Before moving directly to an analysis of the industrialists and the rise of Fascism, we shall briefly examine the general context in which this relationship developed. This entails an analysis of the postwar crisis that led to the collapse of the liberal system and the subsequent rise of Fascism. It is our central contention that the predominant problem confronting postwar Italy was the legitimation of political authority. The ascension to power on the part of the Fascists (or, more precisely, on the part of Mussolini within the framework of a coalition government) may be understood less as prima facie proof of Fascism's invincibility as a political force than as evidence of the political incapacity of the bourgeoisie, the classe dirigente, to reconstitute a viable and legitimate regime in its own right upon the organizational and ideological basis of traditional Italian liberalism.

Even without the war and the severe conjunctural problems associated with the postwar crisis, Italian liberalism would still have had great difficulty adapting to the advent of mass politics. In Chapter 1, we observed that by 1911 the structurally amorphous Giolittian regime had already shown signs of internal collapse. In Chapter 2, we noted a marked conservative-authoritarian trend characterizing the 1913–15 period, prefiguring, in many respects, the crisis pattern to emerge once the war had ended.