Roger D . Griffin Emeritus Professor in Modern History - Curriculum Vitae

Roger David Griffin REFERENCES Full disclosure: This Wikipedia article has been submitted by an academic working in areas which often have a bearing on fascism who has been directly influenced by and indebted to Griffin’s publications and collegiality. Many of the biographical details have been provided through direct communication with him. (born 31 January 1948) is a British professor (now emeritus) of modern ideological, political and cultural history who between 1972 and 2018 delivered courses and dissertation supervision at BA, MA and doctoral level for the History department at Oxford Brookes University (UK). Since the early 1990s his numerous publications, talks, keynotes, and media interviews have earned him an outstanding international reputation as an expert on the application and misapplication of the term “fascism”, as well as being a respected commentator on wider issues relating to its nature as an ideology and the threat which it, along with other members of the extended family of far right ideologies, poses to liberal, socialist, democratic, humanistic, and ecologically informed values. In particular, the impact of his succinct, one-sentence definition of fascism The one sentence definition was first published in chapter 2, "A New Ideal Type of Generic Fascism" , ofThe Nature of Fascism (1991): “Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is populist form of palingenetic ultranationalism.” first published in 1991 is widely credited for helping the (non-Marxist) comparative study of fascism to mature, after seven decades of radical conflict and taxonomic confusion over the term, into a conceptually coherent and flourishing transnational and transdisciplinary academic discipline. Despite considerable initial indifference and scepticism from the university establishment about the unorthodox approach he proposed in The Nature of Fascism, it has proved to be the one of the most “disruptive” and influential books in the history of fascist studies. It broke a number of taboos in the way fascism was approached and offered a working definition which laid the basis for a productive scholarly consensus finally to emerge around about the value of the paradigm he proposed. This gradually replaced the Babelic scattering into mutually unintelligible discourses that routinely occurred whenever experts had gathered to discuss it since Mussolini’s creation of the first Fascio in March 1919. It was a momentary despair at this previous state of affairs that had led Professor Stuart Woolf, a major authority on fascism at the time, to suggest in 1968 (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that ‘Perhaps the word fascism should be banned, at least temporarily, from our political vocabulary’. Stuart Woolf (ed.), European fascism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 132. By the turn of the millennium, conferences on fascism with a high degree of consensus and fruitful communication had first become possible in no small measure as a result of the diffusion of Griffin’s pioneering take on fascism as a revolutionary ideology with a coherent “mythic core” which has come to be known in a phrase synonymous with his theory of fascism “palingenetic ultranationalism”. It was a breakthrough that was particularly palpable among a new generation of scholars researching its highly heterogenous national expressions. This achievement was officially acknowledged when in May 2011 Griffin received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Leuven in recognition of his services to the comparative study of fascism. By then Griffin had placed himself at the forefront of fascist studies, with a stream of articles and a major monograph, Modernism and Fascism (2007), which were being widely cited, and whose core ideas were no longer being marginalized by the bigwigs of mainstream historical and political studies, even if several continued to belittle his work. In 2012 he became the founding editor of Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, Published by Brill till 2025. Now published by " is a peer-reviewed academic publication co-published by the Central European University (CEU) Press (as an imprint of Amsterdam University Press) and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. and three years later co-founded COMFAS (The International Association for Comparative Fascist Studies), its first convention jointly organized in Budapest with Constantin Iordachi of the Central European University (now located in Vienna thanks to the hostility of Viktor Orbán). Its annual conferences hosted in different countries epitomize the vitality and transnational character of comparative fascist studies and the sheer variety of topics and creative projects it now subsumes. This success may stem in part from Griffin’s original enthusiasm for the vision of fascist studies as a collaborative enterprise. However, primarily it must be attributed to the intrinsic heuristic value of the paradigm of fascism as a revolutionary