Carl Levy

Fascism, National Socialism and Conservatives in Europe, 1914-1945: Issues for Comparativists

This article reviews recent literature on comparative fascism. It first examines the definition of fascism (the fascist minimum). The discussion of comparative fascism that follows focuses on the relationship between fascists and conservatives. It also analyses the comparability of various fascisms and National Socialism.

Anarchism and cosmopolitanism

Until recently, the relationship between theories of international anarchy and anarchism has been ignored. Very recent work has started to bridge the gap between International Relations theory and the usefulness of anarchism and anarchist theory for the understanding of global politics. This article takes this discussion one step further by examining the relationship between classical anarchism (1860s–1940s), cosmopolitanism, post-anarchism and the global justice movement. It then investigates the linkages between the works of the 19th- and 20th-century anarchists, Rudolf Rocker and Gustav Landauer, and contemporary examinations of the linkages between cultural nationalism, cosmopolitanism and the classical and post-anarchist projects.

‘Sovversivismo’: The radical political culture of otherness in Liberal Italy

This article examines the concept of sovversivismo (‘subversiveness’) and the sovversivo (subversive) in Liberal Italy. The term could mean spontaneous unfocussed rebellion and a general mood against the State and the ruling class. Drawing its intellectual sustenance and personnel from a territory that stretched through central Italy, subversive culture gave the anarchists a purchase over the larger socialist movement, as the Red Week of 1914 demonstrated. The subversive also attracted avant-garde intellectuals and artists in Milan, Florence, Rome and elsewhere. Before 1914 Benito Mussolini tried to meld the intellectual subversives with the popular and working-class subversives from its geographical heartland in order to outflank the leadership of the PSI. The article discusses the analyses of sovversivo/sovversivismo by Antonio Gramsci and Errico Malatesta, but sovversivismo was also employed by the polite classes in 1914–1915 during the interventionist crisis and used to overwhelm the Liberal State between 1919 and 1926.

Charisma and social movements: Errico Malatesta and Italian anarchism

Summary This article examines the role of charismatic leadership in the Italian anarchist and socialist movements in the period up to the biennio rosso. It focuses on the activities of Errico Malatesta (1853–1932) in 1920 after his return from exile in London. Italian anarchism may have relied upon the informal prestige of leaders such as Malatesta to keep the sinews of its organizations together, however even if Malatesta drew enormous crowds on his return, his oratory was far less demagogic than his maximalist socialist competitors. Malatestas charisma was a product of the supercharged atmosphere of 1920 and his reputation as the ‘socialist Garibaldi’ or the ‘Lenin of Italy’. In fact his Socratic approach, demonstrated in his written and spoken interventions, was rather closer to the educationalism of Mazzini.

Social Histories of Anarchism

This article is a synoptic overview of a larger project on the social histories of anarchism from the eighteenth century to the present. The specific themes of this article are a discussion of the periodization of anarchism as an ism, an ideology originating in nineteenth-century Europe, and its relationship to and differences with more general libertarian or noncoercive modes of behavior and organization found in all human societies. Secondly, the dissemination of anarchism (and syndicalism) throughout the globe and thus the role of the Global South in the history of anarchism will be surveyed. This article focuses on the period of classical anarchism (1860s to 1940s) and therefore discusses the differences between preanarchism and classical anarchism on the one hand, and classical anarchism and postanarchism on the other. Once that is established, which in turn sets the context for the ideology of classical anarchism, the article proceeds to examine the dissemination and reception of anarchism from the 1880s to 1914 in many ways the heyday of anarchism as a global movement, in which it competed with, and at times challenged, the hegemony of social democracy. This challenge was most successfully mounted where anarchism merged with or lived under the protective cover of the syndicalist movement. Thus, a discussion of the relationships among anarchism, syndicalism, and the globalization of the

La Repubblica sociale italiana a Desenzano: Giovanni Preziosi e l'Ispettorato generale per la razza

the proliferation of translations corresponded to an influx of foreign (and often experimental) literary styles. He concludes that the perceived translation boom is somewhat misleading, as the proportion of translations to overall production remained pretty consistent during the fascist period. This information is both clearly presented and usefully analysed, making it easily accessible. Publishing Translations in Fascist Italy contributes significantly to the study of the fascist period by exploring one of the industries at the centre of that period’s conflicts about relationships between culture and nation, government and producers of art. By considering this topic as a publishing rather than literary phenomenon, Rundle is able to convey the wider historical and social implications of his topic, addressing not the peculiarities of any individual case but rather trends that characterize the larger cultural and political landscape. Because the publishing of translations involved so many issues that were important to the fascist period and its negotiation of state and culture, this study is important beyond its specific focus, making it useful reading for anyone studying Mussolini’s regime.

Antonio Gramsci, Anarchism Syndicalism and Sovversivismo

The relationship between Antonio Gramsci’s Marxism and the anarchist and syndicalist traditions is complex and intriguing but it is overlooked by most of his scholarly interlocutors. I have argued that there are a number of elective affinities between the young Gramsci’s unorthodox Marxism and the libertarian socialist tradition, and that Gramsci’s concept of industrial democracy, elaborated during the era of the factory councils in Turin (1919- 1920), was shaped through his encounters with anarchists, self-educated workers and formally educated technicians employed by Fiat and others. His relationship to the anarchists runs far deeper than an Italian variation of the tactical political ploy, which Lenin indulged in his anarchist-sounding pronouncements in revolutionary Russia during the spring and early summer of 1917.

Frustrated of Islington

Critique of David Roberts David Roberts has published widely on Italian fascism and more recently a significant comparative study of totalitarianism in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. The short essay published here is a useful compression of the arguments presented in the longer work. Unfortunately, this piece represents all that is problematic and frustrating in totalitarian/political religion studies. Roberts gives us a useful review of the growth and evolution of totalitarianism and political religion from the inter-war period through the Cold War until we reach the sunny postmodern uplands of the cultural turn. A review of the arguments of Gentile, Griffin, Morgan, Kershaw, Eatwell, Payne, Burrin and Voegelin is helpful to the reader who is unfamiliar with a series of complex arguments, which straddle decades.