By W.E.D. Allen (1901-1973)
The author, W.E.D. Allen, was formerly a Conservative Member of Parliament. He was closely identified with Oswald Mosley in the formation of the New Party. He then made a special study of Fascist theory, both in Italy and Germany. He is a family member of the well known Ulster advertising company whose hoardings were a common sight all over Britain.
This booklet is a history of government systems from very early times down to the days of the Whigs and the Tories and thence on to their position in the 1930s when this treatise was written.
The degeneration and decay of parliamentary democracy and to the State’s to which they give birth is often though to be a biological development (Spengler). Allen explains why this is so and at the same time postulates that rebirth through fascism, with its re-ordering of the Nation State it can revitalise and reverse the process. He goes on to say that the political and economic implications of Fascism are not so significant as the sequence of moral and spiritual reactions which derive inevitably from the Fascist faith.
He was author of the following books: The Turks in Europe (1922), History of the Georgian People (1932), The Ukraine: A History (1942), The Russian Campaigns of 1941-5 (two volumes 1941-46), Caucasian Battlefields (1953), Problems of Turkish Power in the Sixteenth Century (1963) and for the Hakluyt Society, Russian Embassies to the Georgian Kings (1970).
With his wife Nathalia he gathered together and important collection of Russian icons now at the National Gallery, Dublin, exhibited as a collection at his request.