Roger Griffin

Oxford Brookes University · Department of History, Philosophy and Religion

We – representatives of civil society, scientific and cultural communities in Ukraine and in EU countries – urge the German Bundestag, the French National Assembly, the House of Representatives of The Netherlands, the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament, the National Council of the Austrian Parliament, the Congress of Deputies of Spain, t...

This article seeks to exorcise some of fascism’s more haunting taxonomic horrors by focusing on the multiple ‘phantasmagorical’ aspects of comparative fascist studies which thwart attempts to achieve definitive resolutions of such nebulous and contested issues as its relationship to the radical right. It first considers the lasting traumatic effect...

Politics and the Sacred

This unpublished article is based on a paper presented virtually at the Psychoanalytic Conference 'The Attraction of Hate Politics' hosted in Munich in October 2020

In depth interview about the concept and nature of fascism and their relevance to understanding contemporary politics

An in-depth interview on the nature of fascism as a concept and political project and its relevance to understanding contemporary politics

In the entry on ‘Fascism’ published in 1932 in the Enciclopedia Italiana , Benito Mussolini made a prediction. There were, he claimed, good reasons to think that the twentieth century would be a century of ‘authority’, the ‘right’: a fascist century ( un secolo fascista ). However, after 1945 the many attempts by fascists to perpetuate the dreams o...

Recent years have seen major political crises throughout the world, and foreign policy analysts nearly universally expect to see rising tensions within (and between) countries in the next 5–20 years. Being able to predict future crises and to assess the resilience of different countries to various shocks is of foremost importance in averting the po...

The three articles that follow are the second part of a special issue of Fascism devoted to case studies in ‘Latin’ architecture in the fascist era, the first part of which was published in volume 7 (2018), no. 1. The architecture of three clearly para-fascist regimes comes under the spotlight: those of Spain, Portugal, and Brazil, in each of which...

This article sets out to contribute conceptual clarity to the growing recognition of the modern and futural dynamic behind fascist cultural projects by focusing on projects for architectural renewal under the Third Reich. It starts by reviewing the gradual recognition of the futural temporality of the regime’s culture. It then introduces the concep...

The psychiatrist Robert Lifton developed his model of ‘doubling’ to account for the capacity of some human beings to commit atrocities in one compartment of their lives, while continuing to maintain normal social relations in their domestic sphere, a phenomenon which he encountered both in interviews with former Nazi doctors working in concentratio...

This article highlights the progress that has been made within fascist studies from seeing ‘fascist culture’ as an oxymoron, and assuming that it was driven by a profound animus against modernity and aesthetic modernism, to wide acceptance that it had its own revolutionary dynamic as a search for a Third Way between liberalism and communism, and bi...

This article challenges a tendency that grew up in fascist studies in the 1930s to treat Fascism and Nazism as the only authentic expressions of fascism, and to evaluate and understand all other manifestations of the generic force as more or less derivative of them and hence of secondary importance when understanding ‘the nature of fascism’ as an i...

Fixing Solutions: Fascist Temporalities as Remedies for Liquid Modernity This article explores the peculiar temporalities of fascism that emanate from the myth of the eternity of the nation and race that is perpetuated through superhuman, self-sacrificial efforts on their behalf within historical time. It focuses on the role played by modernity as...

This new section of the journal is polemical in intent and sets out to stimulate debate. For submission of your contributions (max. 800 words) please visit the website (brill.com/fascism). The journal's consultant editor Roger Griffin sets the ball rolling.

To begin to write about mass dictatorship in relation to modernity is to walk into a minefield of the sort of definitional and methodological problems encountered in all comparative history. Every dictatorship is both unique and part of a more general pattern, and finding the appropriate grouping of similar regimes to compare meaningfully and the a...

The article suggests a way of mapping the remit for Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies by considering how far a “new consensus” has formed between specialists working in this area which conceptualizes fascism as a revolutionary form of ultra-nationalism that attempts to realize the myth of the regenerated nation. It is a myth which app...

In the last chapter we considered the terrorist violence that has on occasion been engendered both in the distant past and in contemporary history by the communal need to physically defend the nomos from destruction at the hands of hostile alien forces. But throughout human history defensive strategies to conserve a ‘beleaguered tradition’ have oft...

