Tommaso Giordani
Research Interests: intellectual history; welfare state; history of political thought; solidarisme; social catholicism; revolutionary syndicalism
Solidarisme and social Catholicism: interactions, networks, rhetorics (1880-1914)
The project explores previously neglected interaction between two traditions of social reform in late 19th century France: republican solidarisme and French social Catholicism. Historiographical treatment of these traditions runs in parallel, neglecting the question of their interactions. Integrating the traditional tools of intellectual history with the study of networks, institutions, and individual biographical trajectories, however, reveals a much more entangled reality. The project interrogates archival bases in Lyon and Paris in order to understand the flow of ideas between the two discourses, and reveals the extent to which the field of social reform constituted a space of collaboration between secular republicanism and Catholicism in the France of the time.
Tommaso Giordani is a postdoctoral researcher at Tallinn University, Estonia, where he has worked in the ERC-funded project "Between the Times". He obtained an MSc from the London School of Economics and a PhD in History and Civilisation from the European University Institute, Florence with a thesis on the political thought of Georges Sorel. His work so far focuses on the intersection between philosophical and political thought in fin de siècle Europe, and has appeared, amongst other places in Modern Intellectual History, History of European Ideas, and Bergsoniana. His current research focuses on how visions of economic and industrial governance in the late 19th century impacted European political thought in the first half of the 20th century.