Introduction

This chapter presents a general picture of the overall structure of Italian society, and shows how the crisis confronting it can be understood as a crisis within the social system. Italy’s power-system, the balance between its political forces, the value-system invoked to legitimate the power structure, and the economic set-up and to some extent, are a function of her character as a relatively underdeveloped country. Any mercantile economy rests on the division of labour, and, whatever their ideas in the abstract, this was what in practice the ruling-class of the newly united Italy brought into being. The period extending from the start of the economic development proper to the downfall of Fascism marked the evolution of Italy out of her first industrial apprenticeship as a nation into an established industrial state. Fascism itself called a halt for the time being to the critical reappraisal of the traditional Catholic institutions and prolonged the life of many male-dominated familistic traditions.