Why Carlo Ginzburg believed national shame is a deeper bond than national love

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Carlo Ginzburg, a pioneer of microhistory, transformed how we study the past by focusing on the marginalized. Beyond his academic breakthroughs, he argued that feeling shame for a country’s crimes reveals a profound sense of belonging, suggesting that our collective identity is forged through shared guilt rather than affection.

Born in Turin in 1939, Carlo Ginzburg emerged as a foundational figure in microhistory, a discipline dedicated to uncovering the lives of forgotten individuals. His work, including seminal texts like The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms, moved away from broad statistical trends to examine the specific visionary traditions and heretical beliefs of early modern Europe. By analyzing the benandanti folk tradition and the life of a 16th-century miller named Menocchio, Ginzburg argued that historians must often rely on fragmentary evidence to reconstruct the past, famously noting that much historical evidence has been lost to time.

Ginzburg’s influence extended well beyond the library. In 1979, he sent a letter to Pope John Paul II requesting the opening of the Inquisition Archives. His advocacy was instrumental in the Vatican’s eventual decision to grant qualified researchers access to these records by 1998. This commitment to truth-seeking also defined his later career, as seen in his 1999 book The Judge and the Historian, where he analyzed the trial of Adriano Sofri. He drew parallels between the methods of a judge and a historian, both of whom must correlate testimonies with material evidence to deduce reality.

In his later reflections, such as his essay The Bond of Shame, Ginzburg explored the psychological dimensions of history. He posited that shame acts as a powerful indicator of national identity. According to Ginzburg, we feel shame for a country’s wrongdoing because we identify with its story, making the failure feel partly our own. This connection, he argued, is a more authentic marker of belonging than love, as it requires an internal acceptance of a nation's history, including its darkest chapters. Ginzburg passed away in 2026 at the age of 87, leaving behind a legacy that challenged historians to look closer at the traces left by those history often ignores.

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