Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler 2007th Edition by R. Griffin (PDF)

Description

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.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review ‘A product of enormous erudition and profound thought. I am truly enchanted – I thought that nothing new and eye-opening can be said on the topic, and (Griffin) proved me wrong…Congratulations on the great oeuvre.’ – Zygmunt Bauman, Emeritus Prof of Sociology, Leeds University, UK’What a tour de force you have produced! I send my warmest congratulations!…This is indeed a bold and invigorating discussion based on an absolutely admirable range of up-to-date interdisciplinary reference…I think you have an enormously important book here, one that deserves and will receive a wide readership – not just academic colleagues, but students, and even the broader public…I am absolutely delighted and bubbling with excitement! Thank you for the pleasure – it is very rare that I become this effusive.’ – Modris Eksteins, Professor of History, University of Toronto, Canada’This is a fabulous book. It is a grand synthesis which successfully takes the premise of (Griffin’s) first book regarding the centrality of palingenesis to fascism and demonstrates that it is integral to modernism itself…Thank you for sharing this book with me-it is a major contribution!’ – Mark Antliff, Professor of Art History, Duke University, USA’I found this beautifully written and absorbing – an incredible synthesis of material from such a range of sources from the literary to contemporary film!…I was gripped – even at 4 am in the morning which is quite a feat!.’ – Josephine Reynell, Director of Studies for Human Sciences, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, UK’This is an extraordinary book, the most important to appear on the history of fascism in a decade or more…the book itself is extremely original, not merely a pleasure, but even exciting, to read. More than any other study of recent years it accomplishes a sort of ‘paradigm shift’ in fascist studies.’ – Stanley G. Payne, author of A History of Fascism, 1914-1945”In future whoever wants to talk about fascism will have to take this book into account.’ – H-Soz-u-Kult’This book is an exceptional work of analysis. It’s unique and comprehensive perspective opens a window on a past that may become the future.’ – Tom Baugh, Green Institute’Griffin’s highly-detailed book reveals his vast knowledge of modern and fascist art, architecture and literature.’ – Marla Stone, Modernism/Modernity’The quality of Griffin’s work lies in the fact that it offers a highly original, thought-provoking and challenging attempt at a synthesis in this difficult field of research…it is a highly stimulating and often persuasive study of fascism’ – Thomas Rohkrämer, Lancaster University, Lancaster’…this book’s primary value is that of offering a ‘story’ of how fascism became so attractive to millions of people, including legions of educated Europeans – among them many prominent politicians, literati, artists and academics…This study can be wholeheartedly recommended as a delightful, informative and illuminating read. It is a major text and will [be] of interest to anyone concerned with a deeper understanding of modern European politics and culture.’ – European History Quarterly About the Author 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. 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).

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Probably the most intelligent view of modernism and Fascism with great insights and photos.

⭐Roger Griffin has been standing out as particularly sharp-witted theorist and interpreter of classical and neo-fascism. His 1991 monograph The Nature of Fascism has, perhaps, been the most influential book of its kind during the last twenty years. Since then, Griffin has published a number of collected volumes and scholarly papers that too have contributed to the renewed interest in the notion and permutations of international fascism in various disciplines including political psychology, the history of ideas or cultural studies.With his 2007 second monograph and opus magnum Modernism and Fascism, Griffin adds another text to comparative fascist studies that is likely to become a classic, in the discipline. Griffin’s 1991 monograph was an exercise in political taxonomy and historical explanation – a sometimes schematic and technical investigation into the relationship between social classification, terminology and theory. His many papers and various collected volumes contained conceptual elaborations and empirical illustrations of themes he had already touched upon in 1991.With the present volume, Griffin enters new terrain, in terms of the style, purpose and contents of his writing. His older investigations were designed to help comparativists of the contemporary extreme right as well as area specialists to identify, classify and explain various proto-, para- and fully fascist tendencies in this or that country. His new book, in contrast, can be seen as an exercise in Verstehen (comprehending) why fascism was temporarily so strangely successful, on a number of levels. While Griffin’s 1991 monograph is a, sometimes, difficult and dry read, his 2007 opus documents Griffin’s literary talents and often reads like a novel. The book’s key argument is that pre- and inter-war European fascism has not been anti-modern and by no means a reactionary phenomenon. Fascism, to be sure, did constitute a particularly sharp reaction to classical Modernity. Yet, the solution that fascism provided to the psychological distress caused by modernization’s increasingly fundamental disruption of traditional society since the mid-19th century was not rejection or reversion of Modernism, but an alternative Modernity. The palingenetic project that fascism offered to society was, strictly speaking, not the reborn, but a newborn nation. Griffin illustrates this point here with reference to Italian Fascism and German Nazism, as the paradigmatic cases of comparative fascist studies. He does so with a heavy bent towards the cultural aspects of these two fascism’s national revolutions.Apart from providing a dense and comprehensive description of various West European intellectual trends, political schools as well as artistic and literary phenomena from the late 19th century to 1945, this book’s primary value is that of offering a “story” of how fascism became so attractive to millions of people including legions of educated Europeans – among them many prominent politicians, literati, artists and academics. Hugh Trevor Roper once wrote that Nazism was nothing more than a “vast system of bestial Nordic nonsense.” Analogous statements have been made about Italian Fascism. Griffin largely succeeds with this book in explaining why Nazism and Fascism had, nevertheless, the capacity provide a majority of Italians and Germans with a sense of purpose and existential comfort in particularly liminal situations following such deep social disruptions as World War I and the Great Depression.

