fascism - cornell universitypeople.soc.cornell.edu/mmb39/fascism.doc · web viewfascism must...

Berezin, Fascism, 5/13/2023

Fascism.

Forthcoming in: Encyclopedia of Sociology, George Ritzer, ed. London: Blackwell.

Word Count: 2908

Mabel Berezin, Department of Sociology, Cornell, Ithaca, N.Y 14850

[email protected]

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mailto:[email protected]


Overview

Fascism as a historical entity began in 1922 with Benito Mussolini’s coming to

power in Italy. As a political ideology, fascism defines many of the movements that were

present in post World War I Europe from the British Union of Fascists to the Romanian

Iron Guard.

Fascism could have remained simply a characteristic of a group of historically

specific political formations. But the term rather quickly developed a life of its own.

Today it serves as what Alexander (2003) has described as a “bridging metaphor” that is

a term that one uses independently of historical or definitional context when confronted

with acts of arbitrary violence or authoritarianism in political and in some instances,

social life.

The entries (Von Beckerath 1931; Einaudi 1968) in the 1931 and 1968 editions of

the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences discuss fascism exclusively in terms of the

regime in Italy. The authors make some effort to distinguish Italian fascism from

German National Socialism. The 2002 edition of the Encyclopedia omits fascism. Until

the 1990s, scholars viewed fascism as a descriptor of events in post World War I Europe

or as an ideology with only historical interest.

Precise conceptualization has eluded past, as well as, current exegeses of

historical fascism. Attempts to theorize fascism have mined specific historical instances

for generalities and yielded catalogues of characteristics (for example, Payne 1995, 441-

470). Even a cursory reading of this scholarship suggests that it is difficult to generalize

across cases and leaves the impression that Benedetto Croce was correct when he

described fascism as a "parenthesis" in European history.

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In 1979, historian Gilbert Allardyce wrote a frequently cited analysis that claimed

to have closed the question of "generic" fascism. He asserted that fascism had no

meaning outside of Italy and that it was neither an ideology, nor a mental category.

Comparing fascism to romanticism (and curiously obtuse to fascism's other ideological

kin--modernism), he stated that both terms "mean virtually nothing." Resigned to the fact

that "fascism [as a political term] is probably with us for good," Allardyce asserts that the

proper analytic task is to "limit the damage," and concludes: "Placing it [fascism] within

historical boundaries at least provides a measure of control, restricting the proliferation of

the word in all directions, past and present, and preventing it from distorting political

rhetoric in our own time. Fascism must become a foreign word again, untranslatable

outside a limited period in history (p. 388)."

The death knell of fascism has not sounded either in the real world of political

practice, or in the relatively cloistered world of academic discourse (Eatwell 1994;

Laqueur 1996; Levy 1999). For example, Griffin (1991, p. 26) begins where earlier

studies left off. He argues that the term fascism has undergone an "un-acceptable loss of

precision" and proposes a new "ideal type" of fascism based on the following definition:

"Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is

a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism." The collapse of Communism in 1989,

the electoral success of European right wing populist parties that began in the early 1990s

coupled with a resurgence of neo-Nazi violence and the more recent rise of Islamic

fundamentalism has re-awakened social science interest in historical fascism. This entry

aims to capture the variegated approaches to fascism over the last fifty years. It is

divided into three parts. Part one examines fascism as an analytic category; part two

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describes attempts to define fascism as a coherent ideology; and part three, examine the

career of fascism focusing on the last fifteen years.

1. Fascism as Analytic Category

Existing studies of fascism fall into two schools that may be broadly categorized

as follows. The first tries to answer the "what" or definitional question. Frequently this

is articulated in a discussion of whether or not fascism is a "generic" concept or a national

variation of historically specific political instances. Of those who try to define fascism,

the central theme is the impossibility of definition. For example, fascism is the "vaguest

of political terms (Payne 1980, pp. 4-5);" and, "a general theory of fascism must be no

more than a hypothesis which fits most of the facts (Mosse 1979, p.1)." The second

approach bypasses definition and tries to establish the characteristics of regimes and

constituencies (for example Acquarone 1974; Burleigh 2000).

Seymour Martin Lipset's (1981) classic account of the class composition of fascist

movements attributes fascism's success to the political disaffection of the middle classes.