form of ultranationalism which he had been the first to formulate in a succinct definition. His idea of fascism as revolutionary and futural in its temporality had been anticipated, influenced or confirmed by a number of major scholars who had prepared the ground with their own idiosyncratic work in this area, notably George Mosse, Stanley Payne, Zeev Sternhell, and Emilio Gentile. The “eureka moment” and after It can be seen from this outline of his background, that Griffin’s path to becoming an internationally recognized researcher into, and authority on, the “nature” of generic fascism was far from orthodox. Indeed, it was only in his mid-career as a “New University” lecturer with no PhD, and working in an area remote from his undergraduate degree, that a coherent research question took shape in his mind which fully engaged him emotionally, ethically and intellectually. In many ways he was and remains the opposite of the typical “career academic” spawned by elite universities. Unconsciously, perhaps, he was guided less by ambition to achieve peer recognition or academic “success”, and more by the principle established by Arthur Koestler (one of his formative influences) in The Act of Creation that when "genuine fascination" with a question finds itself in a “blocked situation”`—in this case the conundrum posed by the definition of fascism—it can lead to "creative obsession`’, the primary driver of discovery and originality in both the human and natural sciences. Koestler coins a new term for the cognitive thrill that occurs when the stubborn enigma or thorny research question suddenly resolves itself into a new productive insight, the "Aha!" moment: “bisociation”. This is the instant when two previously unconnected frames of reference collide to produce deeper understanding. Arthur Koestler explained his theory of bisociation in chapter one of The Act of Creation (1964) For Griffin the two unconnected frames that suddenly synchronized to produce a new synthesis with respect of fascism were: a) his extensive though unsystematic reading in comparative religion and cultural anthropology, particularly in the work of Mircea Eliade The myth of rebirth was central to Mircea Eliade’s work on the world’s religions, rituals and mythologies and was addressed directly in his Birth and Rebirth (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958. Before moving to the US after the war, he had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Romanian fascist movement, The Legionaries of the Archangel Michael. and Carl Jung, Carl Jung (who had Nazi sympathies in the early years of his study of the human “collective unconscious”, treated the myth of rebirth as an archetype and addressed the topic specifically in the 1939 essay “Concerning Rebirth” republished in Volume 9, Part 1 of his Collected Works: Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). which familiarized him with the archetypal, transcultural myth of rebirth so central to human psychology, metaphysical longings, religious myth and cultural production the world over; and b) the extensive exploration of fascist ideology in programmatic and propagandistic writing, performative speeches, and ritual symbology. These he read using the core skill he had internalized from his study of two modern literatures: a methodological—strategic rather than identificatory—empathy with the world-view of the individual writer or thinker. In other words, an open-minded curiosity to discover how their creativity and originality that made them worth studying decades or even centuries later reflected: how they reflected and refracted the dominant paradigms of cultural thought, ethical landscape, and received diagnosis of the human condition prevalent in their life time, whether it was Dante, Voltaire, Goethe, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Rilke, Mann, or Beckett. In short, how a period “ism” or taxonomic term from the History of Ideas (Classicism, Romanticism, Symbolism, Naturalism, the Enlightenment, Decadence, Existentialism), how the Zeitgeist, simultaneously shaped and was shaped in its contents and connotations symbiotically by unique “creatives” who are now seen as the embodiments of those generic phenomena. Thus it was, that by reading extensively in a dilettante, somewhat random way— unprepared for by and inconsistent with conventional professional postgraduate specialization in the Historical or Human Sciences—an academic question emerged “organically” through the meeting of internal and external factors that sparked Griffin’s “creative obsession” with defining fascism. This crystallized in the determination to break the deadlock in fascist studies only at a point in his career when he felt the urgent need to move on from the frustrating abundance of irreconcilable rival theories that he was delivering in the undergraduate course he was leading. It was a situation which meant simply presenting the lack of consensual definition among “experts”, and that by default he was asking his students to duplicate or reflect in their essay