Origins of Fascism (Prof. Passmore)

1. Fascism as a ‘Political Religion’
2. According to Emilio Gentile, a ‘political religion’ emerges when an earthly movement or regime claims sacred status. A secular movement, endowed with the trappings of a religion, endeavours to shape the individual and the masses through an ‘anthropological revolution’. Since it sees the world in terms of good and evil, it brooks no opposition (E. Gentile, ‘The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 1 (2000), 18–55; idem, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. K. Botsford). The concept of political religion develops the notion, which originated with theorists of totalitarianism, that fascism had its roots in a messianic, all-encompassing ideology, which was dedicated to the creation of a perfect society (C. J. Friedrich and Z. Brezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956)).

Secular religions included, for instance, the republicanism of Mazzini. Notwithstanding this distinction, Gentile tends also to make any pre-1914 secular religion into a forerunner of fascism, while other sources of fascism become ‘secondary’, or ‘circumstantial’ (E. Gentile, ‘The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism’, Modernism-Modernity, 1 (1994), 55–87). He regards the search for a civil religion as a feature of Italian political culture since the Risorgimento, especially evident in organic nationalism and its spiritual cousin, socialism. Furthermore, like Zeev Sternhell, Gentile takes Mussolini’s own account of fascism as a synthesis of spiritual socialism and radical nationalism, both of which he sees as precursors of the political religion, quite seriously. Fascism is a reworking of leftist ideas (Gentile, ‘The Sacralisation of Politics’; idem, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, 1–18. idem, ‘Fascism as a Political Religion’, Journal of Contemporary History, 25 (1990), 229–51). Giventhatthere wasnoequivalent in Nazism of Mussolini’s reworking of socialism, Gentile’s account of fascist origins cannot be applied directly to Germany. Michael Burleigh is therefore somewhat ambiguous on the question of the origins of Nazism. He argues that Hitler’s ideology emerged from a brew of medieval myths of kingship, conventional religion, the writings of Nietzsche and Richard Wagner, and nihilistic art. Nevertheless, he too places special emphasis on the left-wing origins of political religions, traceable back to the French Revolution, via romantic nationalism (M. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); M. Burleigh, ‘National Socialism as a Political Religion’, Journal of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 1 (2000), 1–26).

1. Fascism is not easily summed up in simple dichotomies such as ‘tradition/modernity’, ‘forward-/backward-looking’, or ‘reason/unreason’. Fascists certainly used oppositions such as these.
2. Reason and Unreason

The late eighteenth century is a more meaningful starting point, since modern political alignments first took shape then. Fascists generally disparaged the Enlightenment tradition, which they saw as the fount of materialist individualism. On the one hand, fascists believed, like Enlightenment thinkers, that man could create a better world, if only for some. Fascists also agreed that universal laws regulated human societies, even if the laws in question did not lead to universal emancipation. As Gentile and many others before have argued, Fascism owed something also to JeanJacques Rousseau, who held that it might be necessary to createa ‘civic religion’ andtoforce people to recognizethe ‘general will’. Yet fascists also had something in common with Rousseau’s critic, Gottfried von Herder, for whom national diversity was more valuable than uniformity. However, Herder did not posit the existence of a racial hierarchy.

Herder’s thought prefigured Romanticism and thus linked with an ideological current that flowed directly into the pool from which fascism emerged. Romanticism rejected rational, classicist, precepts of rationality and balance in favour of individualism and subjectiveness. Like fascism, Romanticism idealized the creative spirit who overturned formal rules. Romantics saw imagination as a gateway to the spiritual truths of national and folk identities. Romanticism also developed the organicist strand evident in anti-Enlightenment thought. This organicism simultaneously provided a bridge to rationalist liberalism, for biological science was attractive to liberal rationalists well before Darwin. Moreover, if the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie abandoned organized religion, it rarely rejected spiritualism. It was prone to regard the contemplation of artistic genius as a means to cultivate the self. Liberals could recognize themselves in the romantic idea of self-realization through struggle against nature and routine.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1884–1900) is interesting from our perspective because both Mussolini and Hitler wrote positively of him. One can see why fascists should have admired a thinker who idealized fearless individuals, possessed of a will to power, and who rejected universal values for placing intolerable constraints upon individual creativity. Nietzsche envisaged the leadership of an elite, ready to sacrifice untold numbers in the interests of an ideal. Yet his writings are too contradictory to be appropriated by a single ideology. He urged his contemporaries to face the death of god with the creation of new values, and yet he was scathing of any attempt to create new standards. He rejected German nationalism and yet celebrated the national past. He regurgitated crass anti-Semitic stereotypes while abhorring antiSemites, including, after an initial fascination, Wagner. Furthermore, Nietzsche was a critic of the rational utopia imagined by totalitarians and, in the 1960s, he became an icon for the anarchistic postmodernist Michel Foucault (R. S. Wistrich, ‘Was Nietzsche a Fascist Thinker?’, Partisan Review, 68 (2001), 201– 17).

