CHAPTER 1 Fascism and the Social Life of “Ordinary Life”

The Boy with the Eyes of a Beast

Predappio has existed, in some form or another, since Roman antiquity, and its name is alleged to derive from the original Latin title given to the hill fort at the foot of the Apennines: Praesidium Domini Appi. Until its transformation into Predappio Nuova in the 1920s, Dovia, or Dvi, as it was known in dialect, was a tiny hamlet located around three kilometers down the hill from the original Predappio, a hamlet named for the two roads (due vie: Dovia) that it straddled, one to Predappio Alta (as the original village is now known) and one over the Apennines, toward Tuscany and Florence. In 1894, there were 503 inhabitants in Predappio Alta and 186 in Dovia (Proli 2013, 61).

The Romagna, the region in which Predappio is situated, had been under papal rule for centuries prior to its assimilation into the Kingdom of Italy during the Risorgimento and had cultivated a strong tradition of anticlericalism. The Romagna was also the agricultural heartland of Italy, and the latter half of the nineteenth century saw it hit by both economic crisis and by the impact of a developing capitalist farming industry. The combination of the two cast many of its sharecropping peasants into penury: dismissed from their lands by the established landlords, who were now forced to compete with the mechanized agricultural methods of big and small businesses, these sharecroppers were obligated instead to sell their labor by the day as braccianti, a sort of peasant proletariat. Malnutrition, tuberculosis, pellagra, and malaria were rife, and infant mortality rates were far higher than the Italian average (Proli 2013, 62).

For related reasons, also higher than average were the numbers of socialist and anarchist activists prominent in the Romagna, which remains famous today as a bastion of left-wing politics. Among the most prominent of nineteenth-century revolutionaries produced by the region was Andrea Costa, erstwhile anarchist internationalist and the first Italian parliamentary deputy elected on a socialist platform. Costa had another Romagnole colleague mustering votes for him in that election, a friend in whose house he stayed on at least one occasion, and who would give his firstborn son the middle name of Andrea in his honor: Alessandro Mussolini.

Born in nearby Collina on November 11, 1854, Alessandro was a blacksmith and a fervent and convinced socialist, who represented Predappio at the congress of Romagnole socialist groups in 1876. In 1882, Alessandro married Rosa Maltoni, a schoolteacher from Villafranca, a village near Forli, against the initial wishes of her parents, who did not approve of Alessandro’s socialism. In 1883, they had their first child: Benito Andrea Amilcare Mussolini, named after Andrea Costa, Amilcare Cipriani (another prominent Romagnole socialist), and Benito Juarez, the Mexican revolutionary. At the time of his birth, the family were living in a small five-room house, which also served as Alessandro’s workplace, a few steps from Dovia’s only osteria (built as watering hole for travelers on the road to Tuscany—it remains in business today). A year later they would move to Dovia’s schoolhouse, where Rosa worked as a teacher and where Benito Mussolini grew up. Both of these locations—the schoolhouse and the house in which Mussolini was born—would form central nodes of Predappio Nuova after its construction, as I will go on to describe in chapter 2.

In addition to his labors as a blacksmith, Alessandro was a moderately successful local politician and journalist, elected as a village councillor in 1889 on a joint socialist-liberal ticket, and eventually serving as deputy mayor of Predappio. After the 1902 local elections, however, he was—apparently rather unjustly (Bosworth 2002, 165)—arrested for participating in a riot led by socialists who believed their election victory had been stolen, and he was imprisoned for six months. The humiliation of incarceration and the death of his wife, Rosa, in 1905 seem to have ended the political career of Mussolini padre, who died running a small inn outside Forli in 1910. Originally interred in a cemetery near Forli, he was reburied during the Fascist reconstruction of Predappio alongside Rosa Maltoni, in the cemetery of San Cassiano, one level above what would become the tomb of his son. “Poor socialist Alessandro,” my friend Carlo once said to me, “he must be spinning in his grave at the sight of all those black shirts.”

Contemporary Predappiesi will tell you that their grandparents spoke of the boy with “the eyes of a beast,” and much was later made by the Fascist regime of young Benito Mussolini’s wildness and inability to conform to social rules. He got himself expelled from a prestigious Salesian school in nearby Faenza by pulling a knife on another boy, and one man I knew who attended the same school recalled a janitor who remembered the young Mussolini as, in his words, “a little madman.”

Less was made by the regime of his fervent socialism, which was already evident in 1901, when he applied for—but failed to get—the post of secretary to the town council of Predappio after graduating from school. His first sustained forays into the journalism that would make him famous were with a socialist newspaper for Italian immigrants in Switzerland (of whom Mussolini was one himself between 1902 and 1904) called L’Avvenire del Lavoratore (The Worker’s Future). By 1909, Mussolini had been appointed secretary to the socialist group in Austrian-ruled Trento, from which region he was then expelled later that same year because of his political journalism. In 1910, he was given the same job in Forli, the town nearest to Predappio, together with editorship of its weekly newsletter, La Lotte di Classe (The Class Struggle). A fervid internationalist, anticlericalist, and committed Marxist, Mussolini soon began to make a name for himself on the national stage, speaking at the Socialist Party congress in Milan of the “absolute intransigence” of his part of the country in favor of orthodox socialism (Bosworth 2002, 274), as well as in his village of Predappio, where (at least according to his own newspaper’s report) he received a hero’s welcome (276).

