Description: The anarchist origins of Italian fascism are vividly described in this multiple biography of four anarchists who demonstrated extreme individualist tendencies. Leandro Arpinati began his political career as an anarchist, but went on to lead the Bologna fascists and become Mussolini's Minister of the Interior and the «Second Duce of Fascism.» Massimo Rocca was the extreme anarchist-individualist who goaded Mussolini into openly declaring his stance in favor of intervention in the First World War. Maria Rygier was a leader among the Bologna anarchists who reshaped the revolutionary ideas of the left in terms acceptable to the right. Torquato Nanni helped fuse the left wing of Fascism to the right wing of Bolshevism. All were friends of the young Mussolini, but were among the first to express disillusionment with fascism. By 1934, they had been arrested for «anti-fascist activities» and forced into external or internal exile. Despite Arpinati's and Nanni's participation in the Resistance a decade later, communist partisans assassinated them on the day of Liberation in April 1945. This book's analysis of the motives behind their assassination leads to conclusions about the use of the Myth of the Resistance as a paradigm for government in postwar Italy. It also suggests a model by which political parties have been appended to major personalities according to the degree to which they opposed fascism.
Review Quotes: «Stephen B. Whitaker's scrupulous and wide-ranging research is combined with a professionalism in writing and interpretation that will make this book a must-read for scholars of Italian fascism as well as a gripping story for a wider public interested in the history of this fascinating period. Whitaker is also able to show in concrete detail the Nietzschean and secular religious content current in fascism that is often claimed to be part of fascism, but rarely traced as convincingly as in this book. This collective biography brings forth a free-thinking fascism that will surprise many readers and that will cause even scholars of the period to reflect again on what they knew.» (Walter L. Adamson, Samuel Candler Dobbs, Professor of History, Chair of the Department, Emory University)
«Stephen B. Whitaker's well-researched book will take its place as one of the key works on the revolutionary origins of fascism. Through this history we understand the process by which certain currents of nineteenth-century individualist anarchism became part of the unstable ideological mix that produced fascism and how they played a role in the intellectual formation of Benito Mussolini.» (Alexander DeGrand, Department of History, North Carolina State University)