CHAPTER 5 Neo-Fascism: A Footnote to the Fascist Epoch? Nigel Copsey Every fresh act of neo-fascist violence, every event designed to stir up memories of the fascist epoch, every reference to ethnic cultures as organic entities with their own political rights and destinies, is a reminder of the need for the human sciences not to close the ﬁle on neo-fascism or treat is as footnote to the fascist epoch. (Roger Grifﬁn, Fascism, 2018: p. 125) Three Trends in the Evolution of Neo-Fascism When reviewing the 626-page The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (2009), Roger Grifﬁn lamented that the question of ‘how the revolutionary right has metamorphosed itself in the post-war, post-Soviet or “post-fascist” age’, rather than featuring as a principal theme of the book, was ‘tucked away inconspicuously in a concluding section’. While Anna Cento Bull’s chapter on neo-fascism ensured that the book at least ended on ‘a high note’, 1 its solitary nature reﬂected the prevailing tendency among histo- rians of the ‘fascist epoch’ to dismiss post-war articulations as insigniﬁcant N. Copsey (B ) Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK © The Author(s) 2020 C. Iordachi and A. Kallis (eds.), Beyond the Fascist Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46831-6_5 101