Jonathan Morese wrote: "I add my vote to those in favor of Alastair Hamilton's _The Appeal of Fascism_. It's an excellent book. But it was published way back in 1971, and we need something more up to historiographic date. Ideas, anyone?" I believe I have previously recommended Zeev Sternhell, THE BIRTH OF FASCIST IDEOLOGY (Princeton 1994). He is an Israeli scholar who is largely responsible for reinvigorating Fascist studies, which had pretty-well died out for lack of a determinate object. Sternhell traces the origin of fascism to French socialist thought of the late nineteenth century -- Proudhon, and, above all, Sorel. After 1870 or thereabouts, he says (uncontroversially) that Marxism faced a crisis because capitalism had adapted itself sufficiently that the expected class consciousness of the proletariat was not coming about to the extent necessary for Marxist theory. Here is what he says (249-50)about scholarly attention to Fascism: "The marginalization of fascism relieves those that deal with the necessity of relating to the broad cultural context, which was its true intellectual seedbed. Those who choose the easy path are spared the need to answer many perplexing questions, including that of the intellectual, emotional, or political connection that existed in a given period between broad circles of the intelligentsia and the Fascists or Nazis, or other advocates of a `national revolution.' The apologetic interpretation of events consciously disregards the cultural history of Europe in the last hundred years, the fact that toward the end of the nineteenth century the opposition to optimism, universalism, and humanism developed into a general struggle that affected all areas of intellectual activity. At that time, an alternative political culture came into being; it sought to rescue Europe from the heritage of the Enlightenment, and naturally, when the crisis reached its peak [np] at the beginning of the twentieth century, the attack was directed first against rationalism and humanism." That is something worth chewing on, I think. Leon Surette English Department University of Western Ontario