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Ordinary exemplars: cultivating the everyday in the birthplace of fascism

Heywood, Paolo

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Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which ‘ordinariness’ can come to be exemplified as a virtue. It does so by comparing the status of ordinariness in historical and present-day Predappio, the village in which Mussolini was born and is buried. It describes the ways in which Predappio was mobilised by the fascist regime as an exemplar of an ordinary Italian village, rendered extraordinary by its wholesale reconstruction as a jewel in the crown of fascist urban planning. In similar fashion, Mussolini’s ordinary rural upbringing was mobilised in the service of propagandising his extraordinary and exemplary leadership. In contemporary Predappio, by contrast, ordinariness is what locals reach for to contest understandings of their home as irrevocably associated with the extraordinary Fascist heritage they have inherited. One of the ways in which they do so is to celebrate a local exemplar of this ordinariness, Giuseppe Ferlini, the village’s first post-war mayor. In contrast to Mussolini, Ferlini’s ordinariness is not a backdrop to future greatness, but exactly the quality for which he is celebrated. I suggest that these cases demonstrate the need for vigilance in analytic usage of the category of ‘the ordinary’, which often tacitly assumes the existence of ‘the ordinary’ as a scale in itself, independent of human action. I argue instead that ‘the ordinary’ may be the object of ethical labour, rather than its site, and that exemplification may be a form of such labour, in both our accounts and the lives of those we study.

Citation

Heywood, P. (2022). Ordinary exemplars: cultivating the everyday in the birthplace of fascism. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 64(1), 91-121. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417521000402

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Dec 12, 2021
Online Publication Date Dec 27, 2021
Publication Date 2022-01
Deposit Date May 27, 2021
Publicly Available Date May 27, 2021
Journal Comparative Studies in Society and History
Print ISSN 0010-4175
Electronic ISSN 1475-2999
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 64
Issue 1
Pages 91-121
DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417521000402

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History






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