Reviewed by Roger Griffin (Oxford Brookes University).
There is a fundamental irony running through the weft and warp of this book. It purports to be a warning about the abuse of social science in the investigation of neofascism, and comes with the highest endorsements from respectable scholars for its scholarly precision and analytical clarity. It displays in an articulate academic register a range of emotions from dismay and impatience to barely concealed contempt and anger at the fact that ‘so many academics have spent so much time in the search for neofascism’ (256). Yet the only academic to my knowledge who has devoted considerable time to reflecting on the nature of neo-fascism, or rather to exposing the scandalously inadequate way the topic has allegedly been treated by other academics, is A. J. Gregor himself. Since publishing his revised edition of Interpretations of Fascism (1997) when he started lashing out at interpretations of fascism that diverged from his own (partly on the basis of his adamant conviction that Nazism cannot be regarded as fascist since it was not nationalistic but racist!), he has sounded forth on the topic of neofascism in Phoenix: Fascism in our Time (1999), The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in Our Time (1999), and Metascience and Politics: A Brief Inquiry into the Conceptual Language of Political Science (2002). (1995). The fact is that, contrary to what Gregor implies, very few books, chapters, or articles have appeared attempting to define neofascism or provide its catalogue raisonné. Instead, as is only right, there have been numerous works of various degrees of scholarship and methodological sophistication considering specific post-war political phenomena widely associated with neofascism, such as international neo-Nazism, pagan and Christian racism in the US and elsewhere, the activities of the extreme right’s ‘leaderless resistance’ to the hegemony of liberal capitalism, post-war right-wing extremism in France or Germany, Third Positionism, the Movimento Sociale Italiano in Italy, racist rock music, neo-populism, or the European New Right. Most of these publications, whatever quibbles one could have with their definitions or classifications, are indepth studies of particular manifestations of the far right (we will leave aside another of Gregor’s idée fixes, that fascism is also a phenomenon of the extreme left). His mission to define neofascism through a technique of via negativa leads him to forced readings of what others have actually written. The tone is set within the very first pages where he perversely misrepresents a sustained analysis of the first party programme of the Alleanza Nazionale (AN), the Tesi di Fiuggi, which showed it to be a hybrid of fascist and centre-right ideological components (which it demonstrably was in 1995). He implies instead that the thrust of the