We invited each contributor to Authoritarianism 101 to nominate what they see as the single most important work on the history of authoritarianism from their research perspectives. The reading list is designed to help teachers and students who want to take deeper dives into conceptual or placed based dimensions of authoritarian history. It could also form the spine of an orals reading list for doctoral students in the global history of authoritarianism. In this annotated list, each contributor offers a short pitch for the work they have selected.
Conceptual Histories of Authoritarianism
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).
“Although Arendt was a political theorist, her book is deeply historical and discusses the varieties of authoritarian regimes, the relationship between authoritarianism and modernity, and the significant role of racism and imperialism in authoritarian thinking.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (W. W. Norton, 2021).
“This book is important because of its chronological breadth and comparative approach. It is highly readable, so one does not have to be a scholar to appreciate it.”
Umberto Eco, “Ur-fascism,” New York Review, June 22, 1995.
“Eco’s concise and engaging piece on the features of fascism—a notoriously elusive category—is intriguing because it neatly enumerates the appeal of various authoritarian movements for ideological subjects. As one who was taken in by this appeal as a young man and who has spent a career combating such ideologies, he has a particular draw for student readers, who are often keen to compare the features he outlines with examples from the contemporary world.”
Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 1995).
“This is a rare book that does more than its title promises. It is an intellectual genealogy of the idea of totalitarianism, examining its emergence in fascist Italy and tracking its evolution into an organizing framework of the Cold War. It helps historicize the concept, observing its shifting meanings without rendering the term meaningless.”
Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (University of California Press, 2001).
“Mbembe’s On the Postcolony starts by situating governance in Africa as entangled temporally and tactically with the authoritarian commandment of colonial states, a governing tactic defined by arbitrary violence designed to render the colonized both as subjects to rule and as objects devoid of interiority. From that arbitrary violence, Mbembe points to the ways that authoritarian colonial governance, undertaken without regard to intermediary institutions or legitimizing symbols or practices, shaped the political and social realities of those living in post-independence Africa and ongoing practices of domination and legitimation by authoritarian states.”
Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (Vintage Books, 2004).
“This is the best one-volume history of fascism available. Paxton argues that we need to look at what fascists did rather than what fascists said. He also presents a compelling argument that fascist regimes come to power in stages, and that fascist behavior is distinctive in each of these stages—so that we shouldn’t expect fascists to act the same when they are trying to gain power as when they are consolidating power or when they are trying to maintain it. The stage framework is helpful for understanding the Nazis and the Fascist Party of Italy, but also the dozens of fascist movements that never reached their full capacity for destruction.”
Mira L. Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
“This more recent monograph provides the best and broadest overview of a political and legal category that has been essential to the brutality of authoritarian regimes upon their subjects—statelessness. Siegelberg shows the evolution of the category of “statelessness” as a legal and political concept, particularly in the United Kingdom, and its utilization by authoritarian regimes like Nazi Germany to relegate entire communities and groups beyond the reach of state aid—yet still within the reach of state persecution.”
Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Zone Books, 2025).
“Slobodian’s book merits attention for its focus on the links between certain forms of authoritarianism, particularly those of the fascist or far-right variety, and capitalism; and the presumed relationship between economic liberalism and political democracy.”
Jason Stanley, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future (Atria Books, 2024).
“Erasing History draws on compelling examples from across the globe to show that authoritarian regimes have found history profoundly threatening and how such regimes —from Russia and Hungary to Turkey, India, and the United States—have manipulated the past. Arguing that the ideological war against the past has seeped into every aspect of our culture from the bedroom to the courts, Stanley finds its deepest expression in our schools, “our most egalitarian institution.” The final chapter, “Reclaiming History,” examines strategies of resistance to the authoritarian manipulation of history, such as historical literacy campaigns and support for teachers under fire, suggesting democratic models of education such as those found in the Zinn Education Project.”
Anne M. Wolf, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Authoritarian Politics (Oxford University Press, 2024).
“A useful compendium of over forty chapters that examine (1) authoritarianism as a dynamic phenomenon and (2) its ever-shifting sociology of knowledge production.”
Place-Based Histories of Authoritarianism
Michael Braddick, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2015).
“No single monograph covers the material and debates that this volume does, from the personal rule of Charles I to the role of crowds, print, and political theology en route to the Long Parliament, civil wars, and regicide—all crucial background for American as well as British movements to resist authoritarian rule.”
Phillipe Burrin, France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise, translated by Janet Lloyd (The New York Press, 1996).
“Philippe Burrin’s France Under the Germans supersedes the debate between collaboration and resistance and shows that most ordinary French people learned to accommodate the Germans’ demands during the occupation.”
