A Review of Fascism

Paper Summary:

This paper looks at how Stanley Payne attempts to define fascism in his book "Fascism: Comparison and Definition". The paper explains that in order to address the challenge of fascism, we must understand what fascism is. The paper discusses how fascism went through a series of stages in Italy and Germany and how Hitler created what was arguably the purest fascist state, although it did not conform fully to the principles of fascism. The paper notes that Spain and Portugal represent two other case studies for Payne, but he finds in neither of them the true fascist regime. The writer points out that Payne covered a tremendous range of sources ,as the footnotes throughout the book show, but unfortunately Payne leaves a much more profound question unasked and unanswered: Do we need to re-examine the history and meaning of fascism to determine if it is becoming a prevalent force in parts of the world that Payne found no reason to discuss, and is the United States in danger of becoming fascist?

From the Paper:

"Payne reviews the antecedents of modern fascism and finds these in the "corporatist" movement, a movement which sought to combined social orders under an authoritarian government working closely with business cartels, in reaction to chaotic individualism.(23-24 ) It was also a reaction to the splintered state of many democratic movements (25-26), and a neomonarchist movement (27-29), and a support movement for imperialist policies. (29-31) All of these forces converged at a time of terrible cultural crisis as the First World War tore Europe and European sensibilities to pieces. In the psychological void that followed, many people found comfort in the simplicity of authoritarian answer."

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• Essay # 66529 : "The Chaos of the Interwar Period"
• Book Review # 101417 : "The Coming of the Third Reich" by Richard Evans"

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