Return Of Fascism Research Articles

On the Psychodynamics of Right-Wing Populism: A Frommian Perspective

ABSTRACT The paper analyzes right-wing populism according to Erich Fromm’s social-psychoanalytic approach and using his social-characterological insights on authoritarianism and narcissism. Right-wing populism can be explained much more plausibly if it is understood as an expression of a reactive narcissistic identity construction rather than as a return of fascism and authoritarianism.

Tribute to Samir Amin: The Return of Fascism and the Challenge of Delinking

Tribute to Samir Amin: The Return of Fascism and the Challenge of Delinking

Past the Post?: Screening Progress and Fascism's Return

The 2016 presidential election triggers many unanticipated responses. Emotions run high. Political activists discover newfound energy. One’s place in the world has been unfixed, troubled, and unsettled. Philosophers and artists, stunned, rethink the terms for their critical positions and the formal aesthetics that shape their work. The moment is thus rife with anxiety in search of a response. As a film scholar, I find myself driven to script a response. Ironically, as I write I feel paused in time and space. My unfixedness in the shadow of the election put in motion what can best be described as quivering stasis. From my troubled place, an intellectual processing unfolded. I conjured ideas and images that invariably failed to yield a satisfactory response to what had come to pass. What had I seen? Felt? My psychical and physical response to current events might be likened to what Adorno refers to as “the capacity to shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image” (437). It’s not a pretty picture. But we’ve known this all along.

Le Juif Süss au Quartier Latin en 1950. Entre emballement médiatique et réalité de l’antisémitisme

In October 1950, a cinema club directed by Éric Rohmer created an uproar by programing the Nazi propaganda film, Le Juif Süss, in a cinema in the Latin Quarter (Paris). Was this a reflexive approach, led by a group of cinephiles ? A provocation of a small antisemitic group ? A simple publicity stunt ? Antiracist activists and resistant associations had no doubt : they immediately demanded the cancellation of the screening and greater awareness on the part of public officials about the “return of fascism.” The scandal of the Juif Süss reveals the plausible nature of antisemitism in the early 1950s, as well as the reactions produced by civil society and institutions. It creates the occasion to question the place of hate speech in the post-Shoah period, as well as the means used for combatting it.

Contested Anti-Fascisms in Luigi Zampa’s Anni Difficili, 1948–1949

The article explores the contested meanings of Fascism and collective guilt in postwar Italy. A large body of recent scholarship suggests that the myth of the Italiani brava gente served to suspend questions of collective responsibility and to conceal striking continuities between the fascist regime and the postwar republic, creating a kind of national ‘amnesia’ by 1947. Focusing on events of 1948–1949, the article takes issue with this view, citing examples of widespread awareness and fears of a return of Fascism. Luigi Zampa’s film, Anni difficili, created a controversial definition of Fascism — its origins and its consequences — and addressed collective guilt in a manner that made the film a sensation between 1948 and 1949. The public, far from complacent to programmes of national repression of the memory of Fascism, was in fact eager to examine these issues, even to the point of discussing widespread guilt. Making particular use of newspaper reviews, the article examines the public interpretations of Anni difficili in order to expose the terms by which different political orientations defined the fascist past and imagined its future danger in the emerging republic

Dan Stone. Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945.

It should be easy to write a history of the tiny half-continent of Europe as our globe shrinks and the “national” becomes subsumed by the “transnational.” Dan Stone's absorbing and provocative work shows that writing this history remains vexingly difficult. Europe was at the heart of the Cold War, and that makes its postwar story much more than European. The single city Berlin reproduced the bipolar world in miniature, with welfare capitalism in its Western sectors but welfare dictatorship just a few streets to the East. Like the old German capital, Cold War Europe focused on big questions but also divided populations: how does one hold together Europeans' divergent experiences in a single narrative? Stone's solution is to admit to the division wrought by the Cold War while arguing for deeper unity. His chapters alternate between East and West but the book as a whole traces the adventures of the single concept “antifascism,” which Stone understands as a consensus favoring reasoned compromise that prevailed across the continent. “[A]ntifascism,” he writes, “became the basis of stability in postwar Europe,” a development that would help explain why Christian Democrats embraced welfare states along with corporatist labor arrangements (p. 9). Because Stone understands welfare states as postwar elites' antidote for fascism he sees the weakening of welfare states since 1989 as a sign of fascism's return. (Hence the book's title.) Is this intriguing intuition correct?

Fascism's Return, Scandal, Revision, and Ideology since 1980s

Fascism's Return, Scandal, Revision, and Ideology since 1980s

Vichy's Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar France

One of the distinctive features of the Syndrome - the persistence of the memory of the Vichy regime in French political and cultural life - is that it has been extremely difficult for an authoritative historical discourse to impose itself. Why does Vichy, and all that the name entails, fascinate and even obsess the French, inflecting not only discussions of the past but of the present as well? In Afterlife, Richard J. Golsan explores the complexities of some of the most provocative episodes of Vichy's curious persistence in France's national consciousness. He argues that each of these episodes, events, and scandals constitutes a crossroads where history and counterhistory - different or competing versions of the past - encounter one another, often with explosive and even destructive consequences. Richard J. Golsan is a professor of French at Texas A&M University and the author or editor of several books, including Fascism's Return (Nebraska 1997).

Fascism's Return: Scandal, Revision, and Ideology since 1980 (review)

At first sight, Fascism's Return would seem to belong in the distinguished company of such influential collections of essays on fascism as Woolfe's The Nature of Fascism, Laqueur's Fascism: A Reader's Guide, Hagtvet et alia's Who Were the Fascists, and Mosse's International Fascism. All these managed to contain some seminal essays despite lacking a shared conceptual framework for approaching the topic. Indeed, outside the Marxist camp, it would have until recently needed a draconian act of editorial Gleichschaltung to avoid such a book becoming precisely what it was received wisdom to accuse fascism's ideology of being: a hotchpotch; a ragbag. The absence of a unifying concept of fascism which (mis)informs Golsan's book, however, is now an anachronism. Moreover, this scholarly failing is compounded by a main title and cover design which would constitute a breach of the Trade's Description Act if it applied to books.

Book Reviews : Fascism's Return. Scandal, Revision and Ideology since 1980. Edited by Richard J. Golsan. Stages Vol. 10. Nebraska and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Pp. viii + 330. £23.95

Book Reviews : Fascism's Return. Scandal, Revision and Ideology since 1980. Edited by Richard J. Golsan. Stages Vol. 10. Nebraska and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Pp. viii + 330. £23.95

Will fascism return? Germany and Europe in the mid‐90s

Will fascism return? Germany and Europe in the mid‐90s