⭐Palingenesis has been used for the exact reproduction of ancestral features by inheritance. Roger Griffin understands the political ideology of Fascism as a palingenetic ideology, primarily as a result of the notion that Fascism itself is the rebirth of an empire in the image of that which came before it. The best examples of this can be found with both Fascist Italy and Germany – Italy looking to establish a palingenetic line between the 20th Century regime under Mussolini as being the second incarnation of the Roman Empire, while Hitler’s ‘Third Reich’ was seen as being the second palingenetic incarnation – beginning first with the Holy Roman Empire (First Reich) then with Bismarck’s Germany (Second Reich) and then resulting in Fascist Germany (Third Reich).In other words it seeks, by directly mobilizing popular energies or working through an elite, to eventually conquer cultural hegemony for new values, to bring about the total rebirth of the nation 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.Griffin’s approach has already had an enduring impact on the comparative fascist literature of the last 15 years, and builds on the work of George Mosse, Stanley Payne, and Emilio Gentile in highlighting the revolutionary and totalizing politico-cultural nature of the fascist revolution (in marked contrast with Marxist approaches). Now, his latest 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 civilization and a new temporality in the West found its most comprehensive expression in the ‘modernist states’ of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, which also revealed the destructive and self-destructive nature of all fascist political projects to ‘regenerate’ the nation or achieving cultural renewal.In this context the reviewer was most impressed by page 351: “Inter-war fascist movements had no exit strategy. … They were bound eventually to become bogged down in their dynamism, moribund in their vitalism. There cound be no stabilization, no viable routinization of the charismatic legitimacy of the state (that means, no “Empire Artam”), no social or military peace, no institutional procedures for passing on power to a non-charismatic leader, or for reinvesting it in the party. Nor could power even on the paper be one day entrusted to the people itself in a gradual process of democratization … . Had Mussolini and Hitler managed to cling on to power, … then both regimes may have gone the way of Salazar’s Portugal and Franco’s Spain, charismatic power draining away to a point where the renewal of autocracy after their deaths was impossible, and rapid democratization ensued. However, such an atrophy of modernist energies would have been the ultimate betrayal of the fascist world-view.”

⭐A highly original insight into the major dialectic of the twentieth century.

⭐Für meine Fans, die fragten, ob ich den Artikel wieder bestellen würde, lautet meine Antwort, ohne wenn und aber: E cazzo no?!オックスフォード大学教授による野心的な歴史メタナラティヴ。英国ではモダニズムというと左派のイメージがあり、モダニズム＝リベラリズムという連想が生じるらしい。著者はファシズム、ナチズム、マルキシズムを「モダニズム」と括ることによる反発を想定して、前半で長々と抗弁している。語彙は極めてアカデミックで語り口はくどいが、内容は難解ではない。西欧人の世界観は何世紀もの間キリスト教によって守られていた。キリスト教は人間の時空感覚に｢超越性｣を付与していた。著者はこれを「聖なる天蓋（sacred canopy）」「防備の空（sheltering sky）」と呼ぶ。近代社会の進行はこの天蓋を切り裂いた。時空把握の完全なる世俗化とは｢虚無｣を意味する。「超越性」という天蓋を喪失した人間はあたかもクロノス（ゼウスの父）に貪り食われる息子たちのようである。人間には「聖なる天蓋」が必要なのだ。それは生物体としての人間の中に組み込まれた臓腑の欲求なのである（宗教というのは脳に組み込まれた感覚だという仮説もある）。「無」に貪り食らわれたくない。聖なる天蓋を再生しなくては （｢palingenesis」というのがキーワードのひとつ）。再生欲求の坩堝から誕生したのがモダニズムである、というのが著者の解釈。モダニズムを先導したのがまず芸術家たちだったのはむべなるかな。ファシズム、ナチズム、マルキシズムは全て同根であり、それらは古の聖なる天蓋を喪失した人間集団の本能的な再生運動だったと。以上、根幹部分の論に斬新なところはない。神の死→新宗教の模索、という近代論は百万回と目にしてきたような気がする。しかし19世紀後半から20世紀前半に起こった｢人間存在の地殻変動｣の感覚が実感出来ない限り、「ファシズムの台頭」は永遠に難解な題材なのだろう。著者の博識が素晴らしく、哲学、芸術、神話学、オカルト学、文化人類学、民俗学、心理学etc、諸分野から次々と繰り出される｢時代の状況証拠｣がいずれも刺激的。リベラリズムだって同根の病巣を持っているだろう、と突っ込む読者には物足りなかろうが、表紙が素敵なのとモダニズムアートの写真の数々が楽しいので五つ星。

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