Abstract
Roger Griffin's Modernism and Fascism is the latest accomplishment of this historian's endeavour to prove the kinship of fascism with modernism. In the first part of his daring work, which interweaves the history of fascism, the history and theory of literature, arts and culture, philosophy, social anthropology and more, Griffin builds a groundbreaking definition of modernism (as an "ideal type") that he sees as clusters of social-cultural movements reacting against degenerating modernity.
Solutions in these movements could be sought, thanks to temporalized concepts of history, in the human management of the future as a way out of degeneration. This view of modernism allows Griffin, in the second part of the book, to explain Mussolini's and Hitler's fascist movements and subsequent regimes as futuristically aimed reforms that became destructive events in global history.