Talk:Roger Griffin

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Highly Contested? How, by whom?

A one-phrase acknowledgement that his work is not so universally acclaimed as the fan-copy which currently constitutes this page, is not sufficient. 2600:1700:3D22:2800:6CD7:FC56:6B4B:878A (talk) 2600:1700:3D22:2800:6CD7:FC56:6B4B:878A (talk) 04:51, 5 September 2025 (UTC)

@2600:1700:3D22:2800:6CD7:FC56:6B4B:878A

You would have to go into more detail where this page uncritically praises his work. Otherwise we can't improve it.

So far the article reads like a run-of-the-mill article on a researcher. And at least on Google Scholar Griffin is the most cited resesrcher on the topic. 185.17.14.73 (talk) 22:41, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

COI edit request 1: scholarship sections and selected works

COI disclosure: I am a historian (see Aristotle Kallis) and a university colleague of the subject; I prepared this text partly at his suggestion, am unpaid, and do not edit the article directly (see the connected-contributor tag at the top of this page and my user-page disclosure). Request: please add the following sections, or expand/replace the corresponding existing sections. They summarise the subject's published books and articles and rest on those works as sources. I have split my proposed revision into four requests; this is the first and least contentious. I welcome scrutiny of weight and neutrality.

Comparative fascist studies and the "new consensus"

From the 1990s Griffin's work became associated with efforts to build a more coherent and collaborative comparative study of fascism. Through The Nature of Fascism, the edited reader Fascism (1995), the source anthology International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (1998), the essay collection A Fascist Century (2008) and the textbook Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies (2017), he sought to bring diverse national cases under a shared conceptual umbrella.

In "Decentring Comparative Fascist Studies" (2015), in Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, he argued that scholarship had privileged Italian Fascism and German National Socialism as uniquely "authentic" cases, and called for greater attention to movements often treated as marginal—the Romanian Iron Guard, the Croatian Ustaša, and currents in Brazil, Argentina and South Africa—on the grounds that they illuminate how racism, religion, colonialism and local political cultures shaped fascist projects.

Modernism, "alternative modernity" and the "modernist state"

A second strand links fascism to modernism. In Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (2007) Griffin challenges the idea that fascism was simply anti-modern, arguing that both Italian Fascism and German National Socialism pursued projects of cultural and political alternative modernity, seeking to re-found society and create a "new beginning" rather than restore a pre-modern past. To capture this he introduces the "modernist state", which deploys totalitarian power to shape a new social order while enlisting artists, architects and designers in a collective experiment in national regeneration; monuments, plans for new capitals, mass rallies and redesigned cities are read not as mere propaganda but as attempts to produce a "new man" and a sense of collective immortality. These arguments engage concepts such as "reactionary modernism" and have been taken up in modernist studies and architectural and cultural history.

Post-1945 fascism, the "groupuscular" far right and fascist temporalities

Griffin has written extensively on fascism after 1945. In essays including "The Incredible Shrinking Ism" and "From Slime Mould to Rhizome: An Introduction to the Groupuscular Right", he argues that after the defeat and discrediting of classical fascism the far right fragmented into small, often short-lived "groupuscules" retaining radical palingenetic ideologies but lacking a mass base—a lack of critical mass that pushes some of the most committed toward terrorist cells or "lone actor" attacks. In related work on "fascist temporalities"—for example "Fixing Solutions: Fascist Temporalities as Remedies for Liquid Modernity"—he examines how fascist ideologues narrate history as decline, terminal crisis and sudden rebirth, offering a dangerous resolution to the anxieties of "liquid" modernity.

Terrorism, "heroic doubling" and radicalisation

From the 2000s Griffin extended his focus to ideologically motivated violence. Terrorist's Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning (2012) examines how individuals and groups come to see violence as a sacralised duty within a struggle between good and evil, linking contemporary terrorism to older traditions of millenarianism and political myth. Building on Robert Jay Lifton's notion of "doubling", he introduced "heroic doubling" to describe how otherwise integrated individuals construct a militant alter ego devoted to a higher cause and to the personal immortality thought to be bestowed by dying in its pursuit; in an article in the International Review of Psychiatry he characterises this "heroic self" as enabling extreme violence and the acceptance of one's own death while preserving a sense of moral purpose. He initiated the project AVATAR (Analysis of Virtual Alter-egos in Terrorist Activism and Radicalization) to develop risk-assessment tools based on established data on the motivation of terrorists, though it was abandoned after funding was not secured. He developed the theme at book length in The Divisible Self: Heroic Doubling and the Origins of Modern Violence (2021).