In this period, Mussolini was, as R. J. B. Bosworth puts it, “constructing himself, then, as ‘the extremist,’ the warrior of Romagnole socialism,” itself already famous for its “intransigence” (2002, 279). The context of Italian socialism—and European socialism more broadly—at this time was one of serious crisis, however, and Mussolini’s passionate commitment to an activist Marxism would soon lead him down a different path from that of the national party.

In 1895, a year after publishing the final volume of Das Kapital, Friedrich Engels died in London, thus passing the mantle of socialist leadership onto its next generation, and the two-decade-long economic crisis known as the Great Depression finally came to an end. The following year, Engels’s executor, Eduard Bernstein, a prominent German socialist also living in exile in London, began publishing a series of newspaper articles that would set off what would become known in Marxist circles as the “revisionism debates.”

Bernstein pointed out what others did not wish to acknowledge: that the crisis of the Great Depression, as it was then known, like other crises before it, had passed without apparently doing significant damage to the capitalist economic system; that, in fact, Marx’s theses of the polarization of classes and the increasing pauperization of the working class did not appear to accurately represent reality or to be likely to do so in the near future; and that electoral success, rather than revolution, seemed to many socialists to promise the most likely path to a socialist future.

By this time, the German Social Democratic Party had been legalized for some years, and indeed Engels himself had advocated full parliamentary participation as a tactic in the struggle for revolution in his 1895 introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France. What Bernstein sought to do however was to effect a much more drastic revision of socialist strategy and to reconcile, in his view, theory with practice: the party’s policy, he argued in 1898, “has in every case proved more correct than its phraseology. Hence I have no wish to reform the actual policy of the party …; what I am striving for, and as a theoretician must strive for, is a unity between theory and reality, between phraseology and action” (quoted in Adler 1954). Bernstein wanted to adapt Marxist doctrine to the exigencies of participation in liberal democracy.

The crisis of Marxism that would lead to Mussolini’s split from the Italian Socialist Party was, in other words, at its origins fundamentally concerned with the relation between theory and practice, between the abstract and the concrete, between philosophy and life. The basic problem was that Marxist theory appeared to many prominent socialists of the time, such as Bernstein, to be an inaccurate representation of reality and thus a flawed guide to practical action.

There were three responses, very broadly speaking, to this crisis, each of which addressed this relationship in different ways: the first was the simplest and consisted of denying that such a gap between theory and practice existed or, if acknowledging that it did, claiming that it required only minor adjustments to the basic theoretical framework of Marxism. This was the solution adopted by the wing of European socialism that would go on to form the core of its communist parties, at the time exemplified in the works of Rosa Luxemburg, who virulently rejected Bernstein’s arguments, and Karl Kautsky. The second type of solution followed Bernstein’s cue in rethinking or rejecting some core aspects of Marxist doctrine, most obviously the strategic goal of revolution. This option would be taken up by the majority of European social democratic parties after the schism between socialists and Communists in the wake of the First World War.

The final option is the one of interest to us, for it is both the strangest and also that eventually adopted by Mussolini, broadly speaking. This solution consisted of acknowledging the theoretical failures of Marxism (though often insisting on socialism’s usefulness as a motivating ideology), while continuing to give absolute primacy to the practical importance of revolution, thus reversing the standard means-end relationship in which revolution and socialism are placed by most Marxists: instead of revolution serving to bring about socialism, here socialism would serve to bring about revolution. This solution accepted the reformist point that material forces might not or would not lead to such a revolution and demanded instead that the proletarian revolution be brought about by human will and force of life—thus, again, reversing orthodox Marxist readings of causality, in which human will is secondary to material circumstances. This solution also accepted, in some senses at least, the substance of Bernstein’s critique of the validity of core Marxist principles, while rejecting his conclusion from that premise that revolution was no longer a useful goal. It emerged from mixing Marxism with elements from other thinkers, most notably vitalist philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche, and with counter-Enlightenment narratives, which gave pride of place not to reason and science—as of course Marx had done, to a considerable, if debated, extent—but to the emotions, to the irrational, and to the spiritual.

In Italy, the revisionism debates had a significant impact. The Socialist Party was torn between a reformist wing—led by one of its founders, Filippo Turati, among others—and a maximalist, revolutionary wing, of which Mussolini was a vocal member. This conflict had been going on for some time before Mussolini made a name for himself in 1911–1912, on the occasion of the Italo-Turkish War. In contrast to the tepid response of the reformist wing of the party, Mussolini called a strike in his district to oppose the war, blocking troop trains from nearby Meldola and getting himself arrested (alongside his friend and contemporary Pietro Nenni, who would go on to become a prominent socialist politician after the fall of Fascism). Mussolini benefited considerably from the resulting notoriety, and at the Party Congress of 1912—held in Reggio Emilia, near Forli—he delivered a rapturously received speech and successfully demanded the expulsion of some reformist deputies. Later that same year he was made the editor of Avanti!, the Italian socialist national daily newspaper, a crucially important post in the party. Mussolini and his maximalist wing seemed to have won the battle for the soul of Italian socialism.

