1995.
DAI 1995 55(10): 3292-A.
DA9505716

Abstract

The dissertation presents an intellectual history and multiple biography of four anarchists-turned-interventionists who later joined the fascist movement. Leandro Arpinati began his political career as one of the few anarcho-individualists who favored Italy’s intervention the First World War. He was among the founders of the Bolognese fascio di combattimento, and, later, Mussolini’s Undersecretary to the Ministry of the Interior from 1929 to 1933, where he was known as the ’Second Duce of Fascism.’ In May 1933 he was forced from the government for opposing the establishment of the regime. Arpinati’s anarcho-individualism shaped his tripartite ideology of Individual-State-Nation, his defense of the individual, and his preference for authoritarian over totalitarian solutions. He was also influenced by a group of socialists and revolutionary syndicalists including: Massimo Rocca, an extreme anarcho-individualist who goaded Mussolini into openly declaring an interventionist stance; Maria Rygier, a leader among the Bolognese anarchists who successfully articulated the revolutionary ideas of the left in terms acceptable to the right; and, Torquato Nanni, a prominent socialist lawyer and journalist who hoped to fuse the left wing of Fascism to the right wing of Bolshevism. Like Arpinati, all were close friends of the young Mussolini in Romagna and were among the first to express openly their disillusionment with fascism in power. By 1934, all four had been arrested for ’anti-fascist activities’ and forced into external or internal exile (confino). Despite Arpinati and Nanni’s participation in the Resistance a decade later, they were assassinated by communist partisans on the day of Liberation in April 1945. An analysis of the motives behind their assassinations leads to conclusions about the use of history for sustaining the Myth of the Resistance as a governing paradigm in the postwar period. An examination of the transition from the fascist state to the postwar Italian Republic suggests a model by which political parties have been appended to major personalities in the postwar Italian Republic according to the degree to which they were associated with fascism. Similarly, a resolution of the current political impasse in Italy is likely to involve appending new political alliances to major personalities to the degree to which they were involved in the political corruption since the Second World War.