Quote:
Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
Actually I was discussing them as political theories and philosophies, without reference to any particular regime.
Fascism is not coterminous with National Socialism, and we're not talking about your "Right."
S_A_M
|
Apropos of your conversation about fascism, I refer you to "What Was Fascism?" by Adrian Lyttleton in the Oct. 21, 2004 issue of the New York Review of Books (on-line version for
subscribers only, alas), a review of
The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton. It starts:
Quote:
Why is fascism such an elusive object of inquiry? As Robert Paxton notes at the outset of his study, the image of fascism has a deceptive clarity:
- Everyone is sure they know what fascism is. The most self-consciously visual of all political forms, fascism presents itself to us in vivid, primary images: a chauvinist demagogue haranguing an ecstatic crowd; disciplined ranks of marching youths, colored-shirted militants beating up members of some demonized minority....
But it has proved uncommonly hard to define the nature of fascism, to determine how widely the notion can usefully be applied, or what differentiates it from other political movements and regimes. Historians are mostly in agreement that fascism was a phenomenom of pan-European significance. One of the first important comparative studies of fasicsm, Ernst Nolte's Three Faces of Fascism, wrote of interwar Europe as the "epoch of fascism." But attempts to define fascism have led to such confusions, contradictions, and overlooking of obvious differences that some historians have given up the attempt in disgust. Even grouping together the two major regimes commonly described as "fascist," Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy, is far from uncontroversial.
|
An interesting review, and it sounds like a good book. Buy it from Amazon through lawtalkers' link, and let me know whether it's worth reading.