Mary Callahan, Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma (Cornell University Press, 2003).
“This book provides an important foundation for understanding the rise and formation of the Burmese military from independence to the 1962 period before Ne Win’s coup. It provides important historical context for understanding how and why authoritarianism and coercion have become integral patterns in Myanmar’s nation-building process.”
Kathryn Ciancia, On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World (Oxford University Press, 2021).
“This book offers a nuanced case study of how authoritarian states use internal colonization as a tool of nation building. Focusing on Poland’s eastern borderlands, Ciancia demonstrates that these regions were imagined as both a threat to national cohesion and a laboratory for modernization. Through policies of cultural assimilation, infrastructural development, and selective inclusion, Polish authorities sought to “civilize” what they perceived as backward spaces. This approach illuminates a broader authoritarian logic: the state’s drive to homogenize diversity under a national ideal while maintaining hierarchical control. Ciancia’s work thus deepens our understanding of internal colonization not as a peripheral phenomenon but as central to authoritarian governance, revealing how coercive modernization and cultural engineering intersected in the interwar period”
Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019).
“Estes demonstrates how settler-colonialism functions as a long-term form of state control. The book foregrounds Indigenous resistance in the face of authoritarian power like that demonstrated in Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline (April 2016–February 2017).”
Mattias Fibiger, Suharto’s Cold War: Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the World (Oxford University Press, 2023).
“There is a rich literature on authoritarianism in postcolonial Indonesia and Southeast Asia, but Fibiger’s intervention takes those histories in global directions to explore the flows of transnational capital during the Cold War era that funded the establishment of Suharto’s New Order in Indonesia; it also explores how the Suharto regime supported right-wing authoritarian regimes in other states across the region.”
Federico Finchelstein, The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth-Century Argentina (Oxford University Press, 2014).
“My book focuses on the theory and practice of the fascist idea in Argentine political culture throughout the twentieth century, analyzing the connections between fascist theory and the Holocaust, antisemitism, and the military junta’s practices of torture and state violence, with its networks of concentration camps and extermination. It provides a genealogy of state-sanctioned terror, revealing how fascism was central to Argentina’s political culture and its violent twentieth century.”
Ruth First, The Barrel of a Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup d'État (Allen Lane, 1970).
“Ruth First was a South African sociologist who studied the wave of military coups that were happening across the continent after independence. Her 1970 book is still the most vivid account of what led up to military rule and why it happened.”
Ian Johnson, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future (Oxford University Press, 2023).
“A compelling discussion of various bold efforts to push back against the official view of the past that the Chinese Communist Party uses to defend its legitimacy. In the process, it reveals much about both how authoritarianism works in China, and also how determined and creative people make use of whatever spaces they can find to challenge that system’s efforts to control intellectual life.”
Tracy H. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy, 1922-1943 (University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
“Believe, Obey, Fight identifies the influence of the fascist regime on young people’s lives, within and beyond the classroom. Analyzing propaganda, policies, and institutions, Koon assesses the efficacy of the regime’s youth mobilization strategies over two decades and considers the dictatorship’s response to the growing disenchantment with fascism among younger generations of Italians throughout the 1930s.”
Benedito Machava, The Morality of Revolution: Reeducation Camps and the Politics of Punishment in Socialist Mozambique, 1968–1990 (Ohio University Press, 2024).
“In The Morality of Revolution, Machava focuses on postcolonial Mozambique’s expansive system of reeducation camps, showing how FRELIMO’s revolution turned into a moralist punitive state. The book is particularly useful to think about the connections among African socialism, Christian moralism, austerity, and the coproduction of punitive authoritarianism in a postcolonial context.”
Maruyama Masao, Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, edited by Ivan Morris (Oxford University Press, 1963).
“A 1963 English translation of essays published in prominent journals in the 1950s by a leading public intellectual. Maruyama’s analysis of fascism and post-fascism was written in the early postwar moment, when Japanese intellectuals were engaged in intensive self-reflection about the causes of the rise and fall of military dictatorship in Japan. Maruyama was an eminent philosopher, intellectual historian, political scientist, and public intellectual, and certainly the most famous philosopher of Japanese fascism in Anglophone scholarship. His work has been widely commented on and critiqued.”
Guillermo O’Donnell, "Bureaucratic Authoritarianism: Argentina, 1966–1973," in Comparative Perspective, translated by James McGuire and Rae Flory (University of California Press, 1988).
“This book is a classic. Originally published shortly after the 1976 coup in Argentina, it features a reconstruction of the rise of authoritarianism in Argentina and a comparative discussion of its characteristics throughout Latin America.”