A Fascism and Far Right Reading List

Annotated, Preliminary, and Provisional

People often ask me for suggestions for books on fascism and the far right, so I’ve decided to just compile a list of things I’ve read that have contributed to my writing on fascism and its progenitors. This is not everything I’ve read — for one thing, there are only books here, no journal articles— but this is what I thought was a good start and then some. This lost also mostly deals with Europe up to the Second World War. There’s much good writing on both the post-War far right and fascism in the Americas, but that will have to wait for another time. Before you ask about Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, yes, I think it’s absolutely worth reading and very important, but it also branches out from the history of fascism and is quite controversial, and I didn’t want to get into all that here. I guess I think reading that book sort of goes without saying. I’m also sure an academic will be able to tell you more up-to-date scholarship, but I found all these books helpful and interesting. I hope you do, too!

The Big Picture

The Anatomy of Fascism - Robert Paxton — If you are going to read one book about fascism it might as well be this one. Paxton’s book, both accessible to the general reader and sophisticated, works from the particular to the general to come up with the most useful definition of generic fascism and gives graduated stages of fascist political development. Stage One is the “founding” phase, and Stage Two is the “rooting” phase, where fascist movements become a part of a country’s political system, tolerated or cultivated by the conservative elite, and so forth. Paxton includes a discussion of failed fascisms, movements that fizzled out after having some limited success. Paxton’s Vichy France is also excellent.

A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 - Stanley G. Payne — If you wanna get more into the nitty-gritty, you can read Payne, who engages in a careful taxonomy of various kinds of authoritarian nationalism, emphasizing their differences but also their points of cooperation and commonality. Very good, also, on the 19th and early 20th century pre-history of fascism.

The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe — Dylan Riley - One story about the rise of totalitarianism Europe, drawing on a tradition started by Alexis Tocqueville, is that the interwar tyrannies took root in the absence of civil society: devoid of the associative bonds that could insulate them from repression and propaganda, lonely and atomized men got swept up in mass movements. But, as the sociologist Riley shows, fascism actually grew in contexts with very rich and dense civil societies. He has an interesting diagnosis: fascism arises when there is democratic demand bubbling from below, but no strong conventional political force able to deliver national leadership. As he puts it, fascism is a “twisted form of democratization.”

Fascists - Michael Mann - Another sociological account of fascism, which presents it as part of family of right authoritarian “solutions” to the post-War crisis and modernity and democratization of Europe.

Fascism (Oxford Readers) - Roger Griffin, ed. — A compilation of primary sources from around Europe and the Americas including fascist ideologues and propagandists translated into English. With an introductory essay by Griffin, who is an important scholar of fascism in his own right responsible for the useful formula of fascism as “palingenetic ultra-nationalism.”

Germany —

The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and their Influence on Nazi Ideology - Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke — An important case study in not judging a book by its cover: the title sounds might sound like a bad History Channel show, but this is a serious, scholarly, and fascinating book. Goodrick-Clarke looks into the subcultural origins of Nazi ideology among the pre-World War I “ariosophists,” who combined strident German nationalism with occultism borrowed from Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy. A history of cranks and marginal figures and how their “dream-world” prefigured real politics. As Napoleon said, “Imagination governs everything.”

The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich - George L. Mosse — While Goodrick-Clarke focuses on an intense subculture, Mosse shows how völkisch ideas, with their anti-liberal and anti-democratic themes, mystical intimations about the “German race” and hostility to modernity, deeply penetrated the mainstream of German culture long before the NSDAP existed. Mosse diagnoses Nazism as the combination of anti-modern völkisch ideology and modern political technique.

The Politics of Cultural Despair - Fritz Stern —Looks at the careers of three German critics of liberalism and modernity in the late 19th century and early 20th century. They were part of the “conservative revolution” movement and they contributed to the cultural atmosphere that birthed Nazism. This is a short book and Stern is an evocative writer:

They railed against the spiritual emptiness of life in an urban, commercial civilization, and lamented the decline of intellect and virtue in a mass society. They attacked the press as corrupt, the political parties as the agents of national dissension, and the new rulers as ineffectual mediocrities. The bleaker their picture of the present, the more attractive seemed the past, and they indulged in nostalgic recollections of the uncorrupted life of earlier rural communities, when men were peasants and kings true rulers. Most of them thought that this world had been destroyed by evil hands; consequently they firmly believed in a conspiratorial view of history and society.

Reactionary Modernism: Technology, culture, and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich - Jeffrey Herf — Herf deals with an apparent paradox in the Nazi movement: its simultaneous rejection of modernity and its emphasis on technological progress and development. In his words, “The reactionary modernists were nationalists who turned the romantic anticapitalism of the German Right away from backward-looking pastoralism, pointing instead to the outlines of a beautiful new order replacing the formless chaos due to capitalism in a united, technologically advanced nation.”