Life, Vitalism, Pragmatism

In Mussolini’s early, maximalist socialism, we meet the beginnings of some of the ways in which a particular vision of ordinary life intersects with the histories of Fascism and Predappio. As I noted earlier, Mussolini’s approach to socialism in the wake of the revisionism debates was not unique. Exemplary of it, in fact, is an intellectual who continues to be cited today, whom Mussolini referred to as his “master,” and who acknowledged as his intellectual heirs, in the same breath, both Mussolini and Lenin (see Megaro 1938, 228; Meisel 1950).

Georges Sorel was a civil engineer for most of his life, before attaining celebrity in retirement as a philosopher and intellectual. A convert to Marxism by 1893, Sorel was at first inspired by Bernstein’s revision of Marx but soon came to lament Bernstein’s lack of revolutionary fervor (Sternhell, Sznajder, and Asheri 1989, 47). Significantly influenced by Bergson, as well as by Giovanni Battista Vico, Sorel recast fundamental Marxist concepts such as class and class war in mythical, voluntarist, and vitalist terms: what was really important about them was not that they were true but that they were motivating of political action (Sorel [1906] 1999).

Despite his education as a scientist, Sorel was deeply antitheoretical, declaring Marx’s theory of surplus value, for example, to be uselessly arcane and uninspiring, except insofar as its obscurity might stimulate action in the same way as the mysteries of the Catholic Church had done (180–181). In his most famous work, Reflections on Violence, Sorel makes clear the difference between his own position and that of Bernstein and other revisionists: while they sought to harmonize theory and practice, he sought to transform Marxism from being any kind of theory at all into being a “weapon of war” (Sternhell, Sznajder, and Asheri 1989, 70). Other participants in the revisionism debates had missed the point, in other words, which was not whether or not Marx’s theories were correct or predictive, but how effectively they functioned as “myths” in the service of the revolution. As Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri put it, “practice, for him, preceded theory, and only action really counted. The effectiveness of an act was much more important to him and its intrinsic qualities … In order for someone to throw himself or herself into action, ‘the conviction’ has to ‘dominate the entire consciousness and to operate before the calculations of reflection have time to come into play.’ That was why Sorel rejected any intellectual structure, which he called a utopia, and to which he opposed the power of the mobilizing myth” (1989, 75).

Sorel’s concern with the power of myth is echoed today in some contemporary versions of neo-Fascism, as Maddalena Gretel Cammelli makes clear in her ethnography of CasaPound, a prominent Italian neo-Fascist group named after the poet Ezra Pound. She describes militants explicitly reflecting on the importance of a “ ‘mythical past’ that they draw on in order to mobilize participants and create new myths by invoking the eras of imperial Rome and the Fascist regime” (2017, 93).

Gretel Cammelli also describes the ways in which, for CasaPound militants, “the political program as such gives way to what activists feel is more important: lived experience, the emotional stance of a shared identity, community. Third-millennium Fascism is lived as a prerational experience, described as a style of life capable of grasping people’s inner reason and meeting their need for identity” (2017, 98).

As we will see, this concern with “lived experience” is also crucial to an understanding of early Fascist ideology, or at least to what passes for ideology in early Fascism. As should already be becoming clear, the intellectual roots of Fascism lie in a disdain for departures from concrete experience, such as forms of theory, abstraction, or philosophy.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Sorel was also a convert to William James’s pragmatism (Nye 1973, 422) and even published a book toward the end of his life titled The Utility of Pragmatism. His friend and a fellow inspiration for Fascism, Gustave Le Bon, the father of crowd psychology, shared this admiration, writing, “It matters little to science that an hypothesis be recognized as false after it has produced discoveries. It matters little, equally, that religious, political or moral hypotheses are judged inexact one day if they have assured the life and grandeur of the people who have adopted them” (Le Bon 1914, cited in Nye 1973, 423). As Hilary Putnam and Ruth A. Putnam write of William James, “his aim (as stated in his Essays in Radical Empiricism) is to produce a metaphysics and epistemology close to the natural realism of the common man. The ‘common man’ [sic] takes himself to perceive the ordinary objects of everyday life, whereas philosophers since Descartes have interposed certain types of private entities … between the perceiver and that world of things and events in a public space and time” (Putnam and Putnam 2017). Mussolini himself claimed to have read James and cited him approvingly in interviews (O’Hare McCormick 1926), and a number of scholars before the war argued that there was a certain affinity between Fascism and pragmatism (e.g., Elliot 1926, 1928; Stewart 1928; and Diggins 1966).

While historian John Diggins claims that Mussolini’s knowledge of Jamesian pragmatism was only superficial at best, he also describes the ways in which the relationship between Fascism and American pragmatism was far from being only one-directional. Among those enamored with Fascism for a time was philosopher and student of James (James himself died in 1910, before the advent of Fascism) George Santayana, who admired the Fascist emphasis on hierarchy (Diggins 1966, 488). Prefiguring a point I will return to later in this chapter, Diggins also notes the antitheoretical affinities of both pragmatism and Fascism: “the Italian [pragmatist and later Fascist philosopher Giovanni] Papini was fond of saying that pragmatism was a method of doing without a philosophy. It might also be said that to some American liberals Fascism was a method of doing without an ideology” (496).

