The Anatomy of Fascism

Paxton reviews the beginnings of fascism, its rise to power, and how it governed in order to try to suss out the common threads between successful and unsuccessful fascisms. Published in 2004, I hoped the book would explain how regimes with fascist tendencies like that of Donald Trump could be thwarted. Interestingly, Paxton hesitated to call Trump a fascist until Trump's unsuccessful attempt to retain power. Indeed, in the book Paxton makes an attempt to do away with democratic norms with the threat or actuality of a populist uprising one of the key part of fascism during stage 2, when it becomes influential, rather than mere groups of people obsessed with the unity and purity of the national people. Very solid and I recommend it.

This book takes an interesting approach to defining fascism by dissecting its historical manifestations and then finding what they all have in common. He makes a distinction between fascism and authoritarianism that I hadn’t thought about before. He argues that fascism isn’t simply a subset of authoritarianism because of some key factors like counterrevolutionary tactics and relationships to other institutions.

I’m not a scholar in this field but my main criticism would be that if we define fascism to be so narrow, then it becomes a little unwieldy to fight against. It’s impractical but maybe for the interests of researchers and historians, this is the right move.