- Department of History
C40, Furness College
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YN
United Kingdom - +44 1524594297
Aristotle Kallis
Keele University, Institute of Humanities, Faculty Member
- German History, History, European History, Modern History, Italian (European History), Modern Italian History, and 21 moreBalkan History, Twentieth Century Studies, Propaganda & Indoctrination Studies, Genocide Studies, Urban Planning, History of concepts, Urban Studies, Political History, Italian Politics, Fascism, Propaganda, Totalitarianism, Holocaust Studies, Jewish History, Racism, Identity, Islamophobia, Islamophobia, History of political extremism, Far-right in Europe, Political Extremism/Radicalism/Populism, Right-Wing Extremism, and antisemitism and Islamophobiaedit
- I am Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Keele University, School of Humanities. I moved to Keele Univers... moreI am Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Keele University, School of Humanities. I moved to Keele University in 2016, after 13 years at Lancaster University (Department of European Languages and Cultures and from 2010 Department of History). I have previously taught at the Universities of Edinburgh and Bristol.
My research has taken me from the comparative history of interwar fascism (focused initially on Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany) to the transnational history of fascism, the contemporary radical right (and its relation with the so-called 'mainstream'), the history of mass violence, and more recently urban history (especially the history of 20th-century Rome), Fascist cultural politics, architectural modernism, and public housing.
I am currently working on as project that analyses the public housing initiatives in 1920s Rome, carried out by the Institute of Popular Housing (ICP).
In January 2019 I start work on a Leverhulme-funded project that examines the global history of the 'minimum dwelling' (and in particular the concept of Existenzminimum, as defined in CIAM's second conference in Frankfurt in 1929) from the 1920s to the 1960s.edit
What kind of city was the Fascist 'third Rome'? Imagined and real, rooted in the past and announcing a new, 'revolutionary' future, Fascist Rome was imagined both as the ideal city and as the sacred centre of a universal political... more
What kind of city was the Fascist 'third Rome'? Imagined and real, rooted in the past and announcing a new, 'revolutionary' future, Fascist Rome was imagined both as the ideal city and as the sacred centre of a universal political religion. Kallis explores this through a journey across the sites, monuments, and buildings of the fascist capital.
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Fascist Ideology is a comparative study of the expansionist foreign policies of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany from 1922-1945. Fascist Ideology provides a comparative investigation of fascist expansionism by focusing on the close... more
Fascist Ideology is a comparative study of the expansionist foreign policies of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany from 1922-1945.
Fascist Ideology provides a comparative investigation of fascist expansionism by focusing on the close relations between ideology and action under Mussolini and Hitler. With an overview of the ideological motivations behind fascist expansionism and their impact on fascist policies, this book explores the two main issues which have dominated the historiographical debates on the nature of fascist expansionism: whether Italy's and Germany's particular expansionist tendancies can be attributed to a set of generic fascist values, or were shaped by the long term, uniquely national ambitions and developments since unification; whether the pursuit of expansion was opportunistic or followed a grand design in each case
Fascist Ideology provides a comparative investigation of fascist expansionism by focusing on the close relations between ideology and action under Mussolini and Hitler. With an overview of the ideological motivations behind fascist expansionism and their impact on fascist policies, this book explores the two main issues which have dominated the historiographical debates on the nature of fascist expansionism: whether Italy's and Germany's particular expansionist tendancies can be attributed to a set of generic fascist values, or were shaped by the long term, uniquely national ambitions and developments since unification; whether the pursuit of expansion was opportunistic or followed a grand design in each case
This book investigates how fascism – as an ideology and political praxis – reconfigured the ideological, political, and moral landscape of interwar Europe, generating an atmosphere of extreme ‘license’ that facilitated the leap into... more
This book investigates how fascism – as an ideology and political praxis – reconfigured the ideological, political, and moral landscape of interwar Europe, generating an atmosphere of extreme ‘license’ that facilitated the leap into eliminationist violence. It demonstrates how fascist ideology linked the prospect of violent ‘cleansing’ to utopias of national/racial regeneration, thus encouraging and legitimizing targeted hatred against particular ‘others’. It also shows how the diffusion and internationalization of fascism in the 1930s produced a sense of a revolutionary new beginning and created a transnational fascist ‘new order’ in which Nazi Germany came to occupy a potent position of authority. The book analyzes how the eliminationist initiative and precedent of Nazi Germany became a second ‘license’ that empowered fascist regimes across Europe to embark on their own eliminationist projects with diminished accountability. Finally, it examines how this ‘license’ – enhanced by the actions of fascists and the collapse of order caused by World War Two – released individuals and communities from the burden of legal and moral accountability, turning them into accomplishes in the most wide, brutal, and devastating genocidal campaign that the continent had ever experienced.
