Fascism: The Career of a Concept

In Fascism: The Career of a Concept, Gottfried has set himself not one task but two equally formidable tasks. The first is to focus on the history of the term fascism with its ever-changing meanings, expanding uses, and fierce contestations. The second task is to reveal the essence of the concept by stripping it of the distorting semantic layers that have accrued to it during the nine decades of its life. In pursuing both tasks, Gottfried provides fascinating, if disjointed, insights into the changing historiographical landscape of fascism studies. This landscape qua Gottfried is indeed a strange, eclectic, and elliptical one: Gottfried points to Ernst Nolte and A. James Gregor as worthy pioneers of the conceptual history of fascism, also giving credit to Zeev Sternhell and Stanley G. Payne. But he banishes Roger Griffin’s seminal study of fascism to a bizarre appendix, almost as a hasty afterthought, and strangely...