The Crisis Of Liberal Italy

In this major interpretation of the crisis of democracy in Italy after World War I, Douglas Forsyth uses unpublished documents in Italy's central state archives, as well as private papers, diplomatic and bank archives in Italy, France, Britain and the United States, to analyse monetary and financial policy in Italy from the outbreak of war until the march on Rome. The study focuses on real and perceived conflicts and often painful choices between great power politics, economic growth, macroeconomic stabilisation and the preservation or strengthening of democratic consensus. The key issue explored is why governments in Italy after World War I, although headed by left-liberal reformers, were unable to press ahead with the democratic reformism which had characterised the so-called 'Giolittian era', 1901-1914. Their failure paved the way for parliamentary deadlock and Mussolini's seizure of power.

This volume centres on one of the most dramatic periods of Italian history: 1900-1945. It examines the crisis of the liberal state as it undergoes a process of significant transformation.

Alongside Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George, Giovanni Giolitti (1842-1928) stands out as one of the major liberal reformers of late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe. In the first complete English-language study of Giolitti, De Grand examines the political life of Italy's most notable prime minister after Cavour. Giolitti emerges not as a transitional figure leading fledgling Italy into modern democracy, but as a staunch adherent of 19th-century elitist liberalism trying to navigate the new tide of mass politics. De Grand's careful research offers valuable insight into Giolitti as statesman and, through him, a vantage point on the development of Italy during a critical period. Giolitti's troubled relationship with mass politics defined his years in office. A life-long bureaucrat aloof from the electorate, Giolitti introduced near universal male suffrage—even while commenting that first teaching everyone to read and write would be a more reasonable route—and tolerated labor strikes. Rather than reform the state as a concession to populism, however, Giolitti sought to accommodate the politics of the piazza under the roof of liberal parliamentarianism, first in his pursuit of coalitions with Socialist and Catholic groups, and finally, at the end of his political life, in a failed courtship with Fascism.

This book, first published in 1990, examines Italy’s economic history from its Unification in 1850 to the end of the First World War. Particular attention is paid to the extent to which Italy exhibits the features of Kaznets’s model of ‘modern economic growth’. An Economic History of Liberal Italy begins with a quantitative assessment of Italy’s long-term growth in this period. All of the main relevant variables – including production, consumption, investment, foreign trade, government spending, and welfare – are discussed. The book proceeds through a chronological account of the developments of the economy during this period, and concludes with a critical survey of the relevant historiography. Throughout the book emphasis is given to structural changes, to developments in the main industries, to the relations between different sectors of the economy, and to economic policies. This book is ideal for those studying economics of Italian history.

This book examines industrial associations in Italy from 1906 to 1934 as they relate to the crisis in liberalism and the rise of fascism.

Far-right movements, parties, and governments are changing the language and logic of international order. Zero-sum geopolitics - from Donald Trump to Brexit - and the rhetoric of putting the national interest "first" are back, and along with them come a deep fascination with the values of patriarchy, masculinity, and strength. Putting these dramatic shifts in contemporary American and European foreign policy into wider historical and intellectual context, Geopolitical Amnesia explores the liberal crisis beneath the resurgence of far-right ideas. Drawing on memory studies, it addresses the ways in which the new geopolitics intersects and interplays with an exhausted and amnesiatic liberalism. Scholars with expertise on national and regional ideological traditions look at contemporary memory wars - competing revisionist histories - from Washington to Warsaw, and from the Anglosphere to Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe. They address the changing conditions of memory and nostalgia and discuss how and why it matters that the new geopolitics takes place in an age of accelerated, fragmented, and digitalized global media. Timely and ambitious, this accessible collection reveals the far-right ideas behind the return of geopolitics and the crisis of liberalism that paved its way.