Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism

Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism challenges the familiar picture of Mussolini as a restless opportunist without convictions. Instead, the book reconstructs an intellectual trajectory that begins with Mussolini’s immersion in Marxism and culminates in a systematic reworking of its premises. Fascism is presented not as an ad hoc collection of contradictions but as a variant born from Marxism’s own crises—shaped by syndicalist radicalism, elitist organizational theory, and the porous categories of Marx and Engels themselves. In this view, Mussolini was a “heretical Marxist,” modifying doctrine just enough to scandalize the orthodox and redirect its telos.

By reframing fascism as an ideologically coherent outgrowth of the revolutionary left, the study unsettles the easy partition of twentieth-century politics into right and left camps. It places Mussolini’s development in continuity with broader traditions of Marxism and syndicalism, situating his transformation within a lineage that runs from Engels to Michels, Olivetti, and Panunzio. Recent scholarship makes this reassessment possible: the publication of Mussolini’s complete works, Renzo De Felice’s Mussolini il rivoluzionario (1883–1920), and a wider archive of period literature. Against the earlier Anglophone baseline of Gaudens Megaro’s Mussolini in the Making, the book insists on coherence rather than contradiction, continuity rather than opportunism.

The analysis engages current debates—echoing Zeev Sternhell on the importance of ideology, Domenico Settembrini on affinities between Lenin and Mussolini, and De Felice on fascism’s ties to the left. It also acknowledges tensions: critics will still see opportunism where the author insists on evolution, and the very act of repositioning fascism within Marxism provokes political and scholarly unease. Key concepts such as national syndicalism, Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy,” and the idea of heresy as internal transformation provide the vocabulary for tracing this genealogy. For scholars and students alike, the work invites a new map of ideological descent: Marx and Engels through syndicalist intermediaries to Mussolini’s synthesis and the birth of fascism.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.