Estrema destra e futuro nell’Italia della guerra fredda. Appunti su una ricerca da compiere

The essay reconstructs the relationship between the extreme right and the future in Cold War Italy. This is a subject that has been little investigated by historians or political and social scientists, who have rather focused their analysis on the weight of the past, and particularly on the legacy of Fascism. Nevertheless, the electoral growth of the extreme right, however discontinuous and intermittent, has been such as to suggest that the political cultures of this fragmented political area should be studied more carefully, and not only in the case of Italy. It is thus useful, for in- stance, to reconstruct the relationship between the extreme right and democracy, the idea of society that this area cultivated and the political future that the far-right movements and parties wanted to participate in. From this perspective, in fact, it is possible to grasp a real paradigm shift, with the extreme right committed to repre- senting itself no longer as a defeated political actor relegated to pondering the past, but as a subject looking towards the future, convinced that it could once again play a leading role in national and international politics.