EPL and CIAS Present: Strongmen — Mussolini to the Present

A Conversation with Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Please join Evanston Public Library and Northwestern's Center for International and Area Studies for this conversation about the recent history of authoritarian leadership.

Please join the Evanston Public Library and Northwestern's Center for International & Area Studies for this dialogue with historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat about her new book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Register using this link:

http://bit.ly/strongmen-mussolini-present

About the book

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the "strongman" playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues from Mussolini to Putin—enabling her to predict with uncanny accuracy the recent experience in America. In Strongmen, she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future.

For ours is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of truth, treasure, and the protections of democracy. They promise law and order, then legitimize lawbreaking by financial, sexual, and other predators. They use masculinity as a symbol of strength and a political weapon. Taking what you want, and getting away with it, becomes proof of male authority. They use propaganda, corruption, and violence to stay in power.

Vladimir Putin and Mobutu Sese Seko’s kleptocracies, Augusto Pinochet’s torture sites, Benito Mussolini and Muammar Gaddafi’s systems of sexual exploitation, and Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump’s relentless misinformation: all show how authoritarian rule, far from ensuring stability, is marked by destructive chaos.  No other type of leader is so transparent about prioritizing self-interest over the public good. As one country after another has discovered, the strongman is at his worst when true guidance is most needed by his country.

Recounting the acts of solidarity and dignity that have undone strongmen over the past 100 years, Ben-Ghiat makes vividly clear that only by seeing the strongman for what he is—and by valuing one another as he is unable to do—can we stop him, now and in the future.

About the speaker

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of Italian and History at NYU. A historian and cultural critic, she is an expert on fascism, authoritarianism, war, propaganda, and Donald Trump. She is the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020), Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema (2015), which won the Edinburgh Gadda Prize for Modern Italian Studies, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-45 (2004), and Italian Colonialism (co-edited with Mia Fuller, 2005), among other books.

She has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the Fulbright Research Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a Kluge Fellowship (Library of Congress), and a Getty Research Institute Fellowship. She serves on the editorial or advisory boards of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, the European History Quarterly, and Gender/Sexuality/Italy.

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