some twenty years after the murder and just a short while before the stature of limitations for the crime expired. Again, as Ginzburg ably shows, the testimony of the would-be driver is full of contradictions, inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and the court that convicted the three went to extreme lengths to discard reliable eyewitness accounts of the murder to accept the self-styled driver's version(s) of events. Unfortunately, the book is not especially reader-friendly. It requires close reading and would probably not appeal very much to someone not conversant with the intricacies of Italian politics and the Byzantine nature of the Italian legal system which can convict someone on clearly flimsy evidence. Such weknesses in the book are a shame, because the issues involved here are potentially of wide appeal. They are also of great relevance to readers interested in history, because of the issues of evidence and proof raised. Ginzburg is a famous historian who has justly earned a world reputation with pathbreaking books like THE NIGHT BATTLES (his first and, to my mind, his best) and THE CHEESE AND THE WORMS (both of which, incidentally, I strongly rtecommend). Those works are based on trial evidence from early modern Italian courts run by the Inquisition, and in the present work, Ginzburg shows the amazing similarity between the investigative procedures for establishing guilt used by the Inquisition more than three-hundred years ago and those used by the modern-day judges who convicted the three men accused of the 1972 murder. Still, THE JUDGE AND THE HISTORIAN makes no attempt to help a reader unfamiliar with the tortured history of Italian politics since the 1970s, and so will prove difficult (and worse, tedious) to all but the bravest. Yet a simple re-drafting could have made this a besteller and brought this case of injustice to world attention.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant but Unreadable for Most of Us, April 15, 2009

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice (Paperback)

The 9-year-old review by Mr. Calabria is entirely accurate and fair in its consideration of the portion of this book that deals with the political issues of Italian justice, or rather injustice. I've lived in Italy, and I am familiar with the course of Italian politics over the past 50 years, but I also found the "case" that Carlo Ginzburg makes hard to follow. Ginzburg has shown consummate literary gifts in other books, and it is a shame that he didn't choose to make this important book more intelligible to a larger audience.

However, there's another aspect to the book -- effectively another theme -- which is implied by the title in English, "The Judge and the Historian". Ginzburg raises questions of the comparative use of evidence and the delivery of "verdicts" by practitioners of historiography versus jurisprudence. In just the first twelve pages of his text, Ginzburg surveys the "history of history" to demonstrate how the methods and purposes of the 'science' have evolved, from its beginnings in ancient Greece to its present state. Frankly, I couldn't condense these 12 brilliant pages into an amazon review even if I tried, so you'll just need to get the book, by hook or crook, and ponder his insights for yourself. My five-star rating is based on that aspect of the text.