For many years I taught a university course on fascism, sometimes as a graduate seminar, sometimes as an undergraduate seminar. The more I read about fascism and the more I discussed it with students, the more perplexed I grew. While an abundance of brilliant monographs dealt illuminatingly with particular aspects of Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and their like, books about fascism as a generic phenomenon often seemed to me, in comparison with the monographs, abstract, stereotyped, and bloodless.

— The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton (Page xvi)