Abstract

Known primarily as the “ideologist of the Northern League,” Gianfranco Miglio has been the first and maybe the only scholar who has theoretically elaborated for that movement themes concerning national unity, federalism, the party system and fiscal revolt. Because of his distinct personality and often polemical and oppositional positions, he is often depicted by the more sensationalist sectors of the press as the homo diabolicus of Italian politics. Despite his reputation as a conservative Catholic scholar, he has even been described as an irredentist and a revolutionary, — a “Right-wing Jacobin” so extremist and radical as to make the League's leader, Umberto Bossi, appear as a moderate.