For a long time the historical agenda on liberal Italy has been driven by the problems posed by the subsequent collapse of parliamentary government in Italy and the rise of fascism in the early twentieth century. As in the case of Germany, the causes of these failures have been widely linked to Italy's imbalanced and feeble modernization in the nineteenth century or, alternatively, to its failure to achieve a solid or complete bourgeois revolution. Seen from the 1950s and 1960s there was much to justify such a perspective: attributing fascism to economic and social backwardness was inseparable from the expectation that economic progress and social change would regenerate Italian democracy. Seen from the present, such assumptions are more questionable. The titles under review illustrate many of the ways in which Italian historians have been replotting Italy's path to the twentieth century.
