Suchergebnisse

"During the early decades of the twentieth century, Italy produced distinctive innovations in both the intellectual and political realms. On the one hand, Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944) spearheaded a radical rethinking of historicism and philosophical idealism that significantly reoriented Italian culture. On the other hand, the period witnessed the first rumblings of fascism. Assuming opposite sides, Gentile became the semi-official philosopher of fascism while Croce argued for a renewed liberalism based on 'absolute' historicism." "In Historicism and Fascism in Modern Italy, David D. Roberts uses the ideological conflict between Croce and Gentile as a basis for a wider discussion of the interplay between politics and ideas in Italy in the twentieth century. Roberts examines the connection between fascism and the modern Italian intellectual tradition, arguing that the relationship not only deepens our understanding of generic fascism and liberalism but also illuminates ongoing dangers and possibilities in the wider Western world. This set of twelve essays by one of the leading scholars in the field represents an authoritative view of the modern Italian intellectual tradition, its relationship with fascism, and its enduring implications for history, politics, and culture in Italy and beyond."--Jacket

By developing a long-term supranational perspective, this ambitious, multi-faceted work provides a new understanding of 'totalitarianism', the troubling common element linking Soviet communism, Italian fascism and German Nazism. The book's original analysis of antecedent ideas on the subject sheds light on the common origins and practices of the regimes. Through this fresh appreciation of their initial frame of mind, Roberts demonstrates how the three political experiments yielded unprecedented collective mobilization but also a characteristic combination of radicalization, myth-makin.

Bitterly anti-Marxist though it was, fascism now appears to have been in some sense revolutionary in its own right, but this raises new questions about the meaning of modern revolution. In a recent essay Roger Griffin, a major authority on fascism, challenges Marxists and non-Marxists to engage in a dialogue that would deepen our understanding of the relationship between the Marxist-communist and fascist revolutionary directions. Although he finds openings within the Marxist tradition, Griffin insists that, if such dialogue is to be possible, the Marxists must give up any a priori claim to the unique validity of the Marxist revolutionary project. However, Griffin's way of framing the issues proves too limited, first because his understanding fascism as revolutionary is not rich enough, but also because he too often forces his argument to make the fascist revolution seem the archetypal 20th-century revolution. The alternative starts with a deeper understanding of the basis of the fascist claim to be spearheading, as Marxism could not, a revolutionary departure appropriate to contemporary challenges and possibilities. In asking about the commonality of the fascist and Marxist revolutions, Griffin convincingly accents a certain mode of historical consciousness that seemed to warrant a totalitarian direction. But the historical sense he draws from Walter Benjamin, and then attributes to Marxism and Leninism, misconstrues the area of commonality. Through a different way of conceiving fascism as revolutionary, and of understanding fascist-communist convergence, we can challenge the Marxists more deeply — but also suggest the basis for a more fruitful mode of dialogue around fascism, Marxism and modern revolution.

AbstractThis article seeks to clarify the uses and disadvantages of the concept of 'political religion', which has recently returned to currency, especially to account for the liturgy and the sense of world-historical mission central to Italian fascism, German Nazism and Soviet communism. But the category leads us to inflate abiding, suprahistorical impulses at the expense of historical specificity and novelty. And by making the phenomena in question seem relatively familiar, it diverts us from the deeper challenge they constitute. Still, the objections of critics often miss dimensions that 'political religion' at least approximates. Essential to the requisite synthesis is a recast notion of totalitarianism, understood as a novel frame of mind leading to a new mode of collective action.

AbstractRecent studies of Italian Fascism have focused on ritual, spectacle, commemoration and myth, even as they also take seriously the totalitarian thrust of Fascism. But whereas this new culturalist orientation has usefully pointed beyond earlier reductionist approaches, it has often accented style and myth as opposed to their opposites, which might be summed up as 'substance'. Some of the aspirations fuelling Fascism, responding to perceived inadequacies in the mainstream liberal and Marxist traditions, pointed beyond myth and style as they helped to shape the Fascist self-understanding – and Fascist practice. This article seeks to show how the interplay of substance, style and myth produced a particular – and deeply flawed – totalitarian dynamic in Fascist Italy.