work and exams. Each week he summarized another theory of fascism which cumulatively created an embarras de richesse of alternative approaches and paradigms. But at the time he could offer no methodological guidance which would help the more ambitious student to break out of relativism, understand how this chronic lack of consensus had come about and, more importantly, suggest a way out of the conceptual labyrinth. Once he his subject formulated itself, it is arguable that it was precisely his lack of any formal qualifications or in-depth background knowledge about his subject that preserved his “beginner’s mind” “Beginner’s mind” is a concept central to the meditation techniques of Zen Buddhism. The Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki stated in his Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Boulder, Colorado: Weatherhill, 1970) "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few." and ensured that he approached the “fascist conundrum” Richard A. H. Robinson in his pamphlet Fascism in Europe 1919–1945 published by the London based History Association in 1981 described fascism as an irreducible “conundrum” (thereby vitiating the conceptual coherence and rigour of his own survey history). This did not stop the Association reprinting the pamphlet unchanged in 2010! free from the prevalent preconceptions and misconceptions about fascism which would otherwise have blocked or misdirected his own exploration of its nature. Examples of such prejudices were its deeply reactionary nature, its essentially capitalist or bourgeois character, its visceral anti-modernity and longing to return to the past, its hostility to “culture”, and above all, its lack of an ideology—beyond unadulterated nihilism, irrationalism or cult of violence. Fascism’s “exceptionalism” in this respect dictated that it had to be treated differently from other political isms in the Human Sciences, nearly all of which are by contrast reconstructed in terms of the belief-system and ideals of their prominent activists and disseminators, however odious to the researcher. By breaking with this tradition of imposing assumptions about the nature of fascism from outside, Griffin was following many of the principles established by the greatest pioneer of liberal fascist studies: George Mosse. In his voluminous writings on Nazism and generic fascism he had established many of the key components of Griffin’s, in particular its revolutionary nature. However, he had never seemed interested in resolving them into a succinct definition, presumably because his first-hand experience of the Third Reich and the horrific fates imposed on his family and his Jewish people made him reluctant to reduce such lived experience to an abstract verbal formula. Thus somewhat ironically, it was left to Griffin’s to use his doctorate to offer a single sentence definition of fascism in the Mossean lineage, and in doing so gain his first academic qualification in Political or Human Sciences to undertake such a task. Gained 20 years after his first degree, the thesis was originally entitled The Rebirth of a Nation, His supervisor insisted on changing the title to The Rebirth of Nations thereby removing the allusion. a direct allusion to D. W. Griffith’s outrageously racist silent film of 1915 about the foundation of the US. It is quite possible that this circuitous path to gaining his credentials as a postdoctoral researcher may have cast long shadows over his academic legitimacy and credibility for some within the higher echelons of British academia, and might help account for the hostility of the internal examiner in his viva examination. In his DPhil viva held in St Antony’s College, Oxford, the internal examiner Sir Ralf Dahrendorf, was keen to fail Griffin’s dissertation and took exception to the notion that fascism was not “anti-modern”. However, Ian Kershaw (now Sir Ian Kershaw) insisted that there was “something in his thesis” and his benign intervention prevented Griffin’s theory falling at the first hurdle. The first published exposition of his theory was a reworking and expansion on this DPhil thesis, which appeared under the misleading title The Nature of Fascism (1991), chosen to make the volume fit into a book series on “the nature of the right”. Inevitably, given his non-existent profile in the Human Sciences, it was utterly ignored and only just spared the ignominy of being pulped. In it he analysed the methodological fallacies that had prevented a working definition emerging in the previous seventy years; laid out the schematic ideal type of generic fascism which located its mythic core in a populist form of "genetic ultranationalism, a minimalist definition which he has maintained to this day with only minor modifications to take account of post-war developments (such as the postponement of the revolutionary moment till after the present interregnum and the shift from the nation state to the race as the primary entity to be regenerated); illustrated its heuristic value by applying first it to a survey history of the Fascist and Nazi