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2 - Fascism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

A. James Gregor
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Summary

Almost every scholar who pretends to a study of neofascism offers a summary account of Fascism – and almost all accounts differ in substantial fashion. Attempting to encapsule a quarter of a century of intense political activity in the relatively brief compass of an expository outline is difficult at best. There is always the exercise of judgment and the influence of bias in the winnowing of the enormous abundance of the historic record. Nonetheless, the work of some of the major historians of the twentieth century permits a stenographic rendering of the entire Fascist sequence that is plausible and in large part unobjectionable. We can now be reasonably confident that we know at least some of the essentials of Italian Fascism.

We know that Fascism arose in a new nation, politically reunited after almost one thousand years of dismemberment, strife, political occupation, poverty, and internecine warfare. We know that the fractured Italic peninsula was also host to almost a thousand years of creativity, episodic ebullience, and commercial expansion. For the purposes of discussion, nonetheless, it is important to recognize that the several hundred years before Italy's reunification were particularly marked by recurrent expressions of individual and collective humiliation to be found in the lamentations of many of the nation's foremost spokespeople.

As early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, Niccolo Machiavelli exhorted the people of the peninsula to make the effort to unite against the depredations of foreigners.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Search for Neofascism
The Use and Abuse of Social Science
, pp. 30 - 53
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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  • Fascism
  • A. James Gregor, University of California, Berkeley
  • Book: The Search for Neofascism
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511617225.003
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  • Fascism
  • A. James Gregor, University of California, Berkeley
  • Book: The Search for Neofascism
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511617225.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Fascism
  • A. James Gregor, University of California, Berkeley
  • Book: The Search for Neofascism
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511617225.003
Available formats
×