This edited volume examines the myths of conspiracy within radical-right and fascist cultures and practices from the late nineteenth century onward. While its scope is broad, most contributions focus on the first half of the twentieth century in both European and global contexts, spanning events from the Great War and the Russian Revolutions to the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines and geographical areas, the volume explores the cultural roots, forms, political strategies, and effects of conspiracy imagery within counter-revolutionary, reactionary, fascist, and neo-fascist currents. Particular attention is paid to antisemitism and anti-Bolshevism as strategies for legitimizing radical-right and fascist movements and governments, as well as to their role in mobilizing and polarizing politics and society, especially in wartime contexts.

This edited volume examines the myths of conspiracy within radical-right and fascist cultures and practices from the late nineteenth century onward. While its scope is broad, most contributions focus on the first half of the twentieth century in both European and global contexts, spanning events from the Great War and the Russian Revolutions to the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines and geographical areas, the volume explores the cultural roots, forms, political strategies, and effects of conspiracy imagery within counter-revolutionary, reactionary, fascist, and neo-fascist currents. Particular attention is paid to antisemitism and anti-Bolshevism as strategies for legitimizing radical-right and fascist movements and governments, as well as to their role in mobilizing and polarizing politics and society, especially in wartime contexts.

Winner of the American Political Science Association's 1996 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award. The rise of new political competitors on the radical right is a central feature of many contemporary European party systems. The first study of its kind based on a wide array of comparative survey data, The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis provides a unifying framework to explain why rightist parties are electorally powerful in some countries but not in others. The book argues that changes in social structure and the economy do not by themselves adequately explain the success of extremist parties. Instead we must look to the competitive struggles among parties, their internal organizational patterns, and their long-term ideological traditions to understand the principles governing their success. Radical right authoritarian parties tend to emerge when moderate parties converge toward the median voter. But the success of these parties depends on the strategy employed by the right-wing political actors. Herbert Kitschelt's in-depth analysis, based on the experiences of rightist parties in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and Britain, reveals that the broadest appeal is enjoyed by parties that couple a fierce commitment to free markets with authoritarian, ethnocentric--or even racist--messages. The author also shows how a country's particular political constituency or its intellectual and organizational legacies may allow right-wing parties to diverge from these norms and still find electoral success. The book concludes by exploring the interaction between the development of the welfare state, cultural pluralization through immigrants, and the growth of the extreme right. Herbert Kitschelt is Professor of Political Science at both Duke University and Humboldt University, Berlin. Anthony McGann is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Duke University.

Reaction and Revolution situates the resurgence of far-right movements and thinkers within a longer intellectual history that emerged primarily in interwar Germany—a philosophical conversation centered on political theology. Arguing that the more radically democratic modes of political theology offer better ways to understand and to counter the far right’s rhetorical appeal, this book offers a rhetorical-intellectual critique of three key thinkers and their allied movements: Paul Gottfried and the American paleoconservatives, Guillaume Faye and the French Identitarians, and Nick Land and the Dark Enlightenment. Kevin Musgrave argues that a radical political theology of race offers meaningful ways of challenging the right’s efforts to build a global imperium of whiteness and of reclaiming the promise of human dignity.