The War as Administration: Minutes, Committees, and the Afterlife of Command (1940–1945)

The corpus shows how a state can attempt to govern collapse by administrative forms. Minutes and committee reports generate a reality-effect of control; alliance talk turns dependence into “alignment”; autarkic and economic pieces translate deprivation into civic virtue; corporative and welfare vocabularies promise binding inclusion while tightening surveillance and hierarchy; anniversary and “method” speeches manufacture credibility as atmosphere. After 8 September 1943, the RSI texts push the same operators into a harsher register: betrayal is narrated as the master-cause, refoundation as legal reset, and public order becomes the last usable form of sovereignty—policing work, strikes, desertion, and the return of the “sbandati” through deadlines, pardons, and threats.

This edition keeps the machine visible without letting the apparatus become a second book. Each unit opens with an editorial synopsis and analytic map; notes follow four channels (A textual/editorial control, B historical/contextual anchoring, C internal cross-references and structure, D translation and terminology). Abductive commentary stays operational and concrete: what these texts make normal, what they make unthinkable, and how administrative language becomes the final refuge of command—its afterlife—when authority can no longer rely on victory.

War as Administration: Minutes, Committees, and the Afterlife of Command (1940–1945) is Volume 9 of Mussolini: Philosophy of Command (1901–1944), a critical reader where “philosophy” means practical doctrine: the vocabularies, procedures, and moral transpositions by which political force is made necessary, credible, and livable.