The political persecution of Giuseppe Lombardo Radice by the Fascist regime (1924-1931)

The work and thought of Giuseppe Lombardo Radice have been studied in depth in the past from a pedagogical perspective, but less so from a political one (Cives 1983; Cantatore 2013). In fact, the study of the political profile of the great Catanian pedagogist has always presented many critical issues insofar as it was difficult to fit him into rigid ideological schemes, in a historical period in which such schemes were detrimental to those who decided to break them in the name of an intellectual freedom and autonomy that were ill- tolerated and that would soon be interpreted as symptoms of an absolute irreducibility to the homologising thrusts of the emerging totalitarian regime. It is with this awareness that – in the following pages – we will attempt to outline a precise reconstruction of the f ierce political persecution to which this important exponent of Italian pedagogy was subjected by the fascist regime in the years between 1924 and 1931, based on largely unpublished archive documents.