Provocations on the Liberal Onto-Epistemology of Fascism: An Introduction to the Special Issue (original) (raw)
Related papers
"Fascism Now? Inquiries for an Expanded Frame" / by Alyosha Goldstein and Simón Ventura Trujillo
Critical Ethnic Studies, 2021
Authoritarian political leaders and violent racist nationalism are a resurgent feature of the present historical conjuncture that will not be resolved by electoral politics or bipartisanship. Responding to the urgency of the current moment, this introduction to the "Fascisms" special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies explores what the analytic of fascism offers for understanding the twenty-first century authoritarian convergence by centering the material and speculative labor of antifascist, anti-imperialist, and antiracist social movements and coalitions. We emphasize fascism as a geopolitically diverse series of entanglements with (neo)liberalism, racial capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, militarism, carceralism, white supremacy, racist nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and heteropatriarchy. By emphasizing fascisms in the plural, we seek to address two problematics in particular. First, our intention is to highlight the global proliferation of fascist formations within and beyond the United States and Europe in an expanded historical context. Second, we aim to center the historical, political, and epistemological work of antifascist collective organizing undertaken by Black, Indigenous, and other racialized peoples across the planet.
Analytical Fascism: What Stares Back When One Stares into the De-Enlightenment
George Washington University Illiberalism Studies eBook Series, 2024
While it is clear what those attracted to fascism today are against, it is less clear what they are for. Not in the sense of how they want to remake society—this is usually clear enough. What is less clear is the fundamental values that are driving their desire to create a different kind of order. Compounding this difficulty, too many liberals are stubbornly sticking to some conventional beliefs: that human nature is as liberals think it is, not something that is fundamentally disputed; that facts are what liberals think they are, even if some people choose to ignore them; and that everybody is pursuing basically the same conception of the good, even if some of them are deluded as to where we are now and how to get where we want to go. But this move to the right is not being driven simply by mistakes; it is a principled move, backed by a coherent, consistent, and historically well-sourced value system, even if this value system is perverse. Fascism has its own conception of the moral subject; of the need for a rigid social hierarchy of men; of the nature of individual rights; and of the importance of purity in blood, soil, and ideology. It believes in the unity of the people, the leader, and the state; it embraces very different and (to liberals) often disturbing moral ends; and it employs starkly different rules of social interaction. And it believes, in the end, that this all leads to the greatest expression of democracy ever invented.
Neo-Fascism: A Footnote to the Fascist Epoch?
Beyond the Fascist Century, 2020
Every fresh act of neo-fascist violence, every event designed to stir up memories of the fascist epoch, every reference to ethnic cultures as organic entities with their own political rights and destinies, is a reminder of the need for the human sciences not to close the file on neo-fascism or treat is as footnote to the fascist epoch. (Roger Griffin, Fascism, 2018: p. 125) Three Trends in the Evolution of Neo-Fascism When reviewing the 626-page The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (2009), Roger Griffin lamented that the question of 'how the revolutionary right has metamorphosed itself in the postwar , post-Soviet or "post-fascist" age', rather than featuring as a principal theme of the book, was 'tucked away inconspicuously in a concluding section'. While Anna Cento Bull's chapter on neo-fascism ensured that the book at least ended on 'a high note', 1 its solitary nature reflected the prevailing tendency among historians of the 'fascist epoch' to dismiss postwar articulations as insignificant
Fascism as an Ideological Form: A Critical Theory
Critical Sociology , 2022
This paper argues that fascism is an ideological form rather than an ideological system. An ideology form can best be understood as a set of overall characteristics that distinguishes a class of ideologies from other classes of ideologies. This theory enhances our capacity for recognizing, problematizing, and critically analyzing both existing and potential variations of fascism. Fascist movements in different sociohistorical and geopolitical circumstances vary in terms of their belief systems, strategies, and politics, so conventional comparative methods and approaches that deduce their criteria from a particular model have restricted the area of fascism studies. I argue for a trans-spatial and trans-historical concept with flexible theoretical applications. My central claim is that fascism denotes a class of ideologies that have a similar form, just as a concept such as egalitarianism, socialism, sexism, or sectarianism makes sense as a form of ideology rather than a particular ideology or philosophy.
Is the Ghost of Fascism Haunting Political Thought
Economic and Political Weekly, 2018
The spectre of fascism has continued to haunt political thinking even though original fascism was decisively defeated within a decade. Given the very specific historical conditions in which fascism arose in Europe, whether the term “fascism” significantly applies to more recent forms of authoritarian rule is questionable. Facile reference to the handy historical precedence of European fascism inhibits a genuine understanding of the material conditions that cause authoritarian regimes in the neo-liberal era. More disturbingly, the impressionistic mention of fascism might divert attention from the real issues of resistance to neo-liberalism.
