Where Are We Now With Theories of Fascism?

Geoff Eley

In the time available to me I’ll propose two sets of explanatory theses, which to my mind provide the best ground for thinking about fascism. In its longer version this paper reviews the main lines of thought in historiography and the social sciences since the 1960s as a basis for defining my own ideas. But for reasons of time that will have to remain a kind of implicit preamble. Starting from an earlier essay I published in 1983, “What Produces Fascism: Pre-Industrial Traditions or a Crisis of the Capitalist State?”, I’ll proceed in two steps. First, I’ll summarize what still holds good from my earlier thinking; and then second, I’ll suggest what I think we’ve learned from the intervening quarter century of scholarship and debate.

In 1983 my thinking had FOUR salient features, which still seem to me okay.[1]

First, the necessary crucible for fascist radicalization was the immediate conjuncture of violence, empire, and revolution surrounding the First World War. Rather than any longer-term societal pathologies or deep-historical structures of political backwardness, in other words, it was the varying impact of the Great War that gave the decisive impetus.

Second, to become viable as a politics fascism required an especially severe crisis of the state. Fascism prospered when the state’s capacity for doing the work of reproduction became impaired, whether in managing the economy or in maintaining cohesion in society. In Italy during 1920-22, in Germany in 1930-33, that paralysis encompassed the entire institutional machinery of politics, including the parliamentary and party-political frameworks of representation. On the one hand, sufficient cooperation could no longer be organized among the dominant classes and their key economic fractions using the given party-based arrangements. Parliamentary coalition-building became unbearably complicated, so that politics became factionalized into a series of maneuvers for access to the executive. In the process the gap widened between an increasingly unmoored governmental practice, disastrously divorced from any popular legitimacy, and a febrile popular electorate, increasingly mobilized for action but with ever-narowing effect. On the other hand, accordingly, the popular legitimacy of the same institutional framework passed into disarray. Amidst the severity of this crisis, continuing adjustments of the given institutional arrangements looked ever-more futile. The appeal of more radical extra-systemic solutions consequently widened.[2] This way of formulating the problem, as the intersection of twin crises, a crisis of representation and a crisis of hegemony or popular consent, derived from the ideas of Nicos Poulantzas and their subsequent reworking through the reception of Gramsci.[3]

Third, it became vital to reinstate the importance of fascist ideology. The contested terrain of popular-democratic hopes required careful attention, for it was there that the socialist Left proved most deficient, the fascist Right most telling in its efficacy. Where the Left kept aggressively to its class-corporate practice of proletarian self-defense, the fascists erupted into the arena to appropriate the larger populist potential. In this regard fascism emerged as a new and audacious synthesis, involving radical authoritarianism, militarized activism, and the drive for a coercive state, moved by an ultra-nationalist, imperialist, and racialist creed, and a violent antipathy against both liberalism and socialism. This outlook was not organized around a codified core of texts or ideas; it was never “a closed canonical apparatus” or an elaborately “articulated system of belief.”[4] Rather, it formed a matrix of common dispositions, what Mussolini called a “common denominator,” “a set of master tropes” ordered around “violence, war, nation, the sacred, and the abject.”[5]

Finally, it was the recourse to political violence – to coercive forms of rule, to guns rather than words, to beating up one’s opponents rather than denouncing them from the speaker’s platform – that ultimately split fascism from its alternatives. The coercive resources of the state are always available for use, whether by routine application of the law for the protection of persons and property or the maintenance of law and order, or by curtailment of civil liberties under pressure of a national emergency, as during wartime or a general strike. Coercion in that sense is an entirely normal dimension of any legally constituted governing authority. Privately organized coercion was likewise common to the polities of societies undergoing capitalist development before 1914: strike-breaking, vigilantism, economic paternalism, and servile labor, especially in the countryside, could all richly be found.[6] Yet precisely when measured against such precedents, fascist violence was shockingly new. In Germany this contrast was clear. The Anti-Socialist Law of 1878-90, the harassment, deporting, and imprisonment of left-wing activists, the unleashing of police or troops against strikers and demonstrators – all these were one thing. But terror, first by means of a militarist and confrontational style of politics, then as a principle of state organization, was quite another.

