Italian Fascism

On October 29, 1922, when Benito Mussolini completed his seizure of power in Italy, the Fascist era began in triumph. It ended some twenty-two years later with the execution of Mus-solini and the collapse of the German-sponsored Italian Social Republic. In this second edition of Italian Fascism, as in the first Alexander De Grand disagrees with recent interpretations of the movement as ''revolutionary,'' ''leftist,'' a model for later Third World modernizing dictatorships. Instead, he sees it as a bourgeois response to the challenge of proletarian revolution and an approach to the problem of conservative control in an era of mass politics. For the second edition De Grand has substantially revised his discussion of culture and ideology as well as the Conclusion and has enlarged the bibliography. Incorporating the most re-cent research, this introduction to Italian Fascism reinterprets an important development in modern history.