Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction by Jane Caplan
- 1 Some origins of the Second World War
- 2 The primacy of politics. Politics and economics in National Socialist Germany
- 3 The origins of the Law on the Organization of National Labour of 20 January 1934. An investigation into the relationship between ‘archaic’ and ‘modern’ elements in recent German history
- 4 Internal crisis and war of aggression, 1938–1939
- 5 Women in Germany, 1925–1940. Family, welfare and work
- 6 Intention and explanation. A current controversy about the interpretation of National Socialism
- 7 The containment of the working class in Nazi Germany
- 8 The Turin strikes of March 1943
- 9 The domestic dynamics of Nazi conquests. A response to critics
- 10 Whatever happened to ‘fascism’?
- Bibliography of publications by Tim Mason
- Bibliography of works cited
- Index
10 - Whatever happened to ‘fascism’?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction by Jane Caplan
- 1 Some origins of the Second World War
- 2 The primacy of politics. Politics and economics in National Socialist Germany
- 3 The origins of the Law on the Organization of National Labour of 20 January 1934. An investigation into the relationship between ‘archaic’ and ‘modern’ elements in recent German history
- 4 Internal crisis and war of aggression, 1938–1939
- 5 Women in Germany, 1925–1940. Family, welfare and work
- 6 Intention and explanation. A current controversy about the interpretation of National Socialism
- 7 The containment of the working class in Nazi Germany
- 8 The Turin strikes of March 1943
- 9 The domestic dynamics of Nazi conquests. A response to critics
- 10 Whatever happened to ‘fascism’?
- Bibliography of publications by Tim Mason
- Bibliography of works cited
- Index
Summary
i want to argue in the notes which follow that an attempt to ‘re-evaluate’ the Third Reich in the late 1980s ought to have space for a slightly longer historiographical perspective than was evident in most of the papers and much of the discussion at the Philadelphia conference. Many different points could be raised in this context. I want to confine myself to one because it seems the most difficult and the most problematic: that is, the disappearance of theories, or articulated concepts of fascism from research and writing about the Third Reich in the course of the past twelve years or so. If it is used at all, the term now appears in the new literature (outside East Germany) in a loosely descriptive sense, devoid of theoretical baggage.
I believe that this amounts to an enormous change, both in the conceptualization of National Socialism and in the directions of new research. This change should not be passed over in silence as though fascism theory just melted away, but calls for some kind of stocktaking, towards which these remarks constitute a first fragmentary contribution. My own position on the issues involved is sufficiently muddled for me to try to write about them without having axes to grind: while I felt that the fascism debates of the 1960s and 1970s brought enduring gains to the analysis of Nazism (see below), I never took a fully active part in them; I could never rid myself of basic conceptual doubts and confusions concerning capital, I always felt that a comparative dimension was missing from the writing on German fascism, and I thus usually preferred to use the terms National Socialism or Third Reich.
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- Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class , pp. 323 - 331Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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