Description

What is fascism? Is it revolutionary? Or is it reactionary? This book argues that it is both: fascism unleashes violence against the left and ethnic minorities, but also condemns the bourgeoisie for its "softness". Kevin Passmore opens his book with a series of "scenes from fascist life"--a secret meeting of the Romanian Iron Guard; Mussolini meeting the king of Italy; a rally of Hungarian doctors calling for restrictions on the number of Jews entering the profession. He then looks at the paradoxes of fascism through its origins in the political and social crisis of the late nineteenth century, the history of fascist movements and regimes in Italy and Germany, and the fortunes of "failed" fascist movements in Romania, Hungary and Spain. He shows how fascism employs propaganda and popular culture to propagate itself and how it exported its ideas outside Europe, through Nazi and Spanish post-war escape routes to Latin America. The book concludes with a discussion of the recent revival of the extreme right in Austria, Italy, France, and Russia.

Features

• Succinct history of fascism, from its pre-First World War origins to the contemporary resurgence of the extreme right
• Draws on recent research on fascism, making sense of the highly complicated and various forms and ideas of fascism
• Coverage of eastern as well as western Europe
• Anchors the analysis in narrative history, making the complex ideas manageable
• One of the only books to apply some of the insights of postmodernism to the study of fascism

Product Details

176 pages; 12 b&w halftones & 2 maps; 4-1/2 x 7; ISBN13: 978-0-19-280155-5ISBN10: 0-19-280155-4

About the Author(s)