collapse of the system, David Renton takes Zeev Sternhell, Stanley Payne, Roger ... of his investigation into the 'fascist style of rule' in Fascist Italy and Nazi ...
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The Primacy of Culture: The Current Growth (or Manufacture) of Consensus within Fascist Studies Published in The Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 37, no. 1 (2002), pp. 21-43 Professor Roger Griffin Department of History Oxford Brookes University Gipsy Lane Campus Headington Oxford OX3 0BP ‘Twenty years after the destruction of the Third Reich, the essence of fascism is still elusive.’1 This statement, taken from the very first issue of JCH, edited by Walter Laqueur and George Mosse and dedicated to ‘International Fascism 1920-1945’, epitomizes the state of fascist studies in the mid-sixties when they still were hardly out of their methodological diapers. They had at last started to put behind them an infantile insistence that fascism was the (pseudo)ideology of nihilistic irrationalism, a movement fuelled by pathological barbarism, or a regime whose sole function was to impose a reign of totalitarian oppression. However, as the ten essays collected between the covers of the fledgling periodical demonstrate, they were conspicuously lacking a shared methodological and conceptual framework which would enable the scholarly verve and historical imagination of individual academic talents to be harnessed to a common purpose. Doubtless Nolte’s recently published comparative study of the ideology of the Action Française, Fascism, and Nazism as permutations of generic fascism, Three Faces of Fascism,2 advertized prominently on the back of that first issue, seemed groundbreaking at the time. Indeed, it has become a cliché to award it the paternity of fascist studies outside the Marxist camp. However, if mythic starting points are of any relevance, the slimmer but far more wide-ranging and insightful Varieties of Fascism (New York 1964) by Eugen Weber (on the Editorial Board of that first issue) was to prove a more reliable indicator of the path which the hunt for ‘the’ fascist minimum would eventually take. Certainly Weber’s characterization of fascism, even if it withheld a succinct definition, contained greater heuristic value than the concluding section of Nolte’s work, written in what is (to Anglo-Saxon minds)3 a ‘metapolitical’ register which betrays a will to obfuscate reminiscent of the forbidding forests of Teutonic fairy-tales rather than the
2 sun-drenched clearings sought by children of the Enlightenment. In retrospect that far-off JCH issue can now be seen as a pioneering exercise in pushing the boat out on a ‘first wave’ of comparative fascist studies which peaked in the late 1970s with the production of a spate of key works.4 It was a flurry of international scholarly activity which possessed a paradoxical characteristic, surely a rarity in the political sciences: it generated a profusion of empirical case-studies in putative variants of a generic phenomenon which at best was characterized by a loose ‘typology’ set out as a discursive check-list of characteristics, and at worst was treated as a brainteaser stubbornly defying any neat, let alone consensual, definition. As befits an adolescent phase, fascist studies displayed raw energy and enthusiasm in abundance while being highly unfocussed and ill-disciplined. The notable exceptions to this rule were the studies of fascism which regularly emanated from the parallel academic universe which remained perched on the tortoise-like shell of Marxism’s totalizing, pseudo-scientific Weltanschauung. Ever since the March on Rome a high level of consensus had prevailed among Marxist political scientists, intellectuals, and activists which allowed them to see through the façade of Mussolini’s regime and discern both in it (and later in the Third Reich) no more than an exhibition of capitalism’s ruthless survival instinct now that its foundations were starting to give way under the tectonic forces of history. Hence its desperate bids to conceal its terroristic counter-revolutionary purpose by masquerading as an ‘alternative’ revolutionary ideology to international socialism, or the efforts to camouflage its cynical destruction of working class power with spectacular displays of aestheticizing and anaesthetizing politics. They thus approached it not as a mysterious force, but as a predictable (and readily definable) exercise in the mystification of power relations. It was furthermore for them an axiomatically international (generic) phenomenon with which capitalism was permanently pregnant wherever it had installed itself, and hence liable to beget wherever its hegemony was under threat from socialism. While the rate of productivity of Marxist fascist studies, even in the ‘West’, broadly corresponds to the life-cycle of the Soviet Empire and Eurocommunism, the evolutionay pattern which it is tempting to impose on the ‘liberal’ debate over fascism is different. At least in sheer output, it curiously duplicates the palingenetic structure of cyclic renewal which some would
3 argue is a primary obsession of fascists themselves: an initial period of vitality, followed by decline, which against all odds gives way to a new spate of burgeoning growth.5 Tim Mason’s plea made in 1991 for wider recognition that ‘fascism was a continental phenomenon and that Nazism was part of something much larger’6 is indicative of the perception widely shared at the time that no one definition, Marxist or non-Marxist, had achieved dominance as a conceptual framework of proven heuristic value in the study of fascism. Yet the years that have elapsed since he wrote these words have seen the barren, stone-strewn field of comparative fascism burst into renewed life and colour with a luxuriant profusion of new publications. Some are reprints of classic texts7 or new contributions by the first generation of pioneering scholars,8 while others represent new voices keen to join the debate in order to help turn what was once a cacophony into a choir.9 More importantly, some academics are convinced (myself included) that they can discern signs that an emergent consensus, or at least a growing convergence of approaches, between both the more theoretically oriented political scientists and more empirically inclined historians is enabling ever more scholars to read fascism’s runes, making the repeated jeremiads about its intrinsic resistance to definition so common only a decade ago now seem strangely archaic. Anyone conversant with fascist studies will have already spotted the tell-tale signs of narrative plotting implicit in the above résumé of the story so far. Almost everything to do with comparative fascism is, to borrow the telling phrase used by David Roberts about Fascist ideology, ‘a messy mixture’,10 and neat patterns, no matter how abundantly documented, turn out to be more the fruit of wishful thinking than methodologically sound scholarship, of mythopoeia rather than speculation controlled by data. Marxist theories of fascism resemble less a lingua franca than a highly variegated language family such as Slavonic or Germanic, and their post-imperial afterlife promises to be protracted, as the continued trickle of contributions by ‘old-school’ Marxists such as Reinhard Kühnl,11 and by new-comers such as Mark Neocleous12 and David Renton13 testify. As for the far-flung constellation of ‘liberal’ positions (too individualistic and unregimented to be called a ‘camp’), it is highly debatable whether the flow of its contributions ever really slowed down, let alone stopped.14 Rather it was the fading expectancy that the essential nature of fascism might soon be disclosed by further collaborative
4 or comparative study that prompted Tim Mason’s cri de coeur. The hunt for the legendary ‘fascist minimum’ had by then gone out of fashion, and was no longer considered a respectable outlet for excess intellectual exuberance. In any case, the second wind of fascist studies simply blew the fleet of intellectual explorers more resolutely on a course already thoroughly reconnoitred by the older generation of (mostly American) scholars, no matter how much their considerable idiosyncrasies prevented some of them from realizing the high degree of compatibility of their approaches. The claim which I made in 1998 that a ‘new consensus’ in fascist studies was finally emerging about the nature of fascism as a revolutionary form of ultra-nationalism15 was thus suspect in more than one respect. First, it was if anything the re-formulation of an ‘old’ consensus on the basis of the area of significant overlap between a group of rival theories which had never quite crystallized into a fully articulated common position when it should (the early 1980s). Second, being as yet unrecognized, the consensus which I posited in 1998 was virtual rather than actual, its postulation programmatic rather than empirical. It was more like a conciliatory ‘offer’ made during protracted negotiations than a closing ‘deal’. Third, sufficient salient differences in approach exist between the members of the ‘club’16 and enough theorists are reticent about joining it17 or sceptical about the whole notion of defining fascism,18 as to make the notion of ‘consensus’ spurious to any onlookers more concerned to highlight division than unity. Fourth, it is in the nature of the liberal human sciences, which are inveterately individualistic and pluralistic despite the countervailing coercive powers of ‘schools of thought’ and sheer modishness, that any consensus on generic phenomena that exists about fundamental issues can only be fragmentary, temporary, and ‘heuristic’. No matter how empirically substantiated, agreement within an academic discipline on a particular definition, which is at bottom merely a conceptual construct, is conventional, and will inevitably wax and wane.19 Indeed, the life-cycle of paradigms could be seen curiously to mirror microcosmically the one which Spengler reads into entire cultures. Finally the imagined community of scholars who make up the putative consensus on fascism is far from evenly spread in global terms, being largely restricted to Anglophone areas of the social sciences (themselves isolated ivory towers with respect to ‘common sense’ usage even in their own countries). Key countries such as Italy,
5 Germany, France, the former Soviet Empire (notably Russia), not to mention partially Europeanized academic institutions in the Far East (notably Japan) and in Latin America, have developed a high degree of intellectual autarky in conceptualizingfascism. This apparently places a prohibitively high excise duty on the ruminations of a handful of US, British, Scandinavian, and Israeli scholars to the point where the ‘models’ they produce are treated like luxury imports. It would seem that the world’s citadels of learning (mercifully) have a built-in traditionalism in the humanities which immunizes them more effectively from the ravages of cultural globalization than if they were part of more commercialized sectors of cultural production, such as the entertainment industry. Thus the fact that my duplicitous thesis concerning the emergence of a ‘new consensus’, which set out to foster the very process of convergence it claimed to discover objectively, met with the approval of none other than the USA’s doyen of fascist studies USA himself, Stanley Payne,20 would be unlikely to cut much ice with many non-Anglophone experts. Nor, for that matter, with any Anglophone ones who nurture their own pet theory in a harsh climate where social Darwinian laws have condemned most definitions of fascism to perish of exposure (or lack of it) before they could inspire any concrete empirical research by others.21 Moreover, serious scholars are likely to be underwhelmed by the fact that in 2000 Microsoft’s Encarta Reference Suite adopted a version of the ‘consensus’ definition of fascism to replace Robert Soucy’s more traditional theory (used for the 1999 edition) which denied it any genuine revolutionary dimension, even if this may boost its currency among a new generation of Anglophone and Anglophile cyberscholars.. There are thus no grounds for a triumphalist sense that some new paradigm in fascist studies is sweeping all before it, transforming dark to light and dissent to harmony wherever the magic formulas ‘holistic third-way nationalism’ or ‘palingenetic ultranationalism’ are uttered. In any case, such a mood would imply that hubris and territorial ambition had taken over from the spirit of collaboration and openness to doubt which should always prevail in the humanities. Yet it is the contention of this article, probably no less tendentious and programmatic than my introduction to International Fascism, that in the three years since I postulated its existence, the evidence for the emergence of a consensual approach to fascism within Anglophone
