Victoria de Grazia has published several widely acclaimed studies of fascism, consumerism, and feminism in mid-20th-century Europe. Her most recent book, an edited collection, examines the workings of “soft-power internationalism” in the contemporary era. Browse a series of descriptions of her major publications and their excerpted reviews below.

Soft-Power Internationalism.jpeg — Soft-Power Internationalism: Competing for Cultural Influence in the 21st-Century Global Order

Columbia University Press, 2021

BOOK DESCRIPTION

The term “soft power” was coined in 1990 to foreground a capacity in statecraft analogous to military might and economic coercion: getting others to want what you want. Emphasizing the magnetism of values, culture, and communication, this concept promised a future in which cultural institutes, development aid, public diplomacy, and trade policies replaced nuclear standoffs. From its origins in an attempt to envision a United States–led liberal international order for a post–Cold War world, it soon made its way to the foreign policy toolkits of emerging powers looking to project their own influence.

This book is a global comparative history of how soft power came to define the interregnum between the celebration of global capitalism in the 1990s and the recent resurgence of nationalism and authoritarianism. It brings together case studies from the European Union, China, Brazil, Turkey, and the United States, examining the genealogy of soft power in the Euro-Atlantic and its evolution in the hands of other states seeking to counter U.S. hegemony by nonmilitaristic means. Contributors detail how global and regional powers created a variety of new ways of conducting foreign policy, sometimes to build new solidarities outside Western colonial legacies and sometimes with more self-interested purposes. Offering a critical history of soft power as an intellectual project as well as a diplomatic practice, Soft-Power Internationalism provides new perspectives on the potential and limits of a multilateral liberal global order.

REVIEWS

“This rich book discusses cultural influence in international relations as soft power through case studies on the United States, Europe, Turkey, Brazil, and China. Soft power’s conceptual vagueness, ambiguity, and fecundity (in the form of its smart and sharp power descendants) have created an intellectual project of surprising generative capacity and have shaped diplomatic practices with wide circulatory potential.”

—Peter J. Katzenstein, Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of International Studies, Cornell University

“Baykurt and de Grazia begin their cogent and cohesive edited volume with essays that provide a sophisticated theoretical discussion of soft power. The comparative case studies that follow include China, Brazil, and Turkey. This interdisciplinary collection is a must-read that contextualizes the institutions that provide the scaffolding for the diffusion of Western political cultural practices.”

—Mabel Berezin, author of Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security and Populism in the New Europe

“Soft-Power Internationalism offers a highly informative deep dive into the post–Cold War period when soft power was considered the ultimate method of peace building. It shows how a concept largely promulgated by the West was successfully upended by emerging countries for the sake of their own postcolonial narrative. An essential eye-opener for policy makers seeking a better understanding of today’s vacillating world order.”

—Pierre Vimont, Ambassador of France, Senior Fellow at Carnegie Europe

“A bold and original rereading of soft power, internationalism, revitalized nationalism, and the internet. Baykurt and de Grazia enlarge our understanding of a familiar idea through a new taxonomy of influences, a new perspective on shifts in global power, and a new map of actors of significance as the twentieth century morphs into the twenty-first.”

—Monroe E. Price, author of Free Expression, Globalism, and the New Strategic Communication

The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2020

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Through the story of one exemplary fascist―a war hero turned commander of Mussolini’s Black Shirts―the award-winning author of How Fascism Ruled Women reveals how the personal became political in the fascist quest for manhood and power.

When Attilio Teruzzi, Mussolini’s handsome political enforcer, married a rising young American opera star, his good fortune seemed settled. The wedding was a carefully stage-managed affair, capped with a blessing by Mussolini himself. Yet only three years later, after being promoted to commander of the Black Shirts, Teruzzi renounced his wife. In fascist Italy, a Catholic country with no divorce law, he could only dissolve the marriage by filing for an annulment through the medieval procedures of the Church Court. The proceedings took an ominous turn when Mussolini joined Hitler: Lilliana Teruzzi was Jewish, and fascist Italy would soon introduce its first race laws.

The Perfect Fascist pivots from the intimate story of a tempestuous seduction and inconvenient marriage―brilliantly reconstructed through family letters and court records―to a riveting account of Mussolini’s rise and fall. It invites us to see in the vain, loyal, lecherous, and impetuous Attilio Teruzzi, a decorated military officer, an exemplar of fascism’s New Man. Why did he abruptly discard the woman he had so eagerly courted? And why, when the time came to find another partner, did he choose another Jewish woman as his would-be wife? In Victoria de Grazia’s engrossing account, we see him vacillating between the will of his Duce and the dictates of his heart.

