Fascism: A Warning

Fascism: A Warning (2018) is Madeleine Albright's personal and urgent examination of fascism in the twentieth century and how its legacy shapes the world today. Albright — who fled war-torn Europe as a child and later served as the first woman to hold the office of U.S. Secretary of State — defines fascism not as a fixed ideology but as "a process for taking and holding power," arguing that economic decline, social disorder, and fragmented opposition are the conditions that let authoritarian leaders rise.

Spanning the 1920s through the 2010s, the book moves from the historical rise of Mussolini and Hitler to contemporary figures Albright observed firsthand in her diplomatic career, including Hugo Chávez, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Vladimir Putin, along with warnings about authoritarian pressures within the United States itself. She contends that the democratic momentum that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall has gone into reverse, and that fascism now poses a more serious threat to peace and justice than at any point since the end of World War II.

Part history, part memoir, part diplomatic warning, the book draws as much on Albright's own family history and government service as on historical scholarship, making the case that vigilance against authoritarianism is a continuing, unfinished project rather than a battle already won.