Dave Renton

Dave Renton

Dave Renton is a left-wing writer and historian.

Renton is a great-nephew of the Communist historian Dona Torr and the explorer Rosita Forbes. His maternal grandfather was the Australian shoe designer and Holocaust survivor Kurt Geiger, and his paternal uncle is Tim Renton, Baron Renton of Mount Harry.

Renton studied as an undergraduate at Oxford University with Ross McKibbin and as a postgraduate at Sheffield with Richard Thurlow and Colin Holmes (British historian), before teaching at various universities in Britain and South Africa. At Oxford, Renton was one of the organisers of a campaign to commemorate murdered refugee Said Guleid Ahmed.

His two best-known books are Fascism, theory and practice, and When we touched the Sky. Fascism, theory and practice criticises the "new consensus" theory of fascism associated with Roger Griffin and others, in which fascism is understood as a form of palingenetic ultranationalism. Renton's approach is to analyse fascism as a specific form of reactionary mass politics. In contrast to Griffin, Renton places greater emphasis on what he portrays as a key contradiction between the popular support many fascist parties have enjoyed, and their ideology, which was radically inegalitarian and anti-democratic. Fascism, in Renton's argument, is always a tentative politics, capable of rapid growth but also organisational lethargy or even collapse.

In When we touched the Sky, Renton considers the part played by anti-fascists in the Anti-Nazi League in bringing about the defeat of the British National Front.

He works as a barrister in London.

Books

• Dave Renton (1999). Fascism: theory and practice. Pluto Press. ISBN 9780745314709. 
• Dave Renton (2000). Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the 1940s
• Dave Renton and Keith Flett (2000). The Twentieth Century
• Dave Renton (2001). This Rough Game
• Dave Renton (2001). Marx on Globalization
• Dave Renton and James Eaden (2002) The Communist Party since 1920
• Dave Renton (2002). Classical Marxism
• Dave Renton and Keith Flett (2003). New Approaches to Socialist History
• Dave Renton (2004). Dissident Marxism
• Dave Renton (2004). Trotsky
• Dave Renton (2004). Sidney Pollard: a Life in History
• Dave Renton and Nigel Copsey (2004). British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State
• Dave Renton, Leo Zeilig and David Seddon (2006). The Congo
• Dave Renton (2006) When we touched the Sky: the ANL 1977-1981
• Dave Renton (2007) CLR James: Cricket's Philosopher King. Haus Publishing
• Dave Renton (2008) Colour Blind? Race and Migration in North East England

External links

• Homepage

References

• Dave Renton, 'The Tories, Eton and the private schools'
• Dave Renton, 'Biography'
• Dave Renton, 'Economic globalisation versus social justice? Rosa Luxemburg and the 'frontier of control
• Dave Renton, 'The Poetics of Propaganda: David Widgery'
• Dave Renton, 'The Rentons: A Family History'

Persondata
Name	Renton, Dave
Alternative names	Renton, David
Short description
Date of birth	10 December 1972
Place of birth	London
Date of death
Place of death