Roger Griffin
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This biography of a living person does not include any references or sources. (April 2013) |
Roger D. Griffin (born 31 January 1948) is a British academic political theorist at Oxford Brookes University, England. His recent efforts have focused on a definition and examination of fascism. He has also translated works by Norberto Bobbio and Ferruccio Rossi-Landi.
Griffin's theory of fascism suggests that a heuristically useful ideal type of its definitional core is that it is a form of palingenetic ultranationalism. In other words it seeks, by directly mobilizing popular energies or working through an elite, to eventually conquer cultural hegemony for new values, to bring about the total rebirth of the nation from its present decadence, whether the nation is conceived as a historically formed nation-state or a racially determined 'ethnos'. Conceived in these terms, fascism is an ideology that has assumed a large number of specific national permutations and several distinct organizational forms. Moreover, it is a political project that continues to evolve to this day throughout the Europeanized world, though it remains highly marginalized compared with the central place it occupied in inter-war Europe.
Griffin's approach, though still highly contested in some quarters, has had an enduring impact on the comparative fascist literature of the last 15 years, and builds on the work of George Mosse, Stanley Payne, and Emilio Gentile in highlighting the revolutionary and totalizing politico-cultural nature of the fascist revolution (in marked contrast with Marxist approaches). His latest book, Modernism and Fascism, locates the mainspring of the fascist drive for national rebirth in the modernist bid to achieve an alternative modernity, which is driven by a rejection of the decadence of 'actually existing modernity' under liberal democracy or tradition. The fascist attempt to institute a different civilization and a new temporality in the West found its most comprehensive expression in the 'modernist states' of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, which also revealed the destructive and self-destructive nature of all fascist political projects to 'regenerate' the nation or achieving cultural renewal.
Griffin's recent research has been on terrorism. In his Terrorist's Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning he studies the origins and motivations behind terrorism. He explores the nature of fear in post-modern society, alongside the "metapolitical" universe of the terrorist.
See also [edit]
Works [edit]
- The Nature of Fascism (St. Martin's Press, 1991 ISBN 0-312-07132-9, Routledge, 1993, ISBN 0-415-09661-8)
- Fascism (Oxford Readers) (Oxford University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-19-289249-5)
- International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (view table of contents, Edward Arnold, 1998, ISBN 0-340-70614-7)
- Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science edited with Matthew Feldman (Routledge, 2004, ISBN 0-415-29015-5)
- Fascism, Totalitarianism, and Political Religion Routledge, 2006, ISBN 0-415-34793-9)
- Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (view Table of contents, Introduction, and Index, Palgrave, 2007, ISBN 1-4039-8783-1)
- A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin, ed. by Matthew Feldman (view Table of contents, Chapter 1, and Index, Palgrave, 2008, ISBN 0-230-22089-4)
- Terrorist's Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning, Palgrave, 2012, ISBN 0-230-24129-8.
