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Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy, by Mabel Berezin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. 267 pp. $45.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-8014-3202-2. $18.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8014-8420-0.
Mabel Berezin has made an important contribution to the sociology of cultural production and the study of fascist culture. Her argument proceeds on two interwoven fronts: the definition of Italian fascism as antiliberalism, and the analysis of political ritual as the primary means by which fascism sought to destroy the liberal boundary between private and political identity. Berezin's definition of fascism as the "disavowal of liberal political culture" (p. 5) draws upon various historiographical and theoretical sources (Croce, Stemheel, Holmes, Taylor, Mitchell, Williams) to define the "colonial" (p. 27) relationship between fascist state and Italian nation. Banking upon the inability of Italian liberalism to nationalize the Italian masses between 1860 and 1922, fascism launched itself in a project of "hypernationalization" (p. 24) aimed at imposing a permanent form of fascist identity ritualizing the public "piazza" (square). How and to what extent fascism forged a "fascist community of emotion" (p. 27) are the questions Berezin wants to answer by analyzing the relationships among...