Roger Griffin Emeritus Professor in Modern History

"In the opinion of some historians the era of fascism ended with the deaths of Mussolini and Hitler in 1945; yet, the academic debate about its nature is as far from resolution as ever. Besides, a number of developments since 1945 make it ever more desirable that politicians, journalists, lawyers, and the general public can turn to "experts" for a heuristically useful and broadly consensual definition of the term. The novel post-war phenomena include: the emergence of a highly prolific European New Right, the rise of radical right populist parties, the flourishing of ultra-nationalist movements in the former Soviet empire, the radicalization of some currents of Islam and Hinduism into potent political forces, and the upsurge of religious terrorism. This book brings alive the intense controversy the topic has generated, while suggesting valuable heuristic strategies for resolving it. Twenty-nine academics, mostly German but including several prominent experts working in English, were invited by the journal "Erwaegen Wissen Ethik" to engage with an article by Roger Griffin, one of the most influential theorists in the study of generic fascism in the Anglophone world. The result is essential reading for all those who realize the need to provide the term "fascism" with theoretical rigour, analytical precision, and empirical content. The book will change the way in which historians and political scientists think about fascism, and make the discussion on the threat it poses to infant democracies like Russia more incisive not just for academics, but for politicians, journalists, and the wider public.
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS (with their affiliations as of 2004): David Baker, Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Warwick; Jeffrey M. Bale, Assistant Professor of International Policy Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, California; Tamir Bar-On, Professor of Politics and Sociology at George Brown College at Toronto; Alexander De Grand, Professor of History at North Carolina State University; Martin Durham, Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Wolverhampton; Roger Eatwell, Professor of European Politics at the University of Bath; Peter Fritzsche, Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; A. James Gregor, Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley; Roger Griffin, Professor in the History of Ideas at Oxford Brookes University; Siegfried Jäger, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen; Klaus Holz, Director of the Evangelisches Studienwerk e.V. at Villigst, Nordrhein-Westfalen; Aristotle Kallis, Lecturer in European Studies at Lancaster University; Melitta Konopka, social psychologist at Bochum; Walter Laqueur, Professor Emeritus of History at Georgetown University, Washington, DC; Werner Loh, Research Fellow in Social Sciences at the University of Paderborn, Nordrhein-Westfalen; Bärbel Meurer, Professor of Sociology at the University of Osnabrück; Philip Morgan, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary European History at the University of Hull; Ernst Nolte, Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the Free University of Berlin; Kevin Passmore, Lecturer in History at the University of Cardiff, Wales; Stanley G. Payne, Hilldale-Jaume Vicens Vives Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Friedrich Pohlmann, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau; Karin Priester, Professor of Sociology at the University of Münster; Sven Reichardt, Junior Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Konstanz; David D. Roberts, Albert Berry Saye Professor of History at the University of Georgia; Alfred Schobert, Research Fellow in Social Sciences at the Duisburger Institut für Sprach- und Sozialforschung; Robert J. Soucy, Professor Emeritus of History at Oberlin College, Ohio; Mario Sznajder, Leon Blum Professor of Political Science at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Andreas Umland, DAAD Lecturer in German Studies at the National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyïv; Leonard Weinberg, Foundation Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada; Jan Weyand is a Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg; Wolfgang Wippermann, Professor of Modern History at the Free University of Berlin."

Recent years have seen major political crises throughout the world, and foreign policy analysts nearly universally expect to see rising tensions within (and between) countries in the next 5–20 years. Being able to predict future crises and to assess the resilience of different countries to various shocks is of foremost importance in averting the potentially huge human costs of state collapse and civil war. The premise of this paper is that a transdisciplinary approach to forecasting social breakdown, recovery, and resilience is entirely feasible, as a result of recent breakthroughs in statistical analysis of large-scale historical data, the qualitative insights of historical and semiotic investigations, and agent-based models that translate between micro-dynamics of interacting individuals and the collective macro-level events emerging from these interactions. Our goal is to construct a series of probabilistic scenarios of social breakdown and recovery, based on historical crises and outcomes, which can aid the analysis of potential outcomes of future crises. We call this approach—similar in spirit to ensemble forecasting in weather prediction—multipath forecasting (MPF). This paper aims to set out the methodological premises and basic stages envisaged to realize this goal within a transdisciplinary research collaboration: first, the statistical analysis of a massive database of past instances of crisis to determine how actual outcomes (the severity of disruption and violence, the speed of resolution) depend on inputs (economic, political, and cultural factors); second, the encoding of these analytical insights into probabilistic, empirically informed computational models of societal breakdown and recovery—the MPF engine; third, testing the MPF engine to “predict” the trajectories and outcomes of another set of past social upheavals, which were not used in building the model. This “historical retrodiction” is an innovation that will allow us to further refine the MPF technology. Ultimately our vision is to use MPF to help write what we call “a history of possible futures,” in which the near- and medium-term paths of societies are probabilistically forecast.