Roger Griffin
Encyclopedia
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
academic
Academia
Academia is the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.-Etymology:The word comes from the akademeia in ancient Greece. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning...
political theorist at Oxford Brookes University
Oxford Brookes University
Oxford Brookes University is a new university in Oxford, England. It was named to honour the school's founding principal, John Brookes. It has been ranked as the best new university by the Sunday Times University Guide 10 years in a row...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. His recent efforts have focused on a definition and examination of fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
. He has also translated works by Norberto Bobbio
Norberto Bobbio
Norberto Bobbio was an Italian philosopher of law and political sciences and a historian of political thought. He also wrote regularly for the Turin-based daily La Stampa....
and Ferruccio Rossi-Landi.
Griffin's theory of fascism suggests that a heuristically
Heuristic
Heuristic refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. Heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution, where an exhaustive search is impractical...
useful ideal type
Ideal type
Ideal type , also known as pure type, is a typological term most closely associated with antipositivist sociologist Max Weber . For Weber, the conduct of social science depends upon the construction of hypothetical concepts in the abstract...
of its definitional core is that it is a form of palingenetic ultranationalism
Palingenetic ultranationalism
Palingenetic ultranationalism is a theory concerning generic fascism formulated by British political theorist Roger Griffin. The key elements are that fascism can be defined by its core myth, namely that of "national rebirth" — palingenesis...
. In other words it seeks, by directly mobilizing popular energies or working through an elite, to eventually conquer cultural hegemony
Cultural hegemony
Cultural hegemony is the philosophic and sociological theory, by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, that a culturally diverse society can be dominated by one social class, by manipulating the societal culture so that its ruling-class worldview is imposed as the societal norm, which then is...
for new values, to bring about the total rebirth of the nation from its present decadence, whether the nation is conceived as a historically formed nation-state or a racially determined 'ethnos'. Conceived in these terms, fascism is an ideology
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
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
Europeanisation
Europeanisation refers to a number of related phenomena and patterns of change:*The process in which a notionally non-European subject adopts a number of European features...
world, though it remains highly marginalized compared with the central place it occupied in inter-war
Interwar period
Interwar period can refer to any period between two wars. The Interbellum is understood to be the period between the end of the Great War or First World War and the beginning of the Second World War in Europe....
Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
.
Griffin's approach, though still highly contested in some quarters, has had an enduring impact on the comparative fascist literature of the last 15 years, and builds on the work of George Mosse
George Mosse
George Lachmann Mosse was a German-born American social and cultural historian. Mosse authored 25 books on a variety of fields, from English constitutional law, Lutheran theology, to the history of fascism, Jewish history, and the history of masculinity...
, Stanley Payne, and Emilio Gentile
Emilio Gentile
Emilio Gentile is an Italian historian specializing in the ideology and culture of fascism. Gentile is considered one of Italy's foremost cultural historians of fascist ideology. He is a student of Renzo De Felice....
in highlighting the revolutionary and totalizing politico-cultural nature of the fascist revolution (in marked contrast with Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
approaches). His latest book, Modernism and Fascism, locates the mainspring of the fascist drive for national rebirth in the modernist
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
bid to achieve an alternative modernity
Modernity
Modernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, one marked by the move from feudalism toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance...
, which is driven by a rejection of the decadence of 'actually existing modernity' under liberal democracy
Liberal democracy
Liberal democracy, also known as constitutional democracy, is a common form of representative democracy. According to the principles of liberal democracy, elections should be free and fair, and the political process should be competitive...
or tradition. The fascist attempt to institute a different civilization and a new temporality in the West
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
found its most comprehensive expression in the 'modernist states' of Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
and Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
, which also revealed the destructive and self-destructive nature of all fascist political projects to 'regenerate' the nation or achieving cultural renewal.
Outside of his academic life, Griffin used to count trance music
Trance music
Trance is a genre of electronic dance music that developed in the 1990s.:251 It is generally characterized by a tempo of between 125 and 150 bpm,:252 repeating melodic synthesizer phrases, and a musical form that builds up and breaks down throughout a track...
and rave
Rave
Rave, rave dance, and rave party are parties that originated mostly from acid house parties, which featured fast-paced electronic music and light shows. At these parties people dance and socialize to dance music played by disc jockeys and occasionally live performers...
culture among his many interests, writing the sleeve notes for the two CD volume Return To The Source: Deep Trance & Ritual Beats explaining his liking of the genre and, in keeping with his academic background, how it relates to society.
Works
- The Nature of Fascism (St. Martin's PressSt. Martin's PressSt. Martin's Press is a book publisher headquartered in the Flatiron Building in New York City. Currently, St. Martin's Press is one of the United States' largest publishers, bringing to the public some 700 titles a year under eight imprints, which include St. Martin's Press , St...
, 1991 ISBN 0-312-07132-9, RoutledgeRoutledgeRoutledge is a British publishing house which has operated under a succession of company names and latterly as an academic imprint. Its origins may be traced back to the 19th-century London bookseller George Routledge...
, 1993, ISBN 0-415-09661-8) - FascismFascism (book)Fascism is a 1995 book edited by Roger Griffin. 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...
(Oxford Readers) (Oxford University PressOxford University PressOxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
, 1995, ISBN 0-19-289249-5) - Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science edited with Matthew FeldmanMatthew FeldmanMatthew Feldman was an American Democratic Party politician who served as a New Jersey State Senator, Mayor of Teaneck, New Jersey, and onetime candidate for Governor of New Jersey....
(RoutledgeRoutledgeRoutledge is a British publishing house which has operated under a succession of company names and latterly as an academic imprint. Its origins may be traced back to the 19th-century London bookseller George Routledge...
, 2004, ISBN 0-415-29015-5) - International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (view table of contents, Edward ArnoldEdward Arnold (publisher)Edward Arnold Publishers Ltd is a British publishing house with its head office in London. The firm has been publishing books for over 100 years. It is a member of the Hodder Education group. Edward Arnold publishes books and journals for students, academics and professionals.-Bibliography:*...
, 1998, ISBN 0-340-70614-7) - Fascism, Totalitarianism, and Political Religion RoutledgeRoutledgeRoutledge is a British publishing house which has operated under a succession of company names and latterly as an academic imprint. Its origins may be traced back to the 19th-century London bookseller George Routledge...
, 2006, ISBN 0-415-34793-9) - Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (view Table of contents, Introduction, and Index, Palgrave, 2007, ISBN 1-403-98783-1)
- A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin, ed. by Matthew FeldmanMatthew FeldmanMatthew Feldman was an American Democratic Party politician who served as a New Jersey State Senator, Mayor of Teaneck, New Jersey, and onetime candidate for Governor of New Jersey....
(view Table of contents, Chapter 1, and Index, Palgrave, 2008, ISBN 0-230-22089-4)