Spirit & flame Book

The most basic task of intellectual history - especially of a reviled tradition like Fascism - and the avowed task of Gregor's book is to charitably reconstruct the original doctrines. This "Mussolini's Intellectuals" does superbly. Gregor's sympathetic account of a select group of prominent Fascist intellectuals leaves me with uncomfortably warm feelings about the Duce, which is exactly what a book like this is supposed to do. (He claims to revile Fascism, but, well, you know what Blake said about Milton.)

The book has some weaknesses, which I would attribute to a combination of (1) Gregor's clear axe to grind against the political left and (2) his odd realism about the "true essence" of Fascism. The first is evident in the anti-Marxist polemics that occupy much of the first part of the book; both are visible in a selective focus that makes it appear that there was a core of "real" Fascism - anti-racist, socialist, illiberal - which is clearly of the left. Every possible effort is made to distinguish Fascism from National Socialism, and to ally it with Bolshevism. He makes claims like "there were no Fascist biological racists," which is either a demonstration of how unhelpful this sort of realism is or just flatly false. (See Aaron Gillette's "Racial Theories in Fascist Italy" for the diversity of fascist thought on such questions.) He briefly touches upon aspects of Fascist or proto-fascist thought that would undermine his thesis - for instance, the strains of thought developing ideas of elite theory and crowd psychology - but (in what feels like a deliberate move) does not really develop them.

That said, the book is, again, highly successful as a charitable reconstruction of a tradition of political theory which is no longer extant or well known (even on the existing radical right,) and so my instinct is to recommend it on that basis alone.