‘Living the Blackshirt Life’: Culture, Community and the British Union of Fascists, 1932–1940

Abstract

The perennial struggle to fix the meaning of fascism has recently entered a phase which might best be described as, if I dare, palingenetic, one of rebirth after a period of crisis or decline. If there is any consensus to be reached from this debate, recently relaunched by Roger Griffin, it might be that fascism is more than simply a variety of political ideology or a category of state system. As recent scholarship has increasingly emphasised, not least Griffin himself, the cultural dimensions of fascist movements, in their many European manifestations, are as significant as their organizational development, their electoral successes and failures or their political programmes. Some have attributed this shift towards considering fascism as a cultural system to George Mosse's anthropologically informed interpretation of fascism. A closer reading of these ‘culturalist’ studies reveals that the euphemistically described ‘linguistic turn’ and social anthropologists, such as Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, have played a far more significant role in reconceptualising the problem of fascism than has Mosse's work.