George L. Mosse and Walter Laqueur on the History of Fascism

Abstract

The history and analysis of fascism has been a major theme of the first half century of the Journal of Contemporary History, and was a key interest of its founding co-editors, George L. Mosse and Walter Laqueur. Both made important contributions to the field, but their approaches were quite different. Mosse began his work on fascism earlier and, in a manner consistent with his other research, emphasized cultural and ideological aspects. He was arguably the first to draw attention to ideology as a coherent aspect for study and inaugurated the ‘cultural turn’ in the historiography of fascism long before this became generally fashionable. Mosse was a pioneer in research on popular culture and the visual arts in this area, as well as on the role and character of myth, developing what some scholars have termed an anthropological approach. He also expanded treatment of the development of racial thought and made a major contribution to studying the psychology and culture of nationalism and mass mobilization. Walter Laqueur entered the field somewhat later and stimulated work on the origins and comparative history of fascism. His books were not as innovative in methodology as those of Mosse, but broader in scope and chronological treatment, and sometimes more narrative in structure. Laqueur extended the inquiry to Russia and to the Middle East, areas in which he was a specialist, and also examined the possibilities of neofascism after 1945, as well as its relation to Islamism at the end of the twentieth century.