Diggins notes that the journal New Republic, founded by members of the American progressive movement, evinced some sympathy for Italian Fascism in its early years, arguing that no matter what its faults, it would surely be an improvement on the “stagnation” of liberal parliamentary politics (Diggins 1966, 495). Challenged by one more prescient scholar to explain how it could reconcile liberal progressivism with dictatorship, the journal replied, in a rather anthropological tone, “that the traditional ‘formulas’ of liberalism were inadequate to appraise developments either in Italy or in Russia” (496). “Alien critics should beware,” it went on to argue in its unfortunately titled “Apology for Fascism,” “of outlawing a political experiment which aroused in a whole nation an increased moral energy and dignified its activities by subordinating them to a deeply felt common purpose” (New Republic 1927, cited in Diggins 1966, 497). This emphasis on action at the expense of reflection is also echoed in later philosophical work on ordinary life, such as that of Wittgenstein, who suggested that Goethe’s phrase from Faust (“in the beginning was the deed”) could serve as a motto for his later philosophy (Monk 1991, 713). As Wittgenstein’s biographer Ray Monk puts it, “the deed, the activity, is primary, and does not receive its rationale or its justification from any theory we might have of it. This is as true with regard to language and mathematics as it is with regard to ethics, aesthetics, and religion. ‘As long as I can play the game, I can play it, and everything is all right’ ” (713).

The pragmatist notion of the “common man” also points to another aspect of both Sorel and Le Bon’s thought with affinities to other ideas about ordinary life. Le Bon, famously the author of The Crowd, believed that the turn of the twentieth century was the era of “the unconscious action of crowds substituting itself for the conscious activity of individuals” (1896, 1). This fascination with “crowds” and “masses” would come to characterize the era of Fascism, as Stefan Jonsson has described with reference to Germany, where the masses became, in the words of novelist Alfred Döblin, “the most enormous fact of the era” (cited in Jonsson 2013, 7). Though Sorel disagreed with aspects of Le Bon’s analysis in the book, both concurred on the unconscious and irrational aspects of crowd behavior and on the fact that this made crowds in some sense closer to “natural man” than any other social form. It was to the masses that Sorel believed his myths would appeal.

There is one fairly obvious and predictable outcome of Sorel’s perspective: if it becomes clear that the subject one has taken to be capable of revolution, violence, and the general strike—in this case the proletariat—is not in fact inclined to such actions, then one will go in search of other subjects who are, since it is the end of revolution, and in Sorel’s case the unraveling of the Enlightenment, that matter more than who actually achieves this end. By the time Mussolini was appointed to Avanti!, Sorel had lost hope in the consciousness of the working classes and was turning to antisemitism and the nationalism of Action Française and Charles Maurras.

From Red to Black

For Mussolini, a similar transformation to that of Sorel took place on the occasion of the First World War. Mussolini initially toed the party line of internationalist neutrality, writing after August 1914 that “the proletariat is not disposed to fight a war of aggression and conquest after which it will be merely as poor and exploited as before” (Bosworth 2002, 347). As Bosworth notes, however, “beneath the scatter of his words, he began to perceive that war could entail opportunity, the chance to destroy an old order, the possibility of imagining a new” (2002, 348). Like other socialist maximalists of this period, Mussolini started to see the war as a crucible of action through which Italian political life might be renewed and the cause of the revolution furthered. Soon such doubts would become public: on October 18, 1914, Mussolini wrote in Avanti! that a party “which wishes to live in history and, in so far as it is allowed, to make history, cannot submit, at the penalty of suicide, to a line which is dependent on an unarguable dogma or an eternal law.… Do we—as men and as socialists—want to be inert spectators of his huge drama? Or do we want to be, in some way and in some sense, the protagonists?” (2002, 351–352).

Note that what Mussolini, like Sorel, is opposed to here is what he sees as dogma and law—an interpretation of Marx that places fidelity to theory and principle above “living in history.” As Bosworth describes, Mussolini even found a clinching argument against this interpretation with a quotation from Marx himself: “Whoever develops a set programme for the future is a reactionary” (2002, 352). Despite this sop to Marx, however, this particular heresy proved rather too unorthodox for the Socialist Party hierarchy; within a month of the publication of this editorial, Mussolini had lost his job at the newspaper and been expelled from the party.

The logic behind Mussolini’s conversion to interventionism is complex—possibly even involving payment from the French government (Bosworth 2002, 350–353)—and much historiographical ink has been spilled on debating the consistency and rationality of Mussolini’s intellectual position in this regard and more broadly. Some argue that a degree of coherency can be identified beneath the numerous alterations that Mussolini’s political and philosophical position underwent through the course of his life, of which the abandonment of socialism was perhaps only the most startling (e.g., Gregor 1974, 1979a). Others, perhaps most famously Denis Mack Smith, make Mussolini appear as an opportunistic clown, far more interested in the achievement of personal power and success than in any particular intellectual program (1981).