Nazi propaganda during World War II has been portrayed as the most extreme example of a 'totalitarian' assault on modern society. Its psychological grip and efficacy, however, as well as the commanding influence of Joseph Goebbels in its... more
Nazi propaganda during World War II has been portrayed as the most extreme example of a 'totalitarian' assault on modern society. Its psychological grip and efficacy, however, as well as the commanding influence of Joseph Goebbels in its conduct and output, have been exaggerated. The book examines the organization, agency, strategy and output of Nazi propaganda during 1939-45, showing that neither a 'totalitarian' centralization of resources remained elusive because of the overall 'polycratic' operation of the National Socialist system. It re-defines the benchmarks for assessing the effectiveness of propaganda and underlines the gap between 'totalitarian' intentions and the far more complex reality in which Nazi propaganda was conducted during the war. Through an analysis of the strategies employed across the board of propaganda devices (press, radio, cinema) the book shows that Nazi wartime propaganda succeeded in integrating the 'national community' against its enemies; but failed in becoming a 'totalitarian' mechanism of information and perception-shaping. It also had limited impact on those factors that decided the outcome of the war.
The Fascism Reader is a fascinating and wide-ranging introduction to the complex nature, limits, aspects and dynamics of fascism as both ideology and practice. The book draws together classic and recent interpretations to trace the... more
The Fascism Reader is a fascinating and wide-ranging introduction to the complex nature, limits, aspects and dynamics of fascism as both ideology and practice. The book draws together classic and recent interpretations to trace the development of generic fascism.
Exploring fascism in all its diverse manifestations, this book discusses the classic examples of National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy, as well as a series of less familiar movements and regimes, including the Iron Guard in Romania, the British Union of Fascists, Salazar's dictatorship in Portugal and Franco's regime in Spain. The Fascism Reader explores all the key aspects of fascism including:
the essence and limitations of generic fascism
the intellectual and ideological dimensions of fascism
regimes of fascism as particular models of the exercise of power
fascism and society - from anti-Semitism to fascist attitudes to women.
A must for all students of European history, sociology and politics.
Exploring fascism in all its diverse manifestations, this book discusses the classic examples of National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy, as well as a series of less familiar movements and regimes, including the Iron Guard in Romania, the British Union of Fascists, Salazar's dictatorship in Portugal and Franco's regime in Spain. The Fascism Reader explores all the key aspects of fascism including:
the essence and limitations of generic fascism
the intellectual and ideological dimensions of fascism
regimes of fascism as particular models of the exercise of power
fascism and society - from anti-Semitism to fascist attitudes to women.
A must for all students of European history, sociology and politics.
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This is the third issue of the annual European Islamophobia Report (EIR) consisting of an overall evaluation of Islamophobia in Europe in the year 2017, as well as 33 country reports which include almost all EU member states and... more
This is the third issue of the annual European Islamophobia Report (EIR) consisting of an overall evaluation of Islamophobia in Europe in the year 2017, as well as 33 country reports which include almost all EU member states and additional countries such as Russia and Norway. This year’s EIR represents the work of 40 prominent scholars and civil society activists from various European countries.
