The Making of Fascism: Class, State, and Counter-Revolution, Italy 1919-1922. (Reviews).

The Making of Fascism: Class, State, and Counter-Revolution, Italy 1919-1922. By Dahlia S. Elazar (New York: Praeger, 2001. xii plus 172 pp. $56.00).

This is a difficult book to review for an historian because the author, who is a sociologist, spends a good deal of time and talent proving a proposition which would seem somewhat obvious to most people in our discipline. That is that political decisions and actions, carried out in response to historically conditioned circumstances, have political and social consequences. More specifically she maintains that "... the Fascists' seizure of power was neither pregiven nor foretold by the organization's 'historical origins,' nor was it determined by its 'social base.' Rather, it was the outcome of concrete political struggles guided by specific strategies employed by political organizations. The Italian Fascists did not take political power in an electoral campaign that won the 'hearts and minds' of a broad and free 'mass base,' but in a violent struggle in the streets, aided and abetted by the propertied class and state authorities." (p. 151) As a corollary to this central point, which she defines as "contrary to the prevailing sociological theories," she argues that the early aims and organization of the Fascists evolved radically and rapidly as opportunities for different alliances presented themselves between 1919 and 1922, and that the very expansion of the armed squads in the northern and central parts of Italy eventually determined the ultimate strategy of seizing power out of the hands of liberal parliamentarians. All of this is reasonable and fits comfortably within the current consensus of Italian historians, with whose works she is impressively conversant. Indeed, given her excellent grasp of the secondary literature, one wonders how she can make the claim that there is generally "... an implicit conception of Fascism as a pregiven, monolithic, and static phenomenon" (p. 2) unless she is referring to a select group of unfortunately ahistorical colleagues. Be that as it may, in coming to these general conclusions, she offers some interesting assertions based on rather creative statistics (twenty-six tables i n 153 pages), the analysis of which takes up a substantial amount of the text.

Regarding the seizure of power, the author effectively asserts that the Fascists changed the rules of the game by the militarization of politics. Revolutionary syndicalists, returning veterans, and want-to-be soldiers combined old and new traditions of violence to create action squads willing to attack Socialists and their organizations. Comparing data from the 1920 provincial elections with the frequency of Fascist violence between November 1920 and May 1921, she argues that there was a clear pattern by which the greatest number of attacks occurred in those provinces where the Socialists had their greatest successes, specifically the areas of the North which had undergone capitalist transformation of labor relations. A similar correlation emerges between Fascist illegal take-overs of provincial governments and the deterioration of "liberal hegemony" as marked by Socialist electoral majorities or pluralities. In those areas where the liberals maintained control, both attacks and takeovers were less likely, al though not impossible. This correlation was anything but accidental and reflected the fact that the Fascist squads were aided and abetted by local agrarian elites and their bureaucratic allies in those areas where their traditional economic and political power had been most seriously eroded. Thus money, men, and most crucially, transportation were offered to the Fascists to carry out "punitive expeditions" at ever expanding distances from provincial centers. At the same time, prefects, police, and judges selectively punished Socialists who might respond to the attacks, while offering the Fascists legal impunity and active assistance. This all emanated from longstanding traditions by which landowners had organized in self-defense against labor organizers often in collusion with local authorities. Capitalizing on those traditions and the willingness of paramilitary gangs to resort to violence within the post-war context of economic dislocation, governmental crisis, and Socialist "insurgency" the Fascists quickl y redirected their energies towards gaining power at the local and then the national level. Hence" ... the Fascists never 'seized power' so much as they were handed it, with the support of the propertied class, through the connivance or collusion of the Liberal state's administration." (p. 119)

This portrait reinforces the interpretation of Fascism as a dynamic and malleable movement, and the statistics offer clarity to processes previously based on less precise evidence. One also appreciates the author's willingness to discuss the possibility that things might have gone a different direction depending on decisions of the principal actors, be they Fascist or Socialist. However, it is fair to question the premise of basing a highly refined quantitative analysis of Fascist violence on attacks only mentioned in Socialist archives. This is a function of the data, gathered by De Felice, that she uses (p. 97), but it leads into a reporting bias, in that where the Socialists were most active and successful there would naturally be more violence recorded. In a similar vein, it seems unfair to use 1918 as abase of comparison for strike activity in 1919 and 1920 since for most of 1918, Italy was still at war and this would have lessened the number of strikes. Pre-war data on strikes would have been more accur ate, albeit less dramatic.

In addition, one misses a sense of Quellenkritik anywhere in the book, and Elazar cites historians and commentators who might have had political axes to grind in the same register as modern monographs. On the other hand, the author's emphasis on class leads her to underestimate other motivations. Although she mentions the importance of nationalism in the conclusion, it is almost as an afterthought, and she underplays its critical role in understanding the motivations of the original Fascisri, or more important, in understanding the collusion of the military and police and their dislike of the Socialists who represented both internationalism and defeatism. She also misses the probable causal effect that the use of illegal violence had in forcing the Fascists to vie for state power, even though it clearly fits her own paradigm. It was not just part of their deal with the propertied classes, but as intimidation and murder mounted, the Fascists became increasingly vulnerable to prosecution should the state regain its equilibrium. It became an all or nothing game as the stakes rose and the area of play expanded.

Finally, the book suffers from an unfortunate number of errors which exceed the allowable limit for typographical gaffes. Thus, when Giolitti came to power in June, 1920 it was not "after resolution of the Fiume affair" (p.79); on the contrary, Giolitti was key in forcing D'Annunzio to relinquish the territory. The fatti di maggio took place in 1898 not 1897; Mussolini took the "Socialist" appellation off his newspaper in 1918 not 1928; it's Gabellotti not Gabolletos; Marchese Tanari not Tenari; Ban not Barri; etc. Likewise, the Carabinieri were not under the direct control of the Ministry of the Interior; but rather jealously guarded their ties to the Ministry of Defense (p. 155), and one notes in this regard the author's apparent ignorance of Jonathan Dunnage's excellent 1997 book on the police and Fascism, which is a rare but unfortunate lacuna in the bibliography. Although these peccadilloes do not negate the sometimes interesting points raised by the book's many statistics, such gaps in accuracy do not h elp reinforce the credibility of a work that depends on quantitative precision to make its larger points.