To put it bluntly: killing socialists rather than just arguing with them, or at most legally and practically restricting their rights, brought the most radical of departures. The brutality of this break can hardly be exaggerated. Before 1914 attacks on democracy had unfolded only within normative contexts bringing extra-democratic violence gradually under constraint. The liberal-constitutionalist polities that became generalized all over Europe as a result of the 1860s made arbitrary authority increasingly accountable to representative government, parliamentary oversight, and liberal systems of the rule of law. As socialist parties gained in electoral strength and parliamentary influence from the 1890s they brought older repressive practices under further review. This incremental strengthening of constitutional politics allowed political life in much of Europe to stabilize on the given parliamentary terrain.[7] So it was this political culture of ritualized and respectful proceduralism that the massive disruption of the Great War so badly disordered. This was the history of cumulative progressivism that fascists violently disavowed. The consensual ground of political civility was what fascists in Italy and Germany so aggressively destroyed.

So my approach is a contextual one, stressing the conjunctural decisiveness of the First World War, a crisis in the legitimacy and cohesion of the liberal-parliamentary state, and the recourse to a new kind of political violence. I argued in summary, twenty-five years ago, that fascism was “best understood . . . as primarily a counter-revolutionary ideological project, constituting a new kind of popular coalition, in the specific circumstances of an interwar crisis. As such it provided the motivational impetus for specific categories of radicalized political actors in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, embittered by national humiliation, enraged by the advance of the Left.” Rather than deep-cultural explanations or structural theories of political backwardness, I argued for “theorizing fascism in terms of the crisis that produced it.”[8] The character of the “fascism-producing crisis” is still in my view the best place to begin. But in the time remaining I’ll suggest some of the ways in which this approach might be further extended.

Since the early 1990s the historiography of fascism fully reflects the so-called cultural turn, through which social histories have given way to culturalist approaches of various sorts: new intellectual histories of Nazism and Italian Fascism; critical readings of French fascist intellectuals; studies of fascist aesthetics and the fascist spectacle; major studies of cinema and film; monographic scholarship across the whole range of the arts; studies of fashion, consumption, and all aspects of popular culture; historical scholarship oriented towards everyday life; studies of sexuality; and so forth. Fascism is now approached less as the consequence of societal crisis and political breakdown than via the symptomatology of a cultural crisis of modernity. From being a species of “anti-modernism” (George Mosse), it reemerges as an ultra-nationalist and palingenetic appropriation of modernist energies (Roger Griffin). The Marxist version of this shift is from political theory and materialist sociology (Poulantzas, Frankfurt School, Gramsci) to culture and aesthetics (Benjamin). The still proliferating literatures on the Holocaust and every conceivable aspect of the “racial state” also converge here, as does current interest in states of emergency and states of exception, coalescing around Arendt, Schmitt, and Agamben. In offering my thoughts on some of the implications, I’ll suggest FIVE brief theses.

1. Fascism was a modernism: The intellectual Right’s “reactionary modernism,” its Janus-faced ambivalence about the emergent social world of modernity, has long been remarked: they embraced the new technologies of industrial expansion, the imperialist entailments of a powerful economy, and the new conditions of mass-political action, even as they lamented the lost worlds of tradition. Yet if fervently anti-liberal and anti-democratic, such ideas were hardly “anti-modern” or “backward-looking” in any analytically sensible use of the terms. Nor was the outlook especially paradoxical. Its exponents were “modernist in the full temporal sense of affirming the temporality of the new.” Their “image of the future [might] derive from the mythology of some lost origin or suppressed national essence, but its temporal dynamic [was] rigorously futural.” What the conservative revolution wished to “conserve” had already been “lost (if indeed it ever existed, which is doubtful), and hence [had then to] be created anew.” Indeed, “the chance [now] present[ed] itself to fully realize this ‘past’ for the first time.” Thus “reactionary modernism” was no unnatural coupling, but a dynamic and forward-moving synthesis. Amidst the accelerated intensities of a general societal crisis, such right-wing ideas acquired their own “modernist temporality” once the given forms of social authority destruction passed into severe disarray. Under such conditions, the conservative revolution became a “novel, complex, but integral form of modernism in its own right.”[9] By now, a large range of literatures has accumulated around this insight, including most insistently of all the writings of Roger Griffin, whose recent Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler fully codifies a long accumulating set of claims. As Griffin says: “Fascism can thus be interpreted on one level as an intensely politicized form of the modernist revolt against decadence,” which saw “culture as a site of total social regeneration.” And:

