Abstract

Luisa Mangoni dealt with the historical problem of Fascism both in her studies on culture and intellectuals in Fascist Italy, and in an essay series on some interpretative categories employed by contemporaries and historians to explain the Fascist phenomenon. Regarding the latter perspective, on which this paper is focused, Mangoni concentrated particularly upon the concepts of "Bonapartism" and "Caesarism", as well as on the typical Gramscian issue of "passive revolution". Mangoni emphasizes the value of these categories as food for thought, and as the means to identify Fascism as the product of the crisis of Liberal State and society and to understand the connection between crisis and transformation characterizing the first half of the twentieth century.