This project has its origins in a conversation with Alexander Anievas, Neil Davidson and Adam Fabry in the Marlborough Arms pub in Bloomsbury in November 2011 where we met while attending the Annual Conference of the journal Historical Materialism. This meeting laid the basis for a series of ongoing conversations and collaborations about the history and politics of the far-right and, in particular, how to explain its origins, development and mutations by addressing what we all saw as the neglected and under-theorized significance of international relations and geopolitics. Our conversation led to a two-day workshop held at Queen Mary, University of London in October 2012 which enriched the discussion by bringing in Nicola Short, Mark Rupert, Owen Worth, Stuart Shields and Ishay Landa and which resulted in the co-edited volume, the Longue Durée of the Far-Right: An International Historical Sociology (Saull et al., 2015). I owe a debt of gratitude to all the above for helping me develop my knowledge and thinking on the far-right.
Since then, I have continued to work with Alexander Anievas (Anievas and Saull, 2020, 2022) and I also co-wrote an article with Neil Davidson (Davidson and Saull, 2017). Neil sadly passed away in 2020 and I, like many others, miss him. His work on nationalism, uneven and combined development, and neoliberalism along with his encyclopaedic knowledge of Marxist theory have significantly influenced my thinking on the far-right and it is a great loss that he is no longer around to discuss these ideas. My thinking on the far-right has also benefited from discussions and collaborations with colleagues in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary. I teach a second-year undergraduate module with Ray Kiely in which the nineteenth century history of the far-right, inter-war fascism and the inter-connections between the far-right and neoliberalism all feature. We also co-edited a forum in Critical Sociology on ‘Neoliberalism and the Right’ (2017) for which we provided the introduction. I have also benefited from conversations with Jean-Francois Drolet, another colleague, and a foremost authority on Neoconservatism and the American right. My former colleague, Robbie Shilliam, has been a major influence on my thinking about race and racism and that also extends to Gurminder Bhambra and Lisa Tilley and the wider collaboration involving others that resulted in the special issue of New Political Economy in 2018 on ‘Raced Markets’.
The most important influence on my thinking on the far-right has been Alexander Anievas. Since we worked on the Longue Durée volume, Alex and I have been in conversation about the history and politics of the far-right, presenting papers at conferences and organizing panels, co-writing articles as well as
These two volumes are dedicated to my grandmother, Josephine Saull. She died in 2018. She had been an integral part of my life for as long as I can remember. Growing up, she would visit us – my parents and brother and I – most weekends and, in some respects, she was almost an additional mother. And after my mum died when I was 18 her love, support and encouragement became even more important to me. My nan was also very supportive of me in my academic studies. I lived with her whilst I completed my Masters degree and then, later, a PhD at the lse. I don’t think that she fully understood what these studies involved – she had not benefited from a decent primary let alone a higher education – or much about my career as a university lecturer, but she always made clear to me and to others how very proud of me she was. I will be forever in her debt. I miss her deeply and hope that she knew how important she was to me.