Walter Benjamin
An A to Z of theory.
Fascism and Crisis.
The context of economic crisis and rising fascism cast a long, and fatal, shadow over Walter Benjamin’s world. This shadow strangely prefigures contemporary problems, with the economy once more in crisis and the far right on the rise. In the fourth of his eight-part series, Andrew Robinson discusses Benjamin’s analyses of the effects of economic crisis on everyday life in Germany, and his account of fascism as the ‘aestheticisation of politics’.