regimes; then to abortive interwar fascisms; and finally to postwar developments in fascist ideology and organization with some concluding reflections on the preconditions for fascism to emerge and the increased relevance of fascist studies in a post-Soviet era where extreme nationalism was already on the rise. Griffin’s focus on the many permutations of fascism, its transnational dimension so crucial to the Nazi vision of a “New European Order”, and its radical transformation and diversification after 1945, makes nonsense of the occasional charge levelled at his concept of fascism that it is static and ignoring its dynamic, shape-shifting and international character. In fact, a significant percentage of the articles, courses on fascism and keynotes that he has given since 1991 have concerned the evolution of fascism since the defeat of the Axis powers, and the very different forms it has taken organizationally, tactically and ideologically, something that sets his work on fascism apart from his precursors. E.g. his chapter “Interregnum or endgame? Radical Right Thought in the 'Post-fascist' Era”, in Michael Freeden (ed.), Reassessing Political Ideologies (Routledge, London, 2001), 116-131. Payne, Sternhell, Gentile, Gregor, Paxton, de Felice, Mann, for example, ignore (or treat as largely irrelevant to understanding fascism’s “nature”) the rich developments in fascism after 1945. This naturally invalidate elements of a generic definition based exclusively on the period 1919-1945, such as paramilitarism, leader cult, territorial expansionism or corporatism as definitional aspects of generic fascism since they are all symptomatic of fascism when it becomes a mass movement, which is dependent on external factors. Furthermore, Griffin has made several major excursuses from his central work on political fascism to consider adjacent phenomena with which it overlaps or is frequently confused; the most important being modernism, terrorism, and right-wing populism. Beyond palingenetic ultranationalism: modernism, terrorism, right-wing populism Modernism and the modernist state One recurrent charge against fascism common in the days when it was still seen as an “anti-phenomenon”, defined by what it is against rather than what it is for, was that fascism is hostile to culture, indeed a destroyer of culture, especially any work of creativity with a hint of aesthetic modernism. The prevailing attitude was summed up in the judgement of political theorist and survivor of Fascism, Norberto Bobbio who famously declared in a 1982 interview with the Italian news magazine L'Espresso: "Where there was culture, there was no fascism; where there was fascism, there was no culture. There never was a fascist culture." Refuting this simplistic assertion with a wealth of detail, Griffin’s Modernism and Fascism: The sense of a beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (2007) argues that on the contrary both regimes made central to their reconstruction of a new type of state the inauguration of a cultural renaissance which simultaneously would demonstrate the victory over decadence and the reawakening of the national genius. The fine arts, song, cinema, photography, painting, design, fashion, and architecture were thus harnessed (with markedly differing degrees of central direction, censorship, and homogenization prevailing in the two regimes) to evoking the timeless national values of creativity and inventiveness supposedly being revived in their respective revolutions. Indeed, some major artists vied with each other to be the main articulator of the “fascist style” in their own regime, but all shared the goal, or at least paid lip service to it, of permeating the lives of the new national community with a totalizing (but not homogeneous) spirit of regeneration. The ensuing flow of new aesthetic productivity in both states was reinforced by the intensive sacralization and ritualization of politics through the staging of rallies, processions, and major exhibitions and public events, as well as elaborate ceremonies celebrating key days in the regimes’ respective fascist calendar in a way reminiscent of the French Revolution. A central task of his book was to explain the diametrically opposed positions which the two regimes seemingly adopted on “modernism”. The embrace of futurism, abstraction, and avant-garde experimentalism along with other stylistic idioms by Mussolini’s regime (which utterly refuted Bobbio’s crass verdict) seemingly conflicted with Hitler’s scathing rejection of all these as embodiments of “Jewish” decadence and the need for Germany’s “re-Aryanization” and “re-Nordification” to clean out the Augean stables of “degenerate” art, literature, architecture and music. However, Griffin documents an intense conflict within the Nazi leadership over the “Aryan” quality of some modernist art and the survival of some aesthetic modernism in the Third Reich under the direct patronage of Joseph Goebbels who saw Edvard Munch, for example, as expressive the Nordic spirit. More importantly, he radically rethinks the