This volume seeks to make two contributions to the study of industrialists and Fascism in Italy. First, in contrast with most of the existing literature, whose terminus a quo is the crisis of Italy's liberal system following World War I, my point of departure is the earlier, Giolittian period, when modern industrial associations first formed, entering into new relations with labor syndicates and the state. Studies that limit themselves to the postwar era tend to take for granted the nature and intensity of longer-term developmental problems regarding social structure, the political system, and the legitimation of power in pre- Fascist Italy. This inattention to prior history consequently obscures the enracinement of both the postwar crisis and its unfortunate resolution. Not only are we left with little grasp of the crisis tendencies of Italian liberalism, but we have no sense of the earlier political and sociocultural development of the industrialists, no way of thus ascertaining their prior support for or alienation from the liberal regime.

This study seeks to situate the development of Italian industrialists within the overarching context of Italy's transition from liberalism to Fascism. Rather than accept given interpretations of the relationship between industrialists and Fascism, looking backward into the liberal period for anticipations of proto-Fascist tendencies, my inclination was to study the relationship between industrialists and liberalism without prejudgment and on its own terms and then treat this relationship as an anticipation of the industrialists’ later reaction to the crisis of liberalism and confrontation with Fascism.