This article explores the intellectual discourse of Il Mulino’s intellectual group in relation to the transformation of Italian politics during the period leading up to the centre-left governments. First, it investigates Il Mulino’s cultural project of overcoming the hegemony of idealism by endorsing the empiricist approach favoured by Anglo-American social sciences, while establishing a new role for intellectuals. Then, it focuses on the group’s political agenda aimed at rationalising Italy’s ‘imperfect two-party system’. We argue that, within the Italian intellectual-political scenario, Il Mulino’s intellectual discourse sought to establish a new relationship between culture and politics. It tried to do so both by anchoring Italian political culture to the liberal- and social-democratic European tradition and by contributing to the stabilisation of Italian democracy, while proposing a reduction in the number of political parties.
