The Five Ages of Antifascism

A global history of antifascism from its inception to our own times. Its inspiration, and subject of critique, though, is a work of fascist history, Robert O. Paxton’s classic essay The Five Stages of Fascism. Paxton influentially studied fascism by comparing national case studies and proposing a cycle of five developmental stages through which each national fascism might progress. In this Element, the historian Joseph Fronczak counters Paxton’s method of stages with one of ages: instead of organizing antifascism into national case studies going through stages, he organizes antifascism’s global history into five ages, stressing the transnational causes and solidarities that pushed global antifascism to take form and shift shape over time. A further aim of this Element is to pose this history of antifascism as a counterhistory of fascism, a sort of epistemological experiment for rethinking fascism’s history through a formulation of antifascism’s history.