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Eighty years after the fall of Benito Mussolini, controversy remains about what his dictatorship represented. This reflects the different sides to the Duce’s leadership: while adept at nurturing and enforcing his personal political power, Mussolini’s lack of insight into the requirements of governance prevented him from converting this power into influence to achieve his goals. His efforts to maintain the support of Italy’s conservative elites—economic, social and political—also created tensions with his radical Fascist ambitions, diminishing the momentum behind his regime. Mussolini is frequently portrayed as a charismatic leader, but his rule was secured principally by coercion, ...
This book takes up the stimuli of new international historiography, albeit focusing mainly on the two regimes that undoubtedly provided the model for Fascist movements in Europe, namely the Italian and the German. Starting with a historiographical assessment of the international situation, vis-à-vis studies on Fascism and National Socialism, and then concentrate on certain aspects that are essential to any study of the two dictatorships, namely the complex relationships with their respective societies, the figures of the two dictators and the role of violence. This volume reaches beyond the time-frame encompassing Fascism and National Socialism experiences, directing the attention also towa...
Despite their undeniable importance, the leaders of the Fascist and Nazi youth organizations have received little attention from historians. In Shaping the New Man, Alessio Ponzio uncovers the largely untold story of the training and education of these crucial protagonists of the Fascist and Nazi regimes, and he examines more broadly the structures, ideologies, rhetoric, and aspirations of youth organizations in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Ponzio shows how the Italian Fascists’ pedagogical practices influenced the origin and evolution of the Hitler Youth. He dissects similarities and differences in the training processes of the youth leaders of the Opera Nazionale Balilla, Gioventù Italiana del Littorio, and Hitlerjugend. And, he explores the transnational institutional interactions and mutual cooperation that flourished between Mussolini’s and Hitler’s youth organizations in the 1930s and 1940s.
The interwar period was marked in Europe by the rediscovery of corporatism as a possible solution to the crucial problems of modern mass society. This was the result of general changes across industrialised countries in the relationship between the state and social groups. In Italy, it took on a uniquely authoritarian shape. Fascist regime became the cradle of a new model of corporatism, a “third way” alternative to both capitalism and communism, destined to influence both political, juridical, and economic debate and similar legislative experiments undertaken by other countries, be they democratic or authoritarian. The book offers an overview of corporatism in Fascist Italy. It examines...
This book traces the origins, life and death of Administrative Science in Italy as an academic discipline between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does so by combining the study of ideas, institutional history, intellectual history and social history. The Faculty of Law first introduced Administrative Science in 1875, with the aim of providing the elite with the necessary tools to distribute wealth more equally, to take care of the population and, thus, to make the young Italian State more legitimate in the eyes of the emerging masses. Law and social sciences were merged with the aim of increasing reforms, including that of creating a State of Happiness for all citizens. Throughout its 70-year existence, Administrative Science was deprived of its contents and scientific independence, and academically overshadowed by Administrative and Public law. Finally, although the liberal elites discarded the reformer project of Administrative Science even before Fascism turned everything upside down, most of the original traits of this knowledge were absorbed into Fascist corporate and totalitarian structures.
Reform is a politicized, ideological, sometimes drifting, and chaotic process. As such, what public administration reform means, why it occurs, whose interests it serves, and whether it makes the world a better place, remain contested. Addressing these questions, this major comparative study sheds new light on existing and emerging issues in the field of public administration reform.
An incisive account of how Mussolini pioneered populism in reaction to Hitler's rise--and thereby reinforced his role as a model for later authoritarian leaders On the tenth anniversary of his rise to power in 1932, Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) seemed to many the "good dictator." He was the first totalitarian and the first fascist in modern Europe. But a year later Hitler's entrance onto the political stage signaled a German takeover of the fascist ideology. In this definitive account, eminent historian R.J.B. Bosworth charts Mussolini's leadership in reaction to Hitler. Bosworth shows how Italy's decline in ideological pre-eminence, as well as in military and diplomatic power, led Mussolini to pursue a more populist approach: angry and bellicose words at home, violent aggression abroad, and a more extreme emphasis on charisma. In his embittered efforts to bolster an increasingly hollow and ruthless regime, it was Mussolini, rather than Hitler, who offered the model for all subsequent authoritarians.
Italy observed and recounted with irony and affection, but without indulgence, in its most evident features and its most hidden depths: the rituals, the festivities, pastimes, food, passions, and great historical defects. It is a satirical or semi-serious gallery of characters (the politician, the teacher, the doctor, the "Moroccan," the notary, the cabineer, the big eater . . .) that make the social and human climate of a country unmistakable.
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