Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler

book: Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler | Roger Griffin

books:

Modernism and Fasc...

	Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler Roger Griffin Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
	for more information click here

Intellectual debates surrounding modernity, modernism, and fascism continue to be active and hotly contested. In this ambitious book, renowned expert on fascism Roger Griffin analyzes Western modernity and the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler and offers a pioneering new interpretation of the links between these apparently contradictory phenomena.
Using a wealth of examples, Griffin describes how modernism's roots lay in part in the fundamental human need to perceive a transcendent meaning and purpose to life--and to restore this purpose in times of experienced decay and social breakdown. This sense of revolution and rebirth provided the context in which fascism sought a new world based on the health and strength of the nation or race.
Modernism and Fascism is an original and fascinating synthesis of data and ideas which will be of interest to art and intellectual historians, specialists in the study of modernity and modernism, and experts in fascist studies. It also offers stimulating new insights to all those concerned with the many contemporary movements (e.g. Al-Qaeda, Christian fundamentalists) prepared to fight for their belief in the transcendental meaning of life against the inroads of an increasingly globalized materialism. This is a book which promises to have a resonance far beyond the already broad academic parameters of the project, and will inspire a new wave of scholarly interest in modernity.

for more information click here

Understanding the core of the matter

Palingenesis has been used for the exact reproduction of ancestral features by inheritance. Roger Griffin understands the political ideology of Fascism as a palingenetic ideology, primarily as a result of the notion that Fascism itself is the rebirth of an empire in the image of that which came before it. The best examples of this can be found with both Fascist Italy and Germany - Italy looking to establish a palingenetic line between the 20th Century regime under Mussolini as being the second incarnation of the Roman Empire, while Hitler's 'Third Reich' was seen as being the second palingenetic incarnation - beginning first with the Holy Roman Empire (First Reich) then with Bismarck's Germany (Second Reich) and then resulting in Fascist Germany (Third Reich).

In other words it seeks, by directly mobilizing popular energies or working through an elite, to eventually conquer cultural hegemony for new values, to bring about the total rebirth of the nation from its present decadence, whether the nation is conceived as a historically formed nation-state or a racially determined 'ethnos'. Conceived in these terms, fascism is an ideology that has assumed a large number of specific national permutations and several distinct organizational forms.

Griffin's approach has already had an enduring impact on the comparative fascist literature of the last 15 years, and builds on the work of George Mosse, Stanley Payne, and Emilio Gentile in highlighting the revolutionary and totalizing politico-cultural nature of the fascist revolution (in marked contrast with Marxist approaches). Now, his latest book, Modernism and Fascism, locates the mainspring of the fascist drive for national rebirth in the modernist bid to achieve an alternative modernity, which is driven by a rejection of the decadence of 'actually existing modernity' under liberal democracy or tradition. The fascist attempt to institute a different civilization and a new temporality in the West found its most comprehensive expression in the 'modernist states' of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, which also revealed the destructive and self-destructive nature of all fascist political projects to 'regenerate' the nation or achieving cultural renewal.

In this context the reviewer was most impressed by page 351: "Inter-war fascist movements had no exit strategy. ... They were bound eventually to become bogged down in their dynamism, moribund in their vitalism. There cound be no stabilization, no viable routinization of the charismatic legitimacy of the state (that means, no "Empire Artam"), no social or military peace, no institutional procedures for passing on power to a non-charismatic leader, or for reinvesting it in the party. Nor could power even on the paper be one day entrusted to the people itself in a gradual process of democratization ... . Had Mussolini and Hitler managed to cling on to power, ... then both regimes may have gone the way of Salazar's Portugal and Franco's Spain, charismatic power draining away to a point where the renewal of autocracy after their deaths was impossible, and rapid democratization ensued. However, such an atrophy of modernist energies would have been the ultimate betrayal of the fascist world-view."

for more information click here

products you might be interested in