Modernism and Fascism The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler

by Griffin, Roger

• ISBN13: 9781403987839
• ISBN10: 1403987831
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-06-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Intellectual debates surrounding modernity, modernism and fascism continue to be active and hotly contested. In this ambitious book, renowned expert on fascism Roger Griffin analyzes Western modernity and the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler and offers a pioneering new interpretation of the links between these apparently contradictory phenomena. Using a wealth of examples, Griffin describes how modernism's roots lay partly in the fundamental human need to perceive a transcendent meaning and purpose to life--and to restore this purpose in times of experienced decay and social breakdown.

Author Biography

ROGER GRIFFIN is Professor in Modern History at Oxford Brookes University, UK. His major work is The Nature of Fascism (1991), which established the first new theory of generic fascism for over a decade. It is a theory that continues to have a major influence on the teaching and development of fascist studies by political scientists and historians alike. This is his first authored book since that 1991 breakthrough. He has also edited Fascism, a documentary reader of primary sources relating to fascism published by OUP (1995), International Fascism. Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus, a documentary reader of secondary sources published by Arnold in 1998, and the five volumes of secondary sources relating to fascism in Routledge's Critical Concepts in Political Science series (1993).

Table of Contents

Preface

On the Prow of the Titanic (Bound for Bethlehem)

Anthropological Modernism

Resolving the Aporias of Fascist Modernism

Two Modes of Modernism

Towards an Archaeology of Modernism

The Archetypal Substratum of Modernism

Renewing Society in the "Age of Clay": 1880-1918

Political Modernism and the Nature of Fascism

The Praxis Of Fascist Modernism

Modernism and the Birth of Italian Fascism

The Fate of Modernism under Italian Fascism

Nazism as a Revitalization Movement

The Alternative Modernism of Nazi Culture

The Biopolitical Modernism of the Third Reich

Three Endings and a Conclusion

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