Uploaded October 2018 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
The better part of a century after being relegated to the political fringes by its central responsibility for war and genocide, fascism is unmistakably making a comeback on both sides of the Atlantic. Of course, fascism never completely went away; but what has propelled it from the margins back to the center? Attempts to understand this phenomenon lead inevitably back to a question that has exercised social scientists and political commentators since its emergence: what is fascism, after all?
In this talk given on October 10, historian and IES Senior Fellow Timothy Scott Brown (Professor of History, Northeastern University) discusses some of the answers that have been given to that question, considering how the so-called Alt-Right fits into the picture of fascism as it has been classically understood, and revisiting historical anti-fascist movements with an eye toward better understanding their continued relevance at the beginning of the 21st Century.
The better part of a century after being relegated to the political fringes by its central responsibility for war and genocide, fascism is unmistakably making a comeback on both sides of the Atlantic. Of course, fascism never completely went away; but what has propelled it from the margins back to the center? Attempts to understand this phenomenon lead inevitably back to a question that has exercised social scientists and political commentators since its emergence: what is fascism, after all?
In this talk given on October 10, historian and IES Senior Fellow Timothy Scott Brown (Professor of History, Northeastern University) discusses some of the answers that have been given to that question, considering how the so-called Alt-Right fits into the picture of fascism as it has been classically understood, and revisiting historical anti-fascist movements with an eye toward better understanding their continued relevance at the beginning of the 21st Century.
