Klappentext

[Over] the last decade there has emerged a growing explicit (theoretically formulated) or tacit (pragmatic) acceptance by Anglophone academics working in the field that fascism s ineliminable core is made up of the vision of a regenerated political culture and national community brought about in a post-liberal age. Inevitably, such a consensus can never be total and there are academics working in fascist studies who continue to apply a different ideal type of fascism, some of whom express deep scepticism about the very existence of an area of convergence on the centrality to fascism of an ultra-nationalist myth of rebirth. The most cited version of the consensus applied by academics who are sympathetic to it is the highly synthetic formula that I used to encapsulate my own ideal type: Fascism is a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism

The totalitarian movements represented by the PNF and the NSDAP and the totalitarian regimes that they underpinned became the role model for all revolutionary nationalists in the inter-war period and synonymous with totalitarian, mass-based revolutionary nationalism itself. This became known as fascism after the first such movement to achieve power, namely Mussolini s fascismo. However, it was only in Italy and Germany that the structural crisis of liberal society was profound enough to generate a genuinely charismatic form of populist politics, one which was not confined to the hard core of movement activists, but involved the particular type of consensus generated by a palingenetic political community , thereby creating the basis for a fascist regime.

(Aus dem Beitrag von Roger Griffin)