Indifférence engagée: Elites, modernism and cosmopolitanism

During the Italian Fascist rule, Modernist literary and cultural journals engendered productive aesthetic debates about the role the arts had to play in relation to the political and cultural doctrine of the totalitarian state. In this respect, cosmopolitanism was a central concern for the Italian elites, since it allowed them to resist the totalitarian and universalistic politics of the regime while continuing to engage with European debates and inscribed them into the Fascist system of the arts.