Philosophy Today

Volume 67, Issue 1, Winter 2023

Violent Democracies

Provocations on the Liberal Onto-Epistemology of Fascism
An Introduction to the Special Issue

What follows is a series of provocations, loosely interconnected, centered on the ambiguous relationship between liberalism and fascism in our age of democratic decline. Together they seek to trouble the established binaries and analytic frameworks that would position liberalism and fascism as antithetical and suggest instead that both emerge from the same condition of possibility: imperial racialism. In doing so, they reflect on the discursive function of fascism in sustaining liberal democracy as a project of white supremacy.