Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Development

Abstract

What the critics said about the first edition: Grand...must be congratulated on performing so skillfully the difficult task of providing students (and teachers) of twentieth-century history with a concise yet rounded account of Fascism. - History. This history...commends itself for its clarity, compactness, and grasp of the subject. - American Historical Review. An excellent synthesis and a balanced interpretation of the historical background and the evolution of the political system under fascism. - Choice. On October 29, 1922, when Benito Mussolini completed his seizure of power in Italy, the Fascist era began in triumph. It ended some twenty-two years later with the execution of Mussolini and the collapse of the German-sponsored Social Republic. In this second edition of Italian Fascism, as in the first Alexander De Grand disagrees with recent interpretations of the movement as revolutionary, leftist, a model for later Third World modernizing dictatorships. Instead, he sees it as a bourgeois response to the challenge of proletarian revolution and an approach to the problem of conservative control in an era of mass politics. For the second edition De Grand has substantially revised his discussion of culture and ideology as well as the Conclusion and has enlarged the bibliography. Incorporating the most re-cent research, this introduction to Fascism reinterprets an important development in modern history. Alexander De Grand, a professor of history at North Carolina State University, is the author of The Nationalist Association and the Rise of Fascism in Italy (1978), also published by the University of Nebraska Press.