Monday, November 27, 2017 at 6:00 PM
Klein Conference Room, A510, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall, The New School
66 W. 12th Street, NY, NY 10011
What is fascism and what is populism? What are their connections in history and theory, and how should we address their significant differences? What does it mean when pundits call Donald Trump a fascist, or label as populist politicians who span left and right such as Hugo Chávez, Juan Perón, Rodrigo Duterte, and Marine Le Pen? Federico Finchelstein, one of the leading scholars of fascist and populist ideologies, synthesizes their history in order to answer these questions and offer a thoughtful perspective on how we might apply the concepts today. While they belong to the same history and are often conflated, fascism and populism actually represent distinct political and historical trajectories. Drawing on an expansive history of transnational fascism and postwar populist movements, Finchelstein gives us insightful new ways to think about the state of democracy and political culture on a global scale.
You can read an excerpt from the book here.
Federico Finchelstein is Professor of History at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College and a senior editor at Public Seminar. He has taught at the History Department of Brown University and he received his PhD at Cornell University. He is the author of five books on fascism, populism, Dirty Wars, the Holocaust and Jewish history in Latin America and Europe; his new book: From Fascism to Populism in History (University of California Press, September 2017).
New School colleagues Julia Ott, Oz Frankel, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Andrew Arato and Jeremy Varon will join Finchelstein in a discussion of the book that will be live tweeted by Public Seminar.
