[1] An admirer of Crispi, Oriani disdained bourgeois moderatism, and pleaded for a national revival based on the same spirit of fervent patriotism as had created Italy.

It contains glowing pages, among them the one written for the Italian entry into Rome: A great nation had been added to Europe; the most glorious of world cities became again one of its civil capitals.

Oriani tended to examine the history of modern Italy by means of heroic figures, which lead Antonio Gramsci to refer to his historiographical "titanism".

Oriani exerted a major influence on Italian politics (as well as an indirect impact on the historiography of the time), which culminated in his being labeled a precursor of Fascism.

He criticized the "royal conquest" as a unilateral action to create a new state, assuming that without the support of a strong democratic movement, it would prove to be weak in its foundations.

In the cultural climate of the first decades of the twentieth century, La lotta politica in Italia seemed to offer to many intellectuals an answer to the restlessness of those times and to the expectations towards a different Italy from the Giolitti's one.

For over a decade the book was debated by all the sectors of the Italian culture: famous characters like Amendola, Prezzolini, Gentile, appreciated its passionate and polemic structure.

Georges Sorel, who admired Oriani as a romantic novelist and profound social philosopher, dedicated to him an essay entitled "La rivolta ideale" (L'Indépendance, 15 April 1912).

His work, Sorel noted, "[a] été assez clairvoyant pour prévoir le désastre des scientistes et [a] contribué à maintenir la noble tradition hégélienne".

")[11] Benjamin Crémieux considered Oriani «le seul écrivain politique dont l’influence ait été en Italie vraiment vivificante».

[12] Calling for a renewal of the Italian state and a rebirth of ancient Roman imperialism it is no surprise that the nationalists should choose Oriani as their literary hero.

[13] 'In Oriani', wrote the future fascist leader Dino Grandi, 'my generation found its anxieties, its feelings, its contradictions, its aspirations and its instincts confirmed, and above all explained and clarified.

This operation brought a reversed reading: Oriani, especially through La lotta politica in Italia (that came out in 1956 in a valid critical edition by Alberto Maria Ghisalberti), ended up to be pointed as a «forerunner» – this time – of the Republic, and his democratic liberal opinions and his liking to Garibaldi and Mazzini were underlined.