Transatlantic Antifascisms: From the Spanish Civil War to the End of World War II, by Michael Seidman

Measure the volume of scholarly work first on fascism and then on anti-fascism, and the asymmetry between the two is stark. Michael Seidman opens his book with the observation that there are thirty times more publications on fascism than on anti-fascism. Academic interest in anti-fascism has been limited. Indeed, so limited, Seidman claims, that ‘no historian or social scientist has previously attempted to define the nature, types, and history of antifascism in the Atlantic world’ (p. 1.). This claim is problematic on two counts. The first is that Seidman’s own definition of the ‘Atlantic world’ is narrow (he limits it to Spain, France, the United Kingdom and the United States).