De Grazia’s landmark history captures the seductive appeal of fascism and shows us how, in his moral pieties and intimate betrayals, his violence and opportunism, Teruzzi is a forefather of the illiberal politicians of today.

REVIEWS

“As Fellini did in film, The Perfect Fascist takes us into the dark and complicated heart of Italian fascism. With the expertise of the distinguished historian that she is and the sensibility and writing skills of a novelist, Victoria de Grazia tells of the Italian war hero turned fervent supporter of Mussolini and his glamorous Jewish opera star wife from New York whom he adored and then renounced. It is an extraordinary story which illuminates the ways in which the all-consuming nature of fascism distorted Italian society and destroyed the lives of individuals. I could not put it down.”

—Margaret MacMillan, author of Paris 1919

“The Perfect Fascist is an original and important book. It tells a dramatic story, based on rich documentation, and delivers a probing analysis of the fascist ‘strong man.’ De Grazia’s attention to Teruzzi’s private life, his behavior as suitor and husband, deepens and enriches our understanding of the nature of leadership in Mussolini’s regime and of masculinity, virility, and honor in Italian fascist culture.”

—Robert O. Paxton, author of The Anatomy of Fascism

“With lyrical precision, Victoria de Grazia’s The Perfect Fascist reveals how ideology corrupts the truth, how untrammeled ambition destroys the soul, and how the vanity of white male supremacy distorts emotion, making even love a matter of state. Mussolini’s concept of a virile, nationalist, all-conquering New Man continues to hold a terrifying grip over political and personal thought today, just as it did for Attilio Teruzzi nearly a century ago. De Grazia sheds welcome light on the mystery of why some women, who practically always lose out, also sign up.”

—Sonia Purnell, author of A Woman of No Importance

“This is a perfect book! Original, thoughtful, and timely, The Perfect Fascist beautifully exposes the homogeneity of fascist aspirations and reveals the personal conflicts and paradoxes these aspirations bring with them, including for fascists themselves. Its two entwined narratives―one political and public, the other personal and private―perfectly complement one another and help us understand why the personal is political for those who insist on reshaping people and society.”

—Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

*Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth Century Europe*

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2006

BOOK DESCRIPTION

The most significant conquest of the twentieth century may well have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe's bourgeois civilization. It is this little-understood but world-shaking campaign that unfolds in Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia's brilliant account of how the American standard of living defeated the European way of life and achieved the global cultural hegemony that is both its great strength and its key weakness today.

De Grazia describes how, as America's market empire advanced with confidence through Europe, spreading consumer-oriented capitalism, all alternative strategies fell before it--first the bourgeois lifestyle, then the Third Reich's command consumption, and finally the grand experiment of Soviet-style socialist planning. Tracing the peculiar alliance that arrayed New World salesmanship, statecraft, and standardized goods against the Old World's values of status, craft, and good taste, Victoria de Grazia follows the United States' market-driven imperialism through a vivid series of cross-Atlantic incursions by the great inventions of American consumer society. We see Rotarians from Duluth in the company of the high bourgeoisie of Dresden; working-class spectators in ramshackle French theaters conversing with Garbo and Bogart; Stetson-hatted entrepreneurs from Kansas in the midst of fussy Milanese shoppers; and, against the backdrop of Rome's Spanish Steps and Paris's Opera Comique, Fast Food in a showdown with advocates for Slow Food. Demonstrating the intricacies of America's advance, de Grazia offers an intimate and historical dimension to debates over America's exercise of soft power and the process known as Americanization. She raises provocative questions about the quality of the good life, democracy, and peace that issue from the vaunted victory of mass consumer culture.

REVIEWS

“If Charlemagne or Napoleon could see their continent today, they would be with de Grazia. One glance at Europe's great capitals, and they would assume Europe had been conquered, occupied and settled by Americans. The men who dreamed of l'Europe profonde would curse the ubiquity of Eminem as they sat in the greasy KFC on the Falls Road in Belfast munching their Chicken Popcorn. They would stagger their way around Italy's most beautiful city, guided by a McDonald's map of McVenice. Irresistible Empire is the story of how this happened, of how an imperium came to Europe in the form of an emporium. Unlike the Middle East and Latin America, Europe has seen only the peaceful face of America's empire. De Grazia...shows how--in just one century--the Old Continent was subject to slow conquest by a million consumer goods.”

