Learning from the Enemy: A History of Italian Antifascism in Interwar Europe

(Paperback)

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The book offers the first comprehensive history of Giustizia e Libert and its transnational networks. This Italian antifascist revolutionary group operated both in emigration and underground, offering radical responses to critical questions of interwar Europe. How to understand and fight fascism How to rethink politics in the maelstrom of crisis that shook Italian and European society in the 1930s How to design a new post-fascist order out of the ruins of the Great War To answer these questions Giustizia e Libert founded by Carlo Rosselli in Paris in 1929 and disbanded in 1940 developed several revolutionary projects and linked socialist and liberal traditions in innovative ways, inspired by French and European culture. Their debates focused on fascism as a product of a post-1914 civilizational crisis and a key political, social, cultural phenomenon of the interwar period. To struggle against its enemy, the group aimed to go beyond the Marxist notion of class and to assert different concepts of nation and Europe, while elaborating lucid comparative thoughts on tyrannies. The book traces the groups trajectories and debates in the political and intellectual history of twentieth-century Italy and Europe, and follows its profound and multifaceted legacy to the present.

Reviews

Notwithstanding its small size, Giustizia e Libert had an international relevance, due to the interaction between its exile perception of fascism, affected by the Parisian debates on totalitarianism, and a political activity fully immersed in the Italian reality. Bresciani's book is a remarkable contribution to the current debate on the distinctive nature of fascism(s). -- Carlo Ginzburg
The story that Marco Bresciani tells with great finesse in this necessary book is a very important chapter in the heroic history that accompanied the birth of democracy in Italy. It started far back, from when fascism took power and grew in exile, in the underground struggle, in the discussions among the anti-fascists of Giustizia e Libert about the conditions of political democracy. The movement that had as its founder Carlo Rosselli, the author of Liberal Socialism, was both internationalist and national, engaged in the Spanish Civil War with one of its battalions, and extraordinarily capable of understanding the imperialist nature of Nazi-Fascism before it manifested itself on the battlefields of Europe. This book is a valuable reconstruction of that history. -- Nadia Urbinati, Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory, Columbia University
Marco Bresciani has given a great gift to fascism's enemies everywhere. He captures the fierce intellectual energy that early antifascist thinkers such as Carlo Rosselli drew from their trials of resistance, conspiracy, exile, prison, and combat. Bresciani also matches their intellectual energy with his own. The result is a book of rare intelligence and inspiration. -- Joseph Fronczak, Princeton University, author of Everything Is Possible: Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism
Marco Bresciani's history of the Italian anti-fascist group Giustizia e Liberta is the first available treatment in English of its subject. Based on a wide range of published and archival sources, the book offers numerous insights into this important group's complicated relationship to fascism, communism, and the history of Italian democracy. Bresciani is a sure guide to the group's remarkable ideological diversity, and its legacy in the postwar era. Learning from the Enemy is essential reading for anyone interested in the histories of anti-fascism, socialism, and liberalism in the twentieth century. -- Iain Stewart, Unversity College London, author of Raymond Aron and Liberal Thought in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

Author Bio

Marco Bresciani is Associate Professor at the University of Florence, Department of Political and Social Sciences. He received his PhD in Contemporary History at the University of Pisa. He was a fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa), Remarque Institute (NYU), Centre de Recherches Politiques R. Aron (Ecole Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), Center for Advanced Studies (Rijeka), University of Zagreb, University of Verona. His research concerns Italian and European antifascism and anti-totalitarianism, socialism and liberalism, as well as nationalism and fascism between Italian and Central Europe. He published Quale antifascism Storia di Giustizia e Libert (Rome 2017) and edited Conservatives and Right Radicals in Interwar Europe (London 2021).