The Ethics of Consent—Regime and People in the Historiographies of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany

Abstract

In his trenchant and stimulating review article Patrick Bernhard surveyed a series of English-language studies that focus in one way or another on the relationship between the fascist regime and the Italian people. Drawing on the historiography of Nazi Germany, Bernhard took these studies as his cue to argue that much of the historiography on Italian Fascism is outdated. In particular, he sees the approach adopted to assessing the regime's appeal as often old-fashioned, with the result that Italian historians have vastly underestimated ordinary Italians’ embrace of fascism and their complicity in its violence and war crimes. At the same time, he argues that histories of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy show far more parallels and intersections than have been acknowledged of late and calls on Italian historians to turn their attention to this entangled history.