ABSTRACT
The introduction lays out the aims of the book and its main theoretical proposition, i.e., that the notion of the mass, newly approached, can provide access to the fascist political unconscious. For that to happen, a critical confrontation is necessary with the deeply-ingrained association of fascism with the masses. The varied literature seeing fascism as a form of mass hysteria is overviewed, from classical examples to more recent authors. Subsequently, it is argued that the fascists themselves, in Italy, Germany and other European countries, were strongly opposed to the masses and, with remarkably few exceptions, saw their task as one of eliminating mass power and transforming the threatening masses into other, presumably superior, collective forms, notable among them “the people,” “the nation” or “the race.” This paradoxical situation is all the more glaring, in view of the fact that in the last 20 years or so many historians have agreed on the need to take fascist ideology seriously, and analyze it at face value in order to gain a clearer understating of what fascism was all about. Yet so far this methodological tenet has remained largely inoperative when it comes to addressing the relationship of fascism to the masses. This relationship is still widely regarded, despite the fascists’ own avowals, as one of harmony, even symbiosis. This book seeks to remedy the situation by giving due credit to the fascist enmity to the masses, and even interprets it as a unifying theme, underlying interwar fascism in its different manifestations: social, political, economic and cultural.
