Conclusion: Troubling Coercion and Consent—Everydayness, Ideology, and Effect in German and Italian Fascism

Abstract

In order to understand the meanings of politics at the level of the state or the national polity, historians need to focus on more than just aggregate results and broad effects or the workings of institutional politics in organized public life. Such inquiry also requires innovative, highly focused, imaginative scrutiny of events, spaces, and individual lives if the impact and limits of state policies are to be understood. This chapter considers approaches to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy within a broader and longer historiographical context going back to the 1960s and 1970s. It examines first how “society” became a discreet category of investigation, separate from “politics,” and then how “society” and “politics” became merged together again under the auspices of especially microhistory and the history of everyday life. Alltagsgeschichte can help illuminate how Fascist and Nazi ideas, both through coercion and more insidious means, permeated and shaped all aspects of the everyday, from sociability and common belonging through pedagogy to welfare and governmentality.