THE POLITICAL YEARBOOK 1951. An evaluation, together with factual summaries and excerpts from articles published in that year in the magazine the Reporter. Max Ascoli, Editor and Publisher.
Max Ascoli was a Jewish Italian-American professor of political philosophy and law at the New School for Social Research, United States of America.
Background
Max Ascoli was born on June 25, 1898 in Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy.
He was the only child of Adriana Finzi and Enrico Ascoli, a successful coal and lumber merchant. From childhood Ascoli suffered from eye problems. At four he started wearing glasses, and at school he avoided all sports, on doctor's orders. He depended on friends to read aloud to him at times.
Education
Ascoli graduated from the University of Ferrara in 1920 with an LL. D.
degree in jurisprudence and earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Rome in 1928.
From 1926 to 1928, Ascoli taught jurisprudence at the University of Camerino.
Career
Ascoli's wide-ranging writing career began in 1921 with the publication in Paris of Georges Sorel, a critique of the French socialist and revolutionary syndicalist. In his 1924 book Le Vie dalla croce, Ascoli, who was Jewish and regarded himself as deeply religious, framed his own religious philosophy within a discussion of Judaism and Christianity.
Between 1922 and 1925, Ascoli spoke out forcefully against Mussolini and the rise of fascism in Rivoluzione liberale, Il quarto stato, and other antifascist publications. After Mussolini became dictator in 1925, Ascoli started writing for Non mollare, an underground paper. Ascoli later said that he "ceased to write for it after a man in Florence whom the Fascists considered the writer of an article of mine was murdered. "
From 1926 to 1928, Ascoli taught jurisprudence at the University of Camerino. In the latter year Mussolini's Fascist police arrested him in Milan. He was jailed for several weeks and then sentenced to two years of modified house arrest, later reduced to six months.
Three years of humiliation and police surveillance followed. Ascoli lost his teaching post, his writings were suppressed in Italy, and he was barred from accepting a chair in philosophy at the University of Rome, which he had won in a national competition.
Ascoli was an associate professor of jurisprudence and political philosophy at the University of Cagliari in Sardinia from 1929 to 1931, when he was dismissed for refusing to join the Fascist party. In 1931, with the promise of a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in his pocket and a painting by Gauguin and one by Tintoretto under his arm, Ascoli boarded a ship in Naples and sailed to America.
He spent his first two years in the United States traveling around the country, stopping to study at Harvard, at the University of Chicago, and at the University of Wisconsin. When his fellowship expired, Ascoli, who faced arrest if he returned to Italy, chose political exile.
In late 1933 he became a charter member of the graduate faculty of political and social science at the New School for Social Research in New York City. The Rockefeller Foundation paid half of his salary during the first year.
The University in Exile, Ascoli later recalled, began with seventeen refugee German scholars and "one lonely Italian" professor of political philosophy. When he became an American citizen in 1939, Ascoli said he was in a large group of friends over here, a community which is growing out of the work of each one of us, and mutual confidence, and common beliefs. "
He served as a dean of the graduate faculty from 1940 to 1941. Besides teaching at the New School, Ascoli wrote article after article, book after book, mostly dealing with his "pet obsession. " Ascoli saw his task as "searching for the point at which democratic institutions fail to work in strengthening freedom. "
Ascoli was named the first president of the Mazzini Society, an Italian-American anti-Fascist organization, in 1940, but stepped down the following year when he became associate director of cultural relations in the office of the coordinator of Inter-American affairs, under Nelson Rockefeller, in Washington, D. C. He spent the next two years traveling in Latin America, gathering intelligence and extolling the virtues of America to the Italian communities there.
At the end of 1944, Ascoli set up his own foundation to revive and promote the production and sale of Italian arts and crafts.
Ascoli left the New School in 1950 to work on the Reporter, an award-wining, biweekly magazine based in New York that he founded (1949), edited, and published until it ceased publication in 1968. Known for its aggressive journalism and distinguished staff of editors and correspondents, the magazine included an editorial by Ascoli in nearly every issue. Ascoli described his magazine as "an experiment in adult journalism. " Read by liberals, the magazine studied news issues including McCarthyism, illegal wiretapping, the effects of radioactive fallout, and the Vietnam War. Ascoli's greatest impact as a political scientist came from his involvement with the Reporter.
Ascoli was against fascism and described it as "a parasitic growth on the democratic structure. "
Views
Quotations:
"All the trouble I had with Fascism was because of what I had written and most of all because I would refuse to enter the Fascist Party. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Laura Fermi: "Ascoli has not forced his conclusions on his readers or considered world events in black or white. The partiality he has imparted to his magazine has consisted in his refusal to compromise with principle. And principle may sometimes be very personal. "
Connections
Ascoli married twice. His first wife, Anna Maria Cochetti, wrote poetry under the name Anna Maria Armi. They divorced in 1940. That same year, on October 5, he married Marion Rosenwald, the wealthy daughter of Julius Rosenwald, the chairman of Sears, Roebuck; they had one child.