How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

The author of How Fascism Works, Jason Stanley, is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, where he also teaches at Yale Law School. He holds a PhD from the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. He has held permanent academic positions at Cornell University, The University of Michigan, and Rutgers University before accepting a position at Yale.

Prior to How Fascism Works, Stanley wrote four books. These touch on topics including propaganda, the acquisition of practical “know how,” linguistics, and philosophy.

His concern about fascism is not purely academic. Stanley is a Jewish descendant of a grandfather apparently lost in the Nazi concentration camps and heir to a moving story of resistance to fascist hatred.

As Stanley discusses at several points in the summarized work, his paternal grandmother, Ilse Stanley, escaped Nazi Germany with his father, then a child, in tow. A German Jew, she nonetheless managed to work as a Nazi social worker shortly after she learned of her husband’s disappearance at the hands of the Gestapo when she returned to Berlin in 1936. In that capacity, she regularly entered a concentration camp from which she rescued Jews one-at-a-time without detection for several years. When it became necessary, she fled with Stanley’s father in 1939. She wrote a memoir, published in 1957 as The Unforgotten, about her experiences.