6 academia has grown rather than faded. Part of this evidence is supplied by the doubting Thomases themselves. As a ‘liberal’ academic inhabiting a world of absent centres and melting solidities, it is almost reassuring to be the target of a concentrated (if poorly aimed) salvo from someone who still inhabits the pre-post-modern world of impregnable paradigms. Like a survivalist entrenched in a secure bunker of Marxism-Trotskyism to observe the imminent collapse of the system, David Renton takes Zeev Sternhell, Stanley Payne, Roger Eatwell and myself to task for defining generic fascism in terms of its ideology, and even makes the remarkable allegation that we are somehow out to ‘rescue fascist Italy from stigma’ by stressing the ‘essentially non-destructive nature of fascism’ when compared to Nazism.22 Yet, despite being hailed by its publishers as the ‘first new theory of fascism to come from the left for over 20 years’, the alternative definition which forms the basis of Renton’s analysis strikes a note of profound bathos: ‘fascism should not be understood primarily as an ideology, but as a specific form of a reactionary mass movement’.23 This formula says so little as to be worthless in terms of taxonomic or heuristic value. Instead it speaks volumes about the inability of some sectors of the far left to raise their head from ideological sands of time sufficiently to learn from history instead of imposing dogmatic schemes upon it. Indeed the main historical value of Renton’s book is, ironically enough, that it unwittingly enables the reader to examine at close quarters the doctrinal blinkers and false consciousness which prevented not just the PCI and the KPD, but even brilliantly creative intellectuals such Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, John Heartfield, and Bertolt Brecht, from knowing their enemy. In particular, they disastrously underestimated the genuine affective hold which the prospect of revolutionary change identified with Fascism and Nazism came to exert on the imaginations, emotions, and hopes for the future not just of the middle classes, but on entire swathes of disaffected, disoriented, and (in Depression-struck Weimar) desperate citizens of every social category. In the context of such a book it is thus almost a backhanded compliment to the growing power of the ‘new consensus’ that of all the non-Marxist theorists to choose from, it is its spokesmen who are particularly singled out for attack. The other recent book on generic fascism informed by Marxist assumptions, Mark Neocleous’s Fascism, is far more a sign of the hard times on which left-wing opponents of
7 capitalism have now fallen, forcing Italian Communists, for example, to reinvent themselves as ‘democrats of the left’ and operate as part of the ‘Olive Tree’ coalition. It makes a botched attempt to graft onto the conventional Marxists analysis of fascism’s ‘socially conservative and counter-revolutionary essence’ with a grudging recognition of its revolutionary, future-oriented dynamic (Neocleous actually uses the term ‘palingenetic’), born as much of the contradictions and travails of modernity as of the desire to defend capitalism. The hybrid model of ‘revolutionary reaction’ which results, like most transgenetic experiments, is unviable in that it fails to deliver a usable taxonomic category of fascism. At the same time it makes significant concessions to a concept of fascism as a future-oriented form of nationalism aspiring to bring about ‘regeneration, resurrection’, ‘a new man’ and ‘a new order’, which in orthodox Marxist circles would once have been considered a profoundly heretical, if not a capital, offence.24 High up on the mountain pastures of knowledge overlooking the farms of collective ideology and methodological monoculture, ‘liberal’ academics still can enjoy the comforting, if illusory,25 sense of being able to graze freely on open fields of enquiry. Hence, while some ‘experts’ have no qualms about adopting the consensus position,26 it is to be expected that others display a profound ambivalence. Thus Walter Laqueur, one of the founding fathers of comparative fascist studies (and of the JCH) initially states in his own contribution to fascist studies’ second wave that ‘it would be difficult to improve on the definition of fascism as a form of palingenetic ultra-nationalism’.27 Yet he then embarks on a highly discursive characterization of its ‘essence’ which first takes us back three decades with its vague allusions to the way it manifests a ‘moral and cultural crisis’, and ends up postulating an extensive overlap between fascism and religious fundamentalism. However, the proposition that contemporary fundamentalism can be treated as a close cousin of interwar Italy’s ‘clerical fascism’, and that its vitality in the Third World thus suggests that fascism itself still has a vigorous future, involves an inflation and blurring of the concept which deprives it of taxonomic elegance and heuristic value. It is hardly surprising if a number of other scholars have given a wide berth to the enclosure it represents, no matter how spacious and well appointed. Ambivalence of a different sort is involved when scholars reject the consensus and yet come round to a position which implicitly endorses it. Thus Alexander De Grand, at the outset
8 of his investigation into the ‘fascist style of rule’ in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, dismisses out of hand the scholarly quest for a definition of generic fascism as so much ‘spilled ink’. In the conclusion he nevertheless identifies as a basic common denominator to the two regimes the fact that they both offered a ‘quasi-religious alternative to Marxism’, at the heart of which was ‘the idea of national rebirth in a new society and political system’ which ‘sought to shape a new type of humanity’.28 Similarly R. J. B. Bosworth’s The Italian Dictatorship (a generally unsuccessful attempt to do for Mussolini’s regime what Ian Kershaw achieved for the Third Reich)29 traces the prevalent emphasis on the roie played by ‘the power of ‘myth’ as a mobilizing force’ in the dynamics of fascism to the (trendy) influence of postmodernism, and assumes (quite wrongly) that current stress on the revolutionary thrust of fascism ‘merely replicates the accustomed liberal view’.30 Bosworth also treats with a thinly disguised disdain what he calls the ‘culturalist’ or ‘Mossean’ school of fascist studies (which he sees as having become the ‘dominant historiographical reading of the Italian Fascist era’), especially its assumption that ‘Fascist culture deserve[s] to be re-constituted through ‘thick description’. Hence he dismisses its attempts to bring anthropological insights to bear on the regime’s appeal as ‘modish’, and displays singular myopia when assessing the significance of Emilio Gentile’s groundbreaking investigations of the key role played by symbol, myth, and liturgy31 in its bid to turn Italy into a new type of modern state.32 Yet in his conclusion he still has the magnanimity to concede that applying theories of generic fascism to the Italian case ‘has not constituted a fruitless exercise’, and that applying ‘liberal models of fascism’ which highlight the myth of the new man ‘may pay dividends’. Moreover, he accepts that Mosse and Gentile ‘are right’ to see a modernizing dynamic within Fascism and to stress that it ‘possessed a political culture’ of its own. Indeed, his patronizing conclusion that ‘the teasing-out of the meaning of the cultures of Fascist Italy indeed deserves support’ suggests that he may, despite himself, have actually succumbed to the charismatic appeal of the new consensus and now surreptitiously sees the fascist minimum in terms of an attempted cultural revolution.33 The most curious example of double-think, though, is provided by A. J. Gregor, whose latest book on generic fascism, Phoenix, has harsh words for ‘most Western intellectuals’ who have attempted to understand fascism. Apparently they (we?) have simply failed to grasp the
9 essence of Italian Fascism as the ‘paradigm’ of modern revolutions in creating the archetypal ‘developmental dictatorship’ of the twentieth century, the theory he first elaborated over thirty years ago. However, it turns out that through a remarkable act of leger-de-main, Gregor has now substituted the discourse of ‘economic backwardness’ with that of ‘cultural rebirth’. Thus, he assures us that Fascism grew out of a current of political culture ‘committed to the regeneration of the nation’, the ground for which was ideologically prepared by an elite bent on using the mobilizing power of myth to launch the people on a ‘programme of rebirth’. Hence the hallmark of all movements akin to this ‘renovative and redemptive exercise’ is that they aim to ‘uplift and renovate the nation and empower the nation long enured to humiliation and exploitation’, their psychodynamic power stemming from a ‘tortured, enraged, and passionate demand for national renewal.’34 Predictably, Gregor still stubbornly refuses to admit Nazism to the tightly-knit family of generic fascism (because, as he has always maintained, its racism allegedly disqualifies it as a form of nationalism), even though his ‘new’ characterization of it (regrettably never formulated as a succinct definition) is particularly relevant to the psychodynamics of Nazism’s success in capitalizing on the profound structural crisis which Weimar underwent immediately prior to Hitler’s ‘seizure of power’.35 Nevertheless, he can be warmly welcomed as the recalcitrant prodigal son of the new consensus. Zeev Sternhell’s latest offerings, the extended essays which introduce the new edition of his trilogy on French fascism, display an imperviousness to criticism comparable to Gregor’s. However, in his case it does not suggest bad faith, but rather points to the depth of his conviction that he has found the clue of Ariadne whose thread will unravel fascism’s labyrinthine complexities. In other words he has succumbed to a heady sense of missionary zeal at making his discoveries public. Especially in areas of the humanities where natural science’s experimental methodology cannot be simulated, the vital Popperian principle of ‘falsification’ calls for constant mindfulness of the heuristic nature of all model building and theorizing. Only in this way can research remain informed by an openness to countervailing evidence as well as to alternative hypotheses which account for the ‘same’ phenomenon, rather than endlessly accumulating only data which ‘fits’ and thus falling prey to a manic feeling of being ‘right’ and holding the only key to the problem. Sternhell himself seemed fully aware of this methodological
10 axiom in the first edition of Ni droite ni gauche when he used Weberian terms to stress the constructed nature of any definition of generic fascism: Are the difficulties [posed by fascism] significantly less than those posed by democracy or socialism? Are they not rather intrinsic to every effort to conceptualize without which there can be no historical knowledge?... Certainly there is not a single historical reality which corresponds to a ‘model’ or an ‘ideal type’ (in the Weberian sense of the term) of democracy, socialism or communism. The case of fascism is no different: Italy in the 1920s or 30s certainly cannot claim to possess the properties of an ‘ideal’ fascist state, any more than the Parti Populaire Français, the British Union of Fascists or the Legion of the Archangel Michael fits the ideal of a fascist party. He goes on to state that, because fascism lacks a single doctrinal source comparable to Marxism, there is no fascist matrix within which the variants of fascism are contained. As a result: it falls to the researcher to extract the common denominator, the fascist ‘minimum’ which is shared not only by different movements and ideologies which claim to be fascist, but also those which reject the adjective but nevertheless belong to the same family.36 Over twenty five years have passed since Sternhell conceived his own strikingly original ideal type of the origins of fascism as a synthesis of right (‘organic nationalism’) and left (‘antiMarxist, anti-materialist socialism’) which was first incubated in fin-de-siècle France before pervading its political culture with visions of a post-liberal new order, and simultaneously spreading to Italy where it brought about the genesis of Fascism. It was a thesis which touched raw nerves in a country where academic historians instinctively colluded in the deeply engrained habits of collective denial concerning the extent to which France hosted powerful indigenous traditions of anti-democratic, anti-liberal,and anti-Semitic thought and activism during the ‘fascist era’. In particular, it presented as an integral, if now repressed, episode of French history the process which led large sections of its population, especially among the intelligentsia and ruling elites, to participate proactively in the Third Reich’s ‘New European Order’ after June 1940 as long as a Nazi victory seemed inevitable. Its success in acting as the catalyst to a long-overdue