Selected works

• The Nature of Fascism (Pinter, 1991; Routledge, 1993)
• Fascism (ed., Oxford Readers; Oxford University Press, 1995)
• International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (ed., Arnold, 1998)
• Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
• A Fascist Century (ed. Matthew Feldman, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
• Terrorist's Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
• Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies (Polity, 2017)
• The Divisible Self: Heroic Doubling and the Origins of Modern Violence (Columbia University Press / Agenda, 2021)

References

Aristotlek (talk) 14:37, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

COI edit request 2: "Palingenetic ultranationalism" section

COI disclosure: as in request 1 above — colleague of the subject, unpaid, not editing directly. Request: please add or replace the section defining his central concept. It sets out the argument of The Nature of Fascism and deliberately retains the paragraph of scholarly criticism of the model. The closing paragraph attributes two points (the term's provenance, and his reading of Mosse and Payne) to Griffin himself, cited to a published interview.

Fascism as "palingenetic ultranationalism"

In The Nature of Fascism Griffin argued that fascism is best understood as a form of palingenetic ultranationalism—a revolutionary, populist ultranationalism centred on the vision of a total rebirth (palingenesis) of the nation after a period of perceived decadence or terminal crisis. In his model, fascist movements seek to mobilise an activist minority and, eventually, a broader populist movement to overthrow an existing liberal or traditional order and inaugurate a new historical era under a regenerated "ultra-nation", imagined in either historic-nationalist or racial terms.

Griffin presents this as an ideal-typical "fascist minimum" rather than a checklist of traits, arguing that it identifies the peculiar dynamic distinguishing fascism from other right-wing, authoritarian or revolutionary ideologies, including military juntas, religious fundamentalism, personal autocracies and populist right-wing democracies. He emphasises that the palingenetic project was enacted in the interwar period through political myths, rituals, sacralised leadership and a pervasive rhetoric of crisis and rebirth, seeking to transform both politics and everyday life—with particular weight on cultural and artistic renaissance and the creation of a new type of human being, sometimes called homo fascistus.

The definition has become the most widely cited conceptualisation of generic fascism in Anglophone scholarship, summarised in reference entries on fascism and palingenesis and increasingly taken up in other languages. It has also been applied heuristically beyond interwar Europe—for example to "antebellum palingenetic ultranationalism" in the pro-slavery thought of the nineteenth-century American South. Critics have objected that the model's focus on ideology and myth risks downplaying class coalitions, conservative elites and state institutions, and that its "minimum" is either too narrow or too elastic to capture the full range of historical fascisms.

Griffin has given his own account of the term's provenance: seeking an adjective for a rebirth-oriented ultranationalism, he revived "palingenetic"—by then treated by lexicographers as obsolete in English—after encountering Pierre-Simon Ballanche's La palingénésie sociale. He has also characterised the field he entered: George Mosse had taken fascist ideas seriously as a genuine belief system and noted the decadence–rebirth preoccupation without synthesising it into a theory, while Stanley Payne had an almost complete theory of fascism as national renewal but still treated its "anti-" dimension as primary rather than its "positive" aspiration to inaugurate a new order.

References

Aristotlek (talk) 14:41, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

COI edit request 3: early life and turn to fascist studies

COI disclosure: as above — colleague of the subject, unpaid, not editing directly. Request: please add or replace these two biographical sections. The personal recollections are attributed in-text to Griffin and cited to a published interview under WP:ABOUTSELF; the historical facts about the Goethe Oak are cited separately to the Buchenwald Memorial and to Nikolaus Wachsmann's history of the camps, not to the interview.

Education and intellectual formation

Griffin studied French and German literature at the University of Oxford, graduating with a First-class degree. Early on he became interested in how literary and philosophical currents such as Romanticism, Symbolism and modernism negotiated cultural crisis and addressed questions of meaning in modernity—a concern with the relationship between individual creativity, cultural "isms" and broader historical ruptures that would later feed into his work on fascism as a response to perceived decadence and civilisational breakdown.

In a 2026 interview, Griffin described a non-academic, materially straitened upbringing in postwar Harrow and a route into selective education through a foundation place at John Lyon School, followed by a scholarship to Oxford; he recalled a lasting "impostor syndrome" as a working-class outsider among wealthier peers.

