Much of the existing interpretations of Marinetti's political activities and views tend to divide a radical 'heroic' period up to 1920 from the less palatable period thereafter under the Fascist regime. Additionally, research on Marinetti’s activities on behalf of the Fascist regime is not as thorough as his political activities before and immediately after the Great War. Consequently, a comprehensive narrative and interpretation of Marinetti’s political views and activities throughout his political life—1909-1944—is lacking.

My goal in this dissertation is to provide an interpretive framework that encompasses the whole of Marinetti’s politics, and seeks to explain how the supposedly radical Marinetti did in fact become one of the leading members of a reactionary Fascist regime. My thesis is that Marinetti’s politics were made up of two fundamentally contradictory sets of goals, and throughout his life he sought to bring these two goals together into a workable politics. He sought to advance individual liberties in modern society, but he also desired national greatness, which entailed a certain level of collective order and unity that perforce required limits on individual liberties. This attempt to achieve both liberty and order manifested itself in a series of radical and nationalist political objectives which always sounded reconcilable in the abstract, but never worked out in practice. When faced with the urgency of political reality, when Marinetti had to choose between his radical and nationalist goals, he invariably chose the latter. Thus, I argue that there was no split between the supposedly radical Marinetti of the early years (1909-1920) and the Marinetti of the Fascist era. Politically, the latter was the logical development of the former.