This concise and lucidly written book is designed as an introduction to theories of fascism. Martin Kitchen, a distinguished scholar of German history and politics, assesses the rival claims of the main theories. These include those of the Communist International (which had such a significant political impact at the time), the more important of the psychological explanations of fascism, the theories of totalitarianism which dominated western political science in the 1950s and 1960s, the attempt by Ernst Nolte to find a way out of the impasse in which the theory of totalitarianism found...