Roger David Griffin (born 31 January 1948) [1] is a British professor of modern history and political theorist at Oxford Brookes University, England. His principal interest is the socio-historical and ideological dynamics of fascism, as well as various forms of political or religious fanaticism. [2]
Griffin obtained a First in French and German Literature from Oxford University, then began teaching History of ideas at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes). Becoming interested in the study of extremist right-wing movements and regimes which have shaped modern history, Griffin obtained a PhD from Oxford University in 1990. He first developed his palingenesis theory of fascism in his PhD thesis. [2] His best known work is The Nature of Fascism (1991). [3] In May 2011, he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Leuven in recognition of his services to the comparative study of fascism. [2]
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Griffin's theory, set out first in The Nature of Fascism in 1991, and more recently in Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies (2017), offers a heuristically useful ideal type of fascism as a form of revolutionary organic nationalist movement, or palingenetic ultranationalism. For Griffin, fascism directly mobilises popular energies or works through an elite to eventually achieve the cultural hegemony of new values and the total rebirth of the 'ultranation', whether conceived as a historic nation-state or as a race or ethnos, from what it defines as the present state of decadence. Fascism is an ideology that has assumed a large number of specific national permutations and several distinct organizational forms. Moreover, it is a political project that continues to evolve to this day throughout the Europeanized world, though it remains highly marginalised compared with the central place it occupied in inter-war Europe, and its central role in identity politics has been largely replaced by non-revolutionary forms of radical right-wing populism.
Griffin's approach, though still highly contested in some quarters, has nonetheless influenced the comparative literature on fascism of the last 25 years, drawing on the work of George Mosse, Stanley Payne, and Emilio Gentile to highlight the revolutionary and totalising politico-cultural nature of the fascist revolution in marked contrast to Marxist approaches. His book, Modernism and Fascism, locates the mainspring of the fascist drive for national rebirth in the modernist bid to achieve an alternative modernity, which is driven by a rejection of the decadence of 'actually existing modernity' under liberal democracy or tradition. The fascist attempt to institute a different civilisation and a new temporality in the West found its most comprehensive expression in the 'modernist states' of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Since 1945 fascism has diversified and can no longer form a mass movement that is populist and charismatic, having been reduced instead to terroristic attacks on liberal democratic society and those it deems 'enemies' of the 'true' nation/race and its rebirth.
His most recent research has been on terrorism. In his Terrorist's Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning he studies the origins and motivations behind terrorism. He compares the origins of terrorism to the extremes of the National Socialists in the 1930s, noting that "fanatics" separate the world into good and evil, and then undergo "heroic doubling" where they see themselves as warriors in the battle between good and evil. [4]
This theme will be pursued and deepened in his next monograph The Divisible Self: Heroic Doubling and the Origins of Modern Violence (Columbia: Agenda, Columbia University Press, September 2021).
Griffin was co-founder of the open access journal Fascism (Brill) and co-founder of COMFAS, International Association for the Comparative Study of Fascism, directed by Professor Constantin Iordachi (Central European University).
Griffin has translated works by Norberto Bobbio and Ferruccio Rossi-Landi .
Griffin used to count trance music and rave culture among his interests. He wrote the sleeve notes for the two CD volume Return To The Source: Deep Trance & Ritual Beats, explaining his liking of the genre and how it relates to society. [5]
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy. Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism, fascism is at the far right of the traditional left–right spectrum.
Neo-fascism is a post-World War II far-right ideology that includes significant elements of fascism. Neo-fascism usually includes ultranationalism, ultraconservatism, racial supremacy, right-wing populism, authoritarianism, nativism, xenophobia, and anti-immigration sentiment, sometimes with economic liberal issues, as well as opposition to social democracy, parliamentarianism, Marxism, capitalism, communism, and socialism. As with classical fascism, it occasionally proposes a Third Position as an alternative to market capitalism.
Clerical fascism is an ideology that combines the political and economic doctrines of fascism with clericalism. The term has been used to describe organizations and movements that combine religious elements with fascism, receive support from religious organizations which espouse sympathy for fascism, or fascist regimes in which clergy play a leading role.
Fascism is a book edited by political theorist Roger Griffin. It was published by Oxford University Press in 1995 as a 410-page paperback. It is a reader in the Oxford Readers series, which assembles the writings of various authors on the topic of fascism and the far-right. It serves as an English-language source book to introduce readers to pre-fascist anti-liberalism, interwar fascism in Italy and Germany, as well as associated international variants of fascism from Argentina to Japan.
The Nouvelle Droite, sometimes shortened to the initialism ND, is a far-right political movement which emerged in France during the late 1960s. The Nouvelle Droite is the origin of the wider European New Right (ENR). Various scholars of political science have argued that it is a form of fascism or neo-fascism, although the movement eschews these terms.
The European New Right (ENR) is a far-right movement which originated in France as the Nouvelle Droite in the late 1960s by Alain de Benoist. Its proponents are involved in a global "anti-structural revolt" against modernity and post-modernity, largely in the form of loosely connected intellectual communities striving to diffuse a similar philosophy within European societies.
Palingenesis is a concept of rebirth or re-creation, used in various contexts in philosophy, theology, politics, and biology. Its meaning stems from Greek palin, meaning 'again', and genesis, meaning 'birth'.
