For me something of a classic - by a noted British political theorist.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51TbYVsrl8L._SX327_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
The Nature of Fascism draws on the history of ideas as well as on political, social and psychological theory to produce a synthesis of ideas and approaches that will be invaluable for students.
Roger Griffin locates the driving force of fascism in a distinctive form of utopian myth, that of the regenerated national community, destined to rise up from the ashes of a decadent society. He lays bare the structural affinity that relates fascism not only to Nazism, but to the many failed fascist movements that surfaced in inter-war Europe and elsewhere, and traces the unabated proliferation of virulent (but thus far successfully marginalized) fascist activism since 1945.
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Nature_of_Fascism.html?id=544bouZiztIC&source=kp_book_description
More on Griffin here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Griffin
Griffin's theory of fascism, set out first in The Nature of Fascism in 1991 and more recently in Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies (2017) suggests that a heuristically useful ideal type of its definitional core is that it is a form of revolutionary organic nationalism, or palingenetic ultranationalism. In other words, it seeks, by directly mobilising popular energies or working through an elite, to eventually conquer cultural hegemony for new values, to bring about the total rebirth of the 'ultranation', whether conceived as a historic nation-state or a race, from its present decadence, whether the nation is conceived as a historically formed nation-state or a racially determined 'ethnos'. Conceived in these terms, fascism is an ideology that has assumed a large number of specific national permutations and several distinct organizational forms. Moreover, it is a political project that continues to evolve to this day throughout the Europeanized world, though it remains highly marginalised compared with the central place it occupied in inter-war Europe, and its central role in identity politics has been largely replaced by non-revolutionary forms of radical right-wing populism.
Griffin's approach, though still highly contested in some quarters, has had an enduring impact on the comparative fascist literature of the last 25 years, and draws on the work of George Mosse, Stanley Payne, and Emilio Gentile in highlighting the revolutionary and totalising politico-cultural nature of the fascist revolution (in marked contrast with Marxist approaches). His book Modernism and Fascism locates the mainspring of the fascist drive for national rebirth in the modernist bid to achieve an alternative modernity, which is driven by a rejection of the decadence of 'actually existing modernity' under liberal democracy or tradition. The fascist attempt to institute a different civilisation and a new temporality in the West found its most comprehensive expression in the 'modernist states' of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Since 1945 fascism has diversified and can no loner gain the critical mass to form a mass movement of populist charismatic, so that it is reduced to terroristic attacks to live out its war on liberal democratic society and those it sees as 'enemies' of the 'true' nation/race and its rebirth.
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[–] BeatYouTilYouAreBlue 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago (edited ago)
I can't remember if I have read that particular book but I have read Griffin before. I actually read this the other week, an essay contained in his book Terrorist's Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning. The section on what he calls "Heroic doubling" is quite interesting.
I think his writings are quite good. The way I see it; there is fascism as an idea and fascisms as a movement, and in examples where fascist movements have taken control of the state, fascism as an actual governing regime.
I started reading Ballard's novel Cocaine Nights earlier. Not read this one before.