ISBN 0340731443
Richard James Boon Bosworth FAHA, FASSA (7 December 1943) is an Australian historian and author, and a leading expert on Benito Mussolini and Fascist Italy, having written extensively on both topics.
Mussolini (2002)
Bosworth's 2002 biography, Mussolini
Content
In this biography, Bosworth concentrates less on Mussolini's personality than his political actions, leading to an "avowedly anti-Fascist study of the Duce." The book begins with Mussolini's final two years, then explains how he got there. Bosworth presents Mussolini as a "bully, coward, and a failure," who could not effectively modernise Italy, and who represented the Italy of his time. Bosworth particularly criticised Mussolini's leadership in the late 1930s and portrays him as more of a people-pleaser than an ideologue. He even controversially contends that Mussolini “might have entered history as a figure of some light and some darkness,” had he retired in 1932.
Reception
Referred to as a "well-received biography of Mussolini," Mussolini won Bosworth the $20,000 Premier's Prize at the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, the most prestigious book prize in Western Australia. At the same Awards, Mussolini also won an award in the non-fiction category. Although one scholar notes an "occasionally rambling and disjointed narrative structure", he also calls it, "arguably the most complete biography of the Fascist dictator currently available in any language."
Scholarship
Bosworth's characterisation as a weak dictator, focused on short-term consolidation of power and prestige, differs from other scholars' portrayals. The book opposes the view of contemporaries that Mussolini had determined radically new foreign policy by the mid-1920s, instead depicting him as "an impatient and impulsive but continually oscillating opportunist in international affairs," who maintained the foreign policy of his predecessors. By portraying Mussolini not within revolutionary traditions but as a man without strict ideological beliefs, Bosworth disagrees with MacGregor Knox - a leader scholar on Italy - and Renzo De Felice - a "central and controversial" scholar on Italian Fascism.
(Wikipedia)