Historians of modern Italy are becoming increasingly accustomed to reading accounts that stress the continuities and connections, rather than the points of departure and rupture, between Italy's liberal and Fascist eras. These have been widely welcomed, perhaps especially in the field of Italian colonialism. In Criminal Law in Liberal and Fascist Italy, Paul Garfinkel makes the case for seeing continuity in Italian legal history, a field which for him has traditionally emphasised change between the penal law codes and broader legislative projects of liberal and Fascist Italy. Garfinkel argues against what he depicts as a previously dominant paradigm, which emphasised the classicist understanding of crime, typified by Cesare Beccaria, that focussed on moral fault and on the crime rather than the criminal. According to this hypothesis, this approach gave way, in the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, to a positivist-influenced school, dominated by ‘scientific’ criminal anthropology and sociology (personified by the criminologists Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo). For Garfinkel, in contrast, the overriding framework guiding legislators and jurists across both the liberal and Fascist eras was one he terms ‘moderate social defence’. The tenets of ‘moderate social defence’, which Garfinkel identifies as predating Lombroso's central text, Criminal Man, and culminating in the 1930 Rocco Code, combined widely-held beliefs about ‘moral fault’, fixed and proportionate punishment, and ‘progressive’ imprisonment and other sanctions with (for its proponents) avowedly ‘modern’ principles. These principles differentiated between ‘ordinary’ and ‘dangerous’ crimes and criminals and advocated the introduction of preventative and paternalistic programmes and institutions targeting specific ‘dangerous’ criminals and crime.

Criminal Law in Liberal and Fascist Italy is undoubtedly an impressive work; it comprises over 500 pages of thorough exposition of the evolution of criminal law reform and of Italy's ‘legal culture’ from Unification to Fascism, evidently meticulously researched and referenced. Inevitably, the book does not discuss every possible area of criminal law. The initial two chapters set out the people, ideas, and institutions that shaped Italy's legal culture and policies in the nineteenth century; these are followed by three dense chapters narrowing the focus to examine debates and legislative measures and innovations with respect to three particular areas of ‘dangerous’ common criminality: recidivism, and juvenile and alcohol-related crime. The chapter on alcohol and crime traces a long history of concerns about ‘alcoholism’ and criminal drunkenness, predating national unification and therefore also the development of positivist criminology theories on alcohol as a trigger for innate criminality in habitual offenders. It demonstrates the evolution of legal thinking around alcohol consumption and imputability, from the acceptance pre-Unification and in the 1889 Zanardelli legal codes of non-‘procured’ drunkenness as reducing or even excluding legal responsibility for the commission of crime to the rise of the Italian temperance movement and the passing of Italy's first ‘measures to fight alcoholism’ in the years immediately preceding the Great War. (The enactment of the 1913 ‘anti- alcohol’ legislation, though significantly watered down as it passed through the senate, shocked Italy's wine producers and would galvanise them into a robust ‘defence’ of the product they declared as being in ‘crisis’ well into the 1920s and 1930s.) The final two chapters set out the continuity argument that the principles of ‘moderate social defence’ endured into and through the Fascist dictatorship, evidenced by the content of both the Ferri and Rocco codes.

It is excellent to have such a wide-ranging and highly readable English-language account of modern Italy's legal frameworks: the wealth of detail on the reforms themselves, and on the discussions and discourses that circulated around and informed them, will make this a recurrent go-to volume on the shelves of scholars of modern Italy. It is a valuable reference not only for historians of law, crime and punishment, but for those interested in histories of youth, of alcohol production and consumption, and in questions of state-building more broadly. The book's focus on common crimes rather than perhaps more historical attention-grabbing political crimes is very welcome, as is the exploration of legal reforms – such as the Ferri Code – that were not, in the end, enacted, alongside those that did become law, as is also the realignment of Italian legal cultures in relation to developments in criminal law elsewhere in Europe. Garfinkel is clear in his linking of penal law reform to nation-building in Italy: the accumulation of statistical and other data demonstrating increasing crime rates in the newly-unified state, especially of violent and ‘dangerous’ crime, was understood by legal theorists as a ‘causal link’ to Italy's perceived ‘debilitating weakness’, exemplified by unstable state structures and lack of prestige as an international and imperial power. At the same time, Garfinkel very effectively demonstrates the deeply transnational frames of reference of Italian jurists, not least Ugo Conti, one of the criminal-law reformer protagonists of the book, whose lifespan across liberal and Fascist periods of rule and his straddling of ideas associated with both classical and positivist schools in his own legal philosophy makes him emblematic of the book's central arguments.

The contention that previous scholars have over-egged the influence of Lombroso and the positivist school is perhaps stated with excessive force. In addition, the case made for liberal-Fascist continuities and, in particular, the presentation of the Rocco code as the end of liberal thinking on criminal law, and not the beginning of Fascist thinking, because it was neither ‘wholly Italian’ nor ‘uniquely Fascist’, raises questions that are not fully addressed. Garfinkel concludes that the 1930 Rocco code constituted a ‘culmination of a lengthy, gradual and non linear process of Italian criminal-law reform’, but also that legislation enacted in the same year or just a year or two later, such as the code of penal procedure and revised public security laws, heralded ‘a new era of Fascist criminal justice’. This deduction warrants more discussion of the broader political and social context in which the code emerged and, crucially, was applied. Perhaps a treatment that connects parliamentary and academic juridical legislating and theorising more explicitly to their interactions and interplay with other political and societal agents, and to the use and application of the law, could offer answers here. However, given that Criminal Law in Liberal and Fascist Italy already represents a massive undertaking in terms of archival research and analysis, it is no doubt unrealistic to ask that this could be done within a single volume. Given that Garfinkel's claim to have written ‘the most comprehensive account to date’ of penal law reform between Unification and Fascism seems well deserved, these are perhaps threads of research for another time.