11 bout of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in France made his trilogy of volumes expounding his thesis a remarkable achievement for an uncompromising exercise in intellectual history. Yet Sternhell’s voluminous exposition of his thesis also had the (quite independent)effect of giving rise to a number of serious methodological and interpretive misgivings among academic colleagues around the world.37 Curiously, instead of seizing the opportunity to vindicate the heuristic value of his ideal type and answer some of the telling charges made against him over the years, he uses his hundred page introduction to the French new edition of his key work, Ni droite ni gauche, primarily as a extensive piece of polemical self-justification. Just to take one example, he devotes a single paragraph to recapitulating his summary verdict first made a quarter of a century earlier that Nazism is excluded from membership of the family of fascisms on the grounds that biological determinism is not a definitional constituent of fascism. Apart from being an illogical argument (for example, corporatism is not a definitional part of Sternhell’s ideal type either, but this does not preclude Italian Fascism from being fascist in his judgement), it means he perpetuates his state of denial regarding the extensive match of Nazism’s Weltanschauung with the salient features of fascist ideology which he himself set out in a groundbreaking essay first published in 1976.38 Equally disappointing, he has now slid into the trap of an essentialism which flouts both Popperian and Weberian principles: This work concentrates on ‘the essential’ of the fascist phenomenon in France and elsewhere: the conjuncture of elements from the anti-liberal, anti-bourgeois nationalist right and the anti-Marxist, anti-democratic socialist left equally determined to shatter liberal democracy. This synthesis is made really possible only through a continuous process of revising Marxism in an anti-materialist dimension.39 Undeterred by earlier charges of seeing fascism everywhere he turns his gaze in French political and intellectual culture between 1880 and 1945, Sternhell goes on to share with us that he has now become persuaded by the evidence that France’s contribution to fascism was not confined to inventing it as a new compound in the laboratory of modern idées-force. He now claims it subsequently hosted two mass fascist movements, the urban Croix-de-Feu and the rural Greenshirts, and a full-scale fascist regime, namely
12 Vichy itself. He seems unperturbed by the fact that this recognition has major implications for the validity of his original ‘matrix’ of fascism, since even he cannot argue that the ‘anti-materialist revision of Marxism’ played any significant role in the political programmes of La Roque, Dorgère, or Pétain. By implication his ideal type of fascism has now split like an amoeba to cover two distinct phenomena: there is ‘fascism A’, a political ideology born of the new left/right synthesis which first emerged in France but was only given direct expression as a movement/regime in Italian Fascism; then there is ‘fascism B’, which embraces a number of anti-democratic, anti-Marxist movements and regimes which do not actually contain this synthesis (nor does he argue that they do), and whose definitional minimum remains unspecified. Sternhell argues that concrete examples of these were able to materialize in France because from the late 1880s ‘fascism A’ had been able to saturate (‘impregnate’) France’s political culture with anti-parliamentary ideas and longings for a new political order beyond ‘right and left’. By the time the democratic system entered a profound structural crisis in the early 1930s and was eventually destroyed by external forces in the spring of 1940, ample political space had been opened up for France by its indigenous fascist ideology to host even forms of revolutionary, ultra-nationalist right which did not incorporate socialist ideas originally deriving from Marxist revisionism. In France, then, the creation of purely ideological fascism A acts as a structural precondition for the emergence of ‘concrete’ specimens of fascism B. This at least is what Sternhell seems imply in the following passage: I have no doubt about the essential contribution which the anti-materialist revision of Marxism made to fascism. Once linked to organic nationalism, the refusal of the Enlightenment heritage, the war against a whole humanistic and rationalist culture, this revision made possible the explosion of the fascist synthesis. This synthesis is born in France and reproduces itself in Italy. It impregnates French cultural and political life from the turn of the century: it is certainly this impregnation with fascist, fascistizing, antiliberal, authoritarian, ‘antimaterialist’ values which explains the failure of elites at the time of Vichy. It is certainly this impregnation which allows the formation of mass movements
13 in the 1930s.40 The fact that Sternhell does not claim that the Croix-de-Feu or the Chemises Vertes were fascist in the sense of actually containing the ‘fascist synthesis’ in their core ideology is again implicit four paragraphs later when he talks of the problem of comparing them with the Partito Nazionale Fascista or the Iron Guard (but not, one notes, the NSDAP). He argues that ‘comparable ideas, identical or similar principles, when they are translated into concrete terms, depend on the context: in the French context...the Croix-de-Feu and the Green Shirts were fascist movements’. A few lines on he suggests a similar mediated relationship between fascist ideology and its concrete manifestation when he pronounces his judgement (after considerable prevarication) that Vichy was indeed fascist: ‘The National Revolution was the product of conditions created in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of France, but its ideological content like its structures were received favourably because they were already well rooted in cultural life and corresponded to the aspirations of a vast mass movement of the 1930s’. In short, ideological fascism (‘A’) fuses left and right to go beyond them, while concrete (movement/regime) fascism (‘B’) can be predominantly (e.g. the Falange?) or exclusively (e.g. the Iron Guard?) ‘right’, with little or no active ‘left-wing’ ingredient at all. This two-stage, bifocal view of fascism may have considerable heuristic potential as a properly elaborated theory,41 but since Sternhell apparently feels no need to revise his earlier position explicitly, it merely creates double-vision. In addition, it makes his exclusion of the Third Reich from the remit of fascist studies under category B more untenable than ever, especially given the presence of important ‘leftist’, or at least anti-capitalist, factions before 1934 which could be plausibly accommodated within category A.. Potentially the inclusion of Vichy also dramatically inflates his original concept of fascism, which was previously ideologically and geographically narrowly delimited as far as concrete manifestations were concerned, by logically bringing in a whole cluster of new regimes into consideration as putative examples of it in countries such as Spain, Portugal, Austria, Greece, and Brazil. In short, Sternhell continues to be a founding member of the consensus thanks to his extensive exploration of the central role which palingenetic myth played not just in the undermining of parliamentary democracy in France, but in generic fascism itself. However, he still remains an obdurately eccentric member of it in his public pronouncements.
14 The most thoughtful challenge to the new consensus arguably is mounted in a recent article by Robert Paxton, another of the ‘old guard’ who comes to theories of generic fascism from pioneering work on Vichy France and Dorgère’s Green Shirts.42 The summary terms in which he dismisses three of the main variants of the new consensus hardly bode well for the intellectual rigour of what is to follow. Payne, Eatwell, and I are accused of characterizing fascism in a ‘rather traditional descriptive vein’ by focusing on ‘doctrine’43 (which is actually a contradiction in terms). In fact all three of us devote so much attention to theory as to risk alienating any ‘traditional’ or ‘real’ historian, and we focus on the underlying ideological matrix of fascist thought, policies and action, not on fascist ‘doctrine’ itself. More seriously, we are charged with ‘essentialism’, despite the fact that all of us stress the ideal-typical, and hence essentially constructed, nature of our definitions.44 Despite these groundless accusations, Paxton articulates reservations presumably shared by most historiographically inclined colleagues when he argues that exclusively ideological definitions of fascism of the sort offered by me, Payne, Eatwell, and (the old) Sternhell are inadequate. It is thus more fruitful to search for one which uses all the social sciences and not just intellectual-cultural history by focusing on how fascism manifests itself in history as a concrete phenomenon, an approach only adumbrated by the ‘new’ Sternhell. The resulting ‘functional definition’ of generic fascism, as he calls it, presents it as a ‘system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.’ It is a system which has two phases, ‘the exercise of power’ and ‘radicalization or entropy’, and is preceded by three phases ‘the initial creation of fascist movements’; ‘their rooting as parties in a political power’; ‘the acquisition of power’. Paxton’s approach must seem far less objectionable than ‘the new consensus’ to anyone predisposed to approach fascism primarily as a regime and not an ideology, whether as a system of coercive state power (an approach favoured by Marxists),45 or as a form of totalitarianism (popular among an earlier generation of ‘liberals’).46 Indeed, his critique of the ‘static’ character of generic theories of fascism and his emphasis on the fundamental difference between ’a sect of dissident intellectuals’ and a ‘regime where fascism exercises power’ may well correspond to a wide-spread frustration with abstract and abstruse intellectual constructs, since another
