Fascism’s New Faces (and New Facelessness) in the ‘post-fascist’ Epoch

Abstract

The European New Right, so alarmed at the prospect of the comprehensive homogenisation of culture in the wake of the inexorable process of globalisation, should take comfort that there is no equivalent of McDonaldisation in the human sciences. On the contrary, the latter continues to host a steady proliferation of contested definitions, methodological assumptions, conceptual frameworks, and ethical positions in every sphere of academic specialism. The work by Ernst Nolte that helped (and only helped) pioneer comparative Fascist Studies thirty years ago was Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche [translated into English as Three Faces of Fascism]. One of its many pronouncements was that‘the era of the world wars is identical with the era of fascism’.¹ Since then, most works devoted to the comparative analysis of fascism (indeed, almost all produced outside Germany except for Marxist ones) have explicitly or implicitly corroborated this view, despite few of these texts applying the ‘philosophy of history’ that underpinned Nolte’s interpretative scheme.

This chapter is a slightly shortened version of an article commissioned by Werner Loh, editor of the German periodical Erw¨agen, Wissen, Ethik to serve as the ‘main article’ subsequently discussed in two rounds of comment and criticism by academics invited to respond. The article was debated in two rounds of ‘criticism’ and included two ‘replies’ by Griffin to the criticism, all of which was then published in single issue 15.3, (Autumn 2004). The aim of the periodical is to encourage debate between academics over major issues of contention in their discipline. The whole issue was been reprinted in 2006 in the series Ideas and Politics of the Radical Right (edited by Andreas Umland of the University of Kiev) published by Ibidem Press, Stuttgart, as a contribution to informed debate between academics and politicians over the relevance of fascism to post-Soviet societies in Eastern Europe. The chapter appears with the kind permission of Werner Loh.