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.

Badly outdated on details (claims holodomor is not a genocide), insults every one who ever tried to write about fascism before doing the same things (e.g. claims that only looking at the leaders is misguided and spends not a paragraph on the followers), self contradictory (Franco "carefully avoided any hints of fascist trimmings" but Franco's regime fits the author's definition of fascism) and just plain wrong sometimes (saying that Germany was a recently industrialised in the 1920s)

Saved from one star because of the useful history and contrast of the rise and exercise of power of Italian and German fascism.

Ensayo que trata de definir qué es el fascismo tras estudiar lo que hace (no lo que dice), y las fases en que los dos regímenes históricamente fascistas se hicieron con el poder y siguieron radicalizándose una vez dueños del chiringo.
Me ha gustado mucho el enfoque de historia comparada, y de evitar llamar “fascista” a cualquier cosa autoritaria (por ejemplo, Franco no lo fue). Muy interesante la alianza natural entre los conservadores de toda la vida y los partidos fascistas que les tocó disfrutar a nuestros padres y abuelos: cualquier cosa salvo tocar la propiedad privada, faltaría más.

The word fascist is bandied about a lot but the definition is quite hard to define. This book is comparative study of the various stages that fascist dictatorships around the world went through to reach final their final manifestation. A really thoughtful book and well worth reading. Well worth a read.