The Birth of Fascist Ideology: Passages from a Book by Zeev Sternhell
As I study more about fascism, and in particular the cultural and political and ideological sources from which it emerged, I am impressed BOTH that what we see in America today on the right does have meaningful kinship with some of fascism AND that there are differences.
Most recently, I’ve been extending my researches with a book by Zeev Sternhell (Princeton University Press, 1994), which explores the roots of the fascist ideology in the waning years of the 19th century and the beginning years of the 20th century. Sternhell is looking at the ideological currents at work in various European countries, especially France and Italy.
Two points that Sternhell makes, which I found of interest: 1) fascism was a movement with a thought-out ideology, an intellectual structure that, he says, was as developed as that of other political systems, including liberalism; and 2) fascism should not be regarded as a synonym for Nazism, with which it had some things in common, but with other elements –like the centrality of anti-Jewish racism in the Nazi ideology– strongly differentiating the two.
Here are some passages from that book that struck me as illuminating –to at least a meaningful degree– of what we are encountering in America in our times.
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“Fascism rebelled against modernity inasmuch as modernity was identified with the rationalism, optimism, and humanism of the eighteenth century, but it was not a reactionary or an antirevolutionary movement in the Maurrassian sense of the term. Fascism presented itself as a revolution of another kind, a revolution that sought to destroy the existing political order and to uproot its theoretical and moral foundations but that at the same time wished to preserve all the achievements of modern technology. It was to take place within the framework of the industrial society, fully exploiting the power that was in it. The Fascist revolution sought to change the nature of the relationships between the individual and the collectivity without destroying the impetus of economic activity– the profit motive, or its foundation– private property, or its necessary framework –the market economy…
“This point requires special emphasis. If fascism wished to reap all the benefits of the modern age, to exploit all the technological achievements of capitalism, if it never questioned the idea that market forces and private property were part of the natural order of things, it had a horror of the so-called bourgeois, or, as Nietzsche called them, modern values: universalism, individualism, progress, natural rights, and equality. Thus, fascism adopted the economic aspect of liberalism but completely denied its philosophic principles and the intellectual and moral heritage of modernity.”
(p. 7)
“The first of the two essential components of fascism to appear on the political scene at the end of the nineteenth century was tribal nationalism, based on a social Darwinism and, often, a biological determinism…This formula of Barres [can't discern what "formula" he's referring to] was in fact only the French counterpart of the German formula Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil), and it showed that the old theory, consecrated by the French Revolution, that society was made up of a collection of individuals, had been replaced by the theory of the organic unity of the nation.”
(p. 9)
“This ‘total’ nationalism claimed to be a system of ethics, with criteria of behavior dictated by the entire national body, independently of the will of the individual. By definition, this new nationalism denied the validity of any absolute and universal moral norms: truth, justice, and law existed only in order to serve the needs of the collectivity. The idea of society as something isolated and shut in, a violent antirationalism, and a belief in the supremacy of the subconscious over the forces of reason amounted to a truly tribal concept of the nation…
“This cult of deep and mysterious forces that are the fabric of human existence entailed as a necessary and natural consequence the appearance of a virulent anti-intellectualism. For this school of thought, the fight against intellectuals and against the rationalism from which they drew their nourishment was a measure of public safety. There were a great many nationalists at the turn of the century who, like those of the interwar generation, constantly attacked the critical spirit and its products, opposing them to instinct, intuitive and irrational sentiment, emotion and enthusiasm– those deep impulses which determine human behavior and which constitute the reality and truth of things as well as their beauty. Rationalism, they claimed, belongs to the ‘deracinated’; it blunts sensitivity, it deadens instinct and can only destroy the motive forces of national activity.”
(p. 10)
February 15th, 2010 at 5:47 pm
I’ll be interested in hearing your assessment of this book when you are finished.
Noted above is the fact that capitalism is listed as one of several values / human inventions of liberalism (your paragraph above that comes from p. 7 of the book). This squares with my research on liberalism, in which markets are certainly liberal as they have the potential of aligning with individual self-determination. [& historically a market model followed a mercantilist approach, which is what Adam Smith was rejecting] It has, of course, always been a false charge that somehow liberals are against markets or a market economy. Couldn’t be further from the truth. Smith wrote against the concentration of market power (monopoly, etc.) and would be horrified if he saw the extent of corporate power we see today.
February 15th, 2010 at 5:57 pm
Well, Jim, to some extent the meaning of “liberalism” has changed. It began as a term for those who thought the king and the mercantile state should get out of the way of economic activity. It gradually changed to emphasize other aspects of greater liberty and then to include aspects of governmental involvement in the economy and society.
So laissez-faire capitalism in the 19th century was considered a form of liberalism. But as the term evolved, liberalism became a word applied to a more mixed, New Deal type relationship between government and society.
February 15th, 2010 at 5:59 pm
As a follow up, I recall one particularly good history titled, “Reconsidering American Liberalism,” by James P. Young (1996) which not only helped me see the many threads of liberalism (one of which, surprisingly, was the puritan impulse), but also contrast it with what is today called political conservatism.
February 15th, 2010 at 7:28 pm
“Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted nazism or fascism.”
“Mahatma” Gandhi
February 15th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
One of the “secrets” waiting to be unveiled is the sheer number of German Nazi’s (especially, but not only, scientists) that the CIA and other U.S. security services recruited and absorbed into their ranks after W.W.2
February 15th, 2010 at 9:40 pm
“Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted nazism or fascism.”
“Mahatma” Gandhi
This is the most succinct definition of fascism I have seen. What Gandhi meant, of course, is Western capitalism, which only masks itself as “democracy”–what Hitler called National Socialism. National Socialism had nothing to do with democratic socialism and everything to do with totalitarian capitalism. The insidious nature of practically existing fascism in America was presciently described 30 years ago in Bertram Gross’ “Friendly Fascism”, and more recently, Naomi Wolf’s “The End of America”. The basic definition of fascism adopted by Mussolini was corporatism, the merger of state government and private enterprise. That is the only essential, the details vary with the particular regime. Now fascism is disguised, as in our war against Islamic terror or Islamo-fascism. As Huey Long predicted 60 years ago, “When fascism comes to America, it will be in the form of anti-fascism”.
February 16th, 2010 at 9:38 am
Fascism, like a cameleon, masks itself in a subtle form of normalcy, while the public is sedated by the images projected from the media. Lacking the vigor needed to intervene in the control of the elite, the cameleon finds succor from the inaction of the underclass to solidify their control over public treasuries.
February 16th, 2010 at 1:26 pm
Beautiful, Dan (your way of capsuling this, not the subject matter)!