Denis Mack Smith

Denis Mack Smith, (March 3, 1920 – July 11, 2017) was an English historian who specialized in the history of Italy from the Risorgimento onwards. He is best known for his biographies of Garibaldi, Cavour and Mussolini, and for his single-volume Modern Italy: A Political History. He was granted Italy's highest civilian honor in 1996.

Early life Denis Mack Smith was born in Hampstead (north London), the son of tax inspector Wilfrid Mack Smith (1891–1975) and Altiora Edith Gauntlett (1888–1969). He was educated at St Paul's Cathedral Choir School and Haileybury College, where Martin Wight was one of his tutors. He returned to complete his degree in 1947. After graduating from Cambridge, Mack Smith taught at Clifton College in Bristol for one year.

In 1946, Mack Smith spent an extended period in Italy researching archival material relating to Sicily in 1860. He later recounted that he "passed entire months without talking to anyone” during this period. As Italy was still recovering from the second world war, people were throwing out books that had enjoyed favour during the fascist period. Mack Smith bought up vast amounts from street stalls and sent them back to England, thus forming the basis of a personal library that would aid his writing. During his visit, the philosopher Benedetto Croce took the young Mack Smith in as protégé even though they had vastly different views on Mussolini, and Croce gave him access to the library of his house in Naples. In later years, he entertained Italian scholars at his house near Oxford and gave them books from this extensive collection. His visit to Sicily was the basis for his two-volume work “A History of Sicily” (1968), written with Moses Finley and Christopher Duggan.

He became a fellow at Peterhouse in 1947 and worked as a tutor and lecturer at Cambridge for fifteen years.

In 1954, he published his landmark first book, Cavour and Garibaldi: a Study in Political Conflict, which traced the origins of fascism to the shortcomings of Italian unification. Mack Smith challenged the traditional nationalist view of the period as one of heroic and unified struggle, instead portraying it as a series of political and social conflicts marked by rivalries among elites, tensions between church and state, and foreign interference. Using extensive documentary evidence, he depicted key figures such as Camillo Benso, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel II in a critical light. The book was noted for overturning long-held orthodoxies in Italian historiography, with historian David Gilmour stating that it “upset a well-defended orthodoxy that had been entrenched for almost a century.” Historian Jonathan Steinberg stated that the book told Italians "what they did not want to hear". The best-selling book launched Mack Smith's career and became the standard English-language text on modern Italy.

In 1961, he was elected to a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, a position he held until he retired in 1987, and was an Emeritus Fellow until his death. He became a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972 and was elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy in 1976. Mack Smith published a study of Mussolini’s foreign policy the same year, followed in 1981 by a biography of the fascist leader. He authored an anthology of texts (The Making of Italy 1796–1870), numerous essays and articles, and wrote highly acclaimed biographies of Count Cavour and Giuseppe Mazzini, and a history of the Monarchy of Italy. Mack Smith acted as public orator in San Marino in 1982 before publishing Modern Italy: a Political History in 1997 with Yale University Press. He was elected to the Royal Society of Literature and served as chairman of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy from 1987.

Though his work on Italian history has been criticized by Italian academics, including Rosario Romeo and Renzo De Felice, since their first translations were published in the 1950s, Mack Smith remains the second best-selling author on Italian history after Indro Montanelli. Other Italian academics were outraged over Mack Smith's refusal "to regard Italian fascism and the rise of Benito Mussolini as an aberration". Mack Smith contended that one of the causes of Italian fascism was the structural weaknesses that existed in the Italian political system, a lasting "legacy of the Risorgimento". Others note of his oeuvre that he "remained obstinately English, sceptical, observant and sometimes bitingly ironic".

Smith has been considered the world's leading scholar on Italian history for the English world. He belonged to the post-World War II generation of Cambridge historians, many based at Peterhouse, who learned to appreciate the primacy of documentary evidence. He was an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and received Italy's highest civilian honor in 1996.

Personal life His first marriage was to Ruth Hellmann (later Viscountess Runciman) in 1959, although their union was dissolved in 1962. He remarried in 1967 to Catherine Stevenson. They lived together in Headington, outside Oxford, where they hosted students and intellectuals.

Mack Smith had two daughters, Sophie and Jacintha, and four grandchildren, Stephanie, Tosca, Jonah and Theo.

Awards

Presidential Medal of Italy (1984) Polifemo d'Argento (1988) Order of the British Empire (1990) Fregene (1990) Sileno d'Oro (1996) Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (1996) Honorary Citizen of Santa Margherita Ligure (1999)