Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy.

Abstract

Berezin's study in historical sociology takes as its starting point an Italian present marked by a resurgence of fascism and by renewed contests for the symbolic space of the piazza. Confident that a new understanding of the “old” fascism can have contemporary social and political relevance, Berezin examines interwar efforts to construct “fascist identities” by fusing public and private selves. In a book that engages political philosophy and the anthropology of ritual, Berezin focuses our attention on public spectacle, “the favored expressive vehicle of the fascist identity project” (p. 5).