Humor functions as a form of civic engagement and social protest in Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) and Gertrude Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds (1947), novels that respond to the rise of fascism with complex satire. Despite a common view of Hurston and Stein as either apolitical or conservative, both authors reveal a keen understanding of conversion’s historical legacy in the justification of imperialism. The point both Hurston and Stein make is that humorous incongruity keeps the mind turning and, in the process, forestalls the “settling” of thought into place and “the fixation of belief” associated with totalitarianism. As outsiders for whom conversion—religious or secular—could mean a form of psychic death, they developed distinctive modes of ironic humor involving self-lacerating and self-satirizing critique.

Ezra Pound launches the book as a dramatic “case study” illustrating William James’s theory of “conversion” as a cognitive process by which individuals become converts to a cause, be it artistic, religious, or political. Even as recent scholars have revitalized our understanding of James’s politics and his philosophical engagements with the social, they nonetheless underscore a conspicuous gap: none have investigated how James’s understanding of the social realm is indebted to his pioneering work as a psychologist and, more specifically, to his theorization of conversion as a cognitive phenomenon that impacts not just individuals but larger groups. At one extreme, conversion can yield blind commitment to doctrine, or, more productively, can fracture such monolithic narratives to achieve productive disagreement with, or “dissent” from, repressive or demagogic systems. Literary modernists after James can be understood as mind scientists because they deploy the psychodynamics of conversion both formally and thematically. By making the psychodynamics of conversion visible, their writings encourage readerly dissent from rigid points of view and authoritarian ideological frameworks.

The rigid outlook of its supporters assured the KCIR’s emphatic defeat, which was broadly discrediting to labor courts. The positions taken against the KCIR also reveal the contours of the labor policy ultimately developed in the United States. The KCIR’s fascist premises were apparent by 1926, when the US made a decisive turn away from industrial compulsion. The evolutionary view of law was categorically rejected in the Wolff decision; Wolff’s decade of doctrinal ascendency ended an era of innovative state policy leadership in the United States. The procedural outlook of the KCIR’s liberal critics became the basis of New Deal labor policy, ushering in America’s unique model of labor law without labor rights. In rejecting these tenets of the KCIR, leading thinkers also turned away from international policy developments that shared those premises. Thus, America’s divergence from the labor policy of the rest of the world owed to the development of ideas, no less than institutions and structures, and it was liberals most engaged with global flows of ideas who did the most to turn the United States onto its distinctive path.

This chapter reflects on Sean O’Casey’s work from a postcolonial critical perspective. The focus is firstly upon his early Abbey plays, especially The Plough and the Stars, which are shown to be significant for postcolonial criticism because of their content, the contexts of their initial Abbey productions, and the ways that key aspects of their critical history play outsized roles in framing understandings of the postcolonial critical endeavour. The chapter shows how O’Casey responded to the political complexities of Ireland’s revolutionary era of the 1910s and 1920s. The chapter then examines O’Casey’s later plays, showing how his responses to the revolutionary era evolved as he dealt directly with postcolonial Ireland and the fascism of the 1930s–1960s.

This chapter examines the crucial seven-year period between Stimson’s resignation as secretary of state in March 1933 and his return to the War Department in June 1940. Although Stimson did not anticipate he would ever return to Washington to serve in the federal government, some of his most important public service occurred when he was a private citizen in this period. Particularly, this chapter advances two critical arguments. The first is that Stimson had both a much wider definition of national security than most of his contemporaries did and came to those conclusions before nearly any other American leader or opinion maker. The second argument is that attempting to neatly define Stimson’s internationalism is difficult. Stimson borrowed ideas from the legalistic, moralistic, and New Deal-style categories of internationalism and repackaged them into his own fusion that called for US leadership to manage the world.

This chapter explores the experiences of Italian emigrant veterans during the Fascist regime (1922–1943) and the Second World War. There were many contradictions in the Fascist treatment of emigrant veterans. On some occasions, they were fêted and lauded for their service. Unlike the Liberal state, Mussolini’s government highlighted the contribution of the emigrant soldiers during the Great War as exceptional and worthy of recognition, most notably at the landmark Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, held in Rome in 1932. However, on the whole, emigrant veterans did not become politically active once they returned abroad and were not the dominant standard-bearers for Fascism, and were often badly treated or ignored by the regime. Most of the Fascist government’s attention to the emigrants and the war surrounded the issue of wartime draft evaders, and new laws were passed in the 1920s to permit them to travel to Italy for short periods without being inducted into the Italian Army or otherwise punished. The outbreak of the Second World War upended the emigrant veterans’ lives once more, resulting in experiences of occupation, internment as enemy aliens or mobilization in the Italian or other armies.

The chapter opens with the challenge of connecting fascism to explanations of the Holocaust, given the many distinctive, or purportedly distinctive, elements of National Socialism, not least the radical character of its antisemitism. The chapter argues, however, that thinking about fascism in relation to the Holocaust has three main virtues. First, it prompts us to reconsider the boundaries and distinctiveness of both fascism and Holocaust. Secondly, it suggests that fascist ideology made some critical moves that helped make the Holocaust conceivable and possible. Finally, fascist taboo-breaking helped to create receptive audiences and collaborators across Europe, “catalysing, and radicalising a nexus of local eliminationist agencies.”

This semi-autobiographical essay offers the perspective from the 1970s to the present of a leading historian of Nazi Germany. It shows how a series of paradigms in one way or another obscured the Holocaust, while at the same time underling the importance of the scholarship on the Final Solution that took off in the 1960s. A particular focus of the essay is the debates around fascism and the difficulty of acknowledging the centrality of racism within the fascist model.

In past decades, the relationship between fascism and communism was of major interest. The theory of totalitarianism viewed them as different versions of the same phenomenon. Communists saw fascism as a function of capitalism, and communism as its only legitimate opponent. Both views marginalized the Holocaust. As the Holocaust came to the fore in Western scholarship, entanglements with communism slipped out of view. This chapter argues that they deserve closer attention. Though its roots were older, after 1917 anticommunism gave the right a new focus, giving radical fringe groups respectability. Communism exerted a “negative fascination” on the right, encouraging mutually escalating extremes. Anti-Marxism legitimated Nazi violence after 1933, drawing support even from the Churches. For their part, even after the adoption of the popular front strategy in 1935, the KPD continued to believe that the SPD was the main enemy, and long remained silent on the persecution of Jews. Since the end of the Cold War, the question of the relationship between communism, Nazism, and the Holocaust has been expressed above all in the culture of remembrance.

Corporatism refers to the tradition of constitutional theories that argue that self-organized bodies, such as universities, churches, or labour unions, are independent and important components of a constitutional order. While in the twentieth-century corporatism became associated primarily with economic actors, a central question in corporatist theory was the broader constitutional status of non-state associations and organizations that had their own political powers to govern their members and engage in quasi-legislative activity. In arguing for the independent legitimacy of such diverse corporate actors, proponents of corporatism were united in criticizing more liberal visions of constitutionalism for its abstraction and formalism. Many corporatist theorists thus advocated a sort of societal constitutionalism, where constitutional norms are embodied in diverse institutions that are more proximate to individuals than the state – ranging from major professional and economic associations to a variety of civil society groups. This chapter analyses corporatism both as a tradition in constitutional theory and as an empirical phenomenon that arose in the interwar and post-war periods. It argues that corporatist ideas can contribute to a theory of democratic constitutionalism that emphasizes the importance of organized collective power, and not just the problem of regulating state coercion or distributing formal rights.