An observer in 1920 described some of these consequences of Fascism’s attitude to theory and everyday life in the following terms:

Despite the bombastic words of the programmes approved by their congresses, in which all the ingredients of the new or old revolutionary medicines were immersed, because the Fasci [di Combattimenti] lack a real and true political content and a doctrinal basis, they are obliged to accept the caprice of circumstances passively, and their vaunted praxis, which should have been the generating fluid of elasticity, becomes a solid cement which binds them together and fixes them in the iron framework of the facts of the everyday, until it transforms them, at first a little at a time and almost unknowingly, then suddenly consciously, into a real and true counter-revolutionary organism, the white guard counterplaced against the red guard. (Quoted in De Felice 1965, 660)

This critical observer’s description of Fascism as “fixed” in “the iron framework of the everyday” is precisely what makes sense of Mussolini’s transformation from red to black, just as it does of Sorel’s transformation. To be “fixed in the everyday” is exactly the point of this vision of politics and ideology (if it can be called that); of course, fealty to a doctrine, a theory, a dogma, or a law (like Marxism) would come second to praxis, action, and lived experience. As Mabel Berezin notes in Making the Fascist Self, “Fascists did not believe in abstract values such as liberty, equality, fraternity. They believed in action and style—ideas that specify means and not ends and that make the ends of Fascist action extremely malleable. The Fascist belief in style has derailed attempts to codify Fascist ideology. Scholars’ searches for doctrinal coherence have misread the issue of political style and drawn the incorrect conclusion that Italian Fascism was inchoate” (1997, 30).

In other words, like skeptical philosophers in the narrative of ordinary language philosophy, historians searching for an ideology of Fascism are asking the wrong question: it is in Fascist practice that its essence is to be found, at least according to its self-definitions (or lack thereof).

In the immediate aftermath of his sacking and expulsion from the Socialist Party, Mussolini founded a new paper, one that would go on to become the official organ of the Italian Fascist Party, Il Popolo d’Italia. In its pages, he continued to lobby for intervention into the war until 1915, when Italy finally joined the side of the Entente. Drafted that same year, he served as a Bersagliere until wounded by shrapnel and hospitalized in 1917.

In December 1914, shortly after his expulsion from the Socialist Party, Mussolini was already advocating for the constitution of what he called Fasci d’azione rivoluzionaria in order to spread “subversive, revolutionary, and anti-constitutional ideals” (cited in Bosworth 2002, 363), but his opportunity to put this idea into practice came with the end of the war. On March 23, 1919, he convoked a meeting of a range of ex-military groups in Milan, at which he assumed the role of their Duce, or leader, an event subsequently mythologized as the foundational moment of Italian Fascism.

“The Common Man”

Sorel and Le Bon, both important and well-documented influences on Mussolini (see Megaro 1938; Meisel 1950; Nye 1973; Payne 1995; Sternhell, Sznajder, and Asheri 1989), bring together the two key ingredients for the form that ordinary life would take in early Fascism: vitalism (life) and populism (ordinary man). Needless to say, this is a very specific vision of ordinary life. As Donna Jones argues, “inspired by Bergson, the French political provocateur Georges Sorel would deepen political disillusion with mechanistic and lifeless democracy, in which the sovereign abstract citizens are indifferent to one another and held together simply by an external mechanism. As Mark Antliff has recently shown, Sorel militated for disciplined, aestheticized violence for the sake of a palingenetic and organicist ultranationalism that promised to bring (at least Gentile) people together through intuitive, organic, and mutual sympathy” (Jones 2010, 8).

In other words, despite the fact that it might share with other visions of ordinary life an opposition to abstraction and mechanism, to theory and philosophy, this vision of ordinary life is an exclusivist one, as Jones shows in her account of early vitalism. Like Romanticism, as Charles Taylor has described (1989), it involves a turning inward as part of the valorization of ordinary life. But in the case of vitalism, that turn inward is in quest of a dynamic force, an élan vital, which all too easily became assimilable to race. Furthermore, as Jones shows, because race here came to function as a mysterious internal essence, it produced forms of racism in which race is not just a contingent product of Darwinian adaptation but a “noumenal” quality, not an effect but a direct cause of history (2010, 117–119). Race here is not just an accident of biology, but the basic driver of all history. Stefan Jonsson also notes this exclusivist vision of ordinariness in describing two Fascist visions of the masses: “the block,” “the armored mass, drilled and disciplined, violently cut to shape,” and “the swarm,” “the Jewish mass and the gypsy mass or the mass of hysteric females” (2013, 46).

To return to comparisons with anthropology and the wider social sciences, it is worth noting in passing here that this is not the only exclusivist vision of ordinary life. Various invocations of it in academic literature—some of which also draw on vitalism and populism—make everyday life “the peculiar preserve of the subordinate, the weak, or ‘the people’: ‘Dominant groups,’ it seems, do not inhabit everyday worlds” (Crook 1998, 536). As Stephen Crook points out, there are in fact a number of affinities between early and reactionary vitalists such as Oswald Spengler and later, radical theorists of the everyday, such as de Certeau, Mikhail Bakhtin, Anthony Giddens, and Ulrich Beck. To this list one could also add James Scott’s notion of “weapons of the weak” (1985), as well as a strain of Marxist theory on everyday life stretching from Georg Lukács (e.g., [1911] 1994) through Agnes Heller (1984) and Henri Lefebvre ([1947], [1961], [1981] 2014), up to the contemporary work of thinkers such as Franco Moretti (e.g., 1985, 2013), in which the everyday is by turns understood as the ultimate source of alienation and our greatest opportunity for liberation: “the privileging of the everyday proceeds through the construction of dualisms in which one side of the duality is assigned to established and pathological power while the other is assigned to resistant subordinates. This is so for Habermas’s distinction between system and lifeworld, for Bakhtin’s distinction between unitary language and heteroglossia, and for de Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactics” (Crook 1998, 536). The political valence is reversed in the vitalism of Spengler and Sorel, of course: “while Spengler directly celebrates the life-force embodied in the strong individual, de Certeau and Fiske celebrate the cunning of the life-force through which the individually weak achieve a collective strength” (536).

