What was fascism?

Abstract

In her influential monographs and essays, Katherine Verdery transformed understandings of state socialism and the command economy at its heart. I reflect here on how scholars might similarly reframe understandings of Italian fascism through renewed attention to the infrastructural project so central to fascist governance in both the metropole and overseas possessions. The piece operates in the spirit of Verdery’s critical questioning of Western accounts that overestimated the centralization of power within socialist states. By contrast, the prevailing scholarship on fascist political economy, as well as empire, has stressed its irrationality. A prominent view thus depicts fascist projects of public works and autarchy largely as future-oriented projections (delusions, even) of the Duce or as monuments to failure. By employing an ethnographic sensibility that takes seriously the logics of infrastructure and fascist infrastructural power, the analysis derives inspiration from Verdery’s method of challenging orthodoxies about power in particular state formations.