Fascism and the Revolutionary Right of the Weimar Republic

I have been planning to write a post about fascism both as a historical phenomenon and as a modern political construct since my holiday in the Swiss Alps last August. I brought all the books with me to my Alpine cabin, and I reread them in the thin, cool air above the Albula river:

But, I did not write my essay, and since then I have put it off again and again, because the project fills me with a little trepidation. So, at the outset, a tiresome disclaimer: I am not a fascist, I do not even think it makes sense to declare that one is a fascist, and my purpose here is not to defend the political radicalism and violence of the first half of the twentieth century. I merely aim to provide some historical description of what fascism was, as distinct from what it has become in the postwar Western liberal imaginary.

And with that, I will draw the curtain of the paywall, so that we may talk privately in more confined company.