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The Brazilian pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair turned out to be one of the most memorable, iconic highlights of this global event on the eve of the Second World War. Occupying a moderate-sized curved rectangular plot on... more
The Brazilian pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair turned out to be one of the most memorable, iconic highlights of this global event on the eve of the Second World War. Occupying a moderate-sized curved rectangular plot on the edge of the exhibition's Government zone at the recently reclaimed lands of Flushing Meadows, it offered a surprising glimpse of a country that basked in the glory of its kaleidoscopic traditions and its seeming contradictions but that had confidently directed its gaze toward a futural vanishing point. Nine years after the 1 " revolution " headed by Getúlio Vargas, and just two years after the regime that he headed had mutated into an increasingly authoritarian dictatorship with a new constitution based on corporatist ideas (the New State—Estado Novo), the Brazilian government used the occasion of 2 the 1939 World's Fair—for which, for the first time, it had commissioned an ad hoc national pavilion—to project a self-assured image of modernity, progress, and above all cultural optimism for the vast South American country that had only recently celebrated its first centenary of independence. 3 The pavilion—a subtly angular exhibition building with clean lines and gleaming white surfaces, raised on pilotis, accessed through a curved ramp, and framing an internal " tropical garden " —was the work of two young architects who, at the time, were on the cusp of making their mark on the global architectural scene as the two most authoritative names of that special, confident, and independent " Brazilian way " to modernism. Lucio Costa was actually the sole 4 winner of the national architectural competition for the pavilion, yet he decided to work together
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This chapter discusses the radical right’s embrace of Islamophobia. Initially propagated by certain parties of the radical right in the 1980s as part of a nativist backlash on immigrants and camouflaged under the seemingly less extreme... more
This chapter discusses the radical right’s embrace of Islamophobia. Initially propagated by certain parties of the radical right in the 1980s as part of a nativist backlash on immigrants and camouflaged under the seemingly less extreme garb of ethnopluralism, Islamophobia has mutated into the primary populist anti-paradigm for the overwhelming majority of the radical right. In different yet complementary ways, international terrorism and the global financial crisis have played straight into the radical right’s (in)security agenda. Since the turn of the new millennium, the Islamophobic rhetoric of the radical right has become more and more pervasive, more radical in content, more extreme in scope, and more potent in reach.
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Interwar fascism achieved sensational international reach through the appeal and circulation of a set of generic ideological norms and political practices. Therefore, models of analysis must accommodate alternative local interpretations,... more
Interwar fascism achieved sensational international reach through the appeal and circulation of a set of generic ideological norms and political practices. Therefore, models of analysis must accommodate alternative local interpretations, adaptations, and a wide range of varied outcomes in the process of its diverse local translations. In this article, I propose the new trans-disciplinary mobility paradigm as a productive methodological extension of the transnational approach in fascism studies. I focus on the fluid dynamics of transnational circulation of ‘fascist’ ideas and political innovations, as well as on how these were perceived, (re-)interpreted, adopted/adapted by a wide set of local agents in interwar Europe. I employ a decentred, anti-literalist, and multi-directional mobility approach that analyses the history of interwar ‘fascism’ as the messy net force of diverse, multivalent agencies, of interactions and frictions, in the end of creative translation and trial-and-erro...
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The relationship between fascism, race and antisemitism has troubled historians ever since the end of World War II. While National Socialist ideology and praxis were evidently dominated by an existential hatred of the Jews, discussion of... more
The relationship between fascism, race and antisemitism has troubled historians ever since the end of World War II. While National Socialist ideology and praxis were evidently dominated by an existential hatred of the Jews, discussion of antisemitism in the context of generic/comparative fascism studies reveals a wide variation amongst other fascist movements/regimes that has impeded a historiographical consensus on this matter. This essay examines how a particular, virulent form of (generic) ‘fascist antisemitism’ emerged and spread during the 1930s, under the radicalising influence and increasing kudos of the National Socialist regime, resulting in a de facto internationalisation of ‘fascism’ and a sense of a joint history-making mission against the perceived forces of ‘decadence’. However, the term ‘fascist antisemitism’ does not imply simple imitation of an otherwise imported or imposed (Nazi) model. Instead, long-term traditions and contemporary factors particular to each national setting played a critical role in shaping the relationship between fascism and antisemitism in each branch of the fascist ‘new order’.
