This article challenges commonly held preconceptions about the absence of a cohesive cultural policy by arguing that, while many rival aesthetic creeds were accommodated under Mussolini's regime, they can all be seen as permutations of a common vision of the central role to be played by a culture in the regeneration of the national community and the creation of a new Italy. It points to a profound relationship between Fascism's cultural policy and its core mobilizing myth of palingenetic ultra-nationalism, which similarly spawned a wide variety of surface ideologies similarly doomed to failure by the irreducibly pluralistic nature of modern society.

The prison system under Fascism was used to house both common and political prisoners. After 25 July 1943, the prisons were opened, only to be closed once again in occupied Italy as the Nazis took over the system. San Vittore prison in Milan was theatre to a series of changes over the period from 1943 to 1946, culminating in the famous riots of April 1946. This article analyses the changes in the prison system, the mix of prisoners inside the institution and the continuation of the civil war inside San Vittore after liberation. This micro-focus allows reflections on a number of key issues regarding the post-war state: legitimacy, legality, repression and amnesty. The post-liberation regime's failure to keep order both inside and outside of the prison system was a key test of its legitimacy among those who had gone along with Fascism and were worried about what was to come: The article centres on the extraordinary and contested events surrounding the ‘revolt’ of 1946 in San Vittore and argues that accounts thus far provided are neither accurate nor particularly insightful about this key post-war moment. The amnesty of 1946, so long attributed to Togliatti's personal sense of responsibility was, in reality, forced upon the justice minister by the chaos in the prisons right across the peninsula.

In 1997, Italy's leading politicians began the overdue process of revising the existing constitution. The bicameral commission of parliament charged with this task has proposed significant alterations to the country's institutional structure. Innovations include a directly elected presidency, an end to bicameralism and a greater role for sub-national tiers of administration. However, this article argues that the suggested changes are in fact less sweeping than they seem, and do not address the country's urgent need to move towards a more competitive form of democracy.

This article examines Gramsci's theory of intellectuals in the light of Bauman's distinction between ‘legislators’ and ‘interpreters’. By distinguishing descriptive and prescriptive dimensions to Gramsci's theory, it is possible to see a tension between the dual ethical and political functions that he attributes to ‘organic intellectuals’. In the one, Gramsci effectively deconstructs the intellectual's role as the bearer of universal knowledge, while in the other he reconstructs that role through an emphasis on the revolutionary party. It is argued that the tensions in Gramsci's theory stem from his attachment to a peculiarly modern conception of the relationship between intellectuals, culture and the state.

This article offers an account of a recent debate in the cultural pages of the Italian press on a polemical work of literary criticism entitled Pasolini contro Calvino, in which the two authors are shown to represent emblematically different attitudes towards literature, cultural institutions and the culture industry in post-war Italy. The debate surrounding this claim is examined in substance, but also as an illustration of the workings of culture in 1990s Italy.

Franklin Hugh Adler, Italian Industrialists from Liberalism to Fascism. The Political Development of the Industrial Bourgeoisie, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, xv + 458 pp., ISBN 0–521–433406–8 hbk, £40.00

Giuseppe Berta, Il governo degli interessi. Industriali, rappresentanza e politica nell'Italia del nord-ovest 1906–1924, Marsilio, Venice, 1996, xv + 175 pp., ISBN 88–317–6342–3 pbk, 32,000 Lire

Giorgio FioccaStoria della Confindustria 1900–1914, Marsilio, Venice, 1994, 266 pp., ISBN 88–317–5850–0 hbk, 70,000 Lire

The three books under review trace the organization of industrial interests in Italy from the foundation of the Lega industrial di Torino (LIT) in 1906 to the insertion of Confindustria into the Fascist totalitarian state. As Franklin Hugh Adler's ambitious and detailed account relates the Lega (LIT) begat first a Federazione Industriali Piemontesi (1908) and then the Confederazione Italiana dell'Industria (CIDI) in 1910 which was relaunched as the Confederazione generale dell'industria Italiana (Confindustria) in 1919. All of these organizations came under the effective direction of Gino Olivetti, the first secretary of the Lega who emerges from Adler's analysis as the principal theorist of a liberalproductionist ideology that the author regards as the central value system of the Italian industrial bourgeoisie. The slimmer volumes (in both scope and size) of Giuseppe Berta and Giorgio Fiocca diverge from Adler's account in stressing the discontinuities in the process of association which are attributed to the triumph of one industrial faction over another, and the changes in direction consequent upon this. By presenting these organizations within the broader context of entrepreneurial and associational activity, their accounts also call into question the extent to which the positions of Confindustria can be assumed to be representative of Italian industrialists as a whole.

Pier Paolo Giglioli, Sandra Cavicchioli and Giolo Fele, Rituali di degradazione. Anatomia del processo Cusani, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1997, 243 pp., ISBN 88–15–05713–7 pbk, 28,000 Lire.

Recent developments in Italian politics, such as the emergence of Forza Italia, became possible only after a much deeper process had taken place, the delegitimation of Italian politicians. In the early 1990s, much of the political class which had dominated Italian politics since the Second World War was publicly exposed and removed from politics. The old parties of government, the Christian Democrats (DC) and the Socialists (PSI), were swept aside. What appeared to be a civilized evolution had its visible peak in the difficult struggle conducted by a few magistrates, the Milan-based Mani pulite (Clean hands) team, against political corruption. The so-called Tangentopoli (Kickback city) investigations have been indicated as the turning point of contemporary Italian politics. They certainly represent the moment when a rhetoric of ‘old’ and ‘new’ was divulged, when the Italian Republic began to be felt as a collapsing venture, giving an opportunity for change and reform which has not yet been grasped.