Political scientists generally have been disposed to treat Italian Fascism--if not generic fascism--as an idiosyncratic episode in the special history of Europe. James Gregor contends, to the contrary, that Italian Fascism has much in common with an inclusive class of developmental revolutionary regimes. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

On October 29, 1922, when Benito Mussolini completed the March on Rome and was appointed prime minister of Italy, the Fascist regime began in triumph. It ended some twenty-two years later with the execution of Mussolini and the collapse of the German-inspired Italian Social Republic. In this edition of Italian Fascism Alexander De Grand maintains his disagreement with recent interpretations of the movement and regime as "revolutionary" and "leftist." While not ignoring the importance of ideology, he sees Fascism in Italy as a bourgeois response to the challenge of proletarian revolution and an approach to the problem of conservative control in an era of mass politics.

Presents Italian fascism as a political system characterized by three groups: first, a thorough legal embodiment of dictatorial control, the second, providing for state control of labor, and the third, a less defined control by bodies known as "corporations" which combine capital and labor.