Books March 29, 2012
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The Culture of Consent

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Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organisation of Leisure in Fascist Italy,  Cambridge University Press, 2002

Victoria de Grazia
Victoria de Grazia is a professor of history at Columbia University. She also teaches at the European Union’s graduate facility, the European University Institute at Fiesole, Italy and lectures in the United States, Canada, Cuba and Europe. Before becoming a professor at Columbia University in 1993, Ms. de Grazia taught at Lehman College of the City of New York and at Rutgers University, as well as at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and various other European universities. Victoria de Grazia has published numerous books, including “The Culture of Consent” (Cambridge University Press, 1981), “How Fascism Ruled Women” (University of California Press, 1992), “The Sex of Things” (University of California Press, 1996) and “Irresistible Empire” (Harvard University Press, 2005) She went to Smith College where she graduated magna cum laude in 1968. After a year at the University of Florence on a Fulbright Fellowship, she pursued her doctoral studies in history at Columbia University.

The efforts of fascism to form a ‘culture of consent,’ or shape depoliticized activities, in Italy between the world wars, make a unique portrait of fascist political tactics. Professor de Grazia focuses on the dopolavoro or fascist leisure-time organization, the largest of the regime’s mass institutions. She traces its gradual rise in importance for the consolidation of fascist rule; its spread in the form of thousands of local clubs into every domain of urban and rural life; and its overwhelming impact on the distribution, consumption, and character of all kinds of recreational pursuits – from sports and adult education to movies, traveling theaters, radio, and tourism. The author shows how fascism was able, between 1926 and 1939, to build a new definition of the public sphere. Recasting the public sphere entailed dispensing with traditional class and politically defined modes of organizing those social roles and desires existing outside the workplace.

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