15 newcomer to the fray, Aristotle Kallis, has independently elaborated his own ‘regime-model’of fascism which sets out to identify the various factors to be taken into account when considering the degree of fascism inherent in a particular inter-war dictatorship.47 Methodologically, however, Paxton’s article is both ultra-traditionalist and naively descriptive, harking back to the Dark Ages of fascist studies when it was common to encounter an untidy check-list of definitional features tautologically applied to the very two regimes from which they had been inferred in the first place by mashing Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany together in a sort of conceptual juice-extractor. If anything is ‘essentialist’ it is to pluck the features of a generic phenomenon from thin air on the assumption that it constitutes an actual phenomenological reality ‘out there’, rather than being the product of a subliminal or conscious act of ideal-typical construction, and hence of utopian abstraction. Yet this philosophical ‘realism’ is precisely what Paxton implies is the basis of his attempt to provide a new definition of fascism when he reassures us (himself?) that ‘a real phenomenon exists. Indeed, fascism is the most original political novelty of the twentieth century, no less.’ The plot thickens when we then consider the seven ‘mobilizing passions’ (i.e. ‘mythic core) which constitute Paxton’s ingenuously reified ‘ideal type’ of fascist ideology. They boil down to the attempt, prompted by a ‘dread of….decadence’ to restore, through violence if necessary, the community’s sense of unity and purity’. The striking compatibility of this approach with (and indebtedness to?) the emphasis which the new consensus places on the myth of rebirth in the dynamics of fascism48 is underlined in the very next paragraph where we learn that the fascists’ cross-class appeal in the ‘movement’ stage initially lies in ‘their promise of radical cultural-spiritual renewal and restored national community’, and that their ‘revolution consists of hardening the character and purifying and energizing the community, rather than making the social structure or the economic system more just or free’. Indeed, to become a fullypaid up member of the very consensus from which he has distanced himself, Paxton needed merely to repeat the phrasing which, as we have seen, he is prepared to use elsewhere in the article, and add the term ‘national’ to the term ‘community’ in his ‘functional definition’. Without this qualification his ‘fascism’ applies just as much to several communist states in practice (which would not ruffle the plumage of A. J. Gregor) or to the regime installed by the
16 Taleban in Afghanistan (which the ‘new’ Walter Laqueur might find acceptable) as to the Third Reich, which is surely not Paxton’s intention. In short, far from breaking new ground, his account of fascism takes for granted that fascism already exists as a mobilizing myth of national rebirth (‘palingenetic ultra-nationalism’) before it enters the cycle of five stages which he postulates as necessary to supplement it as definitional components of his model (the last three of which we must assume have only been actualized by Fascism and Nazism, thereby considerably diluting their heuristic value!). Most disappointing of all, this ‘functional definition’ is too conceptually fuzzy to resolve the sort of basic taxonomic questions which he himself poses at the outset (ones which Payne and I have at least addressed), namely whether Peronism or Imperial Japan (or, closer to Paxton’s home ground, Vichy France, or even the Third Reich) are fascist. Nor does it make much sense for him to assert that the ‘right question to ask of today’s neo- or protofascisms’ is whether they are becoming rooted and entering the second and third stage of the cycle, so as to become ‘today’s functional equivalents of fascism’. Not only does his ideal type provide no clear template for identifying them in the first place, but, with its emphasis on groups, national communities, and systems, precludes any recognition of the continuity or structural affinity with inter-war fascism which a number of contemporary phenomena reveal when explored in the light of the ideologycentred ideal type deployed by the ‘new consensus’. They include Evolianism, Third Positionism, Eurofascism, the (European) New Right, Eurasianism, the Websites of some Nazified Christian Identity groups, and the ‘paranoid’ world views of lone terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh or David Copeland, shaped by such works as William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries or Francis Yockey’s Imperium. From the partisan perspective of a member of the consensus, what stands out about the ‘system’ or ‘regime’ concepts of fascism implicit in the most recent comparative studies of De Grand, Gregor, Sternhell, Paxton, and Kallis is that, in contrast to the older ones constructed in the context of ‘totalitarianism’, they all introduce ideological criteria for the identification of a concrete manifestation of fascism which correspond to the new consensus (indeed Kallis does so explicitly). However, the two who have consciously elaborated this approach into a heuristic model (Paxton and Kallis) are open to the charge of confusing definitional features (‘the fascist
17 minimum’) with ‘accidental’ ones derived from how fascist ideology externalized itself within the context of inter-war Europe.49 This was a period when the proximity of the First World War and the profound structural crisis through which liberal democracy was passing at the time had created a powerful palingenetic climate (the ‘fascist epoch’) in which anti-systemic forms of ultra-nationalism could flourish. It made mass revolutionary politics of the right (and left) at least seem a realistic option in a way inconceivable since 1945 except by the most utopian ‘dreamers of the day’.50 This historical sea-change has forced many fascists to adopt new tactics and forms of organization to ensure the survival of their visions of a new order in a hostile environment, producing forms of fascism which fall through the mesh of conceptual nets woven exclusively on the basis of the ‘fascist era’.51 To mix a ‘static’ ideological definition of fascism with an abstract scheme of how it manifests itself historically solely on the basis of inter-war Europe is methodologically illegitimate. It is like blending into an ideal type of communism a cyclic scheme of rise and fall abstracted from the histories of Soviet and Chinese communism, or introducing into a definition of Christianity elements of ritual and doctrine peculiar to Protestantism. The ‘staticity’ of an ideological ideal type of fascism which Paxton objects to derives precisely from the fact that it is the product of an act of idealizing abstraction which has shorn it of its many time-bound contingencies as a concrete historical phenomenon, such as leader cult, corporatism, eugenic racism, imperialism, theatrical politics, or even militarism. All these have served as means to realize their ideology in one or other of their historical and hence ephemeral manifestations, but none of them play a major role in contemporary fascism. It should be stressed once more, that the ‘fascist minimum’ extrapolated in this way is not a reified ‘essence’, but an ideal type with a purely heuristic function. Fortunately the new consensus does not depend for its cogency on the current absence of any viable alternatives and the roundabout way even its severest critics unwittingly corroborate the centrality of the rebirth myth to the dynamics of fascism. A number of empirical studies in Fascist artistic and political culture have appeared since the mid-1980s which are impressive precisely because they do not set out to contribute to an understanding of generic fascism,52 and may even operate an idiosyncratic theory of it.53 It is precisely for that reason
18 that they provide impressive independent corroboration of the revolutionary, palingenetic dynamics of Mussolini’s ‘paradigmatic’ fascist movement and regime at the level of the mythic matrix of vision, doctrine, and policy, no matter how travestied and betrayed in practice. Another encouraging trend is exemplified in a comparative work on Italian and French fascist aesthetics and important new study of the Fascist artist Mario Sironi,54 both of which explicitly incorporate a variant of the consensus into the conceptual framework of the analysis.55 These, along with some other recent studies of cultural issues in fascist contexts which make the ‘palingenetic’ (but not ‘millennarian’) component of fascism central to their ideological matrix demonstrate how productive case-studies in fascist culture can be when informed by the new consensus.56 Certainly such works show up the woeful inadequacies both of studies of fascist aesthetics which lack any clear working definition of the phenomenon under investigation,57 and of monographs on aspects of fascist culture which reduce the ideology of fascism to myth, rhetoric, Freudian fixations, or male-chauvinism.58 The contours of a particular scenario for the future of fascist studies can now be discerned within the portrait of their present state as I have (so partially) drawn it. It is one which would have been unthinkable in the days of ritual breast-beating about the unresolvable fascist conundrum, and is certainly just as open to criticism and scepticism as the idea of an ‘emergent consensus’ which it subsumes. It predicts a period of increasing convergence and cross-fertilization between comparative fascist studies carried out within the broad framework of the new consensus (constantly evolving and refining itself until its heuristic value is exhausted) and the study of specific aspects of the revolution which particular fascisms planned/plan (as a movement) or undertook (as a regime) in the field of political, social, artistic and intellectual culture, enriched as much by anthropological and psycho-historical insights as by ones drawn from conventional political science and history. David Roberts has argued in his incisive critique of Sternhell in the pages of this journal that a key to understanding Fascism is to recognize ‘the exciting sense of possibility among the creators of fascism, the sense that Italians...could create a wholly new form of state buttressed by a whole new political culture.’. He also issued a timely warning against reducing this culture to unbridled irrationalism, charismatic politics, and myth. ‘We can find ritual and rhetoric, virility
19 and the body, but we can also find, in written texts, serious rethinking of the Hegelian ethical state for a mass age, serious discussion of the scope for new forms of education, serious reassessment of the legacy of Giuseppe Mazzini in light of the outcomes of Marxism.’59 If theories of generic fascism can retain a healthy empirical sense of the extraordinary heterogeneity of the genus, while empirical studies of it can be informed by a sophisticated concept of cultural revolution, then the 1990s could come to be looked on as the decade when fascist studies finally come of age. When an exciting process of symbiosis took place between political science and history resulting in a multifaceted but concerted effort by the academic community to which unlock the mysteries of fascism and to exorcize its spells. It would signal the symbolic triumph of humanism over one of the more virulent modern ideologies bent onto destroying it. In short, this article aims to foster a healthy dialectic between the ‘nomothetic’ and the ‘idiographic’, between the conceptual framework of cultural revolution in nationalist key provided by the new consensus and specific case-studies in the welter of specific theories, policies, measures, organizational structures, and institutions embraced or created by fascist movements or the two fascist regimes to bring about the nation’s rebirth . The fruits of such a dialectic applied both in ‘macro’ comparative investigations and ‘micro’ case-studies could definitively transform fascist studies from the unsightly tangle of conflicting positions which they were once widely perceived to be, into an exemplary source of academic insights into the ideological and political dynamics of contemporary history under the impact of modernity.60 Thanks to the transformation the study of fascism would be profoundly humanized. Its experts would no longer be able to get away with focusing on leaders, elites, propaganda, social engineering, and national Sonderwege, or with revelling in abstruse hermeneutic model-building, but would, in the words of one commentator, ‘have to rush everywhere they get the slightest whiff of human flesh’.61 Some interesting examples of just such a tendency are already appearing, both on fascist regimes and abortive fascist movements.62 The jewels in the crown of the miniature cultural empire created through the growing hegemony of the consensus would be ‘native’ historians of fascism, most of whom continue to reconstruct events relating to fascism in their country oblivious of how insights drawn from generic fascist studies might enrich their analyses. There are encouraging signs that such a process
