The Development of Comparative Judicial Politics

Abstract

Much of the scholarly debate over the Heidegger controversy has endeavored to either connect or free his philosophy from fascism. Against both these tendencies, I argue that the central concepts of Heidegger's philosophy are politically underdetermined. Throughout both his late and early periods, Heidegger's primary ambition remained the illumination of the question of being, a project that I argue made his ontological framework inherently relativistic.     

A Call to Action: New Party Candidates and the 1931 General Election*

Sir Oswald Mosley established his New Party in early 1931. It proposed to cut across the party and class divides, with the objective of providing a ‘national’ solution to the economic crisis of the time. According to Mosley, the ‘old parties’– meaning the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Parties – had revealed themselves unable to adapt to the post‐war age. In their place, he argued, a modern organisation, based on youth, vitality and a scientifically reasoned economic plan, was needed to save Britain from terminal decline. Few heeded his call, and the party ultimately paved the way for the British Union of Fascists to emerge in 1932. Nevertheless, the New Party fought the general election of 1931, offering an unsuccessful but suitably intriguing challenge to the National coalition and Labour Party. This article will assess the New Party's election campaign, concentrating on those who briefly rallied to Mosley's appeal only to fall foul of the ballot box. In other words, it provides a case study of those who contributed to a dramatic electoral failure, and traces a significant stage along Mosley's journey to fascism.     

Miss Moriarty,the Adventuress and the Crime Queen: The Rise of the Modern Female Criminal in Britain, 1918–1939

This article demonstrates the reconceptualisation of female criminality in interwar British popular culture. It argues that in fiction and the popular press, the period signalled the rise of the strategic female career criminal who challenged traditional gendered patterns of law-breaking, appropriated wider notions of fashionable modernity and transgressed social and geographic boundaries as poorer women embraced new opportunities for masquerade and used crime for upward social mobility. The article shows that the modern female criminal reflected broader shifts and changes in opportunities and roles for women, suggesting that she functions as a prism through which to explore wider debates and anxieties around femininity, 1918–1939.     

Importing fascism: reappraising the British fascisti, 1923–1926

This article re-evaluates the ideology and significance of Britain’s first self-proclaimed fascist party, the British Fascisti (BF) between 1923 and 1926. It challenges the dominant scholarly perception of BF ideology as a virulent form of conservatism or ‘Conservatism with Knobs On’ by demonstrating that they represent a hybrid movement consisting of both domestic conservative and continental fascist ideas. Thus, the chief purpose of this article is to demonstrate the dynamics of what scholars refer to as ‘fascistisation’ – the adoption and re-contextualisation of fascist features by non-fascist political movements and regimes. The BF’s ideology represents an, at times, contradictory attempt to replicate the Italian Fascist movement and repackage it for a British audience – they were a ‘fascistized’ right-wing pressure group seeking a new, authoritarian state. Abstract notions of the ‘success’ of Mussolini’s fascist experiment in stemming a Bolshevik revolution and his achievements in bringing order and a new sense of patriotism were re-adapted to the British context. These ideas were manacled to British conservative ideas of Christianity, anti-Socialism and imperialism typically associated with Edwardian Die Hards. Ultimately, the BF’s ideology will be proved to be far more complex than scholars have been prepared to acknowledge during a period in which fascism was ill-defined.     

Italian Jews and their ‘political’ reactions to the fascist regime’s anti-Semitic campaign*

ABSTRACT

The article intends to emphasize the political redefinition of Italian Jews in reaction to the fascist aggression and its different answers ‘organized’. Since 1934 there arose strong divisions within Italian Judaism: the real issue of contention, however, did not reside in the attitude towards fascism, but in the judgement on Zionism and postponed a long-standing dynamics. A group of Jews, called ‘bandieristi’ from a magazine called La Nostra Bandiera, on the basis of a ‘fascist’ programme and anti-Zionism, tried to replace the official establishment of the Jewish representatives, the Union Community of Italian Jewish, as a reference to the fascist authorities. The Union was accused by the ‘bandieristi’ of being complicit with international Jewry and Zionism. The confrontation with fascism exasperated the Italian Judaism internal contradictions, putting in long-term dynamic light that preceded fascism and survived the early post-war years.