The 1930s are a major preoccupation of contemporary public culture—a crucial reference point for popular observers and academic researchers alike—as they attempt to make sense of current events by drawing parallels in economics and in politics; between the Great Depression and the Great Recession, historical fascism and the contemporary resurgence of far-right authoritarianism. The essays in this volume take on the question of what we might learn by examining the interwar period of the early twentieth century with and against the first decades of the twenty-first. Through intellectual history, structural analysis and critique, and national and regional case studies from five continents, these essays tackle the “what” and “how” of historical comparison. In this introduction, we present three structures of comparison—the analogy (which proceeds through perceived homogeneity across time periods), the duration (which proceeds through continuity), and the cycle (which proceeds through repetition). We then review common terms of comparison between the 1930s and 2010s, focusing on cycles and periodic crises in the political economy of capitalism and their relation to the (at once enduring and recurrent) phenomenon of right-wing populism and authoritarian nationalism.
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