Why Fascists Hate Sociology
Michael Schwalbe | 02 April 2026 | Inside Higher Ed
Fascists hate sociology, and not without cause: Some of the discipline’s most basic lessons can impede the authoritarian control fascists aim to exert over the state, the economy and society as a whole. The extent to which the architects of fascism consciously grasp sociology’s threat isn’t clear, nor is it clear how much it matters. Even if Florida’s (to take the most egregious example) anti-sociology politicians are acting on instinct, the results are the same. In their bones they know sociology is the enemy and must be neutralized.
Fascist efforts to control a populace employ a familiar set of strategies: Establish the purity of a people—white Christians, in the case of the U.S.—as under threat by outsiders; undermine empathy for outsiders by dehumanizing them; create a mythical past of national greatness; deny that injustice can be perpetuated by the routine workings of societal institutions; define present social arrangements as naturally or divinely ordained; and undermine, as much as possible, growth of the kind of self-knowledge that exposes the moral corruption of fascism…