Fascism proclaimed itself totalitarian and corporative, but it was not entirely neither the one nor the other. It claims to erect a new state, but plenty of reused elements and residues of the liberal state. Authoritarian and dictatorial, it focused on public power, but he also accepted his limited pluralization. It incorporated bodies of economic resilience, eliminated free elections, created a surrogate of political representation, used satellite organizations, but resorted to parallel administrations to handle the economic crisis. Sabino Cassese, in this book that is, at the same time, a history of fascist institutions and a reconstruction of the caesarists' types of State, expresses doubts about the heuristic value of the concept of totalitarianism, examines the successes and failures of corporatism and proposes a more complex analysis of the paradoxes of the fascist state.
Sabino Cassese, a leading expert on the problems of the state, is a professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore and judge of the Constitutional Court.