To begin at the beginning, the premise of the argument to be unfolded in the following chapters is that the sustaining creeds and the metapolitics of contemporary terrorism have their deepest historical tap-root in a psycho-social drive which is constitutive of our humanity. This is the drive to orient our lives towards the fulfilment of a higher c...

Our inquiry into the historical roots of extreme violence has revealed two contrasting species of terrorism: Zealotic and Modernist. Outside the artificially tidy world of idealizing abstraction, in the so-called ‘real world’, fuzzy boundaries and porous membranes naturally exist between these two types. The last three chapters will use specific ca...

‘Great events cast their shadow before them’, the German poet Wolfgang Goethe stated cryptically. However, the constant foreshortening of historical perspectives in an increasingly present-centric ‘media age’ has been aggravated by selective memories induced by the current ‘War on Terror’ (i.e. on Global Salafi Jihad) in the decade following 9/11....

The last four chapters have been devoted to establishing some basic heuristic tools for investigating themetapolitics of terrorism, the terrorist’s creed. These, it should be stressed once again, constitute only one generic, but neglected, level of causation alongside the highly specific, ‘concrete’ social, economic, political, military, cultural,...

So far we have encountered two artificially polarized ‘ideal types’ of terrorism, Zealotic and Modernist, and sampled some of the ways the mindsets of terrorists involved in planning or executing acts of violence have been presented in European and US fiction. This has put us in a position to suggest that a fundamental psycho-social syndrome is at...

MIT astrophysicist John Koestler drives at top speed from Lexington, Massachusetts to a subway station in Manhattan determined to avert a major catastrophe. Two days earlier he witnessed a horrendous plane crash right next to the motorway where he was gridlocked. This, he is now convinced, in a bizarre episode of premonition, was predicted along wi...

In the decade between 11th September 2001 and 22nd July 2011, the day when Anders Breivik carried out a car-bombing and mass-shooting against material and living symbols of Norway’s pro-immigration political establishment, publications of academic and airport books and articles on ‘religious terrorism’ soared. Presented visually as bar charts, the...

So far in this volume there has been fleeting talk of Islamism only in the context of the call from ‘terrorologists’ Jeffrey Cozzens and Jeffrey Bale for more attention to be given to the cultural, non-instrumental, ‘expressive’ aspects of Global Salafi Jihad (GSJ) in Chapter 1, and the replacement of a more traditional Sufism-oriented commitment t...

In one sense, every book on the causes of terrorism written since 9/11 is an afterthought, a theoretical bolting of stable doors long after the riders of a fantasy apocalypse have galloped down their path to God. What this book has set out to do is to provide another bolt to that door by applying to the phenomenon of terrorism the understanding of...

Der Forscher als „einsamer Wolf ist eine bedrohte Spezies. Im Zeitalter der Transdisziplinarität und der Projektkollaboration, in dem sich multikulturelle Expertenteams vergleichenden Studien widmen oder „Kulturtransfer “ forensisch untersuchen, gibt es Forscher, die mehr Erfahrung im Ausfüllen von Projektanträgen und im Skypen haben als mit Archiv...

The article considers how far a "new consensus" has formed in comparative fascist studies which conceptualizes fascism as a revolutionary form of ultra-nationalism that attempts to realize the myth of the regenerated nation. It is a myth which applied in practice creates a totalitarian movement or regime engaged in combating cultural, ethnic and ev...

Nearly 50 years had passed since the formation of the first Fasci in Milan when the University of Reading’s Graduate School of Contemporary European Studies chose 1967 as the year to host first a series of lectures on the form taken by fascism in different countries and then an international symposium on its ‘nature’. Yet, in all that time, outside...

Dans cet article, Roger Griffin cherche non à attiser le débat parfois vif (souvent mené dans les pages de Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire) sur le fait de savoir si le fascisme fut ou non un phénomène marginal sous la Troisième République, mais à inciter à une révision radicale de la manière dont le débat est formulé. Comme en France, les spécia...

“Consensus? What Consensus?” In this article Roger Griffin sets out not to rekindle the sometimes heated discussion (often conducted in the pages of Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire) about whether fascism was a marginal phenomenon in the Third Republic, but rather stimulate a radical revision to the way the debate is framed. As in France, Angloph...

