20th century
A01=Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Author_Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Category=GTM
Category=NHD
Category=NHWL
Category=NHWR5
Category=NHWR7
cultural history
dictatorship
economic development
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
europe
european history
fascism
fascists
historical
history of culture
history of society
history students
human condition
interwar history
italian cinema
italian culture
italy
legacy of fascism
model of modern world
modern historians
modern history
modernity
mussolini
national identity
national traditions
revolution
social boundaries
social movements
social status
Product details
- ISBN 9780520242166
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Mar 2004
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Ruth Ben-Ghiat's innovative cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship is a provocative discussion of the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. Eloquent, pathbreaking, and deft in its use of a broad range of materials, this work argues that fascism appealed to many Italian intellectuals as a new model of modernity that would resolve the contemporary European crisis as well as long-standing problems of the national past. Ben-Ghiat shows that--at a time of fears over the erosion of national and social identities--Mussolini presented fascism as a movement that would allow economic development without harm to social boundaries and national traditions. She demonstrates that although the regime largely failed in its attempts to remake Italians as paragons of a distinctly fascist model of mass society, twenty years of fascism did alter the landscape of Italian cultural life. Among younger intellectuals in particular, the dictatorship left a legacy of practices and attitudes that often continued under different political rubrics after 1945.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and History at New York University.