Spengler, incidentally, was a significant influence on Wittgenstein as he was developing what would become his “late” views on ordinary life (Monk 1991). Wittgenstein shared Spengler’s pessimism and belief that western European culture was atrophied, no longer a “living organism” but “a dead, mechanical, structure” (698). Monk argues that Spengler’s work is crucial to understanding the connection between this pessimism on Wittgenstein’s part and his later philosophy (705). It was partly from Spengler that Wittgenstein derived his antipathy to law and theory, which Spengler associates with “dead,” “mechanical” civilization, as opposed to “history, poetry, and life” (705).

There is an important difference though between the Spenglerian, Sorelian vision of the “life-force” of the strong individual and the contemporary social scientific work on the everyday that Crook points to above. For example, Le Bon’s book on the crowd (subtitled A Study of The Popular Mind) was a highly conservative one. Crowds are irrational, uncivilized, and barbaric. In Le Bon’s words, crowd beliefs “assume the characteristics of blind submission, fierce intolerance, and the need of violent propaganda” (Le Bon 1896, 64). As Sternhell puts it, “the masses move forward under the impulsion of myths, images, and feelings. They wish to obey and democracy is merely a delusion. For the founders of Fascism, the Great War was a laboratory where the ideas they had put forward throughout the first decade of the century were entirely vindicated” (1989, 31). This combination of ideas about how “ordinary men” behave, the power of myths, and the heroic leader capable of mobilizing them is what gives the form of ordinary life here its most distinctive characteristic: the masses require a kind of “modern Prince,” as Le Bon—and Antonio Gramsci, for different if related reasons (Gramsci 1971)—believed, a “psychologist-statesman” who could make use of social scientific insights like those of Le Bon himself to manipulate the masses as if they were an army (Le Bon 1910; Nye 1973). Pace William Mazzarella’s recent claim that populism is expressed “either as … the kind of clearing that a crowd can occupy … or as the radical fullness of the body of a leader in which the people may find a palpable image of their own substance” (2019: 52), early Fascism combined both at the same time. In Mussolini’s case, many of the men he summoned to Milan in 1919 were indeed ex-soldiers, and the Fascist squads they formed modeled themselves quite explicitly on the military. In Mussolini they would find their heroic and exemplary leader.

“One Man Alone”

It is a truism in historiographical work on Mussolini and Fascism to worry about the relation between leader and movement. As Robert Paxton has strikingly put it, speaking of the idea that Fascism ought to be identified with its leader, “this image, whose power lingers today, is the last triumph of Fascist propagandists. It offers an alibi to nations that approved or tolerated Fascist leaders, and diverts attention from the persons, groups, and institutions who helped him” (Paxton 2004, 9). Indeed, as I will go on to discuss, this “alibi” of the myth of Mussolini is in many ways at the heart of the history of his hometown, just as he himself is.

This “alibi” has been offered as an explanation for Italy’s failure properly to come to terms with its past and thus for Predappio’s predicament as a center for neo-Fascist tourism: Fascism was a disease of one man and “one man alone,” as Winston Churchill put it, not of the bel paese, thus no serious process of “defascistization” was required after the war. It has been deployed as part of arguments in favor of the town’s recent initiative to build Italy’s first and only “museum of Fascism” in the former Fascist Party headquarters: to counter this myth, and the distasteful tourism it inspires, Italy must confront its heritage openly. This “alibi” has also been deployed against that same project, by public intellectuals such as Carlo Ginzburg (Luzzatto and Ginzburg 2016): to this way of thinking, Italy may need to confront its heritage, but it certainly should not do so by building another potential shrine for neo-Fascists at a site that is fundamentally contaminated by its association with one man, not with the movement itself.

There are a number of reasons that the relationship between Mussolini and Fascism is a contentious topic. One, as Churchill’s wartime propaganda speech to the Italians about Fascism as the invention of “one man alone” indicates, is about responsibility. If Fascism “was” Mussolini, then his Fascist cadres, his conservative, socialist, religious, and military allies, his supporters in uniform and out of it, and his old friends in Predappio can all be more or less absolved of guilt for what happened in the twenty years between the “March on Rome” and the fall of Fascism. This, in fact, was something like the position taken both by the Allies and by new national administrations after Italy’s liberation, a word that already gestures to the idea of a people beneath an alien and unwonted yoke. I will describe some of this, and what passed for “defascistization,” in the course of later chapters.

