Mussolini's Grandchildren. Fascism in Contemporary Italy

In this seminar, David Broder will present his book Mussolini's Grandchildren. Fascism in Contemporary Italy (Pluto Press, March 2023).

Ahead of last September's general election, poll leader Giorgia Meloni issued a video message in four languages insisting that her party had "handed over fascism to history decades ago." Fratelli d'Italia, heir of the post-1945 Movimento Sociale Italiano and the Alleanza Nazionale of the 1990s-2000s, today calls itself a conservative party; it has no Mussolini-style cult of political violence, and is not today building a dictatorship. Yet fascism is not just a distant past of concern only to history buffs. Still today, controversies over fascism's legacy routinely make frontpage news; and far from simply leaving the past in the past, government representatives routinely seek to shift the terms of public debate around it.

Internationally, recent debates over the rise of rising right-wing forces have often questioned the contemporary relevance of the term "fascism", in the absence of the political forms typical of the 1930s-40s. Mussolini's Grandchildren takes a different, genealogical approach, focused on the tradition of a post-war neofascist party which long denied that fascism had died in 1945. Examining the post-war transitions of the MSI and its heirs, it also uses this history to examine wider changes in Italian public life. It especially focuses on a paradigm shift over the post-Cold War era, amidst falling levels of mass mobilisation and political violence, the shrinking of utopian horizons for social change — but also an assertive challenge to the so-called "antifascist paradigm" of Italy's twentieth-century history.

Mussolini's Grandchildren thus argues that the heirs to post-war neofascism today combine many contradictory impulses, continuing the struggles of the MSI but also hybridising them with other, newer forms of nationalist identity politics. On the one hand, Fratelli d'Italia in effect accepts many limits on its action, in particular with regard to Italy's international position. Yet its effort to redeem its ancestors maintains a core focus on overcoming the political legacy of the Resistance, both at the levels of historical memory and that of Italy's institutions. The attempt to rewrite the constitution; the insistence on honouring the victims of "both sides" in World War II; and the recasting of political struggle in ethnic and civilisational terms; all seek to re-found the Republic, in a struggle steeped in controversies over the past.

David Broder is a translator and historian of Italy. His books include Mussolini's Grandchildren. Fascism in Contemporary Italy (Pluto Press, March 2023) and First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy (Verso Books, July 2020). His PhD dissertation from the London School of Economics was published as The Rebirth of Italian Communism, 1943–44. Dissidents in German-Occupied Rome (Palgrave, January 2021). He is Europe editor at Jacobin magazine, and a regular columnist for the New Statesman and Internazionale.