Roger Griffin (1948): è professore di Storia Moderna all’Università di Oxford Brookes (Regno Unito). È una delle principali autorità mondiali nello studio del fascismo come fenomeno generico. Il suo lavoro principale è The Nature of Fascism (1991), in cui ha delinato una nuova teoria eclettica del fascismo generico. Nel 2011 ha ricevuto un dottorato onorario dall’Università di Lovanio (Belgio) in riconoscimento del suo apporto allo studio comparativo del fascismo. Tra le sue pubblicazioni: International Fascism. Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (1998); A Fascist Century (2008); Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (trad. it.: Modernismo e fascismo. Il progetto di rinascita sotto Mussolini e Hitler, 2 voll., 2018); Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies (2018).
Abstract
This article discusses the conventional approaches to the concepts of consensus and resistance, which must be revised in the light of a revisiting of the totalitarian apparatus of authoritarian societies seen as the result of the attempt not so much to destroy the genuine political culture, but rather to transform it with the goal of realizing the utopian mirage of a resurrected society based on an unprecedented and new model of human being. This presupposes a palingenesis (“palingenetic political community”), which takes place when the revolutionary vision of the totalitarian movement finds its spontaneous resonance in the mass response, among a population that finds itself experiencing a collective feeling of crisis, deeply sedimented. The article suggests a number of potentially revealing cases in the relationship between the totalitarian regime and the Palingenetic community, which has contributed to the legitimization of those regimes and has generated varying degrees of consent to their policies. The conclusion consists of a number of ideas that can be grasped for an exploration of the new ways to conceptualize consensus by overcoming the internal resistance to the human sciences, on the basis of structures already conceptualized and never questioned.
Keywords: Totalitarianism, Coercive Conformism, Palingenetic Community, Charismatic Consensus, Ideology.
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