A second reason that it has often been difficult to separate Mussolini the person from Fascism the political movement relates to the curious nature of the latter as an ideological phenomenon—or, rather, as an almost anti- or meta-ideological phenomenon. Fascism’s flexibility, mutability, and reliance on notions of spirit, praxis, and life rather than doctrine are—rather paradoxically—among its most defining features. Historians and political scientists have argued at significant length over how and whether to define Fascism, both in Italy and internationally, in part because of this chameleon-like quality. I will discuss some of these arguments as they become relevant throughout this book; for now, I want to focus on this striking quality of Fascism as a political phenomenon, that of being self-consciously difficult to define or to pin down. As William Mazzarella notes, quoting political scientist Cas Mudde, a populist politics like that of Fascism is a “ ‘thin-centred ideology’ (Mudde 2017), that can cohabit with any number of political positions” (Mazzarella 2019, 47), a point that historian of Fascism Roger Eatwell also makes, while nevertheless emphasizing that a valorization and defense of what he calls “plain people” is key characteristic of this “thin ideology” (e.g., 2017, 366–367).

This quality is also partly indicated by Paxton’s remark about “the last triumph of Fascists propagandists”: if some things are characteristically Fascist, then the attribution of almost divine authority and responsibility to “one man alone” is surely one of those things. Indeed, this is one of the things that makes Predappio, home to Mussolini’s birthplace and grave, such a powerful attraction for contemporary neo-Fascists. But that such comingling of individual and idea is possible is worth remarking upon. It will be a truism to historians of Fascism, but perhaps not to anthropologists, nor indeed to others: we are not usually wont to think of the truth of ideologies as standing and falling with the person of a follower or even an originator. Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong qua individuals, for example, had an impact on the uptake of their ideas by others as a matter of practical fact, and thus also on the appearance and possibly the reality of those ideas as correct or otherwise; but the ideas themselves were still ideas, intended to live beyond their creators (though see Yurchak 2015 for discussion of Leninist “form” over substance). Rarely is that relationship between doctrine and the actions of an individual or individuals itself inscribed explicitly in that doctrine and in those ideas themselves. Rarely does a movement say, in effect, “pay attention to what we do, not what we say.” This is what I mean by anti- or meta-ideological: Fascist ideology—insofar as such a thing existed—refutes the importance of ideology; it contains its own commentary on the relationship between theory and practice. The substance of that commentary is that practice—often, but not always, that of “one man alone”—trumps theory. “Mussolini is always right!” was one of the Fascist regime’s favorite catchphrases.

Thus was it possible for Italian Fascism to be born, like Mussolini, in the heartlands of Italian socialism, and to attract many of the latter’s onetime adherents, like Mussolini, by drawing upon a particular selection of its truths; thus was it possible for it to champion female emancipation in 1919 and then spend the next twenty-odd years insisting that a woman’s place was in the kitchen or the bedroom; thus could it draw on quasi-anarchist traditions such as syndicalism while also inflating the power of the state to previously unimaginable extents.

These are just a few examples of Italian Fascism’s self-contradictions, often the results of the whims and vacillations of Mussolini himself, in response to changing circumstances. As a contemporary political scientist put it: “the ideology of Fascism contains a very queer potpourri of a sort of Machiavellian Pragmatism, Gentilean Idealism, Sorelian mythmaking and violence, and even the functionalism of the Guild Socialists and Syndicalists of Italy” (Elliott 1928, 10).

This was not a position that Fascism itself took, largely speaking, in its own, limited reflections on its self-contradictions. Fascism—for those Fascists who took the time to think about it—did not have to be ideologically consistent or systematic, because it had nothing but contempt for “intellectuals” and “rationalists” and for the virtues of abstraction or consistency that Fascists associated with systematic philosophizing. Fascism instead was about life, action, force, and practice—and often, of course, about violence. Unlike socialism, for example, which has produced an endless stream of attempts at self-definition or retheorization quite apart from the corpus of Marx’s work, Italian Fascism was not self-reflexive (which is another reason why its contradictions were not often the subject of explicit reflection). Its closest equivalent to The Communist Manifesto is a brief entry in an encyclopedia in 1932, which appeared under Mussolini’s name, but was in fact ghostwritten by Giovanni Gentile, one of the only examples of a Fascist philosopher. Even that text begins by rejecting the whole notion of the importance of doctrine in favor of practice.

All of this returns us to the key issue I wished to raise in briefly narrating the origins of Mussolini and Mussolinian Fascism. Life, practice, action—these are crucial terms in understanding what constitutes Fascist ideology, and they were understood by people such as Sorel and Mussolini in opposition to abstraction, theory, formalism, and transcendence. As Jean Comaroff puts it in relation to contemporary populism, “the fire of populism often excoriates the putative ‘sophistry’ of analysis, theorization, and complexification” (2009, quoted in Mazzarella 2019). At its heart, Fascism was an experiential, organicist, vitalist political movement, not an intellectual one. It was based on a moralized scale of politics in which ordinary life—albeit a very particular kind of ordinary life—trumped theory.

In Mussolini’s transition from socialism to Fascism, we can see this in action. To what he perceives as the “dogma” of his opponents in the party, he opposes the voluntarism of force, action, and intervention, and a belief in the importance of understanding the contingency of historical events such as the outbreak of the First World War. Hence Fascism’s immersion in what the critical observer quoted above calls “the iron framework of the everyday.”

Needless to say, insofar as the everyday or ordinary life is invoked here, it is a highly specific vision of what that looks like (as I have suggested that any such invocation will be). It is a nationalist vision, a racialized, classed, and a militaristic one, as Donna Jones describes in her history of vitalism (2010). It will also, because of its need for a heroic leader to rise above the ordinary, become tied up with the exemplary figure of Mussolini himself, as I will describe in more detail in chapter 2.

