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.

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.

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.