“Fascism is a form of programmatic modernism that seeks to conquer political power in order to realize a totalizing vision of national or ethnic rebirth. Its ultimate end is to overcome the decadence that has destroyed a sense of communal belonging and drained modernity of meaning and transcendence and usher in a new era of cultural homogeneity and health.”[10]

2. Germany was not Italy: In current work a certain consensus of intellectual history sees a “fascist minimum” cohering around the cultural crisis of modernism generated by the Great War. As Roger Griffin puts it: “Fascism is a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.”[11] Griffin has helped illuminate both the overall architecture of Nazi political belief and the somewhat greater heterodoxy in the Third Reich’s cultural sphere than we’d previously thought. But this easily obscures a vital difference in the German and Italian cases. The cultural apparatuses of the Italian regime left far more heterogeneous intellectual space than the coercive machineries of conformity under the Third Reich would ever permit. For one thing, the counter-revolutionary violence of 1920-22 hoisted Mussolini into power incredibly quickly, whereas the NSDAP took power only after building an elaborate popular movement across an entire decade; on the other hand, the Italian regime remained a work in progress until the mid 1930s, while the Third Reich began instating its state-institutional complex as soon as power had first been seized. Whereas Fascism in Italy left multifarious space for conservative intellectuals to remain active, epitomized perhaps by Giovanni Gentile, under the Third Reich such figures were either quickly extruded or began marking their partial distance, from Spengler, George, and Jünger to Ernst Niekisch, Mies van der Rohe, and Edgar Julius Jung. This difference has to compromise the sufficiency of Griffin’s “palingenetic” interpretation. If the Italian emergency in 1919-22 allowed any manner of idealistic hopes to cluster around the promise of a rejuvenated national future, in the Nazi case those more eclectic registers of fascist intellectuality were simply foreclosed. By the time Nazism reached the precincts of power the alignments of the possible were already brutally clear.

3. Nazism was the intensification of modernist governmentality: By “modernist governmentality” I mean the hubris of early twentieth-century medicalizing, welfarist, and social policy expertise, and the planning utopias that approached “populations as both the means and the goal of some emancipatory project” (Stephen Kotkin). I mean the new ways of constructing, imagining, visualizing, quantifying, regulating, policing, improving, reorganizing, comprehensively redesigning, and perhaps transforming “the social,” the social sphere, or society. In this way, too, the old view of fascism as “anti-modernist” has been overturned. But if in the Italian case the critique has shown modernism’s relation to fascism in the arts, philosophy, literature, and aesthetics, in Germany historians have turned to the eugenicist and related ideologies of social expertise pervading the medical, health-care, criminological and social policy professions. Processes of medicalization and racialization were already well under way during the Weimar Republic, involving eugenics, population politics, welfare initiatives directed at women, family policies, criminology and penal reform, imagined projects of social engineering, and the deployment of science for social goals. Nazi antisemitism was in this perspective less the ideological pathology of a cadre of obviously sociopathic fanatics than part of a syndrome deeply embedded in conventionalized practices endemic to Germany’s professional, managerial, and administrative social layers – thus precisely not an anti-modern, atavistic, and irrationalist refusal of civilized norms, but rather a disturbing manifestation of the most hubristic potentialities of social engineering, of aspirations for the comprehensive redesigning of the social order, associated with the promise of technological, managerial, and scientific modernity. From the early 1900s, antisemitic idioms figured within ever more elaborate repertoires of biological politics, where social, cultural and political issues were systematically naturalized under the sign of race. In this regard, the ground for Nazi policies was being discursively laid – not in a narrow or literal sense of “linguistic” preparation, but by systems of practice and elaborate institutional machineries of knowledge production, which over many years worked at demarcating deviant or “worthless” categories of people. In the process popular assumptions became restructured, changing the parameters for what an acceptable social policy could be. As an ideological project in that sense, Nazism enlisted a very specific category of intellectual. One especially devastating example would be Werner Best (1903-1989). A highly educated lawyer, Best rose through the SS, helped build the Gestapo, and worked in the SS central administration till 1940, before going as Reich Plenipotentiary to Denmark. A master of obfuscation after 1945, Best was entirely formed in the universe of early twentieth-century radical-nationalist and antisemitic politics, becoming completely embedded in the Third Reich’s project-oriented policy-making apparatus, a perfect embodiment of the frightening mixture of intellectual sophistication, racialist philosophy and technocratic reason so crucial to Nazism’s appeal among the professions.[12]