Juan Linz's approach to constituency formation starts from the premise that an

independent "phenomenon" of fascism existed and defines it as: ". . . hyper-nationalist,

often pan-nationalist, anti-parliamentary, anti-liberal, anti-communist, populist and

therefore anti-proletarian, partly anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois, anti-clerical, or at

least, non-clerical movement, with the aim of national social integration through a single

party and corporative representation not always equally emphasized: with a distinctive

style and rhetoric, it relied on activist cadres ready for violent action combined with

electoral participation to gain power with totalitarian goals by a combination of legal and

violent tactics (Linz 1976)."

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Linz's definition rests on his assumption that fascism occupies a residual political

field. As a "late-comer" to the political scene, fascism had to capture whatever "political

space," in the form of ideological doctrine and political constituencies, was available to

it. His argument is dependent upon analyzing the social bases of fascism's political

competitors (Linz 1980). Linz recognizes the importance of national case studies and the

characteristics that he outlines are applicable in various combinations to a broad range of

fascist movements and regimes. In general, studies of institutions and constituencies

display greater degrees of analytic precision than those that wrestle with definition.

A central weakness in much of the writing on fascism, past and present, has been

a failure to draw a sharp distinction between fascist movements and regimes, between

fascism as ideology and fascism as state, between political impulse and political

institution. In general, analysts elide the question of culture and ideology or simply deal

with it in a descriptive manner. The forces that enable a political movement to assume

state power are different from, but not unconnected to, the forces that define a new

regime. During the 1920s and 1930s, virtually every country in Europe had a fascist

movement, or political movements that displayed the characteristics of the fascist

impulse, but relatively few of these movements progressed to political regimes, that is

took control of the state (Merkl 1980). Culture and ideology figure differently at both

stages. In the movement phase, they act as powerful mobilizing devices that frame the

political beliefs of committed cadres of supporters. In the regime, phase they serve as

conversion mechanisms to assure the consent of a broad public constituency.

Totalitarian states are not necessary outcomes and historical evidence suggests

that they are as much fascist fictions as political realities (De Grand 1991). Mussolini

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declared that his regime was the first totalitarian state; and although recent historiography

has shown that the fascist cultural project was highly fissured, the intention of, if not the

reality of, coherence was a goal (De Grazia 1992). Hannah Arendt built terror into the

definition of totalitarianism (1973). Her quasi-psychoanalytic approach to fascism which

paints a portrait of mass societies, mobs and atomized individuals responding to the

congeries of a police state evoke contemporary neo-Nazis and images of an Orwellian

1984. Terror and violence as analytic frames may capture the political realities of

Stalinist Russia and Holocaust horrors, but terror did not represent the quotidian

experience of Italian fascism and distracts from historical and theoretical understanding.

In contrast to Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, the Italian fascist regime was relatively

non-repressive.

2. Fascism as Ideology

Scholars have argued that it should be possible to establish a "fascist minimum"

by which they mean a set of criteria without which fascism could not exist (Payne 1985,

p. 196). Yet, they have been reluctant to ascribe greater or lesser degrees of importance

to the variables that they view as characteristic of fascism. For example, Italian fascism

was anti-Socialist and anti-clerical, despite its conciliation with the Catholic Church, but

above all it was anti-liberal as liberalism was understood in early twentieth century Italy.

Discussions of Marxism have confounded discussions of fascism. Simply

positing that fascism is not Marxism, or is a form of "anti-Marxism," fails to address

salient features of both ideologies (Nolte 1969). Many fascists including Mussolini

himself began their political careers as socialists. What were the differences and points

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of confluence between fascism and Marxism which made the transition from one to the

other possible?

The beginning of an answer lies in Zeev Sternhell's (1994) analysis of fascism as

an "independent cultural and political phenomenon" representing a "revision" of

Marxism. According to Sternhell, fascism was a political hybrid that rejected first, the

liberal ideals of rationalism, individualism and utilitarianism, and second, the

materialistic dimensions of Marxism. From Marxism, fascism borrowed a concept of

communitarianism embodied in a new form of revolutionary syndicalism; and from

liberalism, it borrowed a commitment to free markets. Sternhell's contention that market

economies are compatible with fascist ideology and regimes forecloses purely economic

interpretations of fascism. Sternhell's analysis lends support to fascism's disavowal of

liberal political culture but it is overly dependent upon the writings of national, and

sometimes obscure, avant-garde intellectuals to serve as a fulcrum for generating new

theories of fascism.

