The Primacy of Culture

The Current Growth (or Manufacture) of Consensus within Fascist Studies

Bibliographic Data

ID10073972
AuthorsR Griffin (0000-0002-6626-2818, Oxford Brookes University, corresponding author)
Year2002
Volume37
Issue1
Pages21-43
Publication date2002-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Contemporary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-0094 • E-ISSN: 1461-7250
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/00220094020370010701
OpenAlexW2031881316
LanguageEN
Citations received35
References cited4

Twenty years after the destruction of the Third Reich, the essence of fascism is still elusive.'1 This statement, taken from the very first issue of the Journal of Contemporary History, edited by Walter Laqueur and George Mosse and dedicated to 'International Fascism 1920-1945', epitomizes the state of fascist studies in the mid-1960s when they were hardly out of their methodological diapers. They had at last started to put behind them an infantile insistence that fascism was the (pseudo-)ideology of nihilistic irrationalism, a movement fuelled by pathological barbarism, or a regime whose sole function was to impose a reign of totalitarian oppression. However, as the ten essays collected between the covers of the fledgling periodical demonstrate, they were conspicuously lacking a shared methodological and conceptual framework which would enable the scholarly verve and historical imagination of individual academic talents to be harnessed to a common purpose. Doubtless Nolte's recently-published comparative study of the ideology of the Action Franqaise, Italian fascism and nazism as permutations of generic fascism, Three Faces of Fascism,2 advertised prominently on the back of that first issue, seemed groundbreaking at the time. Indeed, it has become a cliche to award it the paternity of fascist studies outside the Marxist camp. However, if mythic starting-points are of any relevance, the slimmer but far more wideranging and insightful Varieties of Fascism (New York 1964) by Eugen Weber (a member of the editorial board of this Journal) was to prove a more reliable indicator of the path which the hunt for 'the' fascist minimum would eventually take. Certainly Weber's characterization of fascism, even if it withheld a succinct definition, contained greater heuristic value than the concluding section of Nolte's work, written in what is (to Anglo-Saxon minds)3 a 'metapolitical' register which betrays a will to obfuscate reminiscent of the forbidding forests of Teutonic fairy-tales rather than the sun-drenched clearings sought by children of the Enlightenment

Current (fluid · Epistemology · Political science · Engineering · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Philosophy