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...
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Summer 2017
June 01 2017
Fascism: The Career of a Concept
Fascism: The Career of a Concept
. By Paul E.
Gottfried
(DeKalb
, Northern Illinois University Press
, 2016
) 256 pp. $46.00
Aristotle Kallis
Aristotle Kallis
Keele University
Search for other works by this author on:
Aristotle Kallis
Keele University
Online ISSN: 1530-9169
Print ISSN: 0022-1953
© 2017 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.
2017
MIT Press
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2017) 48 (1): 84–85.
Citation
Aristotle Kallis; Fascism: The Career of a Concept. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2017; 48 (1): 84–85. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/JINH_r_01095
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