Political Gangsters and Nazism: Some Comments on Richard Hamilton's Theory of Fascism. A Review Article

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Recent scholarship on fascism has generated an impressive array of studies on the social basis of modem Europe's most destructive and dangerous political movement. These works have argued that older theories explaining the causes and outcomes of fascist movements and regimes were inadequate because they lacked close empirical analysis of the people who supported fascism. In historical research on Nazism this general critique articulated with a growing attack on scholarly preoccupation with state administration, national elites, major special interest groups, and foreign policy.2 Predictably, such useful and justifiable responses to the lack of social analysis in the study of European and German fascism have produced a number of problems. Whereas theorizations of the 1950s and 1960s were based on thin empirical foundations, new social scientific research, by stressing largely quantifiable issues in the history