France —

Neither Left nor Right: Fascist Ideology in France and The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution - Zeev Sternhell — Zeev Sternhell’s work is controversial on a number of levels: he claims fascism first arose recognizably in France rather than Italy or Germany, he claims that fascism essentially crystallized in the pre-World War I environment, he claims that fascism should be understood as a cultural and intellectual phenomenon before a political one, and he claims that fascism grew out of a heresy on the left: an anti-materialist revision of socialism that drew upon right-wing nationalism and opposed liberal democracy more than capitalism, viewing democratic society as a spiritual wasteland to be replaced by a more virile and heroic world of producers.

Nationalism, Antisemitism, and Fascism in France - Michel Winock — A collection of essays by a French historian covering everything from Bonapartism to Jean-Marie Le Pen, this is one of my favorites and I often return to it. The first essay “Open Nationalism and Closed Nationalism” describes the transformation of French revolutionary patriotism, with its left-wing flavor, to right-wing nationalism in the late 19th century. Winock’s writing is bold and readable. One great turn of phrase among many: “mortuary nationalism” to describe the right’s reactionary national cult obsessed with decline and decadence.

The Politics of Resentment: Shopkeeper Politics in Nineteenth Century France - Philip Nord — Another one of my favorites: a masterful synthesis of cultural, political, and social history. The late 19th century witnessed the disruption and dislocation of the old artisanal patterns of commercial life in Paris by industrial production, department stores, national and international markets, and the redesign of the city by Baron Haussmann. Nord: “A new variant of nationalism…took shape in the fin de siecle. It spoke in populist accents, waxing lyrical about the charms of village life, the cozy quartier, the virtues of hard work and family intimacy…It claimed the shopkeeper as a natural ally—indeed recasting the petit commercant’s struggle against the department store as a recapitulation in microcosm of the nation’s own against money power.” Also great for its account of the nationalist literary scene, which brought together the bohemian demimonde and high society in a shared spirit of reaction.

A History of Fascism in France: From the First World War to the National Front - Chris Millington — French historiography is riven by a conflict: some French historians reject the notion that fascism ever had a serious foothold in democratic-republican France, which was “immune” or “allergic” to fascism and anything that looked like it was actually just conservatism, others, like Sternhell, think France was the cradle of fascism. Millington’s history charts a middle course, pointing out porousness and cross-fertilization on the right: conventional conservatives and the radical right cooperated and competed according to political conditions; parliamentarians patronized anti-parliamentary leagues, soi-disant anti-Republicans ran for office and won, moderating their rhetoric upon getting elected. Also see French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933-1939 by Robert Soucy and Millington’s and Brian Jenkin’s France and Fascism: February 1934 and the Dynamics of Political Crisis about the February 6 1934 riots at parliament.

Italy —

Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Development - Alexander De Grand — Admirably short, De Grand’s Italian Fascism is still packed with information. De Grand shows how fascism was essentially a conservative and bourgeois reaction to Italy’s interwar crisis. Far from being “totalitarian” as it claimed, Mussolini’s regime was weak, sclerotic, and cobbled together from various social interest groups who saw it as the best way to serve themselves.

The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy 1919-1922 - Adrian Lyttelton — A blow by blow political history of how the fascists seized power in Italy with a lot attention to cultural and social factors as well. The internal complexity of both the fascist movement and the Italian political scene and Mussolini’s ability to navigate both comes into focus.

Intellectuals and Culture —

The Fascist Ego: A Political Biography of Robert Brasillach - William R. Tucker — Brasillach was a young critic and novelist who embraced fascism and his biography points to the contradictions of the movement. We are accustomed to think of fascism as an ideology of social order, but for Brasillach, a self-identified anarchist, and others, it was the occasion for revolt against what he felt to be soul-dessicating modernity and the stultifying hypocrisy of bourgeois liberal society.

The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and Fascism, 1919-1945 - Alistair Hamilton — Although Fascism was essentially an anti-intellectual movement, elevating blood and brawn above brains, many intellectuals flocked to its ranks, drawn to its apparent idealism, novelty and, in particular, its cult of superhuman élites destined to reshape the world. This is a country by country look at the curiosity about and enthusiasm for fascism among European intellectuals, including many famous and not-so-famous names

Avant Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939 - Mark Antliff — A study of Georges Sorel’s idea of “political mythmaking” and its subsequent influence on the artists and intellectuals who would go on to create a fascist aesthetic, arguing that fascism has to be understood as both a political and cultural movement.