Description
"Fascism is the definitive work on the subject inasmuch as anything final can be said about the phenomenon three decades after the event. It is the most comprehensive and systematic attempt so far to survey the existing research in the field and to define the issues that still remain subjects of controversy. The volume is at one and the same time a critical review of the state of fascist studies and an attempt to point of new avenues of research and interpretation. It is the first work on fascism to be completely interdisciplinary and to examine all aspects of the phenomenon. Among the contributors are historians, political scientists, sociologists, and economists. Part I of the work, by Juan J. Liz, is virtually a complete sociological analysis of fascism which investigates such questions as electoral support, composition of the parties and leadership, and the impact of economic depression on the upsurge of the fascist movements. Part II, contributed by Adrian Lyttelton, William Carr, Hans Mommsen, and Karl-Dietrich Bracher, covers Italian Fascism and German national socialism, domestic and foreign policy; it looks at the essentially novel elements of fascism in these countries and the specific impact of the "leader". Part III, by Bela Vago, Alistair Hennessy, and Stanley G. Payne, analyses he fascist movement in the countries in which it failed to come to power. Vago and Payne deal with eastern and western Europe respectively, and Hennessy's contribution investigates the common elements and the differences between fascism and populism in Latin America. In Part IV Zeev Sternbell examines all aspects of fascist ideology from the intellectual crises of the 1890s to totalitarianism. In Part V Alan Milward discusses fascist economic theory and practice in Germany and Italy. He analyses the various conflicting interpretations given by different school of thought and explores the question of whether one can talk of a specifically fascist economy. In Part VI Francis L. Carsten summarizes the political interpretations of fascism from its beginnings to present day, and Eugen Weber puts the fascist phenomenon into the wider historical context of modern European and world history. Weber's challenge of many conventional views suggests that they cannot withstand critical examination". - Publisher.