20 is already in train. Notoriously, Sternhell has made a sustained onslaught on the insular citadels of French historiography in which conventionally the very existence of significant currents of indigenous fascism was denied. More discretely, the study of Salazar and Portuguese fascism has been authoritatively brought into step by Antonio Costa-Pinto,63 while Spain is gradually being opened up to the realization that ‘Franquismo’ is not equatable with ‘fascismo’ not just by foreigner experts such as Sheelagh Eastwood and Stanley Payne,64 but by home-grown scholars such as Wahnón and Mellón.65 Elsewhere Russian neo-fascism is already being interpreted by a convert to the new consensus, Andreas Umland.66 Yet in Italy historians are only now being sensitized to current Anglophone theories of generic fascism by a few indigenous scholars, notably Emilio Gentile and Alessandro Campi.67 Even more out on a limb, Wolfgang Wippermann is one of the only notable non-Marxist scholars in Germany to have persistently staked his reputation on the value of the concept of generic fascism to historians of the Third Reich, even if his own theory continues to diverge considerably from the consensus. Hopefully the extraordinary success of Ian Kershaw’s magisterial biography of Hitler, which makes constant reference to the importance of the myth of national rebirth and renewal to the dramatic increase in Hitler’s charismatic powers in the run-up to the ‘seizure of power’,68 will persuade German academics to be more open to the new consensus on the definition of generic fascism69 (even if Kershaw himself never refers to it and studiously avoids the term ‘palingenetic’). It would would remove an anomaly if USA scholars working on the contemporary extreme right also became more alive to its heuristic value in their taxonomies and ideological analyses.70 It is by now all too obvious that this article has been less a neutral evaluation of the contention that a new consensus is emerging in fascist studies, than a bid to lend a hand in the manufacture of that consensus. But if the scenario I have sketched out proves to more than a piece of self-indulgent wishful thinking (of a markedly palingenetic bent), it would suggest that what Bosworth calls the ‘culturalist school’ is no passing fad. Indeed, the fertility which it is already displaying as a heuristic framework for empirical studies in comparative fascism lends a certain poignancy to the question which Tim Mason, so keen to locate the Nazi dictatorship in a wider context, used for the title of the essay cited earlier, ‘Whatever happened to fascism?’,
21 which was published in 1991, the very year that the second wave of fascist studies symbolically began. Whether he would have been sufficiently impressed by the answers now being given to overcome his Marxist leanings and accept the notion that what he took to be the ‘primacy of politics over economics’ was actually the ‘primacy of culture over politics’71‘is another matter. In the defiantly major key of Nietzschean Lebensbejahung, the scenario I have sketched here would also mean that the full significance of George Mosse’s last book, The Fascist Revolution, a collection of seminal essays on the centrality of culture to the fascist revolution written over a period of thirty-five years (the earliest actually preceding by four years the English edition of Nolte’s less than seminal contribution) would be thrown into relief. His introduction contains a number of assertions which would once have been considered heretical, but can now be seen as providing authoritative sign-posts to the future of fascist studies. Here is just one example: Fascism considered as a cultural movement means seeing fascism as it saw itself and as its followers saw it, to attempt to understand the movement in its own terms. Only then, when we have grasped fascism from the inside out, can we truly judge its appeal and its power...The cultural interpretation of fascism opens up a means to penetrate fascist self-understanding, and such empathy is crucial in order to grasp how people saw the movement, something which cannot be ignored or evaluated merely in retrospect.72 I believe this work could well come to be seen as one of the most significant ever published on generic fascism in this, the formative phase of its study. It would then serve as a fitting monument to an academic who combined historiographical range and depth with methodological and conceptual sophistication to a degree which should serve as a lesson to all of us left to labour in the same field. There would also be more than a touch of irony in the fact that when that first issue of JCH came out all those years ago, one of its two founding Editors had already unwittingly and modestly alighted upon the ideal type of fascism which was to prove empirically the most heuristically valuable of all. Mosse’s own contribution to that issue way back in 1966 is in this respect a harbinger of things to come. In reconstructing ‘the genesis of fascism’ he offers the reader a typically
22 cogent a lucid, wide-ranging account of the central importance to its initial impact of being identified with the myth of the new man, the cult of youth, and an organic view of the world. People turned to it because of the prospect which it held out of putting an end to anomie and alienation by restoring a sense of belonging and rejuvenating the life of the spirit, thereby bringing about the moral rebirth of society. Nor has Mosse any hesitation in spelling out the vital inference to be drawn from these salient features of fascism as a distinctive form of modern politics. They meant that it was not economics or even politics which provided the focal point of its revolutionary mission. Instead ‘cultural expressions of the true community moved to the forefront as symbols of the new society.’73 . ENDNOTES (ignore the partial endnotes at the end of the article) 1
Hugh Seton-Watson, >Fascism, Right and Left=, Journal of Contemporary History 1,1 (1966), 183
2
Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (New York 1965).
3
Or for that matter Franco-Israeli: see Zeev=s Sternhell=s urbane but devastating critique of Nolte=s metapolitical musings in Fascism: A Reader=s Guide (Harmondsworth 1979), 395-399.
4
E.g. Laqueur (ed), Fascism: A Reader=s Guide op.cit. (1st ed. London 1976); G. L. Mosse, International Fascism (London and Beverly Hills 1979); Stein Larsen et. al. (Oslo 1980), Who Were the Fascists; Stanley Payne Fascism: Comparison and Definition (Madison 1980).
5
C.f. the observation of Robert Paxton: >Following a period of active study of generic fascism in the 1960s and 1970s, strongly influenced by Marxism, scholarly activity shifted about 1975 away from generic fascism to particular
23 cases...Now the study of generic fascism is reappearing...=, >The Five Stages of Fascism=, The Journal of Modern History, 70, (March 1998), 1. However, at this level of generalization I would date the >decline= (at least in the general perception of the state of play in the hunt for the fascist minimum) to the early 1980s (cf. note 4). 6
Jane Caplan (ed.), Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class. Essays by Tim Mason, (Cambridge 1995), 331.
7
Peter Drucker, The End of Economic Man (New York 1995: 1st ed. 1937); A. James Gregor Interpretations of Fascism (New York 1997: 1st ed. 1974) with new introduction); Michael Ledeen, Universal Fascism (New York 1998: 1st ed. 1972); Juan Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Colorado, 2000: 1st ed. 1975 ); George L. Mosse The Fascist Revolution (collection of previously published essays written between 1961 and 1996 with a new introduction: Madison 1998).
8
Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism. 1914-1945 (New York 1995); Walter Laqueur, Fascism. Past, Present, and Future (New York 1996); Richard Thurlow, Fascism (Cambridge 1999); A. James Gregor, Phoenix (New Brunswick, New Jersey 1999); Robert Paxton >Five Faces of Fascism=, op.cit.; Zeev Sternhell, new introductory essays to the revised French editions of his trilogy on French fascism Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français; La Droite révolutionnaire 1885-1914; Ni Droite ni Gauche. Morphologie et historiographie du fascisme en France (Fayard 2000).
24 9
Notably Roger Griffin The Nature of Fascism (London 1991); Roger Eatwell, Fascism (London 1996); Mark Neocleous, Fascism (Buckingham and Minneapolis 1997); Aristotle Kallis, Fascist Ideology (London 2000); David Baker, Models of Fascism: Examining the Fascist Matrix, (London, forthcoming).
10
David Roberts, >How not to Think about Fascism and Ideology, Intellectual Antecedents and Historical Meaning=, Journal of Contemporary History, 35, 2, (2000), 208.
11
E.g. his new (4th edition) of Der Faschismus. Ursachen und Herrschaftsstruktur. Eine Einführung, (Heilbronn 1998).
12
Fascism, (Minneapolis 1997).
13
Fascism, Theory and Practice (London 1999).
14
For example several of Sternhell=s major works were published in the >fallow= 1980s, as was Neil O=Sullivan=s Fascism (London and Melbourne 1983).
15
I summarized the area of common ground (consensus) on the fascist minimum in the introduction to International Fascism. Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus (Arnold 1998), 14. This definition is cited in Stanley Payne=s Review Article, >Historical Fascism and the Radical Right=, Journal of Contemporary History, 35, 1, (2000), 110. In the light of the present article I would now modify it to read: fascism is a genus of modern politics which aspires to bring about a total revolution in the political and social culture of a particular national or ethnic community. While extremely heterogeneous in the specific ideology of its many permutations, in its social support, in the form of organization it adopts as an
25 anti-systemic movement, and in the type of political system, regime, or homeland it aims to create, generic fascism draws its internal cohesion and affective driving force from a core myth that a period of perceived decadence and degeneracy is imminently or eventually to give way to one of rebirth and rejuvenation in a postliberal new order. 16
See the essay by Roger Eatwell, >On defining the fascist minimum: the centrality of ideology=, Journal of Political Ideologies 1,3, (October 1996), who, despite his criticisms of Payne and myself, is still very much a member of the >club=, as is demonstrated by his basic definition of the fascist minimum as a form of >holistic third-way nationalism= in Fascism: A History, op.cit. 11.
17
We will return to the particular misgivings of Gregor and Paxton later.
18
E.g. John Whittam, Fascist Italy (London 1995).
19
See Thomas Burger, Max Weber=s Theory of Concept Formation, History, Laws, and Ideal Types (Durham, North Carolina 1976), especially 127-9.
20
Payne, >Historical Fascism and the Radical Right=, op.cit., 109-111.
21
E.g. Paul Hayes, Fascism (London 1973); A. J. Gregor Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship (Princeton, New Jersey 1979); Neil O=Sullivan, Fascism (London and Melbourne 1983); Peter Brooker, Faces of Fraternalism: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan (Oxford 1991); and more recently Laqueur, Fascism. Past, Present, op.cit.
22
Renton, Fascism op.cit., p. 24. In an article for Searchlight, 290, August 1999, 24-5, >Fascism is more than ideology=, Renton makes an even more openly
26 unfounded accusation that a revisionist intent underlies the >new consensus= when he claims that >the danger of the academic approach to fascism lies in the path it treads from an idealist definition of fascism to a positive description of fascism. The argument that fascism equals Mussolini and not Hitler [which within the new consensus only Sternhell=s position comes close to approximating] is an argument for a positive re-evaluation of fascism=. This sort of >positive treatment of Mussolini= he then refers to explicitly as >one factor contributing towards the new-found respectability of the MSI/AN’, Italy’s ‘post-fascist’ political party. 23
Renton, Fascism, op.cit., 3.
24
Neocleous, Fascism, op.cit., 57, 72-3.
25
Apart from the coercive effect which dominant paradigms subliminally exert on the bounds of >legitimate= academic speculation even within the natural sciences C cf. T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago 1970) C the degree of intellectual freedom actually enjoyed in the >Free World= has been radically called into question in a more sinister key by such classic texts as Herbert Marcuse One-dimensional Man (London 1964) and Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York 1988).