Since the Enlightenment, thinkers had assumed that race was a scientific fact, confirmed, notably, by phrenology. Indeed, cranial measurement was not entirely displaced by genetic theories of race—French racial ‘experts’ used it during the war, for instance. The Comte Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races (1853–5) was the culmination of the earlier approach. It contended that history was a struggle between races, in which the dominance of the Aryan race depended on preserving its purity from contamination by the black and yellow races. From the 1860s, Gobineau’s theories became influential in Germany, where Wagner and Nietzsche were among their admirers. The latter, in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), depicted socialists and democrats as products of racial regression, and contrasted them with the Aryan elite. By 1900, racial categories were an integral part of intellectual life, and no single political tendency monopolized them. British liberals used them to justify hegemony in Ireland, while reactionary German conservatives invoked them to legitimize German power over Poles. Social Darwinism also developed a right-wing version (R. Weikart, ‘The Origins of Social Darwinism in Germany’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 54 (1993), 469–88). Fascists would prove to be no clearer in their use of Social Darwinism.

Fascism did not originate simply in a revolt against reason or in the drive to create a political religion. It was inherently contradictory. It would emphasize both leadership and fulfilment through participation in a crowd. It attacked Enlightenment rationalism as a constraint upon struggle and yet invented its own, ultradeterminist, theories of race and nation, justified with all of the paraphernalia of science.

Nationalism

Until the 1860s, nationalism was largely cast as progressive. In the east and south, it sought the reform or destruction of the reactionary tsarist, German, and Austrian empires. In the west, democrats claimed to speak for the nation. Following Rousseau, they believed that each individual was bound to the common good by his [sic] equal share of rights and duties. Democrats condemned aristocracy, monarchy, and the Church for denying the rights of the nation. It derived first from the link between democracy, the people, the indivisible nation, and thence ethnicity. France did indeed produce its fair share of pre-fascist thinkers. Italy and Germany because fascism actually came to power there after the Great War.

Italy was united in 1861 to 1870 through diplomacy and war. Popular nationalism played a subordinate role. After unification, the liberal elites set about ‘creating Italians’. The regime promoted loyalty to king and country, notably through secularized schools, idealization of the army, sport, parades, and monuments. For some nationalists this was not enough. The obstacles were enormous, for in large parts of Italy, especially the south, ‘Italy’ meant little more than taxes and police interference in customary ways. Notwithstanding, the followers of the democratic nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini condemned the liberal regime for its unrepresentativeness. They saw the liberals as too concerned with pointless quarrels to bring their policies to fruition and as too elitist to mobilize the masses. Mazzinian nationalists demanded something like a civic religion. In their orbit can be found the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who claimed that isolation of hereditary criminals—hangovers from an earlier stage of evolution—from the rest of society would benefit the Italian race. Yet Mazzinians also believed that democracy entailed individual rights and the peaceful coexistence of nations. We cannot know how in practice they would have reconciled individual liberty and dedication to the nation. At most, we can say that Mazzinian nationalism was ambiguous and, later, that fascists drew upon elements of it. Lombroso’s positivist criminology, for instance, influenced the Fascist criminal code of 1930 (Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, 7–13; Lehmann, ‘The Germans as a Chosen People’; Pick, Faces of Degeneration). By 1914, Italian nationalism had developed a genuinely radical right component. It was rightist in the sense that it was strongly anti-socialist or more particularly anti-Marxist; it was radical in that it held that the creation of a truly united Italy, without the socialists, depended upon the displacement of the old ruling class by a new one.