category of “modernism” in a way that allows the entire cultural production of both regimes to be recognized as futural and spiritually modernist, whatever the aesthetic, outstanding examples being Arno Breker’s titanic sculpture placed on a stretch of Reichsautobahn and Albert Speer’s plans for Germania, Berlin’s megalomaniacal new capital, both of which deploy neoclassicism with a modernist but deeply anti-humanist fervour to symbolize the new (Nazi) world. Extending the term even further, Griffin defines the totalitarian states of fascism, on a par with the USSR, as “modernist states”, using totalitarian power to create a new era for humanity (or part of it) in every area of society and enlisting the enthusiasm and collaboration of many thousands of creatives in sciences and the arts with their vision. Terrorism and heroic doubling 9/11 unleashed a spate of books and articles about terrorism and many academics were tempted to apply expertise developed in an adjacent area to contributing to the collective effort to make sense of its dynamics. Griffin was no exception. He had already recognized that the creation of “fascist new man” or homo fascistus, a direct equivalent of homo sovieticus at the heart of Soviet propaganda, was central to social engineering in all three regimes. He had studied the pervasive heroization rituals and the promise of a this-worldly eternity (what Hitler called a “German immortality) to those who made the ultimate sacrifice. Clearly fascism strove to turn “ordinary citizens” into a generation prepared to die for the sake of their nation and race. Studying what had emerged about the Al Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers and the process of radicalization the attackers had undergone, a pattern crystallized. There was cumulative evidence from a number of sources that Islamist radicalization, like Fascist, Nazi, and Soviet radicalization, involved a process of creating an alter ego totally dedicated to the cause (a Manichaean cause which dehumanized the constructed enemy and everything that symbolized them and what they stood for). Griffin termed this process “heroic doubling” and used a wide range of sources from psychology and psychotherapy to flesh the concept out, especially in relation to the doubling process which was central to Robert Lifton’s exploration of the mind of the “Nazi doctors” as well as being a major theme in modern literary fantasy. These insights seem to link to the his abortive research on the recurrent theme of the “dark Reich” in interwar literature. With hindsight this can be seen to have stemmed from an intuition that German culture was producing works which registered and externalized a dangerous process of splitting or doubling that was occurring in many “normal” and “socialized” German citizens under the extreme socio-economic, political and existential pressures unleashed on them collectively in the wake of the First World War. It was a process which Nazism was eventually able to intensify and instrumentalize by producing in millions of followers a split between the “German” self and demonized others. Though not a major success, Griffin gave presentations on his theory at the Home Office and Europol, and his approach was applied by the criminologist David Polizzi in his Toward a Phenomenology of Terrorism: Beyond Who is Killing Whom, became the conceptual basis of a successful PhD on the role of narrative in terrorist radicalization, and was welcomed in a review published by the British Psychological Society for the "penetrating beam of empathetic understanding" it provided into the mind of a terrorist. Radical Right-wing Populism (RRWP) and incurvation Since the rise to prominence of populist right-wing parties, some of whose leaders have become heads of some of the most numerous or powerful states in the world, there has been a proliferation of journalists, commentators, public intellectuals and social media pundits in the media and social media who have convinced themselves and sought to persuade others they are witnessing “the return of fascism”. Griffin has thus found himself dedicating much of his time since in the last decade clarifying the sharp and patrolling the sharp distinction which his theory draws between populism, however “right-wing”, and fascism. This has meant pushing back against the Pavlovian habit of equating anything racist, illiberal, or violent which does not emanate from the “left” and any form of oppressive use of state power, even if it is rooted in a communist past, with fascism. Once fascism is seen as a revolutionary bid to inaugurate a new order and new historical era, it becomes a defining feature of fascism that it dedicates itself to the replacement of democratic regimes with a totalitarian state which attempts to mobilize support for the national “race” and create a new type modern human being, even if both Mussolini and Hitler—after a feigned and failed putsch respectively—followed a democratic path to the conquest of power. In contrast, the mission of RRWP is not to destroy democracy but destroy