ABSTRACT
When I began work on the first edition of this book, efforts to find a framework within which various fascist movements and regimes could be understood was just beginning after a hiatus of over a decade. During the 1980s scholars had more or less given up trying to find a Fascist minimum and had begun to treat Italy and Germany as distinctly separate regimes. Most of the work on Fascist Italy and on Nazi Germany was not comparative in the 1980s and early 1990s. Since the publication of the first edition of this book, three new directions have opened up. First, comparative studies of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany have become much more common, although the connections have been made more on the level of ideology than in methods of governing, which is the subject of this study.1 Second, the debate on generic fascism and the fascist minimum has taken on new life with the publication of works by Roger Griffin, Stanley Payne, Roger Eatwell and Robert Paxton.2 Finally, the concept of totalitarianism, which had fallen into disuse with the waning of the Cold War, was re-evaluated as a tool for looking at the fascist experience. One of the objections to the earlier use of the term was that it seemed to leave out Italy, while linking Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Although this approach offered some satisfaction to Cold Warriors who favoured lumping the USSR with the despised Nazi state, it was conceptually unsatisfying to leave out the Italian regime that gave fascism its name. The new version of totalitarian theory is less willing to leave Italy outside, even if the Italian totalitarian project remained largely on paper.3
