Learning from the Enemy: An Intellectual History of Antifascism in Interwar Europe

The first comprehensive history of an Italian revolutionary group that fought fascism in interwar Europe and pursued a liberal socialist project beyond it

This Italian antifascist revolutionary group "Giustizia e Libertà" operated both in emigration and as part of the clandestine resistance, offering radical responses to the rise of Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism. 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 Libertà," 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.

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 Libertà (Rome 2017) and edited Conservatives and Right Radicals in Interwar Europe (London 2021).