From ‘Consensus Studies’ to History of Subjectivity: Some Considerations on Recent Historiography on Italian Fascism

Abstract Since the period of Mussolini’s regime, some anti‐Fascists have attempted to understand the issue of reception of Fascism by the ordinary Italian people. Such an attempt was ignored by the orthodoxy of anti‐Fascist history after World War II. In the 1990s, a cultural turn in Fascist studies once again began to deal with the question of reception according to the perspectives of ‘aestheticization of politics’, on the one hand, and ‘sacralisation of politics’, on the other. Such a turn has produced valuable studies, but they do not overcome the assumptions of a top‐down approach. The everyday life of ordinary people under Fascism provided a reality that goes beyond the top‐down approach of consent or dissent. In this article, I suggest that a history of subjectivity pioneered by Luisa Passernini is more promising in approaching the complex attitude of people under Fascism.