Having highlighted the passage in Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism describing an impromptu nocturnal joy-ride in the country lanes near Milan, the chapter focuses on the epiphanic nature of this experience as the revelation not just of a new aesthetic but a new moral universe and a new secular mysticism. It argues that the Nietzschean bid to ov...

Ten essays on the nature of fascism by a leading scholar in the field, focusing on how to understand and apply fascist ideology to various movements since the twentieth century, Mussolini's prophesied 'fascist century'. Includes studies of fascism's attempted temporal revolution; Nazism as extended case-study; and fascism's postwar evolution. © Edi...

Researchers combing through back numbers of this journal in search of authoritative guidance to the relationship between modernity, modernism, and fascism could be forgiven for occasionally losing their bearings. In one of the earliest issues they will alight upon Emilio Gentile's article tracing the paternity of early Fascism to the campaign for a...

Now in its thirty-sixth year on the French political scene, the National Front (FN) of Jean-Marie Le Pen has become probably the best documented form of post-war right-wing radicalism in the world. It is thus all the more remarkable that, against all the odds, James Shields has managed to produce a truly original, scholarly and valuable book on the...

Johann Goethe once claimed that ‘great events throw their shadow before them’. Perhaps it is the instinct of scholars in the human sciences to work where the light is strongest that explains why some of the major, formative processes of modern history have been added so belatedly and hurriedly to the repertoire of legitimate research topics. It was...

The emerging shape of the post Cold War world provides evidence that rather than diminishing, the profound intersection of political ideology and religious forms of belief is an ever more potent force in world affairs. This volume offers both theoretic underpinnings, and a comparative analysis that elucidates this potent and dangerous phenomenon. ©...

Including 25-page editorial introduction and concluding 14-page interview between Feldman and Griffin

Intellectual debates surrounding modernity, modernism and fascism continue to be active and hotly contested. In this ambitious book, renowned expert on fascism Roger Griffin analyzes Western modernity and the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler and offers a pioneering new interpretation of the links between these apparently contradictory phenomena.

The old-new typology separates the far right political party family into categories of old and new, with the interwar and contemporary far right differing in ideology concerning liberal democracy, populism, neo-liberal economics, biological racism, and anti-Semitism. However, this article sets out to reassess the old-new typology, contending that t...

In the last decade Bosworth has established himself as the foremost Anglophone historian of Italian fascism. Here he offers us seventeen finely crafted chapters which take the reader by comfortable stages from the fraught Italy of Giolittian liberalism on the eve of the First World War to Fascism's final demise amidst social breakdown, war, civil w...

It appears, in fact, that modernist radicalism in art — the breaking down of pseudo-traditions, the making new on a true understanding of the nature of the elements of art — this radicalism involves the creation of fictions which may be dangerous in the dispositions they breed towards the world.

The Fascist Party [...] started to become, like Mazzini’s Young Italy, the faith of all Italians contemptuous of the past and longing for renewal. A faith like any faith that comes up against an established reality to be broken up and melted down in the crucible of new energies and recast to accommodate the burning zeal and intransigence of a new i...

By building a defensive barrier of peasant protection well to the east in order to seal this land off once and for all from the storm floods of Asia, [...] we will slowly lay down one German wall after another, so that, working eastwards, German people of German blood can carry out German settlement.

Innocence the child is and forgetting, a beginning anew, a play, a self- propelling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yea-saying. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885)1 The very fact of modernism raises the question of whether cultural renewal is any longer possible at all. This is a paradox of large dimensions, for modernism identifie...

And whoever must be a creator of values in good and evil: verily, he must first be an annihilator and shatter values. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1SS3)1 Modernity [... ] pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. Marshall Berman, All that is Solid...

The first row of any knitting project is the ‘cast-on’ row. This provides the foundation for the stitches. The last row, which finishes the loops so they don’t unravel, is called the ‘bind-off or ‘cast-off row. Anon., Beginning to Knit (2006)1 My aim is not to dispute the existence of a connection between modernism and fascism: it is to think where...

We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! [...] Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and space died yesterday. Filippo Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (1909)1 History as it is made, not as it is abstractly imagined — the only history that really exists — is not in time bu...

