Learning from the Enemy: An Intellectual History of Antifascism in Interwar Europe

About the Book

The book offers the first comprehensive history of “Giustizia e Libertà” and its transnational networks. This Italian antifascist revolutionary group operated both in emigration and underground, offering radical responses to critical questions of interwar Europe. How to understand and fight fascism? How to rethink politics in the maelstrom of crisis that shook Italian and European society in the 1930s? How to design a new post-fascist order out of the ruins of the Great War ?
To answer these questions “Giustizia e Libertà” – founded by Carlo Rosselli in Paris in 1929 and disbanded in 1940 – developed several revolutionary projects and linked socialist and liberal traditions in innovative ways, inspired by French and European culture. Their debates focused on fascism as a product of a post-1914 civilizational crisis and a key political, social, cultural phenomenon of the interwar period. To struggle against its enemy, the group aimed to go beyond the Marxist notion of class and to assert different concepts of nation and Europe, while elaborating lucid comparative thoughts on tyrannies.
The book traces the group’s trajectories and debates in the political and intellectual history of twentieth-century Italy and Europe, and follows its profound and multifaceted legacy to the present.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Archives and Libraries
Abbreviations

Introduction
Which Antifascism?
Learning from the Enemy

1. Antifascism as an Experiment
1.1. Understanding Fascism Means Fighting Fascism
1.2. Group Picture: Between Giolitti and Mussolini
1.3. Blending Liberalism, Democracy, and Socialism
1.4. The Turtle Conspiracy
1.5. In the Shadow of Piero (But Not Only)

2. Exile in Paris as a Laboratory
2.1. Fascism: 'Th e Autobiography of a Nation', or of Europe?
2.2. Crisis of Democracy and of the Nation-State
2.3. Class Politics, Revolutionary Myths, Soviet Dictatorship
2.4. 'Non-Conformist' Strategies of Imitation and Competition
2.5. Crisis of Civilization

3. Time for Action?
3.1. A 'European Civil War'
3.2. 'Which Italy?'
3.3. 'Conspiracy in Broad Daylight' (Turin)
3.4. Different Time Frames
3.5. Spain: An International Battleground

4. Shades of Socialism
4.1. Rosselli's Legacy: What Form of Socialism in an Age of Tyranny?
4.2. Nations, Europes, and Empires
4.3. Exploring the World (from a Prison Cell in Rome)
4.4. In the Footsteps of Heretics and Utopians

5. A Posthumous (and Hidden) Vitality
5.1. From the Fall of Paris to the Resistance
5.2. The Knight and the Castle

Index

About the Author :
Marco Bresciani is Associate Professor at the University of Florence, Department of Political and Social Sciences. He received his PhD in Contemporary History at the University of Pisa. He was a fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa), Remarque Institute (NYU), Centre de Recherches Politiques R. Aron (Ecole Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), Center for Advanced Studies (Rijeka), University of Zagreb, University of Verona. His research concerns Italian and European antifascism and anti-totalitarianism, socialism and liberalism, as well as nationalism and fascism between Italian and Central Europe. He published Quale antifascism? Storia di Giustizia e Libertà (Rome 2017) and edited Conservatives and Right Radicals in Interwar Europe (London 2021).

Review :
Notwithstanding its small size, Giustizia e Libertà had an international relevance, due to the interaction between its exile perception of fascism, affected by the Parisian debates on totalitarianism, and a political activity fully immersed in the Italian reality. Bresciani's book is a remarkable contribution to the current debate on the distinctive nature of fascism(s). The story that Marco Bresciani tells with great finesse in this necessary book is a very important chapter in the heroic history that accompanied the birth of democracy in Italy. It started far back, from when fascism took power and grew in exile, in the underground struggle, in the discussions among the anti-fascists of Giustizia e Libertà about the conditions of political democracy. The movement that had as its founder Carlo Rosselli, the author of Liberal Socialism, was both internationalist and national, engaged in the Spanish Civil War with one of its battalions, and extraordinarily capable of understanding the imperialist nature of Nazi-Fascism before it manifested itself on the battlefields of Europe. This book is a valuable reconstruction of that history. Marco Bresciani has given a great gift to fascism's enemies everywhere. He captures the fierce intellectual energy that early antifascist thinkers such as Carlo Rosselli drew from their trials of resistance, conspiracy, exile, prison, and combat. Bresciani also matches their intellectual energy with his own. The result is a book of rare intelligence and inspiration. Marco Bresciani's history of the Italian anti-fascist group Giustizia e Liberta is the first available treatment in English of its subject. Based on a wide range of published and archival sources, the book offers numerous insights into this important group's complicated relationship to fascism, communism, and the history of Italian democracy. Bresciani is a sure guide to the group's remarkable ideological diversity, and its legacy in the postwar era. Learning from the Enemy is essential reading for anyone interested in the histories of anti-fascism, socialism, and liberalism in the twentieth century.