Dylan Riley's comparative historical analysis of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Romania is a major and original contribution to the understanding of the origins of fascism, its varieties, and its relationship to civil society development. Indeed, this is the most innovative account of this historical phenomenon since Sheri Berman, Jason Kaufman, and Ariel Armony established that the development of civil society can foster authoritarian political regimes.

The main argument advanced in the book is that associational development in the context of failed hegemonic politics may lead to fascism rather than to mass-based liberal democracy. More specifically, it is argued that the rise of fascism is facilitated in a political environment where dominant liberal social elites of the liberal democratic order reduce politics to a set of conflicts among largely incompatible interest groups, instead of defining politics in terms of a hegemonic national project. In turn, this failure of liberal elites to establish their political hegemony reduces rather than strengthens the capacity of the progressive counterhegemonic nonelites to democratize the polity. The ensuing crisis of politics creates opportunities for the antipolitical and antiliberal forces of fascism to appropriate successfully civil society infrastructures and ideologies in order to terminate the liberal democratic order.

Like Berman and Armony, Riley challenges the Toquevillian thesis that civil society development and liberal democracy go hand in hand. Yet Riley thinks that the critics of the Toquevillian tradition have gone too far owing to a conflation of democracy with liberal democracy. On the basis of this insight, the author's first dramatic challenge to the scholarship on fascism is to uphold the view that this political phenomenon was not entirely antidemocratic. While agreeing that fascism was profoundly antiliberal, he shows that its ideological core rested on claims of being more representative of the modern nation than the factional liberal democratic status quo. Thus redefined, fascist movements appear considerably less anti-Toquevillian and not as antidemocratic as the existing literature says they were.

The second theoretical innovation of the book is to synthesize Gramsci and Toqueville. Riley argues that the Toquevillians' claim that thick civil societies have direct political effects should be complemented by the Gramscian insight that these effects are contingent on the capacity of dominant social elites to establish their hegemony. Wherever fascism did not take hold, the hegemony of liberal social elites was established through cross-class alliances built by convincingly converting elite interests into a set of demands involving the whole people and by institutionalizing political conflict across clear left-right divides. Failure to establish the political institutions of hegemony simultaneously with civil society development, Riley argues, led to fascism because people were faced with radical skepticism about liberal forms of representation. Therefore, in all three countries examined in the book the fascist critique of liberal democracy and its “political class” resonated because the absence of clear party identities made political parties victims to sectional interests and fragmentation. This exposed the political system to the fascist charge—credible in the political conditions in which fascists operated—that it merely represented interest groups rather than the citizens.

But fascism did not present the same face everywhere. Like any political artifact, it saw context-specific translations: party fascism in Italy, traditionalist fascism in Spain, and statist fascism in Romania. Thus, in Italy, fascism stepped into the political crisis of liberal-democratic politics caused by the fact that fragmented liberal-conservative and leftist democratic elites failed to enlist Northern Italy's burgeoning civil society into a liberal democratic political project. Most importantly, although they could have secured a massive majority in the parliament in the aftermath of World War I and thus have given Italy a progressive mass democracy, the Left proved incapable of tapping into the democratic energies of civil society and fell victim to fragmentation. The fascists stepped into the void, appropriated the bulk of civil society organizations and, after assuming power, institutionalized a symbiosis between party and state (party fascism). Though the story looks strikingly similar in interwar Spain and Romania, local characteristics led to different varieties of fascism in these countries. In Spain, Italian-style party fascism was impossible because of the strength of the antiliberal alliance between small and large landholders, on the one hand, and a Catholic civil society on the other. Hence, Spain ended up with a traditionalist variety of fascism. In Romania, the fact that associational development was funded and controlled by the state deprived Romanian party fascism of the capacity to build a strong popular base. In turn, this allowed the monarchy to repress party fascism and establish statist fascism instead.

In addition to being highly innovative, Riley's book is exceptionally well designed. Each of the three cases is analyzed in a separate chapter from a Gramscian perspective and then an entire chapter is spent making the case that the alternative Marxian and Weberian perspectives fail to explain the three cases and that cases that appear to fit these alternative approaches even better (Hungary and Germany) pose problems as well. The weakness of Southern Italian civil society and the success of Catalan liberal social elites to establish their political hegemony, two characteristics that prevented the rise of fascism in the two regions, provide interesting subnational-level countercases to the rest of the story.

However, some readers will be puzzled by Riley's redefinition of fascism as authoritarian democracy, although this should be less confounding for those familiar with Raymond Aron's Democracy and Totalitarianism. Riley's tour de force could have benefited from theorizing the implications of the failure of party fascism and statist fascism to join forces in the case of Romania. Similarly, some area scholars may be intrigued by the fact that Riley's analysis plays down the central role of the military in the rise of Spanish fascism. Other readers may take issue with the fact that the book does not dwell on the temporary convergence in 1941 between Romanian party fascism and the wartime military government of Marshal Ion Antonescu, leading to what was arguably a more explicit form of fascist regime than the previous “royalist” one analyzed by Riley. But given the sheer scope of the material covered, such tensions and gaps are probably unavoidable and in no way detract from the fundamental contributions made by the book. The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe is sure to become a standard reference for scholars working on the ambiguities of civil society development, the collapse of liberal democratic orders, and the institutionalization of authoritarian rule.