This wide-ranging collection of academic essays examines the various undertakings by modern intellectuals and ideologues in the process of propaganda and political debate. Matthew Feldman calls attention to the substantial role played in post-Great War Europe and the US by religions—both familiar monotheisms like Christianity and secular ‘political faiths’—over the last century of upheaval and revolutionary change. While the first part considers Ezra Pound as a case study in fascist ʼconversion’ in Mussolini’s Italy, leading to extensive propaganda, the second half examines other fascist ideologues, from Martin Heidegger to Anders Behring Breivik, before turning to other leading ideologies in modern Europe and the US, communism and liberalism, covering key figures from Thomas Merton and Albert Camus to the Russian Constructionists and Samuel Beckett, with especial focus on the subjects of modern warfare, political terrorism, and genocide, ranging from Stalinist gulags to the war in Iraq. With thought-provoking discussion of the interplay between belief and modern politics as understood by familiar intellectual voices, this volume will be of interest to scholars and general readers alike.



Professor Matthew Feldman is a specialist on fascist ideology and the far-right in Europe and the USA. He is the author or editor of more than 20 books, including three book-length studies, and more than 40 articles or academic book chapters. Published volumes include Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe (Routledge, 2008), A Fascist Century (Palgrave, 2008), and, with Roger Griffin, the five-volume collection Fascism: Critical Concepts (Routledge 2003). More recent volumes include Doublespeak: The Rhetoric of the Far-Right since 1945 (with Paul Jackson, 2014), The ‘New Man’ in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919–1945 (with Jorge Dagnino and Paul Stocker, 2017), as well as the journal specials Far-right Populism and Lone Wolf Terrorism in Contemporary Europe (Democracy and Security, 2013) and The Ideologies and Ideologues of the Radical Right (Patterns of Prejudice, 2016). His most recent monograph, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935-1945, appeared with Palgrave in 2013, and his first collection of essays, Falsifying Beckett, appeared in 2015 with ibidem Press.