Concluding Remarks

Abstract

More than 40 years have passed since the first edition of The Nature of Fascism. At the conference the previous year that gave rise to the volume I was a junior and overawed participant. Stuart Woolf deserves our thanks for the courageous and difficult enterprise of bringing together a group of experts from many different countries and disciplines. However, as Roger Griffin has suggested, the conference and the volume revealed that there was little common ground or agreement on how to approach the subject of the nature of fascism. The gap between theory and empirical research remained wide. Probably a present-day reader would learn more about the nature of fascism from reading the series of single-country monographs in the other volume edited by Stuart Woolf, European Fascism, which at least gives a reasonably comprehensive picture of the scope and variety of the phenomenon.