‘Then you know your destination’, he asked. ‘Yes’, I said ‘I have already said so, “Away-From-Here” that is my destination.’ ‘You have no provisions with you’, he said. ‘I don’t need any’, I said. ‘The journey is so long that I will die of hunger if I do not get something along the way. It is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.’

The most spectacular displays of modernism are not to be found in a museum of expressionist art or a collection of prose poetry, but in the avant-garde political collaborations that sought to come to terms with a brand new world regarded as unstable or dangerous. Peter Fritzsche, ‘Nazi Modern’ (1996)1 The consideration of fascism and modernism from...

When Hitler’s national Socialists came to power in January of 1933, they believed they stood at the very edge of history, poised to redirect the nation to fit the grooves of an envisioned Aryan future. Peter Fritzsche, ‘Nazi Modern’ (1996)1 Even in art, where Hitler ensured that every product of the leading modernist movements of the day was swept...

The Terrors and Decadence are two of the recurring elements in the apocalyptic pattern: Decadence is usually associated with the hope of renovation. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (1966)2 Regardless of the site we choose for our excavation, we shall always hit the same ancient underground river which feeds the springs of all art and discover...

There were overwhelming demonstrations of the new community spirit, mass oaths under floodlit cupolas, bonfires on the mountains, [...] choral singing in the churches in honour of the Nazi seizure of power. [...] Something genuinely new seemed beginning. Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger (1999)1 This Age must be called, not the decline of the Wes...

On 17 September 1998 BBC News made the following announcement under the headline ‘The sky is falling’: ‘The height of the sky has dropped by 8km in the last 38 years, according to scientists from the British Antarctic Survey. Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are believed to be responsible for creating the effect.’1 This is not a metaphysical la...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3898216748/ref=cm_pdp_arms_dp_25 In the opinion of some historians the era of fascism ended with the deaths of Mussolini and Hitler. Yet the debate about its nature as a historical phenomenon and its value as a term of historical analysis continues to rage with ever greater intensity, each major attempt to resolve...

Finding a pragmatic exit from the semantic labyrinth surrounding ‘ideology' and ‘culture', this article considers the neutral connotations of ‘ideology' as a formative, intrinsically paradoxical, constituent of culture, and argues that the heterogeneous, volatile, and contested nature of all ideologies when viewed through some postmodernist lenses...

This article first surveys the confusion that prevailed in fascist studies for decades, and which makes it quite understandable if the term ‘fascism’ has been generally avoided both by historians and by lecturers and others teaching inter-war European history to students in non-specialist ‘survey’ courses. It then outlines the main features of the...

An important feature of Emilio Gentile’s theory of political religion is the way he conceives it explicitly as one factor within a constellation of related political, social, and cultural phenomena centring on ‘totalitarianism’. He thus presents it as forming an integral part of a conceptual cluster generating a multi‐point perspective on political...

This essay sets out to provide a context for the following six specialist essays that cumulatively throw light on the value of applying the conceptual 'triad' formed by fascism, totalitarianism and political religion to certain forms of right-wing extremism. It underscores the tangled semantic debate surrounding all three terms, while also highligh...

Book InformationItaly’s Social Revolution. Charity and Welfare from Liberalism to Fascism. Italy’s Social Revolution. Charity and Welfare from Liberalism to Fascism Maria Sophia Quine Basingstoke Palgrave 2002 xv + 430 £60.00 0-333-63261-3 By Maria Sophia Quine. Palgrave. Basingstoke. Pp. xv + 430. £60.000-333-63261-3, 0-333-63261-3.

Conventional academic research into the legacy of inter-war fascism has generally neglected the myriad minuscule and often ephemeral formations of the extreme right which have sprung up since 1945, to concentrate instead on abortive attempts to emulate the success of the Nazi and Fascist party-based mass movements, and more recently on non-revoluti...

This article prepares the conceptual ground for a new heuristic approach to understanding acts of political violence that consciously incur the risk of death to their perpetrators. It focuses on the deep-seated human drive to escape the futility and emptiness induced by clock-time (chronos), and the way a sense of being ‘chosen’ for a mission of de...

This paper argues that conventional approaches to the concepts of consensus and resistance have to be revised once it is accepted that the totalitarian apparatus of authoritarian societies results, not from the attempt to destroy a genuine political culture, but to transform it in order to realize a utopian vision of a reborn society based on a new...