Abstract

In this essay, Michele Battini seeks to pay his intellectual debt to Luisa Mangoni, by commenting upon and reinterpreting a masterpiece of hers: "Una crisi di fine secolo". He deepens his analysis through a reading of texts, sources and evidence from the twentieth-century European and Italian literature on the emerging question of industrial mass society and the so-called "psychology of crowds". The author also shows how, in Italy's political and intellectual history, this problem became crucial in defining the relationships between politics and the intelligentsia during Fascism starting from the first decades of the twentieth century, and it remained so in redefining these relationships after Fascism.