Italian Fascism, Messianic Eschatology and the Representation of Libya

Abstract Taking its starting point from the work of John Gray on the continuation of religious categories of thought in the mass movements of modernity, the article considers the strand of Messianic utopianism within Italian Fascism and its effect upon the representation of the country’s largest colony, Libya. It considers the ways in which those who wrote on Libya in the 1930s – government officials, figures within the military, well‐known commentators and journalists – participated within a discourse that was dominated by eschatological thought, by the notion of an established order rapidly coming to an end so as to give way to a radically new order. It considers how those who were involved in the process of colonisation wrote about their experience of time and how they considered the Fascist attempt to reform human consciousness. The concluding part of the essay explores the relation, within the writing of Italian officials and observers, between the expectation of utopia and the justification of the use of terror to suppress opposition to the new order that Fascism promised.