Towards stretching and repairing fascism and anti fascism studies
Arbeit Bewugung Geschichte [Work – Movement – History. Journal of Historical Studies], 2022
Towards stretching and repairing fascism and anti-fascism studies This piece explores further lines of enquiry suggested in my earlier review of Kasper Braskén, Nigel Copsey and David Featherstone's edited collection, Anti-Fascism in a Global Perspective: Transnational Networks, Exile Communities, and Radical Internationalism.1 Given that the study of fascism and anti-fascism is, for many scholars, co-constitutive, this article looks to connect with, and contribute to, recent discussions relating to 'Decolonising fascist studies'.2 Not only this, some of the arguments presented here are pertinent to the study of the contemporary far right which, it might be argued, is yet to have its own reckoning with decoloniality.3
60 Years Fascism Seminar Revisited, 2025
In 1963, historian George L. Mosse was invited by his colleague Gordon Craig to give an extended seminar on the history of Nazism and Italian Fascism at Stanford University. The purpose of the seminar was to critique draft chapters of The Crisis of German Ideology, the groundbreaking book Mosse was writing at the time. Participants included distinguished historians, philosophers, sociologists, literary studies specialists, economists, and political scientists from Germany, Spain, Iran, Great Britain, the United States, and beyond. Over the course of a semester—and only eighteen years following the end of World War II—these scholars defined and debated the parameters of European fascism. They asked: What are the intellectual origins of right-wing populist political movements? To what degree was fascism a European revolution? Were individual charismatic leaders the driving forces behind Italian and Spanish fascism and Nazism? What was the relationship of the churches and other institutions to fascist movements? In short, they strove to better understand the development of fascism in the twentieth century by debating the origins and trajectory of rightist, anti-democratic European political movements. Their discussions were often contentious. Mosse pushed the assembled professors to think of fascism as a comprehensive worldview that provided answers to its adherents in uncertain cultural and political moments. In a particularly heated exchange, Mosse, to the chagrin of many, declared, “I must object very sharply your saying these things are an ideological ragtag of ideas. That is a value judgment. I mean, we don’t like them, but it’s no more an ideological ragtag than any ideology.” In spite—or, perhaps, because—of these disagreements, however, the Stanford Seminar proved incredibly influential to the historiography of European fascism. Gordon Craig cited it in helping him develop the Sonderweg argument that modern Germany deviated from the rest of Western Europe by not adopting liberal democracy and the values of the Enlightenment after national unification in 1871. Meanwhile, Mosse himself went on to publish not only The Crisis of German Ideology (1964, 2021), but also such volumes as Nazi Culture (1966) and The Nationalization of the Masses (1974, 2023), which drew upon themes and ideas he first raised in Stanford in 1963. The original seminar was, nevertheless, limited. Little attention was given to lived experiences, including those of women, colonial subjects, soldiers, and the victims of fascist movements. Though some of the attendees would later make major contributions to the history of gender and sexuality, the discussion did not address fascist views of the body or stereotypes. Reflecting its time, few women participated in the seminar. The Stanford discussion also did not consider the varied utopias and empires that fascists hoped to create, nor did they weigh the importance of those who actively resisted Nazism, Italian Fascism, and other European anti-democratic movements. And though Mosse advocated for the importance of understanding fascism in the context of popular culture, many of his peers continued to frame their analyses within the less-fertile realms of diplomatic and political history. In the past half-century, these limitations have only grown more apparent. New studies have stressed the entangled relations, ties, and mutual transnational influences between right-wing radical movements, parties, and regimes, complicating the consensus view of fascism that the Stanford Seminar helped to pioneer. Meanwhile, other studies on fascist empires, colonialism, the disparate nature of European far-right worldviews, and the lived experiences of the victims of fascism have changed the terms of scholarly debate concerning the nature, characteristics, goals, and agenda of fascism. And yet the concept of “fascism” has nevertheless re-emerged with particular force as Europe and North America once again encounter new politics, radical and destabilizing rhetoric, and unprecedented events like 6 January 2021 in the United States, German coup conspiracies, and rightist coalitions. Indeed, the word itself is often used as a sort of passe-partout to describe deeply different political and temporal phenomena, encouraging many public-facing scholars to write and opine about an eternal and universal “fascism.” For these reasons, and in the spirit of the original Stanford Seminar, the George L. Mosse Program in History proposes to once again examine fascism in light of contemporary populist, anti-democratic, illiberal, and authoritarian movements and ideologies. Participants will represent the geographic diversity of current proto-fascist and fascist movements, including Eastern and Western Europe. They will also include experts from three generations of scholars who have worked on the history of fascism. They will be asked some of the same questions Mosse and others posed in 1963: What is meant by fascism? How does fascism co-opt institutions? How do historians deploy the term as compared to public commentators? However, the speakers will also be asked to consider new, pressing questions, which reflect how the debate over the meaning and definition of fascism have shifted in our current political constellation. For instance, the 2025 conference will also ask: Can historians make comparisons between different national contexts? What constitutes a “fascist empire”? How did European far-right movements seek to reshape the bodies of their populace? And is it meaningful to use the terms “fascism” and “fascist” to describe contemporary political movements? There is no question that it is high-time for such a reexamination. For example, the American Historical Association recently featured an Oxford-Style Debate, “Resolved: Fascism Is Back,” where scholars discussed the utility of the term “fascism” in examining contemporary global political crises. And since 2016, the common features of fascism are increasingly visible in Europe and the United States, including longing for a mythic past, for autocracy, for racial hierarchy, for political violence. Taken together, these features reveal if not an outright return of fascism, then the resurrection of many of its key elements. We need look no further than the 2017 spectacle of antisemitism and white supremacy on display at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and the current wave of violence against LBGTQ+ communities to see that concerns about resurgent fascism are not without merit. The explosion of online racist conspiracy theories, the detention of immigrants, widespread suspicion about the validity of elections, and the claim that executive branches should not be subject to constitutional constraints all indicate the continued vulnerability of liberal and representative governments to tyranny and anti-democratic politics. Against this backdrop, our conference endeavors to redefine fascism for our own time, sixty years after the classic debates from 1963.