Description:
This reader focuses on the definition and ideology of generic fascism, bringing together articles, essays, and political writings by several key figures to lay bare the structural affinity that relates fascism not only to Nazism but to the many failed fascist movements that surfaced in inter-war Europe and elsewhere. In both his introduction and his editorial commentary Griffin locates the driving force behind all fascist movements in a distinctive utopian myth, that of the regenerated national community, destined to rise up from the ashes of a decadent society.
Brief description: ROGER GRIFFIN is Professor of Modern History at the Oxford Brookes University and edits the Routledge quarterly, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions. He has numerous articles and chapters on generic fascism, as well as editing three major anthologies of documentary texts: Fascism (OUP, 1995), International Fascism (Arnold, 1998) and the five volume (with Matthew Feldman) Fascism: Critical Concepts (Routledge, 2004). His two monographs are The Nature of Fascism (Pinter, 1991) and Modernism and Fascism (Palgrave, 2007).