Fascists and Fascism

Fascism has fascinated and appalled observers since its emergence from the catastrophe of the First World War, remaining a malign symbol of the 20th century’s horrors: genocide, total war, racism, ethnonationalism. A century after it was buried in the wreckage of the Second World War, fascism has returned as a political and cultural force. But just what is fascism? What makes a fascist? Is it an exhausted ideology or a virus permanently lurking in the modern body politic? Or is it an empty concept altogether, an aesthetic pose or a lazy insult with no real content? This course will grapple with these questions as we investigate the roots of fascism in fin de siècle Europe (and its overseas empires), its spectacularly violent career between the world wars, and the conditions that allowed for its return in the crisis-ridden atmosphere of the 21st century. 

We’ll explore the many paradoxes of fascism, focusing on its murderous rivalries with antagonistic ideologies, its profoundly ambiguous relationship to modernity, and its complex psychological appeal to individuals in distinct times and places. We’ll engage with recent scholarship that looks beyond the classical cases of Italy and Germany to consider local varieties of fascism that appeared elsewhere in Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and the United States, understanding it as a global phenomenon of violent reaction. Our guides through this inferno will include classic theorists like Hannah Arendt, Giovanni Gentile, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Polanyi, Wilhelm Reich, Carl Schmitt, and Leon Trotsky. With them we’ll seek to understand historical fascism and its ruinous political, cultural, and psychological consequences. We’ll also read contemporary scholars like Roger Griffin, Michael Mann, Robert Paxton, Dylan Riley, Klaus Theweleit, and Alberto Toscano, who offer new perspectives on the fascist past and crucial context for understanding its 21st century mutations.

This course runs on the premise that the lens of history can help us see our own situation with new clarity. Through close reading and conversation on the nature of fascism past and present, we’ll strive to better understand our own historical moment and the choices it presents us.