The fascist revolution : toward a general theory of fascism /

Mosse (history, Univ. of Wisconsin) explains fascism as a revolutionary, nationalistic mass movement manipulating cultic symbols, festivals, and rites into an apocalyptic civic religion. He identifies common assumptions from the many varieties of European fascism. Fascists substituted modern mass politics for pluralistic and parliamentary government. Youth who sought meaning, action, and excitement to relieve their boredom dominated the movement. Fascistic romantic idealism borrowed from stereotypical male images born of the war experience. Whereas many studies of fascism consider mainly political, economic, and social factors, Mosse explores fascist aesthetics, its relationship to the avant-garde, the theater, and the Nazi concept of beauty. He sees several historical connections between French nationalism and fascism. Both movements consciously used Christian forms in order to construct a rival secular religion. During the French revolution Europeans were introduced to a new kind of politics mobilizing and integrating the masses into a movement that played on the need for community and friendship; this was expanded by the fascists. Mosse gives an insider's view of fascism in this insightful, synthetical work. This volume will be of interest to undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. M. S. Power Arkansas State University

For a generation, Mosse, currently an emeritus professor, has been a key contributor to fascism's cultural and intellectual history. In classic works, he has explored German, Italian, and European culture and ideology, politics and political symbolism, racism and nationalism, and attitudes toward respectability and sexuality. Here, he gathers and revises essays originally published over the past three decades, many previously available only in multiauthor collections or foreign journals. The first, which supplies the collection's subtitle, offers a masterful overview of twentieth-century European fascism based on the author's lifelong effort "to understand the movement on its own terms." Other essays address fascism's attitudes toward the French Revolution, intellectuals, the avant garde, homosexuality, and the complex relationship between racism and nationalism. Mosse closes with an essay originally published in connection with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's 1991 "Degenerate Art" exhibit, "Nazi Aesthetics: Beauty without Sensuality." Readers curious about why Germans (and Italians) supported their fascist leaders will find Mosse's work indispensable. --Mary Carroll

A brief yet invaluable reassessment, from one of our most insightful and profound thinkers on the nature of fascism. Co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary History and author of nearly two dozen books (e.g., Fallen Soldiers: Replacing the Memory of the World Wars, 1990), Mosse has helped to shape our contemporary understanding of fascism--and, consequently, of 20th-century history. He's trained dozens of practicing historians, leaving the field indelibly altered. The essays collected here have all appeared previously in academic journals and scholarly volumes. In them Mosse examines facets of fascism. (Following the usual convention, "fascism" refers to the generic phenomenon, while "Fascism" alludes to the Italian variant.) His topics include fascist aesthetics, theater, and the avant-garde; fascism and the French Revolution; the nexus between fascism, nationalism, and racism; fascism and the role of intellectuals; fascism (or in this case, specifically National Socialism) and the occult; and fascism and homosexuality. The author opens his introduction by acknowledging the changing interpretations of fascism over the last five decades. His own method might be described as cultural analysis--or, to borrow a term from Clifford Geertz and cultural anthropology, "thick description." To be sure, class analysis, long favored by many Marxist and leftist historians, fails to fully capture fascism's essence. And yet even a cultural approach poses certain inherent difficulties. For, as Mosse and others have pointed out, a paradox lies at the heart of "fascist studies": Intellectuals have chosen to use rational analysis to study and explain a movement that's irrational by its very nature--as well as hostile to the West's humanistic tradition. Hardly an introductory work for the novice, but instead a fundamental summation of a lifetime. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.