26
E.g. John Pollard, The Fascist Experience in Italy (London 1998); Richard Thurlow, Fascism (Cambridge 1999). It will be interesting to see the relationship to the new consensus which informs David Baker=s forthcoming book on
27 theories of generic fascism, but given his enthusiastic endorsement of one variants of it in his biography of A. K. Chesterton, The Ideology of Obsession (London, New York 1996) he is unlikely to be one of its most vitriolic critics. 27
Walter Laqueur, Fascism Past, Present, Future (New York 1996) 9.
28
De Grand, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: The Fascist Style of Rule, (New York and London 1995) 2, 77-8.
29
Ian Kershaw The Nazi Dictatorship (4th edition London, 2000).
30
R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism, (London 1998) 226.
31
Particularly The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Harvard 1996).
32
Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship, op.cit., 24-9.
33
Ibid., pp. 228-9. There is a strong suspicion that Bosworth is guilty of tarring with the same brush of ‘culturalism’ all specialist publications on fascism with a cultural/aesthetic focus. This leads him to confuse traditional empiricists with an anthropological bent such as G. Mosse and Emilio Gentile with scholars demonstrably influenced by the ‘linguistic turn’ of the early 1990s when Anglophone scholars ‘discovered’ the relevance to Fascist studies of a postmodernist (post-structuralist/ deconstructionist) preoccupation with texts and discourses and rather than facts and causes (e.g. Barbara Spackmann, Mabel Berezin, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, and, above all Andrew Hewitt (see especially his Fascist Modernism : Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-garde, Stanford, Calif., c. 1993). The distinction between a post-modernist and pre-
28 post-modernist concern with culture in fascist studies, as in all historiography, is an important one which space precludes me from developing in this context. Clearly I share the concern of ‘real’ historians such as Richard Evans, (In Defence of History, London, 1997) that, taken to extremes, applying the postmodernist preoccupation with ‘discourse’ instead of causes to historiography can subvert the essence of the discipline (not that the postmodern mindset can abide ‘essences’). In particular, it can encourage scholars to reduce fascism uncritically to an aestheticising, depoliticizing set of myth-laden ‘texts’. The best works written after the linguistic turn, e.g. Emily Braun’s Mario Sironi and Fascist Modernism. Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge 2000) avoid such pitfalls and make a real contribution to fascist studies. One implication of this article is that the ‘culturalist’ trend in historiography is to be welcomed if it is increasingly informed by a judicious blend of the best of post-modernism tempered by the best of historical ‘modernism’ as embodied in the George Mosse and Emilio Gentile, and perhaps enriched by a greater awareness of the relevance of sophisticated cultural anthropologists such as Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz. 34
A. James Gregor, Phoenix. Fascism in our Time (New York 1999)
189, 30-31, 47, 138, 162. 35
For ample empirical evidence of this see particularly Ian Kershaw, Hitler (London 1998), vol.1: Hubris, 431-52.
36
Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche, op.cit., 116.
37
In English: Antonio Costa-Pinto, >Fascist Ideology Revisited: Zeev Sternhell and
29 his Critics= European History Quarterly, 6, 16 (1986); Robert Wohl, >French Fascism Both Right and Left: Reflections on the Sternhell Controversy=, The Journal of Modern History, 61 (1991); more recently the two articles by Eatwell and Roberts cited earlier have levelled criticisms at aspects of his methodology. 38
>Fascist Ideology=, in Walter Laqueur, Fascism: A Reader=s Guide. op.cit, 325406.
39
Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche, op.cit., 80.
40
Ibid., 82.
41
If the embryonic distinction between ideological and concrete fascism has been gestating in Sternhell=s mind for some time, this at least helps explain his inclusion of the Iron Guard in his encyclopedia definition of fascism as a fusion of left and right, which is deeply anomalous given Codreanu’s profound hostility to the left in all its forms. See the article >fascism= in D. Miller (ed.) The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought (Oxford 1986).
42
Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (New York 1972); French Peasant Fascism: Henri Dorgère=s Greenshirts and the Crises of French Agriculture 1929-1939 (Oxford 1997).
43
‘The five stages of fascism=, The Journal of Modern History, 70 (March 1998), 1, 4. The subsequent quotations are taken from pages 9, 21, 11, 6-7, 7, 22, 23.
44
Indeed The Nature of Fascism devoted a whole chapter to the concept of the ideal type and on page 19 warns the reader that >there is clearly no question of [the book] revealing the “essence” of fascism. Fascism has already been demonized
30 quite enough ...without the waters being muddied even further by an academic work with >essentialist= implications. 45
Notably Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London 1974), and Kühnl, Der Faschismus, op.cit.
46
A recent example is Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich. A New History (London 2000) who eschews any discussion of Nazism=s relationship to fascism, but writes a vigorous defence of the totalitarian paradigm and makes extensive use of the term ‘political religion’. (Incidentally, the terms in which he portrays the ideological contents of Nazism=s >pseudo-religious= dimension are profoundly compatible with the concept of fascism suggested by the new consensus.)
47
Aristotle Kallis, >The Aregime-model@ of fascism: a typology=, European History Quarterly, 30, 1 (2000). Kallis attempts to apply his own version of a >practical= definition of fascism to a comparative study of Fascist and Nazi imperialism in the (misleadingly entitled) Fascist Ideology. Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922-1945 (London 2000).
48
Kallis is much more open about his acceptance of the consensual definition of fascist ideology as a form of revolutionary nationalism as a basic premise of his attempts to elaborate the >regime-model= of fascism: see Fascist Ideology, op.cit., 35, 38 (where he talks of >national palingenesis=), and >The RegimeModel of Fascism: A Typology=, op.cit., 96.
49
Arguably Payne does something similar when he introduces into his minimum such elements as >mass mobilization, the Führerprinzip=, and the tendency to
31 >normatize war and/or military values=, which holds true for the dominant forms of fascism in the 1930s but far from being universally true of its contemporary manifestations. See A History of Fascism op.cit., 14. I must confess that I fall into the same trap in The Nature of Fascism, op.cit., when (e.g. on page 44) I stress both the mass-movement, 'populist' dimension of fascism as a movement and the >imminence= of the national rebirth in the fascist mindset. Neither of these criteria hold for many varieties of neo-fascism, some of which spurn popular mobilization and are prepared to sit out the >interregnum indefinitely=: see Roger Griffin, >Between metapolitics and apoliteía: the New Right's strategy for conserving the fascist vision in the Ainterregnum@=, Modern and Contemporary France, 8, 2, (Feb. 2000). 50
The phrase is an allusion to Kevin Coogan=s Dreamer of the Day. Francis Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (New York 1999), a brilliant study of the shadowy, phantasmagorical world of the post-war neofascism, most of which would be quite invisible through the taxonomic lenses applied by Neocleous, Renton, Sternhell, Gregor, de Grand, Paxton, or Kallis.
51
See Roger Griffin, >Interregnumor endgame? Radical Right Thought in the APostfascist@ Era=, The Journal of Political Ideologies, 5, 2, (2000), 163-178.
52
Pier-Giorgio Zunino, L=ideologia del fascismo (Bologna 1985); Walter Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge, Mass.1993) Jeffrey Schnapp, Staging Fascism (Stanford University 1996); Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, Mass.1996); Günter
32 Berghaus, Fascism and Theatre (Oxford 1996); Marla Stone, The Patron State (Princeton, NJ. 1998); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities (University of California 2001). For the new trend in taking seriously the Fascist regime=s >myths, beliefs and values= see Sergio Luzzatto, >The Political Culture of Fascist Italy=, Contemporary European History, 8, 2, (1999), 317-334. 53
Barbara Spackmann, Fascist Virilities. Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis 1996); Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self. The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca 1997).
54
Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Fascist Modernism. Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge 2000).
55
Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff (eds), Fascist Visions. Art and Ideology in France and Italy (Princeton, New Jersey 1997).
56
E.g. for Spain Sultana Wahnón, >The Theatre Aesthetics of the Falange=, in Günter Berghaus (ed.) Fascism and Theatre (Oxford 1996). For Britain a significant has already been made in Thomas Linehan, British Fascism 1918-39. (Manchester 2000), and another important work in the same vein promises to be Tom Linehan and Julie Gottlieb (eds), Cultural Expressions of the Far Right in Britain (London 2002).
57
E.g. Jeffrey Schnapp and Barbara Spackman (eds) Fascism and Culture [Special issue] Stanford Italian Review, vol. 8, no. 1 (1990); R. J. Golsan (ed.), Fascism, Aesthetics, Culture, (Hanover and London 1992); Alice Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality (Minneapolis 1994).
33 58
E.g. Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertizing under Fascism, (Minneapolis 1995); Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle (Berkeley 2000). See Roberts, >How not to Think about Fascism=, op.cit., and Luzzatto, >The Political Culture of Fascist Italy=, op.cit. on the conceptual and methodological deficiencies of much current work on the >cultural= aspects of fascism.
59
Roberts, >How not to Think about Fascism=, op.cit., 208
60
`Modernity under the New Order: The Fascist Project for managing the Future', Thamesman Publications (Oxford Brookes School of Business imprint), 1994. Downloadable at: http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/humanities/staff/ moderni.txt
61
Luzatto, >The Political Culture of Fascist Italy=, op.cit., 334.
62
E.g. Philip Coupland, >The Blackshirted Utopians=, Journal of Contemporary History, 33, 2, (1998), 255-72; Charles Burdett, >Journeys to Other Spaces of Fascist Italy=, Modern Italy, 5, 1, (2000) 7-23.
63
Antonio Costa-Pinto, Salazar=s Dictatorship and European Fascism. Problems of Interpretation (New York 1995); The Blue Shirts. Portuguese Fascists and the New State (New York 2000).
64
Sheelagh Eastwood, Spanish Fascism in the Franco Era: Falanga Española de las JONS (New York 1988), Stanley Payne, Fascism in Spain 1923-1977 (Wisconsin 1999).
65
Wahnón, >The Theatre Aesthetics of the Falange=, op.cit. A forthcoming book
34 also informed by the new consensus is Joan Mellón (ed.) Orden, Jerarquía y Comunidad. Fascismos, Autoritarismos y Neofascismos en la Europa Contemporánea (Madrid, 2002). 66
Andreas Umland, Vladimir Zhirinovskii in Russian Politics: Three Approaches to the Emergence of the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia, 1990-1993, unpublished D.Phil. dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin (1998); >Wladimir Shirinowskij in der russischen Politik: Einige Hintergründe des Aufstiegs der Liberal-Demokratischen Partei Rußlands=, Osteuropa, 44, 12, (1994), 1117-1131; >The Post-Soviet Russian Extreme Right=, Problems of Post-Communism, 44, 4 (1997), 53-61. Stephen D. Shenfield, Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, and Movements (New York 2001) also uses a modified version of the new consensus in his investigation.
