Italian reformers face the perennial problem of searching for an alternative to the country’s corrupting patronage politics, which guarantee Fiat government at Lamborghini prices. The perennial problem for the Italian leftists, who have given up on Marxism, is finding an alternative to market mechanisms for organizing society. The distinguished historian Paul Ginsborg, author of books on modern Italy and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, tries to solve these two problems in his new book, “The Politics of Everyday Life: Making Choices, Changing Lives” (Yale University Press, 200 pages, $27).

Inspired by his own experiences as a local civic activist, Mr. Ginsborg wants people “to take back control of their own lives.” He insists that, because the personal is political, participatory democracy is the solution to the problems not only of Italy but of the world. “Time and again,” he writes, “those who wish to make their own street or neighborhood or city a better place to live in are pushed almost immediately into making connections between their own lives and the larger more distant forces that shape them.”

To American ears this will sound like a rehash of the ideas associated with the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the Students for a Democratic Society, written in another era of left-wing decline. Mr. Ginsborg’s rendition adds a contemporary, anti-globalist twist. Like the founders of SDS, he rejects the authoritarian left but nonetheless insists that politics provide a collective (almost religious) sense of purpose and meaning that is beyond its capacities. Perhaps Mr. Ginsborg’s enthusiasm and naivete can be attributed to the fact that Italy only introduced election for local office in 1992. Before that, mayors were appointed from Rome.

In less than 200 pages, Mr. Ginsborg takes on subjects ranging from the family, personal consumption, the tyranny of television, the evils of neo-liberalism to the decline of mass political parties, all thrown together in an ill-digested mix marked by numerous errors of fact and interpretation. Writing well beyond his knowledge, Mr. Ginsborg talks about how American voting-rights legislation was a product of one version of “civic activism,” the urban riots of the 1960s. But exactly the reverse was the case: The rioting followed the passage of the voting rights act.

Like the prominent Italian radical Antonio Negri, whose new book “Multitude” constructs a problematic case for a new pantheistic leftism built around the ideas of Spinoza, Mr. Ginsborg is oblivious to Italy’s real world problems. Unable to reform its wildly underfunded pension system because a series of labor ministers have been assassinated, burdened by long-term unemployment five times that of the United States, undercut by Chinese and world competition for its famed artisanal industries, troubled by Islamic extremism, burdened by a highly politicized judiciary, and literally dying off as families don’t come close to reproducing themselves, Italy has become in the words of the Economist magazine “the new sick man of Europe.”

Mr. Ginsborg wants “to start over again” to create a world with a “public ethic” of responsibility and “accountability,” where citizens don’t have to be “wheedlers in the face of the state” and its innumerable Italian petty bureaucrats, each of whom demands exaggerated deference. He insists that the market can’t be allowed to pollute the almost-religious purity he imputes to the ideal public sphere. But “on the other hand,” he writes, “jobs in the public sector can’t be treated” as patronage plums.

His inability to resolve this tension leads him down the same path that many have trod before him. He recognizes that professionals are too often “answerable only to themselves,” but nonetheless, like John Kenneth Galbraith in “The Affluent Society,” he places much of his faith for the salvation of the world in the hands of the new class of “millions of teachers, social workers, judges, local and national civil servants who are both upright and conscientious.” They need, he concludes, a “service ethic,” and a “new public philosophy,” but he does little to articulate one.

The disparity between Mr. Ginsborg’s enormous aspirations and the few minor examples of a model he provides leaves the reader wondering why this book was written. Perhaps the reality of Italy’s current problems are simply so daunting that Mr. Ginsborg, like Mr. Negri, has decided to escape into “the land of what ought to be.”

Mr. Siegel is the author of “Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life” (Encounter).