Fascism - Cornell University



Fascism.

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

Word Count: 2908

Mabel Berezin, Department of Sociology, Cornell, Ithaca, N.Y 14850 mmb39@cornell.edu

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.

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 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)."

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 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 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 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 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.

References

Acquarone's Alberto. 1974. L'organizzazione dello Stato totalitario (Reprint). Turin: Einaudi.

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," American Historical Review 84 (1979), 388.

Arendt, Hannah. [1951]1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Baldwin, Peter "Social Interpretations of Nazism: Renewing a Tradition," Journal of Contemporary History 25 (1990): 5-37;

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

Bermeo, Nancy. 2003. Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Browning, Christopher R. 1992. Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Collins.

Brustein, William I. 1996. The Logic of Evil. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.

Burleigh, Michael. 2000. The Third Reich. New York: Hill and Wang.

De Felice, Renzo. 1977. Interpretations of Fascism, trans. Brenda Huff Everett. Cambridge: Harvard.

De Grand, Alexander. 1991. "Cracks in the Facade: The Failure of Fascist Totalitarianism in Italy, 1935-9." European History Quarterly 21: 515-535.

De Grazia, Victoria. 1981. The Culture of Consent. New York: Cambridge.

De Grazia, Victoria. 1992. How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 Berkeley: University of California Press.

Eatwell, Roger. 1994. "Why Are Fascism and Racism Reviving in Western Europe?" Political Quarterly 65(3) (July - Sept.):313-325.

Einaudi, Mario. 1968. “Fascism.” Pp. 334-341 in International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Vol.5, David L. Sills, eds. New York: Macmillan Company and the Free Press.

Fritzsche, Peter. 1990. Rehearsels for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany. New York: Oxford.

Fritzsche, Peter. 1998. Germans into Nazis. Cambridge: Harvard, Cambridge, 1998.

Gentile, Emilio. 1993. Il culto del littorio. Rome: Laterza.

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. 1996. Hitler’s Willing Executioners. New York: Knopf.

Griffin, Roger. 1991. The Nature of Fascism. New York: St. Martin's.

Koshar, Rudy, Ed. 1990. Splintered Classes. New York: Holmes and Meier.

Laqueur, Walter. 1996. Fascism: Past, Present, Future. New York: Oxford.

Levy, Carl. 1999. “Fascism, National Socialism and Conservatives in Europe, 1914-1945: Issues for Comparativists.” Contempory European History 8 (1): 97-126.

Linz, Juan J. 1976. "Some Notes Toward a Comparative Study of Fascism in Sociological Historical Perspective." In Fascism: A Reader's Guide, edited by Walter Laqueur. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Linz, Juan J. 1980. "Political Space and Fascism as a Late-comer." Pp. 153-89 in Who Were the Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism, edited by Stein Ugelvik Larsen. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget.

Linz, Juan J. 2000. Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes. London: Lynne Riener Publishers. (Reprint with new introduction of Chapters 1-6 in Handbook of Political Science, edited by Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby. Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1975.)

Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1981. Political Man (Reprint). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.

Luzzatto, Sergio. 1999. “The Political Culture of Fascist Italy.” Contempory European History 8 (2): 317-334.

Mann, Michael. 2004. Fascists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Merkl, Peter H. 1980. "Comparing Fascist Movements." Pp. 752-83 in Who Were the Fascists, Who Were the Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism, edited by Stein Ugelvik Larsen. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget.

Mosse, George L. 1979. "Towards a General Theory of Fascism.” In International Fascism, edited by George L. Mosse. London: Sage.

Mosse, George L. 1991. The Nationalization of the Masses. Ithaca: Cornell.

Nolte, Ernst. 1969. Three Faces of Fascism, trans. Leila Vannewitz. New York: New American Library.

Paxton, Robert O. 2004. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Knopf.

Payne Stanley G. 1980. Fascism: Comparison and Definition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Payne, Stanley G. 1995. A History of Fascism, 1914-1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Sternhell, Zeev. 1994. The Birth of Fascist Ideology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stone, Marla. 1998. The Patron State. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Von Beckerath, Erwin. 1931. “Fascism.” Pp. 133-138 in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 5, Edwin R.A. Seligman and Alvin Johnson, eds. New York: Macmillan: 133-138.

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