Rather than treating fascism as an historical aberration safely sealed inside Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany, Mark Neocleous asks what kind of political logic made it possible.

His argument places fascism inside the contradictions of modern capitalism: revolutionary in its appetite for transformation, reactionary in what it seeks to restore, and dependent upon an imagined national past that must be invented before it can be “reborn.” 

Neocleous follows fascism through its attacks on liberalism, Marxism and Enlightenment reason, examining mass psychology, myth, nationalism, race, violence and the cult of leadership. Particularly useful is his account of “reactionary modernism”: fascism does not simply reject modernity but embraces technology, mobilisation and perpetual innovation while directing them towards hierarchy, racial fantasy and domination. The future becomes a machine for manufacturing a past that never existed.

Compact but theoretically substantial, this is less a general history than an anatomy of fascist thought. It belongs beside writers such as Zeev Sternhell, George Mosse and Roger Griffin, but its Marxist emphasis on capitalism, class and political reason gives it a sharper material edge. A strong introduction for readers trying to understand fascism as a recurring structure rather than a costume left behind in the 1930s.

University of Minnesota Press/Open University Press, 1997 first-edition hardcover. No dust jacket as issued; bumped and rubbed corners, light marking to boards, internally clean.