William Mazzarella has recently argued in relation to populism that a concern for the ordinary is characteristic of both populism and anthropology: “One might … say that anthropology itself, methodologically if not always ideologically, tends toward a populist stance, aligning with the common sense of the common people” (2019, 46). The form that ordinary life took in the thought and practice of early Fascism is very different in many ways from the form it takes in anthropology and the broader social sciences. My intention here is precisely to highlight the diversity of forms in which the category may appear and of ends to which its instrumentalization may be directed.

It is undeniable, though, that there are some features common to many such invocations of ordinary life as a category (there is a family resemblance between them, if you will). As I noted in my introduction, many social scientific and political visions of ordinary life include a moralizing scale, for example, in which ordinary life is good and something else—something “less ordinary”—is bad.

Fascist invocations of ordinary life, according to at least one well-known account (Nolte 1965), also share with social scientific work a deep-seated “resistance to transcendence”; and while Fascist visions of ordinary life were specific and exclusionary (i.e., only certain sorts of people could be ordinary), some social scientific invocations have also been exclusionary, though along an entirely different axis (e.g., de Certeau 1984; Scott 1985). Likewise, Fascist visions of ordinary life were vitalist and in some sense radically so in absolutely distinguishing some lives from others; but some have read Wittgenstein’s notion of “form of life” as vitalist, too (see Lash 2006; McDonough 2004; Moody and Shakespeare 2012), and, as Ray Monk notes in his biography, Wittgenstein’s own thinking was sometimes unhappily inflected by ideas about race (1991, 277–279, 731–737).

My point here is that it is not just the contents of ordinary life—the contingent and conventionalized things we wish to point to when we invoke the category—that vary but also the characteristics of ordinary life as a conceptual category itself and its place in a broader galaxy of conceptual forms. For example, a great many invocations of ordinary life share Fascism’s antipathy to abstraction, whether that abstraction is conceived of in the form of mechanism, strategy, law, or theory. But beyond the abstraction versus ordinariness dichotomy, there are other conceptual categories at play here, too, that reveal something about the specific forms that ordinary life takes.

As I will describe in more detail in chapter 2, in the early history of Fascism and Predappio, for instance, the category of ordinariness became tangled up with that of its heroic exemplary opposite. Mussolini was to be seen as both an ordinary man, from an ordinary Apennine village, and also as Il Duce, the man who was “always right.” His hometown, likewise, became both a symbol of Mussolini’s humble origins and a transfigured image of Fascist modernism through its reconstruction under the regime. In this history, in other words, unlike in contemporary anthropological discourse, the exemplary and the ordinary become intertwined. Similarly, the threat to ordinary life in contemporary Predappio does not come from skepticism (as in Cavell) or mechanism (as in early Fascism). Instead, it comes from the history and politics of Fascism itself.

The category of ordinary life itself has an ordinary life of its own: it appears at specific times and places and in response to specific needs and ends. One example of such a specific time and place is early Fascist thought, in which ordinary life emerges as a marked category in opposition to doctrine or philosophy, in the valorization of the common man in opposition to the bourgeoisie, but also in a highly exclusivist and racialized form, in which only some people could count as the right kind of ordinary people.

In Predappio today, ordinary life also appears as such a marked category. It takes “doing,” in Sacks’s terms, because in truth, in comparison to almost any other relevant context, life in Predappio is anything but ordinary, and its inhabitants are well aware of that fact. But the ordinary life that contemporary Predappiesi seek to produce is very different from the form in which it emerges in early Fascist thought.

Indeed, “doing being ordinary” is what people in Predappio do when they conspicuously and studiously refuse to engage with the politics of their history (Candea 2010). When Valentina tends to the graves of her relatives amid a sea of black-shirted tourists, and does so without complaint, she is not unaware of what these visitors are there for, and she knows why they all wear black. Nor is she so inured to their presence that it “goes without saying”; she has her own personal experience of the fact that people—some from her hometown—died fighting men wearing the same color; as I will describe, she lived through pitched street battles between neo-Fascists and Communists in the 1960s and ’70s, and she knows that to a great many of her compatriots her home is anathema because of these tourists and the man they visit—“the Chernobyl of history,” as its former mayor likes to put it, or a “toxic waste dump” in the words of one commentator (Wu Ming 2017). Nor does she have any sympathy with their politics, as she will explain to you if you ask, though probably not otherwise. She lives this as her ordinary life, and indeed does her best to categorize these visitors as doing the same, because to do otherwise is to conjure up political specters—black, but also red, as I will describe—who are best left undisturbed in their graves.

The category and form of ordinary life, not just its living, comes to life in Predappio in opposition to the politics of Fascism. By this I do not mean simply “Fascism,” for it is not only Fascists who politicize Fascism. I mean simply what to almost anybody anywhere else would be a perfectly ordinary way of understanding Fascism, namely as one of the most controversial and ideologically divisive political experiments in recent Western history, to put it mildly. The utter domination of Predappio by the shadow of this experiment makes it impossible, I will argue in the remainder of this book, to live there without performing these operations of “ordinarification” on oneself, one’s home, one’s economic and ritual life, and one’s politics.