Abstract
Any attempt to conceptualise the relationship of fascism and modernity means operating with two terms which are semantic mine-fields in their own right and about whose definition a formidable literature has grown up. What makes matters worse is that even some of the most perceptive scholarly attempts to establish a relationship between the two have been marred by the intrinsic nebulousness of the two concepts so that there is little in the way of authoritative monographs or articles to build on. For this necessarily overcondensed bid to suggest a new conceptual framework appropriate to the subject, I thus propose to return to basics.
Future organisation is a matter for technicians with the ring kept free for the operation of science and organisation by the universal authority of an organised and disciplined movement … Thus can be achieved the great necessity of steadily and systematically increasing the power to consume as science and rationalisation increase the power to produce.
Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain 19321
This chapter was first published by the Oxford Brookes School of Business as part of a series of papers on modernity given in 1993, and appeared as a Thamesman Publication with the Oxford Brookes School of Business imprint, 1994. It was based on a talk given for a seminar on Nazism and modernity held by Ian Kershaw at the University of Sheffield the same year. It contains the kernel of ideas fully elaborated in Griffin’s Modernism and Fascism. The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
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Notes
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Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-identity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.
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© 2008 Roger Griffin
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Griffin, R. (2008). Modernity Under the New Order. In: Feldman, M. (eds) A Fascist Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594135_2
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