What Is Fascism (Paperback or Softback)

What Is Fascism by Sergio Panunzio (originally published in 1924 as Che cosʼè il fascismo in Italian) is, as the title suggests, an attempt to explain and define, not only what the term “fascism” means, but also the political movement it named, together with the historical circumstances that led up to it.

Of Fascism, Panunzio says, “it is a movement unto itself, original, atypical... essentially historical [in] nature... the product of two crises: the general crisis of Socialism throughout Europe... [and] the crisis of war and post-war Italy... until the Blackshirts entered Rome.” In other words, Fascism is and was preeminently Italian in nature; it was both “revolutionary and conservative” at the same time.

The book also discusses what Panunzio calls the Italian Revolution – a bloodless revolution in contradistinction to the Russian one – which began “in May 1915 with the intervention of Italy” in World War I, and which culminated in the March on Rome, in October 1922.

Sergio Panunzio (AD 1886-1944) – an Italian jurist, political scientist, philosopher, and journalist – was a leading authority on and proponent of Revolutionary Syndicalism, which later transformed into National Syndicalism before finally informing and merging with Italian Fascism. He was one of the main ideologues of Italian Fascism under Benito Mussolini.