67
Alessandro Campi is editor of the series Fascismo/Fascismi which is publishing a series of non-Italian publications on generic fascism as part of an attempt to introduce Italian scholars to approaches to the subject of which they have to date remained generally (blissfully?) unaware. A significant book in this series promises to be Alessandro Campi (ed.), Il fascismo e i suoi interpreti (Rome 2001) with essays by many of the >major players=, Italian and foreign, in the field. Meanwhile, Emilio Gentile has produced for the recent volume Le religioni della politica fra democrazie e totalitarismi (Roma, Bari, 2000) a seminal redefintion of totalitarianism in terms of the sacralization of politics and the attempt to realize a palingenetic vision of the ‘new man’ which he specifically
35 applies to generic fascism. It has appeared in English as ‘The Sacralization of Politics: Definition, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions (Vol. 1, No. 1, Summer 2000). 68
Kershaw, Hitler, op.cit, vol.1: Hubris, passim.
69
Wippermann is perhaps academia=s most faithful follower of fascism: his Faschismustheorien (Darmstadt), which was first published in 1972, reached its seventh revised edition in 1997, and he also produced Europäischer Faschismus im Vergleich, 1922-1982 (Frankfurt 1983). He was recently involved in an impressive initiative in spreading the word further, namely an issue of Ethik und Sozialwissenschaft(11, 2, (2000) 289-334) edited by Werner Loh.. It was devoted to the question of generic fascism and is due to appear in book form as W. Wippermann and W. Loh (eds) ‘Faschismus’ kontrovers (Lucius und Lucius, Paderborn, forthcoming). Conceived as a forum discussion, it featured an article by Wippermann making the case for the term fascism to be more widely used in the non-Marxist generic sense which he gives it (based on the premise that the Fascist regime can be construed as the >real type’ of generic fascism), followed by responses from thirteen German political scientists and historians as well as two Americans (Peter Fritzsche, Stanley Payne) and one >Brit= (R. Griffin).
70
It is a curious anomaly that, while it was USA academics who pioneered the original drive towards conceptual sophistication in fascist studies, many of their most productive colleagues have yet to recognize the relevance of an ideal type
36 of fascism which stresses its palingenetic thrust in such murky areas as neoNazism, the ‘new’ Ku Klux Klan, and new forms of pagan and religious right. See, for example, Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a EuroAmerican Radical Right (New Brunswick 1998); Jeffrey Kaplan, Radical Religion in America. Millennarian Movements from the Far Right to the Children of Noah (Syracuse, New York 1997). 71
Tim Mason, ‘The Primacy of Politics. Politics and Economics National Socialist Germany’ in S. Woolf (ed.), The Nature of Fascism (London 1968), 165-95.
72
George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution (New York 1999), x.
73
George L. Mosse, >The Genesis of Fascism=, Journal of Contemporary History, 1, 1, (1966) 19-20.
1
2 3
4
5
Hugh Seton-Watson, ‘Fascism, Right and Left’, Journal of Contemporary History 1,1 (1966), 183. Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (New York 1965). Or for that matter Franco-Israeli: see Zeev’s Sternhell’s urbane but devastating critique of Nolte’s metapolitical musings in Fascism: A Reader’s Guide (Harmondsworth 1979), 395-399. E.g. Laqueur (ed), Fascism: A Reader’s Guide op.cit. (1st ed. London 1976); G. L. Mosse, International Fascism (London and Beverly Hills 1979); Stein Larsen et. al. (Oslo 1980), Who Were the Fascists; Stanley Payne Fascism: Comparison and Definition (Madison 1980). Cf. the observation of Robert Paxton: ‘Following a period of active study of generic fascism in the 1960s and 1970s, strongly influenced by Marxism, scholarly activity shifted about 1975 away from generic fascism to particular cases...Now the study of generic fascism is reappearing...’, ‘The Five Stages of
37
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 13 14
15
Fascism’, The Journal of Modern History, 70, (March 1998), 1. However, at this level of generalization I would date the ‘decline’ (at least in the general perception of the state of play in the hunt for the fascist minimum) to the early 1980s (cf. note 4). Jane Caplan (ed.), Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class. Essays by Tim Mason, (Cambridge 1995), 331. Peter Drucker, The End of Economic Man (New York 1995: 1st ed. 1937); A. James Gregor Interpretations of Fascism (New York 1997: 1st ed. 1974) with new introduction); Michael Ledeen, Universal Fascism (New York 1998: 1st ed. 1972); Juan Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Colorado, 2000: 1st ed. 1975 ); George L. Mosse The Fascist Revolution (collection of previously published essays written between 1961 and 1996 with a new introduction: Madison 1998). Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism. 1914-1945 (New York 1995); Walter Laqueur, Fascism. Past, Present, and Future (New York 1996); Richard Thurlow, Fascism (Cambridge 1999); A. James Gregor, Phoenix (New Brunswick, New Jersey 1999); Robert Paxton ‘Five Faces of Fascism’, op.cit.; Zeev Sternhell, new introductory essays to the revised French editions of his trilogy on French fascism Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français; La Droite révolutionnaire 1885-1914; Ni Droite ni Gauche. Morphologie et historiographie du fascisme en France (Fayard 2000). Notably Roger Griffin The Nature of Fascism (London 1991); Roger Eatwell, Fascism (London 1996); Mark Neocleous, Fascism (Buckingham and Minneapolis 1997); Aristotle Kallis, Fascist Ideology (London 2000); David Baker, Models of Fascism: Examining the Fascist Matrix, (London, forthcoming). David Roberts, ‘How not to Think about Fascism and Ideology, Intellectual Antecedents and Historical Meaning’, Journal of Contemporary History, 35, 2, (2000), 208. E.g. his new (4th edition) of Der Faschismus. Ursachen und Herrschaftsstruktur. Eine Einführung, (Heilbronn 1998). Fascism, (Minneapolis 1997). Fascism, Theory and Practice (London 1999). For example several of Sternhell’s major works were published in the ‘fallow’ 1980s, as was Neil O’Sullivan’s Fascism (London and Melbourne 1983). I summarized the area of common ground (consensus) on the fascist minimum in the introduction to International Fascism. Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus (Arnold 1998), 14. This definition is cited in Stanley Payne’s Review Article, ‘Historical Fascism and the Radical Right’, Journal of Contemporary History, 35, 1, (2000), 110. In the light of the present article I would now modify it to read: fascism is a genus of modern politics which aspires to bring about a total revolution in the political and social culture of a particular national or ethnic
38
16
17 18 19
20 21
22
23 24 25
community. While extremely heterogeneous in the specific ideology of its many permutations, in its social support, in the form of organization it adopts as an anti-systemic movement, and in the type of political system, regime, or homeland it aims to create, generic fascism draws its internal cohesion and affective driving force from a core myth that a period of perceived decadence and degeneracy is imminently or eventually to give way to one of rebirth and rejuvenation in a postliberal new order. See the essay by Roger Eatwell, ‘On defining the fascist minimum: the centrality of ideology’, Journal of Political Ideologies 1,3, (October 1996), who, despite his criticisms of Payne and myself, is still very much a member of the ‘club’, as is demonstrated by his basic definition of the fascist minimum as a form of ‘holistic third-way nationalism’ in Fascism: A History, op.cit. 11. We will return to the particular misgivings of Gregor and Paxton later. E.g. John Whittam, Fascist Italy (London 1995). See Thomas Burger, Max Weber’s Theory of Concept Formation, History, Laws, and Ideal Types (Durham, North Carolina 1976), especially 127-9. Payne, ‘Historical Fascism and the Radical Right’, op.cit., 109-111. E.g. Paul Hayes, Fascism (London 1973); A. J. Gregor Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship (Princeton, New Jersey 1979); Neil O’Sullivan, Fascism (London and Melbourne 1983); Peter Brooker, Faces of Fraternalism: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan (Oxford 1991); and more recently Laqueur, Fascism. Past, Present, op.cit. Renton, Fascism op.cit., p. 24. In an article for Searchlight, 290, August 1999, 24-5, ‘Fascism is more than ideology’, Renton makes an even more openly unfounded accusation that a revisionist intent underlies the ‘new consensus’ when he claims that ‘the danger of the academic approach to fascism lies in the path it treads from an idealist definition of fascism to a positive description of fascism. The argument that fascism equals Mussolini and not Hitler [which within the new consensus only Sternhell’s position comes close to approximating] is an argument for a positive re-evaluation of fascism’. This sort of ‘positive treatment of Mussolini’ he then refers to explicitly as ‘one factor contributing towards the new-found respectability of the MSI/AN’, Italy’s ‘post-fascist’ political party. Renton, Fascism, op.cit., 3. Neocleous, Fascism, op.cit., 57, 72-3. Apart from the coercive effect which dominant paradigms subliminally exert on the bounds of ‘legitimate’ academic speculation even within the natural sciences ‘ cf. T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago 1970) ‘ the degree of intellectual freedom actually enjoyed in the ‘Free World’ has been radically called into question in a more sinister key by such classic texts as Herbert Marcuse’One-dimensional Man (London 1964) and Edward Herman and Noam
39
26
27 28
29 30
31 32 33 34
35
36 37
38
39 40 41
42
Chomsky Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York 1988). E.g. John Pollard, The Fascist Experience in Italy (London 1998); Richard Thurlow, Fascism (Cambridge 1999). It will be interesting to see the relationship to the new consensus which informs David Baker’s forthcoming book on theories of generic fascism, but given his enthusiastic endorsement of one variants of it in his biography of A. K. Chesterton, The Ideology of Obsession (London, New York 1996) he is unlikely to be one of its most vitriolic critics. Walter Laqueur, Fascism Past, Present, Future (New York 1996) 9. De Grand, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: The Fascist Style of Rule, (New York and London 1995) 2, 77-8. Ian Kershaw The Nazi Dictatorship (4th edition London, 2000). R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism, (London 1998) 226. Particularly The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Harvard 1996). Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship, op.cit., 24-9. Ibid., pp. 228-9. A. James Gregor, Phoenix. Fascism in our Time (New York 1999) 189, 30-31, 47, 138, 162. For ample empirical evidence of this see particularly Ian Kershaw, Hitler (London 1998), vol.1: Hubris, 431-52. Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche, op.cit., 116. In English: Antonio Costa-Pinto, ‘Fascist Ideology Revisited: Zeev Sternhell and his Critics’ European History Quarterly, 6, 16 (1986); Robert Wohl, ‘French Fascism Both Right and Left: Reflections on the Sternhell Controversy’, The Journal of Modern History, 61 (1991); more recently the two articles by Eatwell and Roberts cited earlier have levelled criticisms at aspects of his methodology. ‘Fascist Ideology’, in Walter Laqueur, Fascism: A Reader’s Guide. op.cit, 325406. Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche, op.cit., 80. Ibid., 82. If the embryonic distinction between ideological and concrete fascism has been gestating in Sternhell’s mind for some time, this at least helps explain his inclusion of the Iron Guard in his encyclopedia definition of fascism as a fusion of left and right, which is deeply anomalous given Codreanu’s profound hostility to the left in all its forms. See the article ‘fascism’ in D. Miller (ed.) The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought (Oxford 1986). Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (New York 1972); French Peasant Fascism: Henri Dorgère’s Greenshirts and the Crises of French Agriculture 1929-1939 (Oxford 1997).
