Italy’s war in alliance with Hitler ended in surrender on September 8, 1943. In that year, I had expected to be and dreaded being drafted (I was nineteen) and sent to war. But the Italian military machine was, after all, Italian and thus behind schedule. My call to arms came up only in October 1943, and came from the newly installed Fascist puppet regime known as the Republic of Salò. Like most of my peers, I sought escape in hiding. The penalty for deserters was, however, to be shot on the spot, and whoever hid a deserter equally risked his or her life. I thus spent some ten months “buried” (for I was not allowed even to be seen within the house-hold) in a somewhat hidden room until Florence was liberated from German occupation in August 1944.

After the early grant that brought me to New York in 1949-50 (shopping between Columbia and the New School for Social Research to the U). While as a politologo I was largely self-taught (I had no teachers). In learning by myself, I could and did rely on the international context (the IPSA context), on my entering the path-breaking IPSA Committee of Political Sociology (where I made lifelong outstanding friends: Marty Lipset, Juan Linz, Stein Rokkan, Matte Dogan, Hans Daalder, S.N.Eisenstadt),.It is quite evident that had I not been exposed to the science of politics that blossomed after World War II in the United States, I would have been an entirely different scholar.” I returned many times United States in the 1960s, first as a Visiting Professor of Government at Harvard (1964-65), and subsequently as a recurrent Visiting Professor of Political Science at Yale between 1966 and 1969. 

Remember that philosophy was, for me, a war “accident.” I was mainly interested in logic, not in philosophers. But logic was not taught in Italian universities and was, indeed, anathema for both idealistic philosophy and Marxist dialectics (the dominant schools). I had to work my way out. It would take too long to rehearse how a combination of stubbornness but also, again, of fortunate coincidences allowed me to move to political science. Skipping all the many amusing anecdotes, by 1956 I had managed to have political science entered in the statute (the list of recognized and permitted teachings) of the Florence Faculty of Political Sciences, which had previously encompassed teaching on law, history, economics, statistics, geography, philosophy. I was able to switch (always as a professore incaricato) to this entirely novel and, for many, suspect academic discipline.  

In 1971-72, pretty much worn out by some three years of battles (it was quite rough in Italy), I went to Stanford, where I spent a delightful and fruitful year “on the hill” as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Thereafter, in 1976, I somewhat suddenly decided to leave Italy time. Stanford offered me the position that Gabriel Almond was leaving. Stanford put all the distance from Italy that I needed. But then, out of the blue, I received an offer from New York that could not be refused. After three years, in 1979, I left Stanford and became Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where (since 1994) I am Professor Emeritus.

As of 1994, I lived mainly between New York and Rome. When my academic activities came to an end, I devoted myself mainly to my role as a public intellectual, making publicly available my knowledge and skills. In fact, it was during this period that I intensified my activity as a columnist for the most important Italian newspaper “Corriere della Sera”, dealing with both “old issues” (such as the institutional reforms in Italy) and new pressing concerns (starting with climate change). It was also the period of international prizes and awards for me, receiving several Honorary Degrees and being awarded, in 2005, the prestigious “Principe de Asturias” prize. In the meantime, I kept writing essays, focusing on some of the most pressing issues of our time – the impact of new media on public opinion (Homo videns), the consequences of migration on contemporary society (Pluralism, multiculturalism and strangers), the effects of climate change and overpopulation (The Earth Explodes), and finally the risks to the future of democracy (The Race to Nowhere).