—Johann Hari, The New York Times Book Review

“Irresistible Empire is extraordinary in the breadth of its historical vision, the depth of its archival research, and the fluency with which its author tacks across the 'White Atlantic' and, in turn, across continental Europe itself. Few authors approach de Grazia's wide familiarity with the sources and issues, and fewer still can write with such a marvelous balance of generosity and irony. A spectacular feast for the senses and the mind.”

—Michael Geyer, University of Chicago

“Thomas Mann, a Rotarian? This is only one of the many delicious surprises awaiting the reader of Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia's rich and richly ironic exploration of the vexed encounter between American salesmanship and the mercantile cultures of continental Europe. Tacking effortlessly across the White Atlantic, de Grazia tells the story of a near-century-long, transnational seduction--a story that is one part coercive geopolitics and one part coyly improvised dance.”

—Jean-Christophe Agnew, Yale University

“[An] important, richly detailed, sometimes eccentric book...[De Grazia's] subject is 'the rise of a great imperium with the outlook of a great emporium': how America's products, producers and salesmen, with the full cognizance and backing of its politicians, came after 1900 to transform not just the purchasing habits and desires of Europeans but also their ideas about society and themselves...Much has been published on American empire and on the transatlantic divide in recent years. The great virtue of this work is that it takes a provocative and unusual line. De Grazia illustrates how empires can seduce and not simply coerce.”

—Linda Colley, The Nation

“This is an extraordinary book, and de Grazia displays impressive range and erudition in taking the reader from Dresden to Duluth, Minnesota, from Belgian entrepreneurs to Italian supermarket concerns, to the boardrooms of the advertising giant J. Walter Thompson on New York's Madison Avenue. She attends both to material, economic changes and to the social (and gender-historical) consequences and cultural meanings of those changes, a divide that few historians are able to span. Consequently, hers is a richly textured and multilayered account, highly accessible for its absorbing anecdotes and engaging style and yet deeply grounded in archival research and current historiographic insight. Above all, de Grazia has done a tremendous service by theorizing and historicizing this contentious topic and by giving it the transnational treatment that it demands. This ambitious book will remain a reference point for years to come.”

—Paul Lerner, The Times Literary Supplement

“Irresistible Empire describes how 'cleverly marketed and advertised brand-goods' from across the Atlantic knocked down the fortresses of a more hierarchical and craft-based 20th-century European culture. The book is full of elegant case studies and erudite anecdotes.”

—Cormac Ó Gráda, The Irish Times

“Irresistible Empire is a brilliant synthesis of economic and cultural history--magisterial in scope, convincing in argument, written with vigor and grace. Victoria de Grazia breathes new life into the notion of 'Americanization,' providing fascinating details and fresh insights on nearly every page. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the elusive but implacable influence of American consumer culture in foreign settings, throughout the twentieth century and beyond. A powerful, important, and timely book.”

—Jackson Lears, author of Fables of Abundance: a Cultural History of Advertising in America

“This richly rewarding and smoothly synthetic work traces the influence of American business practices and models in Europe through the crisis-wracked course of the twentieth century. Its palpable merits lie in the close coordination of archival research and transversal analysis across different regional locales, business sectors, nation-states, and periods--all accomplished with brisk synoptic sweep...This important, well-crafted, and stimulating work has very convenient aids in its illustrations, endnotes, and critical bibliographical essays. It will be an excellent classroom resource across undergraduate and graduate courses. The argument is bolstered by clear, pertinent statistical information and "hard" data to support the author's case for sinewy "soft-power" hegemony.”

—Michael Ermarth, The Journal of Modern History

Dizionario del fascismo vol. I - A-K

Victoria de Grazia, Sergio Luzzatto
Einaudi, 2002

DESCRIZIONE

Il dizionario affianca alle voci storiche (su personaggi maggiori e minori, momenti politicamente e militarmente decisivi, istituzioni politiche ed economico-sociali, centri di cultura e di propaganda, periodici, entità diplomatiche) voci sociologiche e antropologiche per studiare i concetti chiave, i simboli liturgici, gli slogan, le pratiche diffuse, la mentalità del fascismo. Il volume, già parte della collezione "Grandi opere", è ora riproposto in edizione più economica e accessibile.