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This article traces the extraordinary architectural production of the Roman branch of the Istituto Case Popolari (Institute of Public Housing, ICP) during the period between 1925 and 1930. This was the most prolific and creative period in... more
This article traces the extraordinary architectural production of the Roman branch of the Istituto Case Popolari (Institute of Public Housing, ICP) during the period between 1925 and 1930. This was the most prolific and creative period in the history of the Institute, delivering a rich portfolio of distinctive public housing projects in and around Rome with modest means and against the backdrop of a severe housing crisis. It was also the period when a single architect, Innocenzo Sabbatini, left his creative mark on the most significant of the…
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... historic centre that radiated from the Campidoglio towards the north, the west, and the southeast, in a spectacular passeggiata all the way from the northern entrance to the city via the Mausoleum of Augustus and Pantheon to the... more
... historic centre that radiated from the Campidoglio towards the north, the west, and the southeast, in a spectacular passeggiata all the way from the northern entrance to the city via the Mausoleum of Augustus and Pantheon to the monument of Vittorio Emanuele, the Foro, the ...
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In the early 1930s the fascist authorities took the decision to celebrate the 2000-year anniversary of Augustus’ birth, scheduled for 1937–8. The celebrations constituted the pinnacle of fascism’s identification with romanità and... more
In the early 1930s the fascist authorities took the decision to celebrate the 2000-year anniversary of Augustus’ birth, scheduled for 1937–8. The celebrations constituted the pinnacle of fascism’s identification with romanità and underlined Mussolini's growing tendency to identify with an 'imperial' imagery. They also constituted a crucial landmark in the regime's effort to portray Rome as the sacred centre of a new universal political religion. In this article I focus on the two landmark architectural-urbanistic projects in the context of the Bimillenario that were eventually fused into one: the reconfiguration of Augustus’ Mausoleum and its surrounding zone; and the excavation and reconstruction of the Ara Pacis Roman temple. The extravagant programme of architectural-urbanistic interventions in an area of profound archaeological importance inside the historic centre of Rome provides a case-study for assessing the regime’s growing tendency to use architecture and c...
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The rise and victory of Italian Fascism in the first half of the 1920s passed Greece by. Yet soon afterwards the international experience of ‘fascism’ found more receptive audiences within the prodigious dissident ‘third spaces’ where... more
The rise and victory of Italian Fascism in the first half of the 1920s passed Greece by. Yet soon afterwards the international experience of ‘fascism’ found more receptive audiences within the prodigious dissident ‘third spaces’ where more and more mainstream Greek political actors chose to operate in the interwar period. This article explores the dynamics of the ideological and political formation of ‘third ways’ in interwar Greece, paying attention to the interplay between international stimuli and local contextual singularities. In these thirding spaces ‘fascism’ was understood and operationalised in very different, subjective, and ever-shifting ways by each of these actors. It was regarded mostly as a potential component of diverse thirding processes/solutions and rarely as the desired outcome thereof. This explains why fascism came to inform a range of very different thirding projects in interwar Greece—from pursuing rupture and renewal to aspiring to status quo-affirmation; fr...