Griffin has also described a formative episode during a student visit to East Germany, when a morning at Goethe's house in Weimar was followed by a visit to the Goethe Oak on the Ettersberg, which he found lay within the grounds of the former Buchenwald concentration camp. The oak, associated with Goethe and left standing when the SS cleared the beech forest for the camp in 1937, was set alight during the Allied air raid of 24 August 1944 and felled soon afterwards, its stump preserved at the site to this day. Griffin has said the disjunction between the German culture he had come to love and the reality of Nazi atrocity marked the beginning of a lasting preoccupation with the subject.

The turn to fascist studies

In the early 1970s Griffin began teaching at Oxford Polytechnic (later Oxford Brookes University), initially in the history of ideas, using broad cultural concepts such as the Enlightenment, Romanticism and modernity to explore the interplay of ideology, political movements and cultural production from the eighteenth to the twentieth century in Europe.

Griffin has recounted that a chance encounter in a Genoa taverna—where a stranger extolled the "genius" of Julius Evola's Rivolta contro il mondo moderno—led him to study Evola's pre- and post-war writings and crystallised his sense of fascism as animated by a core myth of decadence and national rebirth. His first published article (1985) was on Evola.

Reacting against what he saw as a "Babelic scattering" of incompatible definitions and paradigms, Griffin set himself the task of identifying a minimal but historically grounded core that could explain both the diversity and the distinctive generic identity of fascist movements. He undertook doctoral study at Oxford while teaching full-time, obtaining a DPhil in 1990; the thesis was reworked as The Nature of Fascism (1991). Griffin has said the thesis was examined externally, and positively evaluated, by Ian Kershaw, to whom he had earlier written for reassurance about the validity of his theory, and that Roger Eatwell subsequently commissioned it for a book series.

References

Aristotlek (talk) 14:43, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

COI edit request 4: lead, populism section, and institutional roles

COI disclosure: as above — colleague of the subject, unpaid, not editing directly. Request: please replace the lead with the version below and add/replace the two closing sections. The populism material is the most interpretation-adjacent, so I have filed it last and on its own. Note: the Matej Bel appointment currently rests on the interview for the subject's stated aims; if a university or CV source for the appointment itself is preferred I can supply one.

Replace the lead paragraph with: Roger David Griffin (born 31 January 1948) is a British historian and theorist of ideological currents in modern Europe whose work has focused on fascism, political extremism, modernism, terrorism and, increasingly, radical right-wing populism. He is emeritus professor of modern history at Oxford Brookes University, where he taught for more than four decades. He is best known for his definition of generic fascism as a form of "palingenetic ultranationalism", which has been widely adopted, adapted and criticised in comparative fascist studies.

Populism, post-fascism and "incurvation"

In his later work Griffin draws a sharp line between revolutionary fascism and contemporary radical right-wing populism. While acknowledging overlaps in nativism, xenophobia and hostility to liberal elites, he argues that most right-wing populist movements seek to operate within electoral democracy rather than to refound the state within a totalitarian regime and new historical era, and that leaders such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi and Jair Bolsonaro are better understood as populist or illiberal democrats than as neo-fascists—while warning that radical-right populism can nonetheless erode judicial independence, minority protections and international commitments from within.

In a 2026 interview he restated this position directly: he does not regard Trump as a fascist, since Trump operates within the existing democratic order rather than seeking a "new order"; he places Putin closer to fascism on that axis; and he holds that calling a disliked politician "fascist" carries cathartic rather than taxonomic value.

In a more recent, still-embryonic proposal, Griffin introduces "incurvation" to describe how autocratic and populist states "curve inwards"—borrowing a term Martin Luther used for a self-enclosed betrayal of faith—rejecting any sense of belonging to a shared humanity and pursuing narrow national or sectarian interests at the expense of international norms. The heuristic value of the neologism has yet to be tested in scholarly debate.

Institutional roles, honours and public engagement

Griffin co-founded and was founding editor of Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal, and co-founded the International Association for Comparative Fascist Studies (COMFAS). In May 2011 KU Leuven awarded him an honorary doctorate for his contribution to the comparative study of fascism. He has given numerous keynotes, interviews and public talks in Europe, North America, the Middle East and East Asia. In 2026 he took up a teaching appointment at Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia, where he has said he hopes to help develop a centre for the comparative study of neo-fascism and right-wing populism in Central Europe.

References

Aristotlek (talk) 14:44, 4 September 2026 (UTC)