Italy

Several reforms promoted by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi passed or went into effect in 2015, affecting the labor, electoral, banking, and education sectors. Renzi continued to advocate for improvements to the judiciary as well as for an ambitious parliamentary reform plan, which the Senate approved in October. The Renzi government continued to reduce spending and restructure the civil sector to counter the economic problems that had challenged its predecessors.

[Juan Peron had] spent his career in the army and greatly admired the way Mussolini had handled Italy, some of which he had seen firsthand during officer training in the 1930s. In 1943, when he met Eva, Peron wanted to do in Argentina what Mussolini had been able to do in Italy–line up the support of the working classes and take control of the government ... Later, after Il Duce–and his mistress–were strung up by fickle followers, Peron would amend his ambition, saying that what he really wanted was "a fascism that is careful to avoid all the errors of Mussolini."

If a formal architect of fascism can be identified, it is Benito Mussolini ... who ... became Italy's leader in 1922 ... Labor and management were organized into twenty-two industry and trade "corporations," each with Fascist Party members as senior participants. The corporations were consolidated into a National Council of Corporations; however, the real decisions were made by state agencies such as the Instituto per la Ricosstruzione Industriale, which held shares in industrial, agricultural, and real estate enterprises, and the Instituto Mobiliare, which controlled the nation's credit.

I said that in Italy ..., an essentially medieval, planned and controlled economic order was taking over the fruits of the industrial revolution while destroying its root, the freedom of the individual. "Why will you talk about the rights of individuals!" Italians explained, at last impatient. "An individual is nothing. As individuals we have no importance whatever. I will die, you will die, millions will live and die, but Italy does not die. Italy is important. Nothing matters but Italy." ... It was the spirit of Fascism, the spirit that indubitably did revive Italy.

Fascist Italy was certainly a country in which there was no liberty. It had adopted the notorious Soviet pattern of the "one party principle" ... Yet there was still a conspicuous difference between the Bolshevik and the Fascist ... For instance, there lived in Fascist Italy a former member of the parliamentary group of communist deputies, who remained loyal unto death to his communist tenets, Professor Antonio Graziadei. He regularly received the pension which he was entitled to claim as professor emeritus, and he was free to write and to publish ... books which were orthodox Marxian.

Renaissance Florence [was] the city where Machiavelli lived most of his life ... In contrast to its brilliant legacy in literature, painting, sculpture, and architecture, the political story of this Italian city-state was one of constant devolution—from spirited republicanism into one-man rule, or despotism. For nearly the last 60 years of the 15th century, the city was controlled by the Medici family ... Lorenzo the Magnificent ... transformed Florence into the cultural capital of Europe while simultaneously devastating his family's fortune by the time he passed from the scene in 1492.

Machiavelli described how the dictator Oliverotto took control of the city of Fermo in A.D. 1501. Oliverotto asked his uncle, Giovanni, to hold a banquet in his behalf, during which Oliverotto’s soldiers slaughtered Giovanni and all the other guests—enabling Oliverotto to take control of the city. Machiavelli's assessment of this crime and the slaughter committed by Agathocles was matter-of-fact. He drew a distinction only between the ineffective versus effective use of atrocities—labeling them respectively as badly used and well used ...

Buchanan: ... I picked up some of the Italians who had paid much more attention to the model of the state, the model of politics. I spent a year in Italy (1955-56). It changed my perspective on politics because I think a lot of Americans, of my generation anyway, still had a romantic view of politics. Italians, for me at least, served the function of introducing a lot of skepticism, a lot more questions. Had I not spent that year in Italy, I might not have ever really been able to come to the critical realistic view of politics as I did.

First we see the conviction ... that there were economic and social problems affecting them that ought to be solved, that foremost ... were those of poverty and of crises, and that they were determined that the government do something about [them]. So deeply rooted were these convictions that no man could arrive in power who did not adopt them as part of his polity. This situation became itself the parent of another settled conviction that began as a little trickle and finally cut its way deep into the terrain of Italian public thought. It began to flow as a full current in the regime of Agostino Depretis, who rose to power as premier in 1876.