Roger David Griffin (born 31 January 1948) is a British professor of modern history and political theorist at Oxford Brookes University, England. His principal interest is the socio-historical and ideological dynamics of fascism, as well as various forms of political or religious fanaticism.

Education and career

Griffin obtained a First in French and German Literature from Oxford University, then began teaching History of ideas at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes). Becoming interested in the study of extremist right-wing movements and regimes which have shaped modern history, Griffin obtained a PhD from Oxford University in 1990. He first developed his palingenesis theory of fascism in his PhD thesis. In May 2011, he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Leuven in recognition of his services to the comparative study of fascism.

This theme will be pursued and deepened in his next monograph The Divisible Self: Heroic Doubling and the Origins of Modern Violence (Columbia: Agenda, Columbia University Press, September 2021).

Griffin was co-founder of the open access journal Fascism (Brill) and co-founder of COMFAS, International Association for the Comparative Study of Fascism, directed by Professor Constantin Iordachi (Central European University).

Griffin has translated works by Norberto Bobbio and .

Griffin used to count trance music and rave culture among his interests. He wrote the sleeve notes for the two CD volume Return To The Source: Deep Trance & Ritual Beats, explaining his liking of the genre and how it relates to society.

Selected works

Monographs

  • The Nature of Fascism (St. Martin's Press, 1991 , Routledge, 1993, )
  • Fascism (Oxford Readers) (Oxford University Press, 1995, )
  • International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus, Edward Arnold, 1998, )
  • Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science edited with Matthew Feldman (Routledge, 2004, )
  • Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (view Table of contents, Introduction, and Index, Palgrave, 2007, )
  • A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin, ed. by Matthew Feldman (view Table of contents, Chapter 1, and Index, Palgrave, 2008, )
  • Terrorist's Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning, Palgrave, 2012,
  • Fascism. An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies (Polity, 2017)
  • Fascism in the series Quick Immersions (Tibidado, 2020)
  • The Divisible Self: Heroic Doubling and the Origins of Modern Violence (Columbia: Agenda, Columbia University Press, September 2021)

Articles

  • 'Interregnum or endgame? Radical Right Thought in the 'Post-fascist' Era', in Michael Freeden (ed.), Reassessing Political Ideologies (Routledge, London, 2001), pp. 116–131.
  • Football in No-Man's-Land? The prospects for a fruitful "inter-camp" dialogue within fascist studies between Marxists and non-Marxists, for special issue of European Journal for Political Theory, vol. 9, no. 2 (2012)
  • Fixing Solutions: Fascist Temporalities as Remedies for Liquid Modernity]. In: Journal of Modern European History 13 (2015), 1, 15–23. (Introduction to a forum on Fascist Temporalities)
  • The role of heroic doubling in terrorist radicalisation: a non-psychiatric perspective', International review of psychiatry, vol. 29, no. 4 (2017), pp. 355–61.
  • 'Building the visible immortality of the nation: The centrality of 'rooted modernism' to the Third Reich's Architectural New Order', Fascism, vol. 7, no. 1 (2018), pp. 9–44.

References

  • Roger Griffin CV
  • Roger Griffin at Oxford Brookes University