Roger Griffin

Modernism and Fascism

design; and Goebbels even pressed him to design the ‘Deutsches Volk, Deutsche Arbeit’ exhibition. Things were on the up.35 The image of the Reichsminister for Propaganda and Enlightenment, Joseph Goebbels, encouraging Mies van der Rohe to tender for prestigious regime projects encourages us to ‘revisit’ the whole subject of Nazism’s famed jihad against modernism. An even more striking example of the recurring incongruities in Nazism’s interactions with Western modernity is Joseph Goebbels’ weakness for Jazz, offi cially lambasted as the epitome of ‘degenerate music’. This foible accounts for a remarkable moment on the evening of 15 February 1938 when he went backstage with Hermann Goering at the Scala Theatre, Berlin, to congratulate the internationally acclaimed English band-leader, Jack Hylton, whose tour was breaking all Germany’s box-offi ce records that spring. (Apparently Hitler had attended the concert but gone straight home.) This was no lapsus on Figure 7 Walter Gropius’ uncompromisingly modernist competition entry for the Reichsbank in Berlin, 1933.

The ‘post‐Fascism’ of the Alleanza Nazionale: A case study in ideological morphology

Abstract This article sets out to resolve the contentious issue of the Alleanza Nazionales (ANs) relationship to Fascism by focusing on the partys first official programme, the Theses published when it formally replaced the overtly fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano in January 1995. Considered in the light of a particular model both of generic fascism and ideological morphology, these theses document the considerable extent to which the ANs vision of a new political class and regenerated national community is rooted in historical Fascism, even if care has been taken to express this vision in a ‘modernized’, anti‐Nazi and anti‐totalitarian discourse. At the same time the party unequivocally commits itself to upholding the institutions and methods of liberalism as the corner stone of Italys ‘Second Republic’. What results is a new ideological hybrid, ‘democratic fascism’, one which could yet establish itself as the ideology of the dominant faction in Italys government coalition.

From slime mould to rhizome: an introduction to the groupuscular right

Conventional academic research into the legacy of inter-war fascism has generally neglected the myriad minuscule and often ephemeral formations of the extreme right that have sprung up since 1945, and has concentrated instead on abortive attempts to emulate the success of the Nazi and Fascist party-based mass movements, and more recently on non-revolutionary ‘neo-populist parties’. However, when examined closely, many of these formations can be observed to behave as fully developed, highly specialized and largely autonomous grouplets that simultaneously form the constituents of an amorphous, leaderless and centreless cellular network of political ideology, organization and activism that is termed here ‘the groupuscular right’. As such, these ‘groupuscules’ are to be seen as the product of a sophisticated process of evolutionary adaptation to post-1945 realities that allows extreme variants of revolutionary nationalism to survive in the ‘post-fascist’ age in a form that is largely resistant to attempts to suppress them, and may represent a number of permanent, if mostly inconspicuous, threats to liberal democracy.

Ideology and culture

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 is their hallmark only under the historically exceptional societal conditions of high modernity. It moves on to consider the virtues of several non-reductionist variants of Marxist theory that postulate a subtle dialectic between ideologys coercive and emancipatory functions, aspects that can be seen at work at the generative and experiential core of all human cultures, and not just capitalist ones. These reflections lead to a call for a dialectical, anthropologically informed approach to the interface between culture and ideology. It concludes on a speculative note by suggesting that analogies made between ideological self-replication in cultural processes and the genetic basis of evolution could be more than metaphorical should the infant science of ‘memetics’ prove to have an empirically sound base.

Shattering crystals: The role of ‘dream time’ in extreme right-wing political violence

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 destruction can precipitate the experience of being reborn in a new supraindividual dimension (‘dream time’). At this point the etymological connotations of ‘self-sacrifice’ and ‘fanatic’ acquire a new significance, since the personal palingenesis experienced by the soldier or terrorist confronting death may rehearse archetypal patterns of mystic purification and immortality. This ‘chrono-ethological’ perspective on extreme political violence is elaborated by considering the devastating impact that Western modernity has had on the access to states of ‘self-transcendence’ available in traditional religious culture. It is then applied to examples of inter-war fascist paramilitarism and contemporary ‘lone-wolf’ terrorism.

British Fascism: The Ugly Duckling

By concentrating on the reasons for the failure of specific forms of British fascism primarily from a historiographical and Anglocentric point of view, it is easy to lose sight of structural causes at work which arguably help determine the fate of any specimen of the fascist genus. At the risk of disconcerting or alienating readers concerned with the unique events and facts which make up history in the sense of ‘how it actually was’, this essay will concentrate on sketching out a model designed to throw into relief the factors which condition its viability as a genus of modern political ideology. The aim is bring out the fact that the failure of the individual fascisms which have been the subject of earlier chapters was in no way exceptional, but part of a pattern exhibited by nearly all their blood relatives in other countries.

The sacred synthesis: The ideological cohesion of fascist cultural policy

Summary This article challenges commonly held preconceptions about the absence of a cohesive cultural policy by arguing that, while many rival aesthetic creeds were accommodated under Mussolinis regime, they can all be seen as permutations of a common vision of the central role to be played by a culture in the regeneration of the national community and the creation of a new Italy. It points to a profound relationship between Fascisms cultural policy and its core mobilizing myth of palingenetic ultra‐nationalism, which similarly spawned a wide variety of surface ideologies similarly doomed to failure by the irreducibly pluralistic nature of modern society.

Studying Fascism in a Postfascist Age. From New Consensus to New Wave? 1

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 applied in practice creates a totalitarian movement or regime engaged in combating cultural, ethnic and even biological (‘dysgenic’) decadence and engineering a new sort of ‘man’ in a alternative socio-political and cultural modernity to liberal capitalism. Having surveyed empirical evidence for the spontaneous emergence of a broad, though contested, scholarly convergence around this approach in the historical and social sciences in the last two decades, even beyond Anglophone academia, the article suggests that this development is part of an even wider phenomenon. This is the tendency for scholars to take seriously the utopian ideological and cultural dynamics of political phenomena once generally dismissed as exercises in the monopoly of power, of exercise of violence for its own ‘nihilistic’ sake rather than as a rebellion against nihilism in the search for a new order. It finishes with a reminder from several experts that fascism is not a static or immutable phenomenon, an insight that demands from scholars a willingness to track the way it adapts to the unfolding conditions of modernity, thereby assuming new guises practically unrecognizable from its inter-war manifestations.

Introduction: God’s counterfeiters? investigating the triad of fascism, totalitarianism and (political) religion

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 highlighting the way they can each be directly associated with the project of creating a new order. The practical implications of an aversion to seeing them as interrelated, convergent components of a conceptual cluster is illustrated by the acute lack of consensus among major historians about their relevance to Nazism. A brief outline of the topics covered in the individual contributions is followed by an appeal to political scientists and historians to bring to the study of political extremism a greater sense of synergy and shared humanistic purpose.

The Reclamation of Fascist Culture

Alexander De Grand, Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Development, Lincoln, NE and London, University of Nebraska Press, 3rd edn, 2000; xvi + 191 pp.; 0803266227; £9.95 Jeffrey Schnapp, A Primer of Italian Fascism, Lincoln, NE and London, University of Nebraska Press, 2000; xxi + 325 pp.; 0803292686; £16.95 G.L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Towards a General Theory of Fascism, New York, Howard Fertig, 1998; 230 pp.; 0865274320 Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000; 316 pp.; 0521480159; £40.00, US