3. Fascism: the Career of a Concept

Fascism refuses to go away. There are four identifiable stages in the career of

fascism as a concept: first the post-World War Two period when the classic analyses

were written spanning roughly from 1950 to the early 1970s (much of these writings have

been discussed in the first part of this entry); second, the social interpretations phase;

third, the cultural institutional turn; and most recently, the return to political explanations.

"Social interpretations" of fascism began to re-emerge in the 1980s (Baldwin

1990). Heirs of Lipset's mode of analysis, these studies were less deterministic and

grounded in a nuanced notion of class and political action (for example, the essays in

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Koshar 1990). DeGrazia’s (1981) study of the Fascist leisure organization the

Dopolavoro examines how fascism co-opted the Italian working classes through the

regime’s colonization of its leisure time. DeGrazia focuses upon how workers pursued

political projects that on the face of it were against their interests instead of locating the

charisma of fascism in the collective psychology of class groupings.

Social interpretations have occupied more historians of Nazi Germany than of

fascist Italy. Two central and contrasting works in this genre are Browning’s (1992)

history of a German police battalion in Poland and Goldhagen’s (1996) study of how

ordinary Germans were not only complicit but actively engaged in the murder of the

Jews. Browning provides a measured analysis of how ordinary citizens became involved

in the Nazi genocide. Goldhagen argues that “ordinary Germans” became killers because

they were inherently anti-Semitic and enjoyed hunting down their Jewish neighbors and

engaging in acts of violence against them. Brustein (1996) argues that membership in the

Nazi party was a rational and not an emotional decision. Career advancement demanded

party membership and German citizens who wanted to feed and clothe their families fell

in line.

In the mid-1990s, the social approach to the study of fascism shaded into an

approach that focused on political culture (Luzzatto 1999). Influenced by Mosse’s

(1975) seminal work on the “nationalization of the masses” in Germany, Gentile (1993)

studied the symbols of Italian fascism. Gentile concluded that fascism was a form of

political religion that sacralized politics. Fritzsche’s twin studies of Weimar (1990) and

Nazi Germany (1998) illustrate how the social interpretation flows into cultural analysis.

Another thread of the cultural analysis was the focus upon how cultural institutions

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intersected with political regimes. Stone’s (1998) study of fascist art patronage illustrates

this approach. Berezin’s (1997)’s study of public political events links the study of

fascist ritual to comparative political analysis.

The millennium has seen a resurgence of interest in fascism within the social

sciences. Linz’s (2000) classic 1975 essay on totalitarian and authoritarian regimes was

re-issued as a monograph. Paxton’s (2004) Anatomy of Fascism begins where earlier

generations of studies left off. Paxton sets himself the task of trying to define the

parameters of fascism as a political phenomenon and he astutely chooses the term

“anatomy” to characterize his project. As his title Fascists suggests, Mann (2004)

reinvigorates the class approach to fascism. Mann analyzes six cases of interwar

European fascism and identifies the presence of paramilitarism combined with the usual

array of anti-statism and nationalist ideology as a distinguishing feature of fascism.

Despite the vast array of new scholarship at their disposal, Mann and Paxton more or less

conclude that fascism was an inter-war European phenomenon that is not likely to repeat

itself in its early 20th century form.

Political scientist Nancy Bermeo’s Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times (2003)

is not exclusively a study of fascism and it has the advantage of including Latin America

in the analysis. Bermeo views transitions to and from democracy as a series of choices

that ordinary people make as they are try to get on with their lives. This book taps into

the attraction of individuals to political groups who offer solutions to practical problems.

The attraction is based on potential efficacy rather than any prior moral assessment of

ideology—whether that ideology is democratic or not. Bermeo offers a first step in

demarcating the experience of the varieties of popular political choice.

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References

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Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2003. The Meanings of Social Life. New York: Oxford.

Allardyce,Gilbert "What Fascism is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept,"

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Baldwin, Peter "Social Interpretations of Nazism: Renewing a Tradition," Journal of

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Berezin, Mabel. 1997. Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Inter-war Italy.

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Bermeo, Nancy. 2003. Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the

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