Dave Renton is a left-wing writer and historian.
Renton is a great-nephew of the Communist historian Dona Torr and the explorer Rosita Forbes. His maternal grandfather was the Australian shoe designer and Holocaust survivor Kurt Geiger, and his paternal uncle is Tim Renton, Baron Renton of Mount Harry.
Renton studied as an undergraduate at Oxford University with Ross McKibbin and as a postgraduate at Sheffield with Richard Thurlow and Colin Holmes (British historian), before teaching at various universities in Britain and South Africa. At Oxford, Renton was one of the organisers of a campaign to commemorate murdered refugee Said Guleid Ahmed.
His two best-known books are Fascism, theory and practice, and When we touched the Sky. Fascism, theory and practice criticises the "new consensus" theory of fascism associated with Roger Griffin and others, in which fascism is understood as a form of palingenetic ultranationalism. Renton's approach is to analyse fascism as a specific form of reactionary mass politics. In contrast to Griffin, Renton places greater emphasis on what he portrays as a key contradiction between the popular support many fascist parties have enjoyed, and their ideology, which was radically inegalitarian and anti-democratic. Fascism, in Renton's argument, is always a tentative politics, capable of rapid growth but also organisational lethargy or even collapse.
In When we touched the Sky, Renton considers the part played by anti-fascists in the Anti-Nazi League in bringing about the defeat of the British National Front.
He works as a barrister in London.