MODERATES. — Those who, during the period of the Risorgimento, opposed both radical change and the maintenance of the status quo on the political-social plane.
Precursors of this vision of political reality can be considered certain men of the post-Napoleonic Restoration who were opposed both to Jacobin abstraction, which sought to wipe the slate clean of everything, and to reactionary abstraction, which opposed any useful innovation: naturally, these men of the Restoration and their supporters (e.g., cf. Cardinal Consalvi) acted more out of empirical tactics and balanced common sense than out of a broad theoretical vision; and moreover, even if they perceived the demands and tastes of an enlightened legacy (as would be the case for the moderates properly so called), they did not accept French doctrinaire liberalism. The true moderates, while accepting the persuasion of the men of the Restoration that it was necessary to be against both reactionaries and revolutionaries, were then frankly liberal in their method (by which they sought to act in political life not through force but through the transformation of ideas) and in their theory of the constitutional State. Evidently the term "moderate" is sometimes vague, since it includes men of vastly different backgrounds: from Balbo, so typically antidemocratic, to D'Azeglio, a supporter of popular sovereignty.