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During the late 1920s and 1930s, a group of Italian modernist architects, known as ‘rationalists’, launched an ambitious bid for convincing Mussolini that their brand of architectural modernism was best suited to become the official art... more
During the late 1920s and 1930s, a group of Italian modernist architects, known as ‘rationalists’, launched an ambitious bid for convincing Mussolini that their brand of architectural modernism was best suited to become the official art of the Fascist state (arte di stato). They produced buildings of exceptional quality and now iconic status in the annals of international architecture, as well as an even more impressive register of ideas, designs, plans, and proposals that have been recognized as visionary works. Yet, by the end of the 1930s, it was the official monumental stile littorio – classical and monumental yet abstracted and stripped-down, infused with modern and traditional ideas, pluralist and ‘willing to seek a third way between opposite sides in disputes’, the style curated so masterfully by Marcello Piacentini – that set the tone of the Fascist state’s official architectural representation. These two contrasted architectural programmes, however, shared much more than wh...
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The relationship between fascism, race and antisemitism has troubled historians ever since the end of the second world war. While National Socialist ideology and praxis were evidently dominated by an existential hatred of the Jews,... more
The relationship between fascism, race and antisemitism has troubled historians ever since the end of the second world war. While National Socialist ideology and praxis were evidently dominated by an existential hatred of the Jews, discussion of antisemitism ...
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This chapter discusses the radical right’s embrace of Islamophobia. Initially propagated by certain parties of the radical right in the 1980s as part of a nativist backlash on immigrants and camouflaged under the seemingly less extreme... more
This chapter discusses the radical right’s embrace of Islamophobia. Initially propagated by certain parties of the radical right in the 1980s as part of a nativist backlash on immigrants and camouflaged under the seemingly less extreme garb of ethnopluralism, Islamophobia has mutated into the primary populist anti-paradigm for the overwhelming majority of the radical right. In different yet complementary ways, international terrorism and the global financial crisis have played straight into the radical right’s (in)security agenda. Since the turn of the new millennium, the Islamophobic rhetoric of the radical right has become more and more pervasive, more radical in content, more extreme in scope, and more potent in reach.
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In the last three decades, the rise of a populist challenge to the liberal political mainstream exposed how shallow the supposed victory of global liberalism was, even in its heartlands in Europe and North America. Exclusive nationalism... more
In the last three decades, the rise of a populist challenge to the liberal political mainstream exposed how shallow the supposed victory of global liberalism was, even in its heartlands in Europe and North America. Exclusive nationalism and nativism, identity politics, critiques of globalisation and internationalism, and calls for democratic re-empowerment of the demos have converged politically on a new locus of inflated territorial, indeed 'border' sovereignty, aligning the call of 'taking back control' on behalf of a radically redefined community ('we') with a defensive re-territorialisation of power along existing fault lines of nation-statism. In this paper, I argue that the very same call has become the new common political denominator for all populist platforms and parties across Europe. I argue that populists across the conventional left–right divide have deployed a rigidly territo-rialised concept of popular sovereignty in order to bestow intellectual coherence and communicative power to the otherwise disparate strands of their anti-utopian critiques of globalisation. In spite of significant ideological differences between so-called right-and left-wing populism, in the short-term the two populist projects have sought to stage their performances of sovereigntism on, behind or inside the borders of the existing nation-states. Keywords Populism Á Sovereignty Á State Á Power Á Border After seemingly emerging strengthened from the First World War, liberalism suffered the political equivalent of near-death in the 1930s, attacked from illiberal and anti-liberal forces from left and right in large parts of the world. Against many
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This article traces the extraordinary architectural production of the Roman branch of the Istituto Case Popolari (Institute of Public Housing, ICP) during the period between 1925 and 1930. This period was the most prolific and creative in... more
This article traces the extraordinary architectural production of the Roman branch of the Istituto Case Popolari (Institute of Public Housing, ICP) during the period between 1925 and 1930. This period was the most prolific and creative in the history of the Institute, delivering a rich repertoire of distinctive public housing projects in and around Rome with modest means and against the backdrop of a severe housing crisis. It was also the period when a single architect, Innocenzo Sabbatini, left his creative mark on the most significant of the Institute's executed projects. Under Sabbatini's creative lead, the ICP sought to advance a distinctive, coherent vision for public housing while also producing a singular architectural language that was both modern and unmistakeable 'situated' in the traditions and the ambience of Rome. I examine the three arguably most innovative ICP projects of this period bearing Sabbatini's signature (the Albergo Rosso in Garbatella; the so-called Casa del Sole in Tiburtino; and the unrealised Trionfale Nuovo project). Through these three projects, I seek to trace a fascinatingly singular Roman road to architectural modernism that predated the 'heroic' phase of razionalismo in Rome during the early 1930s but has been largely redacted from the narratives of modernist architecture .
