Reading list for italian Fascist ideology

by p_nathan

Hi,

I'm looking for an understanding of what went into Mussolini's fascism; where the ideas for it came from, how it bound together, and how the ideas played out. E.g., it seems that Futurism (1) contributed certain ideas to it. I've dug up a document which purports to be Mussolini's doctrine (2), but (a) I don't know if it's a reliable document and (b) I don't really know enough to integrate it into the tumult of the ideas of the time.

I have a book http://www.amazon.com/The-Crisis-German-Ideology-Intellectual/dp/0865274266 which gives one account of how it played out in Germany, if that gives some context of the style I'm looking to find.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifesto_of_Futurism (2) http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm

Sunshine_Bag

So as I'm sure you've probably encountered by now, it's best to almost straight up ignore most of what Mussolini ever says about himself of Fascism. He's a horribly unreliable narrator that for the great majority of his rise viewed the Fascist Party as a tool, and greatly mistrusted those that worked under him. Also, what can be viewed as 'official' Fascist ideology tended to shift based on either the current time frame, or Mussolini's mood in general. That being said, there are overarching currents that exist in all permutations of Italian Fascism (War is good and necessary; the Italian people are weak and must be molded; an economy based on syndicalism; a heavy, and very skewed, look towards the past) but they're much better to study and look at on the micro-scale as the movements had different objectives and outcomes based upon the region.

Here's a decent list to get you started.

Biographies

  • Mussolini, Renzo De Felice - While it is now showing its age in the historiaography debate, the massive standard bearer on Mussolini for most of the past half century has been Renzo De Felice's massive multi-volume tome. It is in Italian, however, and it has come under some debate on if it is too kind of Fascism. By the end of his life, there is some debate on if De Felice had moved towards becoming an anti-antifascist of sorts. It is still the work towards which much is indebted to.
  • Mussolini, Denis Mack Smith - probably the closest English language analogue to De Felice's work in terms of notability. It is a lot shorter (I doubt anybody will ever write as detailed as an account as De Felice did), but just as important. Like with De Felice, the volume suffers slightly now in the historiaography debate, but it is still just as important.
  • Mussolini, by RJB Bosworth - the other side of the historiaography debate is encountered by Bosworth. Where De Felice can be seen as an anti-antifascist, Bosworth is a leading voice in anti-anti-antifascism (don't worry, Fascism historiaography only gets more fun) and deconstructs a lot of the Great Man Theory that Smith builds, before reconstructing it as a perhaps 'Great Bad Man' Theory. More on that in a moment.

General Overviews

  • Modern Italy by John Foot - a leading socialist historian, Foot constructed a textbook that set about to overview many of the whys of modern Italy, and the years of Fascism play a heavy role throughout the book. It explains a lot of Fascism at a macro-level, while hinting at underlying currents that he will examine in other works.
  • Modern Italy, A Political History by Denis Mack Smith - While it overviews the entirety of Italian politics since the Risorgimento, a hefty portion of the book goes into a great overview on the nitty gritty of Fascist policy and the reasons and consequences.
  • Italy's Divided Memory by John Foot - Foot discusses and deconstructs memories that the Italian nation either as a region, or as a state, has with its past. A lot is focussed on the roots of Fascism and the atrocities that they carried out, along with how their memory has been shaped.
  • The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism by RJB Bosworth - Bosworth takes De Felice and Smith to task for the former's anti-antifascism, and the later's Great Man History. He then reconstructs interpretations of Mussolini and Fascism into the 'Great Bad Man History' that I mentioned before, walking a fine line between many schools of thought while showing that the models of study for Italian Fascism need to be blurred to get a full understanding.

Specific Topics

  • Football and Fascism: The National Game Under Mussolini by Simon Martin - a very engrossing and technical account of how the tendrils of Fascism infected football (or calcio) under the Fascists, while also exploring how underlying tension in the Party itself spilled over on to how it affected the sport. It also gives a curious accounting, and introduction, on to how the Fascists simply did not understand the Roman past that they were continually trying to harken back to.
  • Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema by Ruth Ben-Ghiat - an amazing account of how Fascism used the cinema towards propaganda purposes during the height of their empire years between the invasion of Ethiopia (1935-1936) and the loss of their colonies (1941-43). Ben-Ghiat explores how the use of film showed the true policy of the potential empire.