A. James Gregor is the leading authority on Italian fascist ideology in the English language. Mussolini's Intellectuals is the conclusion of 40 years of scholarship on fascist intellectuals and the ideology they produced. While specialists will find little if anything new in this volume, the uninitiated will find a cogent presentation of the author's long-standing claim: that Italian fascism was not simply the violent, irrational, anti-intellectual phenomenon so often misrepresented in the historical and social scientific literature but, rather, a movement with a serious ideological core that responded to the historical failings of the liberal state, as well as to the conjunctural problems of the interwar period. The book's major strength derives from a firm grasp of the intellectual origins of fascism, particularly the unredeemed promise of the Risorgimento to develop a morally regenerated and unified nation.

Rarely has Giovanni Gentile, fascism's major intellectual, been presented so authoritatively in such a relatively short, general study. Gregor proceeds to elaborate the major elements of fascist ideology and illustrate how intellectuals such as Gentile, Ugo Spirito, Sergio Pannunzio, Camillo Pellizzi, and Carlo Costamagna responded to challenges the fascist regime confronted, domestically and internationally, during its 20-year reign. Gregor is quite right in holding that Julius Evola was marginal for most of this period, though he dedicates a chapter to him largely because Evola became a primary point of reference for young neofascists after the war. Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) leader Giorgio Almirante used to tell them that Evola was “our Marcuse but better.” Any serious scholar willing to wade though such a swamp of opaque dreck—and particularly a scholar with manifest sympathies for Gentile—is to be commended for remarkable tenacity. Gregor effectively situates Evola within the final and most tragic stage of Italian fascism, stopping well short, however, of accomplishing the truly impossible, rendering this cosmically arcane writer fully coherent. Beyond adding new material on Evola, Gregor also dwells briefly on the fascist appropriation of Carl Schmitt, particularly Schmitt's concept of “extended spaces” (Grossraüme). Unfortunately, Gregor does not do much with Schmitt beyond that, and this is regrettable, because there is a paucity of analysis focusing on the German jurist in the literature on Italian fascism, and because Schmitt has recently generated much interest among political theorists whose insights Gregor might have applied to Italian fascism more generally.

Gregor always has had a penchant for viewing history and politics mainly though the texts of fascist writers, rather than relating texts to unfolding events and to the work of contemporary scholars. Not that events and contemporary scholarship are totally absent, but they remain in the background, called forth only when needed to round out the picture or to sustain claims, sometimes dubious, that stretch well beyond the otherwise exemplary explication de texte. Here and in prior work, he treats fascism as a developmental dictatorship, and an anticapitalist one at that. True, there were fascist ideologues who spoke in such terms, including Benito Mussolini himself. The problem is that rhetoric was unmatched with action. It was during the 1930s that the transition had been made from a dictatorship intent upon eliminating all sources of opposition to a distinctively fascist state. Capitalism was hardly eliminated, though there was significant state intervention that led more to bureaucratic stasis than to significant growth; in any case, Confindustria, the industrial peak association, made sure, in the words of their leaders, that Lo Stato Fascista stopped at the factory gate, despite the ambition of fascist trade unions, the Ministry of Corporations, and fascist leaders. In fact, there was less growth during this period than during the twenties and no warrant to suspect that whatever development did take place was greater than that which would have been accomplished with a nonfascist government.

Spirito, one of Gregor's cases, argued at an international conference on corporatism held at Ferrara in 1932 that private property should be eliminated and vested in unitary employer-employee corporations. Gregor makes a lot of Spirito's so-called communist thesis, arguing, on the basis of disjointed comments by Mussolini, that Spirito had been influential. The 1932 Ferrara conference has been studied extensively by multiple scholars and from multiple standpoints (those of Confindustria, the fascist trade unions, etc.). Gregor cites virtually none of this literature and relies almost exclusively on Spirito's admittedly fascinating text. Yet Giuseppe Bottai, then minister of corporations, clearly distanced himself and the government from Spirito's intervention. The reader would get no idea from Gregor that Spirito's dramatic thesis went absolutely nowhere and that he had no influence whatsoever on subsequent corporatist development. This is but one example of how and why events and contemporary scholarship are so important, while illustrating the limitation of Gregor's method.

Most disappointing, in light of a wealth of recent scholarship on the fascist turn toward racism in 1938, is Gregor's treatment of anti-Semitism. This he treats as a contingent, not central, element of fascist ideology, an accommodation to the foreign policy objective of solidifying ties with Nazi Germany. Surprisingly, he regards the Manifesto of Fascist Racism (wrongly attributed to Mussolini) as “a relatively inoffensive document,” though it was the political premise that led to legislation that reduced Italian Jews to second-class citizenship and excluded them from public educational institutions and government service. Although Gregor concedes that one of his cases, Costamagna, wrote numerous anti-Semitic tracts, he gives the impression that, like Gentile, most fascist intellectuals were hostile or removed from the new racial policy. In fact, none of them, not even Gentile, broke with the regime, or offered even mild public criticism, while some enthusiastically applied anti-Semitic measures against Jewish professors and students, including a ban on all books written by Jewish authors. Gregor suggests that racism was embraced by a few malevolent Jew-haters like Giovanni Preziosi or “outsider” intellectuals like Evola. However, as recent scholarship has shown, those Italians in the cultural and academic worlds demonstrated no solidarity with their Jewish colleagues. Both Renzo De Felice and Emilio Gentile have suggested that there were internally generated sources of fascist racism not reducible to foreign policy concerns. Of these, most important was Mussolini's projected “anthropological revolution” whereby the new totalitarian fascist state would fabricate a new society that, in turn, would fabricate new historical subjects conceived of as a “new race.” Here, Jews were portrayed as living incarnations of an antifascist “bourgeois spirit,” fatally bound to the corrupt liberal state that had emancipated them, instinctively antithetical to all the unified, imperial, and “proletarian” values that were to mark the New Fascist Man. None of this is even hinted at in Gregor's book, though from 1938 through Italy's collapse in World War II, these themes had become integral aspects of fascist ideology.

Few could quibble with Gregor's book as a general introduction, written for nonspecialists. Unfortunately, as a scholarly monograph it leaves much to be desired, especially as a conclusion to the author's distinguished 40-year engagement with the subject.