Patrizia Dogliani – författare

This book represents a valuable contribution to the history of the Socialist Second International and, more generally, of European socialism between the Great Depression of the 1880s and WWI. It comes to fill a gap in the scholarship, insofar as it investigates the history of the Socialist Youth International. During the first phase of the making of socialist parties, this organization was in charge of the political and cultural education of the proletarian youth. Capitalizing on an approach based on social, quantitative and political history, and on an analysis of mentalities and languages, the book reconstructs the many-sidedness of the “school of recruits” of the social-democratic and revolutionary movements. The working conditions of youth in Europe, its unionization and economic struggles, the fight against militarism, the pedagogical work, the internationalism and the commitment to maintain peace, and the attitude of young militants towards Bolshevik revolution are some of thethemes investigated in the book. It also clarifies the role and the engagement with the issue of the new generation shown by prominent figures of Marxism such as Karl Liebknecht, Jean Jaurès, Henri De Man, Willi Münzenberg, Henriette Roland Holst, and Robert Danneberg. Finally, the book constitutes also a page of European social and political history, reconstructed through the history of the various youth socialisms and their relationship with the Marxist tradition.

This book uncovers how fascism reshaped Italian society according to its ideological and historical interpretation of the Italian nation and people and identifies the strengths of this transformation, but also the resistance encountered from, for example, women and minority groups, to accept it in everyday life. It analyzes the success achieved by some policies aimed at popular masses in order to integrate them into the nation, and how fascism initiated an early welfare state project to address specific categories of society such as veterans, families, mothers and children. The book also questions the concept and practices of social citizenship reserved only for those who gave evidence of formal adherence to fascism.