The history of fascist ideology is long and it draws on many sources. Fascists took inspiration from sources as ancient as the Spartans for their focus on racial purity and their emphasis on rule by an élite minority. Researchers have also seen links between fascism and the ideals of Plato, though there are key differences between the two. Italian Fascism, in particular, styled itself as the ideological successor to Rome, particularly the Roman Empire. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's view on the absolute authority of the state also strongly influenced fascist thinking. The 1789 French Revolution was a major influence insofar as the Nazis saw themselves as fighting back against many of the ideas which it brought to prominence, especially liberalism, liberal democracy and racial equality, whereas on the other hand, fascism drew heavily on the revolutionary ideal of nationalism. The prejudice of a "high and noble" Aryan culture as opposed to a "parasitic" Semitic culture was core to Nazi racial views, while other early forms of fascism concerned themselves with non-racialized conceptions of their respective nations.
Italian fascism, also classical fascism and Fascism, is the original fascist ideology, which Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini developed in Italy. The ideology of Italian Fascism is associated with a series of political parties led by Mussolini: the National Fascist Party (PNF), which governed the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, and the Republican Fascist Party (PFR), which governed the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945. Italian fascism also is associated with the post–war Italian Social Movement (MSI) and later Italian neo-fascist political organisations.
What constitutes a definition of fascism and fascist governments has been a complicated and highly disputed subject concerning the exact nature of fascism and its core tenets debated amongst historians, political scientists, and other scholars ever since Benito Mussolini first used the term in 1915. Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall".
Palingenetic ultranationalism is a definition of "true fascism" proposed by political theorist Roger Griffin. The phrase was first coined by Griffin in his 1991 book The Nature of Fascism. A key element is the belief that fascism can be defined by what Griffin posits in his book to be the true core myth of fascism, namely that of the need for a social revolution to occur first before a "national rebirth", palingenesis, could then take place.
The National Fascist Party was a political party in Italy, created by Benito Mussolini as the political expression of Italian fascism and as a reorganisation of the previous Italian Fasces of Combat. The party ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 when Fascists took power with the March on Rome until the fall of the Fascist regime in 1943, when Mussolini was deposed by the Grand Council of Fascism. The National Fascist Party was succeeded by the Republican Fascist Party in the territories under the control of the Italian Social Republic, and it was ultimately dissolved at the end of World War II.
Roy Starrs is a British-Canadian scholar of Japanese literature and culture who teaches at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He has written critical studies of the major Japanese writers Yasunari Kawabata, Naoya Shiga, Osamu Dazai, and Yukio Mishima, and edited books on Asian nationalism, globalization, pan-Asianism, Japanese modernism, and cultural responses to disaster in Japan. He has also published essays on Japan-related topics such as the Kojiki, Lafcadio Hearn, and Japanese calligraphy.
António Costa Pinto is Full Professor at Universidade Lusófona, Portugal. He was formerly a research professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, and Professor of Politics and Contemporary European History at ISCTE – Lisbon University Institute, Portugal.
Reactionary modernism is a term first coined by Jeffrey Herf in the 1980s to describe the mixture of "great enthusiasm for modern technology with a rejection of the Enlightenment and the values and institutions of liberal democracy" that was characteristic of the German Conservative Revolutionary movement and Nazism. In turn, this ideology of reactionary modernism was closely linked to the original, positive view of the Sonderweg, which saw Germany as the great Central European power, neither of the West nor of the East.
Roger Eatwell is a British academic currently an Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Bath.
Fascist syndicalism was an Italian trade syndicate movement that rose out of the pre-World War II provenance of the revolutionary syndicalist movement led mostly by Edmondo Rossoni, Sergio Panunzio, Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, Michele Bianchi, Alceste De Ambris, Paolo Orano, Massimo Rocca, and Guido Pighetti, under the influence of Georges Sorel, who was considered the "'metaphysician' of syndicalism". The fascist syndicalists differed from other forms of fascism in that they generally favored class struggle, worker-controlled factories and hostility to industrialists, which lead historians to portray them as "leftist fascist idealists" who "differed radically from right fascists." Generally considered one of the more radical fascist syndicalists in Italy, Rossoni was the "leading exponent of fascist syndicalism", and sought to infuse nationalism with "class struggle".
Matthew Feldman is an Anglo-American historian, literary critic and political scientist. As Emeritus Professor in the Modern History of Ideas at Teesside University, and Professorial Fellow at the University of York, Feldman specializes in fascism and the far right in Europe and the United States. He consults on neo-Nazi terrorism, hate crimes and radical right extremism for Academic Consulting Services.
Para-fascism refers to authoritarian conservative movements and regimes that adopt characteristics associated with fascism such as personality cults, paramilitary organizations, symbols and rhetoric, but it diverges from conventional fascist tenets such as palingenetic ultranationalism, modernism, and populism. It often emerges in response to the need for a facade of popular support in an age of mass politics, without a genuine commitment to revolutionary nationalism, instead focusing on maintaining tradition, religion, and culture. Para-fascist regimes may co-opt or neutralize genuine fascist movements. Examples of para-fascism include the regimes and movements of Austrofascism in Austria, Metaxism in Greece, the “New State” of Salazars’ Portugal, and Francoism in Spain.
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