40 43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
‘The five stages of fascism’, The Journal of Modern History, 70 (March 1998), 1, 4. The subsequent quotations are taken from pages 9, 21, 11, 6-7, 7, 22, 23. Indeed The Nature of Fascism devoted a whole chapter to the concept of the ideal type and on page 19 warns the reader that ‘there is clearly no question of [the book] revealing the “essence” of fascism. Fascism has already been demonized quite enough ...without the waters being muddied even further by an academic work with ‘essentialist’ implications. Notably Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London 1974), and Kühnl, Der Faschismus, op.cit. A recent example is Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich. A New History (London 2000) who eschews any discussion of Nazism’s relationship to fascism, but writes a vigorous defence of the totalitarian paradigm and makes extensive use of the term ‘political religion’. (Incidentally, the terms in which he portrays the ideological contents of Nazism’s ‘pseudo-religious’ dimension are profoundly compatible with the concept of fascism suggested by the new consensus.) Aristotle Kallis, ‘The ‘regime-model’ of fascism: a typology’, European History Quarterly, 30, 1 (2000). Kallis attempts to apply his own version of a ‘practical’ definition of fascism to a comparative study of Fascist and Nazi imperialism in the (misleadingly entitled) Fascist Ideology. Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922-1945 (London 2000). Kallis is much more open about his acceptance of the consensual definition of fascist ideology as a form of revolutionary nationalism as a basic premise of his attempts to elaborate the ‘regime-model’ of fascism: see Fascist Ideology, op.cit., 35, 38 (where he talks of ‘national palingenesis’), and ‘The Regime-Model of Fascism: A Typology’, op.cit., 96. Arguably Payne does something similar when he introduces into his minimum such elements as ‘mass mobilization, the Führerprinzip’, and the tendency to ‘normatize war and/or military values’, which holds true for the dominant forms of fascism in the 1930s but far from being universally true of its contemporary manifestations. See A History of Fascism op.cit., 14. I must confess that I fall into the same trap in The Nature of Fascism, op.cit., when (e.g. on page 44) I stress both the mass-movement, 'populist' dimension of fascism as a movement and the ‘imminence’ of the national rebirth in the fascist mindset. Neither of these criteria hold for many varieties of neo-fascism, some of which spurn popular mobilization and are prepared to sit out the ‘interregnum indefinitely’: see Roger Griffin, ‘Between metapolitics and apoliteía: the New Right's strategy for conserving the fascist vision in the ‘interregnum’, Modern and Contemporary France, 8, 2, (Feb. 2000). The phrase is an allusion to Kevin Coogan’s Dreamer of the Day. Francis Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (New York 1999), a brilliant study of the shadowy, phantasmagorical world of the post-war neofascism, most of which would be quite invisible through the taxonomic lenses applied by Neocleous,
41
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59 60
Renton, Sternhell, Gregor, de Grand, Paxton, or Kallis. See Roger Griffin, ‘Interregnum or endgame? Radical Right Thought in the ‘Postfascist’ Era’, The Journal of Political Ideologies, 5, 2, (2000), 163-178. Pier-Giorgio Zunino, L’ideologia del fascismo (Bologna 1985); Walter Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge, Mass.1993) Jeffrey Schnapp, Staging Fascism (Stanford University 1996); Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, Mass.1996); Günter Berghaus, Fascism and Theatre (Oxford 1996); Marla Stone, The Patron State (Princeton, NJ. 1998); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities (University of California 2001). For the new trend in taking seriously the Fascist regime’s ‘myths, beliefs and values’ see Sergio Luzatto, ‘The Political Culture of Fascist Italy’, Contemporary European History, 8, 2, (1999), 317-334. Barbara Spackmann, Fascist Virilities. Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis 1996); Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self. The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca 1997). Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Fascist Modernism. Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge 2000). Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff (eds), Fascist Visions. Art and Ideology in France and Italy (Princeton, New Jersey 1997). E.g. for Spain Sultana Wahnón, ‘The Theatre Aesthetics of the Falange’, in Günter Berghaus (ed.) Fascism and Theatre (Oxford 1996). For Britain a significant contribution in the same vein promises to be Tom Linehan and Julie Gottlieb (eds), Cultural Expressions of the Far Right in Britain (London 2002) . E.g. Jeffrey Schnapp and Barbara Spackman (eds) Fascism and Culture [Special issue] Stanford Italian Review, vol. 8, no. 1 (1990); R. J. Golsan (ed.), Fascism, Aesthetics, Culture, (Hanover and London 1992); Alice Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality (Minneapolis 1994). E.g. Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertizing under Fascism, (Minneapolis 1995); Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle (Berkeley 2000). See Roberts, ‘How not to Think about Fascism’, op.cit., and Luzzatto, ‘The Political Culture of Fascist Italy’, op.cit. on the conceptual and methodological deficiencies of much current work on the ‘cultural’ aspects of fascism. Roberts, ‘How not to Think about Fascism’, op.cit., 208 `Modernity under the New Order: The Fascist Project for managing the Future', Thamesman Publications (Oxford Brookes School of Business imprint), 1994. Downloadable at: http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/humanities/staff/ moderni.txt Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922-1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001) is the most sophisticated full-scale work on the relationship between Fascism and modernity to date, even if it lacks a sustained discussion of
42
61 62
63
64
65
66
67
68 69
the term ‘modernity’ and misses an opportunity to locate Fascism’s complex variant of it within the revolutionary thrust of European fascism as a whole. Luzatto, ‘The Political Culture of Fascist Italy’, op.cit., 334. E.g. Philip Coupland, ‘The Blackshirted Utopians’, Journal of Contemporary History, 33, 2, (1998), 255-72; Charles Burdett, ‘Journeys to Other Spaces of Fascist Italy’, Modern Italy, 5, 1, (2000) 7-23. Antonio Costa-Pinto, Salazar’s Dictatorship and European Fascism. Problems of Interpretation (New York 1995); The Blue Shirts. Portuguese Fascists and the New State (New York 2000). Sheelagh Eastwood, Spanish Fascism in the Franco Era: Falanga Española de las JONS (New York 1988), Stanley Payne, Fascism in Spain 1923-1977 (Wisconsin 1999). Wahnón, ‘The Theatre Aesthetics of the Falange’, op.cit. A forthcoming book also informed by the new consensus is Joan Mellón (ed.) Orden, Jerarquía y Comunidad. Fascismos, Autoritarismos y Neofascismos en la Europa Contemporánea (Madrid, 2002). Andreas Umland, Vladimir Zhirinovskii in Russian Politics: Three Approaches to the Emergence of the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia, 1990-1993, unpublished D.Phil. dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin (1998); ‘Wladimir Shirinowskij in der russischen Politik: Einige Hintergründe des Aufstiegs der Liberal-Demokratischen Partei Rußlands’, Osteuropa, 44, 12, (1994), 1117-1131; ‘The Post-Soviet Russian Extreme Right’, Problems of Post-Communism, 44, 4 (1997), 53-61. Alessandro Campi is editor of the series Fascismo/Fascismi which is publishing a series of non-Italian publications on generic fascism as part of an attempt to introduce Italian scholars to approaches to the subject of which they have to date remained generally (blissfully?) unaware. A significant book in this series promises to be Alessandro Campi (ed.), Il fascismo e i suoi interpreti (Rome 2001) with essays by many of the ‘major players’, Italian and foreign, in the field. Kershaw, Hitler, op.cit, vol.1: Hubris, passim. Wippermann is perhaps academia’s most faithful follower of fascism: his Faschismustheorien (Darmstadt), which was first published in 1972, reached its seventh revised edition in 1997, and he also produced Europäischer Faschismus im Vergleich, 1922-1982 (Frankfurt 1983). He was recently involved in an impressive initiative in spreading the word further, namely an issue of Ethik und Sozialwissenschaft(11, 2, (2000) 289-334) edited by Werner Loh.. It was devoted to the question of generic fascism and is due to appear in book form as W. Wippermann and W. Loh (eds) ‘Faschismus’ kontrovers (Lucius und Lucius, Paderborn, forthcoming). Conceived as a forum discussion, it featured an article by Wippermann making the case for the term fascism to be more widely used in the non-Marxist generic sense which he gives it (based on the premise that
43 Fascist regime can be construed as the ‘real type’ of generic fascism), followed by responses from thirteen German political scientists and historians as well as two Americans (Peter Fritzsche, Stanley Payne) and one ‘Brit’ (R. Griffin). 70
72 73
Tim Mason, ‘The Primacy of Politics. Politics and Economics in National Socialist Germany’ in S. Woolf (ed.), The Nature of Fascism (London 1968), 165-95. George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution (New York 1999), x. George L. Mosse, ‘The Genesis of Fascism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1, 1, (1966) 119-20.