1. The context for the emergence of this new nationalism was the rise of socialism, anarchist terror, peasant occupations of landed estates, and defeat of the Italian army at Adowa in 1896. Among the most important of the new nationalist journals was Corradini’s Il Regno, founded in 1903. Unlike earlier nationalists, Corradini was of conservative background. He incorporated Social Darwinism and pragmatism into a nationalist, anti-socialist, and anti-democratic ideology. He held that Italy must overcome its weakness towards other powers by harnessing the ‘iron laws of race’, expelling foreign influences, and engaging in an aggressive imperialist policy. Nationalism would incorporate workers into the nation and regenerate the bourgeoisie, forcing it to abandon ‘feminine humanitarianism’ and degenerate liberalism.
2. In Germany, right-wing nationalism developed earlier, as liberals bowed to the genius of Bismarck, the aristocratic, conservative, architect of German unity. Wagner viewed art as a means to reconcile the individual with the German community, with its past and future. He believed that the Germans were descended from pre-Christian nature-gods and so uniquely placed to apprehend the pure essence of being (M. Brearley, ‘Hitler and Wagner: The Leader, the Master and the Jews’, Patterns of Prejudice, 22 (1988), 3–22). Wagner’s son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain also influenced Hitler. Chamberlain’s racism combined Darwinism with mystical idealism derived from Gestalt theory. Presentday peoples originated in cross-breeding between different races, followed by careful inbreeding over a long period. Whereas Darwin denied the existence of innate qualities, Chamberlain believed that breeding would lead to thegradual emergenceofaperfectform —theexpression of amystical lifeforce.

By 1914, nationalism was so strongly anchored in the German right that its left-wing origins were a distant memory. Conservatives exploited exclusionary potentials long present within nationalism and made it a xenophobic, anti-socialist, authoritarian creed. Paul Lagarde was one of the first to claim the label of radical conservative. Lagarde’s racism was not biological but he did preach discrimination against Jews on the grounds that it would encourage assimilation (F. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961); V. Viaene, ‘Paul De Lagarde: A Nineteenth-Century “Radical” Conservative-and Precursor of National Socialism?’, European History Quarterly, 26 (1996), 527–57).

1. The Socialist Origins Of Fascism
2. For much of the nineteenth century, socialists were nationalists. They associated democracy with the triumph of the people and assumed the people to be a nation. They used the terms ‘worker’ and ‘people’ interchangeably, thereby enabling broad recruitment, including the petty bourgeoisie and the inevitable bourgeois intellectuals. Socialism had never been free from prejudice, notably towards women and foreign labour. The rise of Marxist socialism, which was theoretically internationalist, secularist, and dedicated to the interests of the industrial proletariat alone, sometimes brought out the exclusionary potential of the older socialist tradition. The French Blanquistes provide an excellent example of this evolution. They espoused a sort of working-class Jacobinism, advocating seizure of power by a revolutionary party on the back of an urban uprising. They were anti-parliamentarian, nationalist, xenophobic, and sometimes anti-Semitic. Even after the triumph of Marxism in the labour movement, internationalism never entirely replaced nationalism. Marxism, after all, insisted that the triumph of the proletariat depended upon a preliminary bourgeois-democratic revolution within the nation. Socialists were as concerned as anyone with the question of leadership and with the creation of an elite, which they implicitly contrasted with the non-elite.

Liberalism

Some have speculated that in 1904, while in Switzerland, Mussolini attended the lectures of the world-famous political scientist Vilfredo Pareto. He probably did not, and yet the possibility that he did so underlines the extent to which political ideas crossed national and political boundaries. Coupled with the great diversity of fascism, this fact renders it impossible to locate the origins of fascism in a single part of the political spectrum. Fascism drew upon centrist ideologies, too. In the last decades of peace, liberals believed that mass politics was eroding elite leadership. For liberals, too, elites were the progressive element in history and their potential decline would be a manifestation of decadence. Liberals often saw the market as a Darwinian struggle, in which the elite rose to the top.

In Germany, too, liberalism contained anti-democratic tendencies. Liberals at first embraced Social Darwinism to justify individual freedom and attack aristocratic conservatism. Increasingly, they used it to legitimate social inequality. A key figure in this transition was Haeckel, who urged that ‘Passion and selfishness, conscious or unconscious, is everywhere the motive force for life.’ In 1878,he claimed that the struggle for existence would not lead to socialism but to a sort of bourgeois aristocracy of talent. With time, German conservatives, too, embraced Social Darwinism. In a book dedicated to Haeckel, published in 1875, Friedrich von Hellwald argued that the struggle for existence would lead to the triumph of the aristocracy. He endorsed militarism, class domination, absolutism, slavery, despotism, and the spiritual yoke of the Church, as ‘inventions of men for the purposes of self preservation’. Von Hellwald opposed liberalism as well as socialism, and yet retained a faith in progress, which he saw as the product of violent conflict between individuals, races, and nations, leading to the annihilation of the weak (Weikart, ‘The Origins of Social Darwinism in Germany’, 483). In fact, pre-1914 German ultranationalism never lost its liberal component. Heinrich Class’s pamphlet ‘If I were Kaiser’ was transitional between authoritarian liberalconservatism and fascism in that it appealed to the Kaiser and yet presumed to speak for the nation to him, calling for government by a strong man.