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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.
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.
334 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 18, 2024
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February 23, 2026
I bought this book mistaking it for a different book called "organize, fight, win" but I read it nonetheless. This is a good book but it is dense with many different italian names that are difficult to keep straight at one time, also I took a break in between this book and another book I was reading at the time. This book is focused on Intellectual antifascism there is very little actual praxis going on. In other words they discus ideas of what to do without actually doing anything much other than commenting on other left authors and the enlightenment as well as socialism, and contention with socialist/communist groups. It is an interesting read and their analysis of fascism is good but it brought down by their lack of class analysis.
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