We know a lot about the sociology of fascism, but how have sociologists responded to fascism when confronted with it in their own lives? How courageous or compromising have they been? And why has this history been shrouded in silence for so long? In this major work of historical scholarship sociologists from around the world describe and evaluate the reactions of sociologists to the rise and practice of fascism.
Fascists presents a new theory of fascism based on intensive analysis of the men and women who became fascists. It covers the six European countries in which fascism became most dominant - Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania and Spain. It is the most comprehensive analysis of who fascists actually were, what beliefs they held and what actions they committed. The book suggests that fascism was essentially a product of post World War I conditions in Europe and is unlikely to re-appear in its classic garb in the future. Nonetheless, elements of its ideology remain relevant to modern conditions and are now re-appearing, though mainly in different parts of the world.
In her examination of the culture of Italian fascism, Mabel Berezin focuses on how Mussolini's regime consciously constructed a nonliberal public sphere to support its political aims. Fascism stresses form over content, she believes, and the regime tried to build its political support through the careful construction and manipulation of public spectacles or rituals such as parades, commemoration ceremonies, and holiday festivities. The fascists believed they could rely on the motivating power of spectacle, and experiential symbols. In contrast with the liberal democratic notion of separable public and private selves, Italian fascism attempted to merge the public and private selves in political spectacles, creating communities of feeling in public piazzas. Such communities were only temporary, Berezin explains, and fascist identity was only formed to the extent that it could be articulated in a language of pre-existing cultural identities. In the Italian case, those identities meant the popular culture of Roman Catholicism and the cult of motherhood. Berezin hypothesizes that at particular historical moments certain social groups which perceive the division of public and private self as untenable on cultural grounds will gain political ascendance. Her hypothesis opens a new perspective on how fascism works.
The nature of 'fascism' has been hotly contested by scholars since the term was first coined by Mussolini in 1919. However, for the first time since Italian fascism appeared there is now a significant degree of consensus amongst scholars about how to approach the generic term, namely as a revolutionary form of ultra-nationalism. Seen from this perspective, all forms of fascism have three common features: anticonservatism, a myth of ethnic or national renewal and a conception of a nation in crisis. This collection includes articles that show this new consensus, which is inevitably contested, as well as making available material which relates to aspects of fascism independently of any sort of consensus and also covering fascism of the inter and post-war periods.This is a comprehensive selection of texts, reflecting both the extreme multi-faceted nature of fascism as a phenomenon and the extraordinary divergence of interpretations of fascism.
In this classic study, Reich repudiates the concept that fascism is the ideology or action of a single individual or nationality, or of any ethnic or political group. Instead he sees fascism as the expression of the irrational character structure of the average human being whose whose primary biological needs and impulses have been suppressed for thousands of years.
What is fascism? Is it revolutionary? Or is it reactionary? Can it be both? Fascism is notoriously hard to define. How do we make sense of an ideology that appeals to streetfighters and intellectuals alike? That is overtly macho in style, yet attracts many women? That calls for a return to tradition while maintaining a fascination with technology? And that preaches violence in the name of an ordered society? In the new edition of this Very Short Introduction, Kevin Passmore brilliantly unravels the paradoxes of one of the most important phenomena in the modern world—tracing its origins in the intellectual, political, and social crises of the late nineteenth century, the rise of fascism following World War I, including fascist regimes in Italy and Germany, and the fortunes of 'failed' fascist movements in Eastern Europe, Spain, and the Americas. He also considers fascism in culture, the new interest in transnational research, and the progress of the far right since 2002. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
In this fascinating account of the master social scientist and policy innovator, Gino Germani, written by his daughter, the reader will find a rich social and intellectual history. Germani's life traversed Italy under Mussolini's fascism, Argentina under Peronism, and North America during the glorious days of the social sciences' postwar expansion. With high irony, the biography concludes with Germani's return to Naples, Italy, as what Ana Germani correctly calls "an outsider in the homeland." This is a volume that should be uniquely appealing to area specialists, social psychologists, and those concerned with the cross-currents of politics and society. From his youth in Italy, which he left as a result of persecution by the Fascist authorities, through his long and distinguished career in international social science, and a career carved out in a series of exiles, Germani maintained a unity of purpose based on a liberal world outlook in political terms and a struggle against totalitarianism. Social science was the cement that bound Germani's affirmations of democracy and his opposition to dictatorship. In Argentina, Germani is recognized as the founder of modern scientific sociology. There as elsewhere, his work was grounded on the presumption that a biometric society was the ground on which all science develops. Living and working during one of the most fertile periods in the development of social research in Argentina, Germani was the central protagonist of its most fertile period. Argentina served as a central focal point for discussion and debate on the practices of modern societies and the cultural forms. Whether in Italy, Argentina, or the United States, German's work took seriously the individual and transpersonal events that helped form social structures of modernization. The book is rich in details, providing a full bibliography of the works of Germani, his relationships with foundations, universities and personnel, and brief profiles of individuals who worked with and knew him.
The Nature of Fascism draws on the history of ideas as well as on political, social and psychological theory to produce a synthesis of ideas and approaches that will be invaluable for students. Roger Griffin locates the driving force of fascism in a distinctive form of utopian myth, that of the regenerated national community, destined to rise up from the ashes of a decadent society. He lays 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, and traces the unabated proliferation of virulent (but thus far successfully marginalized) fascist activism since 1945.
A historical look at the emergence of fascism in Europe Drawing on a Gramscian theoretical perspective and development a systematic comparative approach, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain and Romania 1870-1945 challenges the received Tocquevillian consensus on authoritarianism by arguing that fascist regimes, just like mass democracies, depended on well-organized, rather than weak and atomized, civil societies. In making this argument the book focuses on three crucial cases of inter-war authoritarianism: Italy, Spain and Romania, selected because they are all counter-intuitive from the perspective of established explanations, while usefully demonstrating the range of fascist outcomes in interwar Europe. Civic Foundations argues that, in all three cases, fascism emerged because the rapid development of voluntary associations combined with weakly developed political parties among the dominant class thus creating a crisis of hegemony. Riley then traces the specific form that this crisis took depending on the form of civil society development (autonomous- as in Italy, elite dominated as in Spain, or state dominated as in Romania) in the nineteenth century.
For some time the conventional wisdom in the interdisciplinary field of Holocaust studies is that sociologists have neglected this subject matter, but this is not really the case. In fact, there has been substantial sociological work on the Holocaust, although this scholarship has often been ignored or neglected including in the discipline of sociology itself. Sociology and the Holocaust brings this scholarly tradition to light, and in doing so offers a comprehensive synthesis of the vast historical and social science literature on the before, during, and after of the Holocaust—a tour d’horizon from an explicitly sociological perspective. As such, the aim of the book is not simply to describe the chronology of events that culminated in the deaths of 6 million Jews but to draw upon sociology’s “theoretical toolkit” to understand these events and the ongoing legacy of the Holocaust sociologically.