the hard-won partial hegemony over democracies since 1945 of liberal, socially egalitarian, the commitment to universal humanistic principles of social justice and equality of rights, and the establishment of a peaceful, law-bound international order. By openly calling for the basic civic and human rights guaranteed by the state, as well the material advantages enjoyed by full citizens, to be open only to what is considered the “true” nation, populism opens a whole Pandora’s Box of destructive myths about ethnicity, nationalism, and the enemies of the people at home and abroad. But when RRW populism gains political ascendancy, the result is not a fascist state but what Viktor Orbán proudly called an “illiberal democracy”. Griffin has argued that though "populist” has no expletive force and sounds utterly innocuous as an slur word compared with “fascist”, the separate and combined actions of four of the most powerful populist leaders, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, illustrate that populism poses a new and far more dangerous threat to liberal democracy and humanity as a whole than contemporary fascism. Since 1945, fascism—evaluated from a Griffinian perspective—has largely been reduced socio-politically to extremely marginalized psychotic forms of destructive racial and socio-cultural fantasy, breeding violent ideation, conspiracy theory, and othering hate projections cut off from external reality in a minute percentage of the disaffected and dissociated in society. The bulk of fascism is now only tenuously linked to the historical realities of interwar fascism, contemporary politics, or the practicalities of radical change. Compared with interwar fascism’s impact on world history, he maintains, postwar fascism has only had an imperceptible effect on society beyond keeping a perversely nostalgic memory alive of the creation of a modern racial state in the heart of Europe, fomenting sporadic episodes of racial hatred, and providing the rationale for occasional terrorist murders committed by its delusional lone actors. The total deaths caused by fascism in nearly eight decades (which does not include the victims of military dictatorships in Latin America, Africa and Asia, none of which were fascist in the revolutionary sense) amounts to a few thousands. This he compares with the disruptive impact which just of five populist leaders, Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Donald Trump, together wielding power over a total of 1.4 billion inhabitants, have had on the world in the last two decades. Between them, they have been responsible for supporting Putin’s war against Ukraine and vetoing effective measures that the EU might have taken against him, fomenting deep ethnic and religious division by imposing the hegemony of one religion on a constitutionally secular state, encouraged massive destruction to the Amazonian Rain Forest for reasons of commercial gain, conducted a military campaign on an impoverished and colonized people which has destroyed over 80% of the buildings and the social infrastructure and al , cut off huge amounts of vital foreign aid previously used to fight famine, disease, and killed tens of thousands of civilians, withdrawn from global humanitarian organizations and projects, cut of foreign aid to millions targeting famine, disease and refugees from conflict. The alliance between two of them has conducted a series of military campaigns which has destabilized the Middle East and closed a shipping route vital for world fuel supplies and trade. Most serious of all, thanks to populism, the most powerful country in the world has, instead of taking leadership on ecological issues, has reversed measures to slow the climate polycrisis while it fights a state war against liberal legislation and academic institutions. The four countries they govern demonstrate that populist governments turn liberal democracies into rogue states which collectively pose a major threat to human civilization both in terms of social justice and the survival of the human biosphere. Griffin’s engagement with the issues raised by populism has characteristically led him to create a new term, incurvation, to describe the way both autocratic and populist democratic states turn in on themselves to a point where the policies they enact undermine the international community, the hegemony of universal humanism, and the rule of law and so increase the likelihood of catastrophic human disasters, wars and ecological breakdown. He hopes that this concept will help bring focus to the non-fascist drivers of populism, the breakdown of the international order, and the increasingly desperate need for a collective pushback against populism and incurvation in those increasingly rare countries where safe spaces for humanistic values, secular or religious, and enlightened politics still exist to host a new wave of idealism on a par with that which gave rise to the United Nations and its many affiliated humanistic organizations, one which this time recognizes planetary health as the basis of a viable humanity.