REVIEWS

Dizionario del fascismo vol. II - L-Z

Victoria de Grazia, Sergio Luzzatto
Einaudi, 2003

DESCRIZIONE

Con questo secondo volume continua e si conclude il "Dizionario del fascismo", cui hanno collaborato 180 studiosi (per un terzo stranieri), fra cui lo storico francese Pierre Milza, autore della voce su Mussolini, Enzo Collotti, Nicola Tranfaglia, Angelo d'Orsi, ma anche critici della letteratura e dell'arte, sociologi, antropologi e giuristi. Il volume si apre con la voce Labriola Teresa e si chiude con la Z di "zona grigia", con cui gli storici hanno definito quella maggioranza degli italiani che, alla fine della guerra, sono passati dal regime fascista alla repubblica in modo passivo.

REVIEWS

How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945

University of California Press, 1993

BOOK DESCRIPTION

“Italy has been made; now we need to make the Italians,” goes a familiar Italian saying. Mussolini was the first head of state to include women in this mandate. How the fascist dictatorship defined the place of women in modern Italy and how women experienced the Duce’s rule are the subjects of Victoria de Grazia’s new work. De Grazia draws on an array of sources--memoirs and novels, the images, songs, and events of mass culture, as well as government statistics and archival reports. She offers a broad yet detailed characterization of Italian women’s ambiguous and ambivalent experience of a regime that promised modernity, yet denied women emancipation.

Always attentive to the great diversity among women and careful to distinguish fascist rhetoric from the practices that really shaped daily existence, the author moves with ease from the public discourse about femininity to the images of women in propaganda and commercial culture. She analyzes fascist attempts to organize women and the ways in which Mussolini's intentions were received by women as social actors. The first study of women’s experience under Italian fascism, this is also a history of the making of contemporary Italian society.

REVIEWS

“Analyzing the deep conflict between modernity and traditional patriarchal authority, de Grazia defines the emerging ideals of Italian womanhood in the 1920s and ‘30s when Catholic, Fascists and commercial models of conduct competed to shape women’s perceptions of themselves and of their society…The product of meticulous research and deep contemplation, the book is an important contribution to women’s studies.”

—Publishers Weekly

“The first comprehensive study of women under fascism…Ms. de Grazia’s research has been wide and varied, and her book has plenty of startling and ultimately sad details.”

—Raleigh Trevelyan, The New York Times Book Review

“For the common reader as well as the professional on, Victoria de Grazia opens doors and sheds new light on a fascinating subject.”

—Mary Gordon, author of The Company of Women

“How Fascism Ruled Women is eminently readable and a paragon of archival research…[It] will be remembered for its cohesive synthesis of variegated documents (from fascist fascicoli to movie fan rags and beyond), its rich and critical insight, and certainly for its lively style.”

—Ellen Nerenberg, Italian Bookshelf

Screen sexthings.png — The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective

University of California Press, 1996

Read Victoria de Grazia’s Introduction here.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

This volume brings together the most innovative historical work on the conjoined themes of gender and consumption. In thirteen pioneering essays, some of the most important voices in the field consider how Western societies think about and use goods, how goods shape female, as well as male, identities, how labor in the family came to be divided between a male breadwinner and a female consumer, and how fashion and cosmetics shape women's notions of themselves and the society in which they live. Together these essays represent the state of the art in research and writing about the development of modern consumption practices, gender roles, and the sexual division of labor in both the United States and Europe.

Covering a period of two centuries, the essays range from Marie Antoinette's Paris to the burgeoning cosmetics culture of mid-century America. They deal with topics such as blue-collar workers' survival strategies in the interwar years, the anxieties of working-class consumers, and the efforts of the state to define women's—especially wives' and mothers'—consumer identity. Generously illustrated, this volume also includes extensive introductions and a comprehensive annotated bibliography. Drawing on social, economic, and art history as well as cultural studies, it provides a rich context for the current discourse around consumption, particularly in relation to feminist discussions of gender.

REVIEWS

“This wide-ranging volume . . . illuminates the development of modern consumption practices, gender roles and the sexual division of labor in both the U.S. and Europe.”

—Feminist Bookstore News

“A rare pleasure. Rooting gender and consumption in the actions of people making their own history, these brilliant essays move from nineteenth-century pinups to the formation of gendered modernity. Once you’ve savored this volume, you'll never think of modern life in the same way again.”

—Temma Kaplan, author of Red City, Blue Period

The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy

Cambridge University Press, 1981

BOOK DESCRIPTION

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.