Historical Case Study #1

 The Political Economy of early European Fascist Movements and Parties 1919-33. What elements of political economy did early fascist movements and parties express? 

Seminar Presentation pdf file

Essential Reading

Baker David :  'The Political Economy of Fascism: Myth or Reality: or Myth and Reality?' New Political Economy  Volume 11, Number 2, June 2006. pp. 227-250. (Link to draft article above).

David Ramsay Steele: 'The Mystery of Fascism' (Link) 

A. James Gregor: 'Mussolini's Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought.' (Link)

And a critique of Gregor's position: Tobias Abse SYNDICALISM AND THE ORIGINS OF ITALIAN FASCISM The Historical journal, 25, I  (I982),  pp.  247-258. (Link)

Extra reading

Sternhell Z.: Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France. (1986) (Introduction & Chapters 2-5). 

Gregor A. J.: The Young Mussolini & the Intellectual Origins of Fascism. Berkeley; London: 1979. 

Gregor, A.J. (1979) Italian Fascism and developmental dictatorship Princeton, N.J.: Univ. Press. p. 127. (Chapter 5). 

Maier Charles S : Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy after World War 1, Princeton, New Jersey, 1975, pp. 579-593. 

Mann Michael: Fascists, CUP, Cambridge 2004. (Chapter 3)

Maier Charles S In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987. (Chapter 2.)

Quotations

 Gregor, A.J. (1979) Italian Fascism and developmental dictatorship Princeton, N.J.: Univ. Press. p. 127. Chapter 5 'THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FASCISM.' 

.... First of all, it can easily be established that [Italian] Fascism, prior to its advent to power, advertised a specific program addressed to immediate problems that afflicted the national economy. Moreover. Fascism entertained a long-range economic program that was reasonably well articulated in the doctrinal literature of 1921 and 1922. Furthermore, while it is true that Fascism's immediate, and some considerable part of its more comprehensive programs, were not incompatible with the interests of important segments of Italy's economic elite, those programs were autonomous, originating among its principal ideologues before allies previously unattached to the movement joined forces with Fascism. Whatever accommodation there might have been with the established economic interests of the peninsula, this accommodation was a contingent, rather than a constituent, characteristic of Fascist economic policy.