Roger Griffin

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Roger Griffin is a British academic political theorist at Oxford Brookes University, England. His recent efforts have focused on a definition and examination of fascism. He has also translated works by Norberto Bobbio and Ferruccio Rossi-Landi.

Griffin's theory of fascism suggests that a heuristically useful ideal type of its definitional core is that it is a palingenetic and populist form of ultranationalism. In other words it seeks, by directly mobilizing popular energies or working through an elite, to eventually conquer cultural hegemony 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 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 marginalized compared with the central place it occupied in inter-war Europe.

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, Stanley Payne, and Emilio Gentile in highlighting the revolutionary and totalizing politico-cultural nature of the fascist revolution (in marked contrast with Marxist approaches). His latest 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 civilization and a new temporality in the West found its most comprehensive expression in the 'modernist states' of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, 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 and rave 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. These sleeve notes can be found online at [1]. Since 1999, however, he now derives his joy on a daily basis from bringing up his young son.

[edit] Works

• The Nature of Fascism (St. Martin's Press, 1991 ISBN 0-312-07132-9, Routledge, 1993, ISBN 0-415-09661-8)
• Fascism (Oxford Readers) Oxford University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-19-289249-5)
• Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science edited with Matthew Feldman (Routledge, 2004, ISBN 0-415-29015-5)
• International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (view table of contents, Edward Arnold, 1998, ISBN 0-340-70614-7)
• Fascism, Totalitarianism, and Political Religion 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)

[edit] External links

• Roger Griffin web page — Samples of writings:

Fascism and Religion

The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology

Revolution from the Right: Fascism

Notes towards the definition of fascist culture: the prospects for synergy between Marxist and liberal heuristics

How fascist was Mussolini?

The Sacred Synthesis: The Ideological Cohesion of Fascist Cultural Policy

Was Nazism fascist?

Nazism and generic fascism

"Party Time": The Temporal Revolution of the Third Reich

Hooked Crosses and Forked Paths: The Fascist Dynamics of the Third Reich

Nazi Art: Romantic Twilight or Post-modernist Dawn?

Totalitarian Art and the Nemesis of Modernity

Solving the fascist conundrum (review article)