Robert Paxton

Robert Owen Paxton (born June 15, 1932) is an American political scientist and historian specializing in Vichy France, fascism, and Europe during the World War II era. He is Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science in the Department of History at Columbia University.

Quotes

• An American reader who honestly recreates the way the world looked from France (in 1940) cannot assume that he or she would easily have found the path to a 1944 hero’s role.
  • Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), Introduction, p. xiv

• Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
  • The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), Allen Lane History, ISBN 1-4000-4094-9, p. 218