Debuting on 5 September with an essay by Tony Blair on the art of governing is the new Silvio Berlusconi Editore, a publishing house founded by Mondadori Group with the purpose of focusing on liberal and democratic thought.

‘Silvio Berlusconi Editore,’ explains Marina Berlusconi, President of the Group ,‘will have a very precise objective: fighting for the concept of freedom and giving a voice to its broadest variations, while remaining absolutely separate from any form of political militancy. We decided to name this new publishing house after my father, Silvio Berlusconi, because his projects, his achievements, his life were founded on freedom. With no compromises. Talking about freedom today is more important than ever. Our society, Western society, appears increasingly threatened: wars, strengthening autocratic regimes, and the aversion that not a few of us show for the values our history was built on, starting with the most precious asset we have, freedom. An asset that we now see called into question.

Series

The publishing house will release a limited number of titles each year, divided into two series. The first, ‘Biblioteca’, will collect important books to be published or republished, translated for the first time or translated again, but classic books nevertheless, either already recognised or destined to become so. ‘Libera’, the second series, is dedicated to contemporary authors tackling open questions on current events. In fact, the publisher aims to alternate past and present beyond any scheme, while focusing on both literature and non-fiction, Italian and foreign authors.

Titles Being Released

With On Leadership. Lessons for the 21st Century, Tony Blair has written a manual for ‘an art of good governance’ that he wished he had known when he began his long political career. A synthesis of lessons in leadership from years of experience at the top of a large, long-standing liberal democracy.

A work that answers some fundamental questions: How can we prioritise and deal with crises? How can we balance short-term victories with long-term structural changes? What is the best way to attract investment, to reform healthcare or education and to ensure citizen safety? And what should governments do to take advantage of the enormous opportunities of the 21st-century technological revolution? A decade at the helm of the United Kingdom, a commitment to supporting developing countries, working for peace in the Middle East and the fight against extremism have given Tony Blair the tools to judge today’s political situation clearly, immersing himself in various and often conflicting settings and scenarios.

Together with the release of On Leadership, two classics published in the ‘Biblioteca’ series enhance the Silvio Berlusconi Editore line. Voltaire’s Letters on the English, a work written in 1727 and 1728, during the author’s stay in England, recounts the political model of the parliamentary monarchy, religious tolerance, and the dynamism of a society in which scientists and men of culture played a fundamental role, in contrast to the tyrannical French feudal model. In this edition, the French philosopher’s classic is translated for the first time from English, the language in which it was written almost in its entirety.

The classics in the ‘Biblioteca’ series also include The Passing of an Illusion by François Furet, a historian known for his studies on the French Revolution and long-time director of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. This is a fundamental work of 20th-century history that seeks to understand the influence that communist ideas long exerted on Western intellectuals, despite the tragic experiences that marked it, first in the USSR, and then in other countries.

2025

With his eyes on Russia, more modern this time, Alexander Baunov, a philologist of antiquity, has written The End of the Regime, a book that has become a bestseller in his homeland as a symbol of resistance to Putin. The first translation in the world will be published in 2025 by Silvio Berlusconi Editore in the ‘Libera’ series.  The work focuses on an analysis of the fall of the regimes of Francisco Franco in Spain, António Salazar in Portugal and the colonels in Greece, capturing moments in the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Without ever explicitly mentioning them, analogies with the contemporary history of Putin’s Russia, are the key to grasping the different historical frameworks analysed by Baunov.

Also coming out in bookshops in 2025 is I giorni contati, a new essay by Ernesto Galli della Loggia in the ‘Libera’ series. Without making allowances, the historian and editor of ‘Corriere della Sera’ addresses the state of Western civilisation, which is denying its roots and no longer seems to remember its values. Rather than inviting us to feel sorry for ourselves, the diagnosis is a combative call to resistance, a reprimand to remember who we are and fight for our existence.

In 2025, the ‘Libera’ series will also publish Ragazzi di carta velina by Walter Siti, editor of the works by Pier Paolo Pasolini and winner of the Strega Prize in 2013 with Resistere non serve a niente. The great writer reflects on the fragility of children, making it an interpretative paradigm that runs through many of the changes taking place in our society. In his analysis, Siti chooses the language of the latest generation as a starting point to understand the dynamics of a social context in which no one wants to offend and everyone considers themselves a victim.

Finally, Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity and Bourgeois Equality are the titles of Deirdre N. McCloskey’s ‘Bourgeois Trilogy’, which will be published in the Silvio Berlusconi Editore ‘Biblioteca’ series next year. The author, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C. and Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois Chicago, aims to show that capitalism and bourgeois values are a pillar of social, economic and cultural progress, in contrast to certain prejudices that persist in the public debate.

Starting on 26 June 2024, www.silvioberlusconieditore.it will be online with the first previews.