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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2009
David Roberts has published widely on Italian fascism and more recently a significant comparative study of totalitarianism in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. The short essay published here is a useful compression of the arguments presented in the longer work. Unfortunately, this piece represents all that is problematic and frustrating in totalitarian/political religion studies. Roberts gives us a useful review of the growth and evolution of totalitarianism and political religion from the inter-war period through the Cold War until we reach the sunny postmodern uplands of the cultural turn. A review of the arguments of Gentile, Griffin, Morgan, Kershaw, Eatwell, Payne, Burrin and Voegelin is helpful to the reader who is unfamiliar with a series of complex arguments, which straddle decades.
1 Roberts, David D., The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe. Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar.
2 Gentile, Emilio, ‘La nazione del fascismo. Alle origini della crisi dello Stato nazionale in Italia’, Storia Contemporanea, 24, 6 (1993), 857–8Google Scholar.
3 Brooker, Paul, The Faces of Fraternalism: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 289–315 (esp. 314)Google Scholar. I discuss Gentile and Brooker in Levy, Carl, ‘Fascism, National Socialism and Conservatives in Europe, 1914–1945: Issues for Comparativists’, Contemporary European History, 8, 1 (1999), 104–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Griffin, Roger, ed., Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5–6Google Scholar.
5 I discuss Mussolini's ideological formation in Levy, Carl, ‘“Sovversivismo”: The Radical Political Culture of Otherness in Liberal Italy’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 12, 2 (2007), 147–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Williams, Robert, The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics, 1904–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.
7 I criticise the overemphasis on the coherence of Italian syndicalism, in Carl Levy, ‘Currents of Italian Syndicalism before 1926’, 45 2 (2000), 209–50.
8 For a new overall view of the connection between colonial war and the modern instruments of genocide see Annette Becker and Georges Bensoussan, eds., ‘Violences de guerre, violences coloniales, violences extrêmes avant la Shoah’, Revue d'histoire de la Shoah, 189, July–December 2008.