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... I FOREIGN POLICY, AND j WAR IN FASCIST ITALY AND NAZI GERMANY ... upon which Fascist and Nazi success chiefly depended - the Italian and German armies. ...
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The radical right has broken taboos in order to introduce harsh repressive norms that give them a license to pursue their regressive agenda.
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Fascism exerted a crucial ideological and political influence across Europe and beyond. Its appeal reached much further than the expanding transnational circle of 'fascists', crossing into the territory of the mainstream, authoritarian,... more
Fascism exerted a crucial ideological and political influence across Europe and beyond. Its appeal reached much further than the expanding transnational circle of 'fascists', crossing into the territory of the mainstream, authoritarian, and traditional right. Meanwhile, fascism's seemingly inexorable rise unfolded against the backdrop of a dramatic shift towards dictatorship in large parts of Europe during the 1920s and especially 1930s. These dictatorships shared a growing conviction that 'fascism' was the driving force of a new, post-liberal, fiercely nationalist and anti-communist order. The ten contributions to this volume seek to capture, theoretically and empirically, the complex transnational dynamic between interwar dictatorships. This dynamic, involving diffusion of ideas and practices, cross-fertilisation, and reflexive adaptation, muddied the boundaries between 'fascist' and 'authoritarian' constituencies of the interwar European right.
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The Brazilian pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair turned out to be one of the most memorable, iconic highlights of this global event on the eve of the Second World War. Occupying a moderate-sized curved rectangular plot on the edge... more
The Brazilian pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair turned out to be one of the most memorable, iconic highlights of this global event on the eve of the Second World War. Occupying a moderate-sized curved rectangular plot on the edge of the exhibition's Government zone at the recently reclaimed lands of Flushing Meadows, it offered a surprising glimpse of a country that basked in the glory of its kaleidoscopic traditions and its seeming contradictions but that had confidently directed its gaze toward a futural vanishing point. Nine years after the 1 " revolution " headed by Getúlio Vargas, and just two years after the regime that he headed had mutated into an increasingly authoritarian dictatorship with a new constitution based on corporatist ideas (the New State—Estado Novo), the Brazilian government used the occasion of 2 the 1939 World's Fair—for which, for the first time, it had commissioned an ad hoc national pavilion—to project a self-assured image of modernity, progress, and above all cultural optimism for the vast South American country that had only recently celebrated its first centenary of independence. 3 The pavilion—a subtly angular exhibition building with clean lines and gleaming white surfaces, raised on pilotis, accessed through a curved ramp, and framing an internal " tropical garden " —was the work of two young architects who, at the time, were on the cusp of making their mark on the global architectural scene as the two most authoritative names of that special, confident, and independent " Brazilian way " to modernism. Lucio Costa was actually the sole 4 winner of the national architectural competition for the pavilion, yet he decided to work together
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With this volume we wish to move the debate on inter-war fascism from its ideological nature to its political dynamics; from classification according to criteria derived from conceptual ‘ideal types’ to a ‘relational perspective’ that... more
With this volume we wish to move the debate on inter-war fascism from its ideological nature to its political dynamics; from classification according to criteria derived from conceptual ‘ideal types’ to a ‘relational perspective’ that scrutinizes the complex contemporary contexts and processes of ideological, political and institutional hybridization over the time and space of inter-war Europe.