Abstract

From the end of the 1920s, the labour issue - an important element in the social sphere of Fascist political ideology and propaganda - became increasingly important in universities. This coincided with the establishment of the myth of corporativism, and attempts to align law studies with the needs of the corporative state. However, in the second half of the 1930s, with the growing totalitarian nature of the regime and its new imperial dimension, labour had become a real political anthropological tool in the construction of the «new State» and «new civilization». Moreover, it constituted one of the central elements of school reform carried out by the Minister of Education, Giuseppe Bottai. The paper aims to reconstruct certain theoretical and practical aspects of labour issues in universities during the later years of Fascism, with a particular focus on attempts to introduce university students to manual work.