100 books like Fascist Spectacle

Ben-Ghiat limns the traits that characterize authoritarians in modern times.

Drawing a line from Mussolini to Trump, the author guides readers in the authoritarian’s playbook, revealing how dictators corrode democratic norms and undermine institutional restraints on their power. This lucid, well-written history makes you think about dictatorship across time, cultures, and nations.

In her decades of work on Italy’s Fascist era, Marla Stone has shown an especially keen eye for the development of the regime’s policies and ideologies, whether in the sphere of art and culture, or that of political violence and imperialist aggression. Here Stone offers a succinct and penetrating overview of the origins, rise, consolidation, and eventual crash of Fascism in Italy, followed by a translation of some three dozen primary documents—about a third of which were otherwise unavailable in English—to illustrate her narrative. Particularly chilling are the propaganda texts from 1938 on, when Mussolini’s grandiose claims to the legacy of ancient Rome took a back seat to full-blown racial politics, “as Italians were declared ‘Aryans’ and biological anti-Semitism became part of official ideology.”

When Rome started minting coins for export markets in the third century BCE, one of the first emblems it chose was the she-wolf that, according to legend, suckled the twin infants Romulus and Remus on the site of the city not yet founded. In Italy, almost every generation since then has embraced the animal—as the author explains, “a beast that was Roman and mother, ancient and wild, fearsome and protective”—to communicate pretty much whatever message it wanted. Cristina Mazzoni amply illustrates the indeterminacy of the symbol, which Mussolini leveraged in his propaganda to elicit feelings of both patriotic pride and terror, but still found difficult to control. Case in point: just fifteen years after Mussolini’s death, the wolf with twins became the symbol of the 1960 Rome Summer Olympics.

The raised-arm salute is the most distinctive gesture of 20th-century Fascism and Nazism; in the 21st century, it still thoroughly shocks when spotted. Its origin? Though the so-called “Roman salute” has been widely supposed to date back to classical antiquity, Winkler in a meticulous study demonstrates that it is a modern creation, an anachronism that first consistently cropped up in theatrical contexts (stage and early motion pictures) in the 1890s. Though nonsensical from a historical point of view, “it does make political and ideological sense”, argues Winkler, “to all those who see in the Romans a model for power and might and for glorious conquest of others.” More generally, the book is essential reading on the origins and evolution of Mussolini’s theatricality.

This ferocious little book is brilliant. It’s as much about how to fight fascism as it is about fascism itself, but it’s still a good place to start figuring out how the fascists came to power in Italy.

The key thing to grasp, Behan insists, is that there was nothing inevitable about Benito Mussolini’s rise (hence the “resistible” in the title, which is also a clever homage to Bertolt Brecht’s classic antifascist allegory, his 1941 play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui). Behan’s big point is that if the foes of early Italian fascism had all worked together and resisted, they could have smashed fascism before it got going. 

This is a wonderful book attentive to the cultural dimensions of fascism.

It is also a good book for making sense of fascism’s global attraction. Within a few years of its creation in Italy, fascism began to attract adherents around the world. To give just a few examples, there were Goldshirts in Mexico, Grayshirts in South Africa, Blackshirts everywhere from Kenya to the United States, and Greenshirts in Egypt and France. In Ireland were Blueshirts. And in China there were Blueshirts as well.

In Revolutionary Nativism, the historian Maggie Clinton details the Chinese Blueshirts’ ideological vision of exclusionary nationalism, hyper-modernist regeneration, and military authoritarianism.

The Blueshirts’ attempts to realize their vision, Clinton writes, amounted to a “Cultural Revolution from the Right.”

Ask some historians of fascism what book in English they recommend as an introduction to the subject, and, I’d guess, most will recommend Robert O. Paxton’s classic 2004 book-length essay, The Anatomy of Fascism.

Fair enough, but to my mind it is Paxton’s earlier monograph French Peasant Fascism that is his outright masterpiece of historical writing. If you’ve read The Anatomy of Fascism, there’s also the joy of seeing Paxton, in French Peasant Fascism, working out the ideas and themes that animate the later, better-known book. To understand the rightwing Depression-era French farmers known as the Greenshirts, Paxton argues, don’t focus so much on their official programs and doctrinal declarations, but rather watch them in action.

Watch them as they act out their ideology, at the market-day rally or when the taxman comes. 

Enzo Traverso is a gifted thinker, the sort who doesn’t simply change his readers’ minds but rather reshapes how they might even begin to perceive the world around them.

He offers his readers intense, tragic, and peculiarly inspiring visions of the modern world. In The New Faces of Fascism, Traverso considers the twenty-first century radical right, the right of Éric Zemmour, the “great replacement,” MAGA, the Golden Dawn, and Brexit. Unlike simplistic critiques posing the new right as the “return” of fascism, Traverso’s method for understanding the new right begins with the recognition that it “inevitably awakens the memory of fascism.” Fascism haunts our world. It is a ghostly presence in the present.

Read New Faces of Fascism alongside From Fascism to Populism in History, written by another of the great present-day historians of fascism, Federico Finchelstein, and feel the press of the past on the politics of… show more.

An American journalist, expelled from Italy in 1925, traces roots, rise, and rule of Il Duce in this 1935 book, which is as vivid as its title.

Mussolini appears as a cheap showman, who, “acting the Hero,” revived ancient Roman pomp and spectacles. He was also aware of the power of mass media, especially the cinema, “posing before men and moviemen.”

One of the virtues of Seldes’ book are the extensive quotations, which unmask Mussolini and others in their own words. Fascist documents, quoted at length, include “The Fascist Decalogue” (note its VIII. Commandment!) and the “Fascist Catechism,” which must be read to be (dis)believed.

Seldes’ book has become valuable again in the current age of assorted domestic and foreign media- and image-obsessed demagogues, autocrats, and dictators.

This famous novel tells the story from the other side, a socialist on the run, in fascist Italy. Certain unforgettable scenes portray the bullying and humiliation at the core of fascism and its human cost. I first read this in college, then re-read it when I was conducting research on Mussolini’s Italy.