Abstract
It is now time to turn to the second approach to analyze fascist systems: the ideal type. This heuristical device, developed by the sociologist Max Weber, consists of bringing together a maximum number of properties that can be found in fascist systems. When we have an ideal type it is possible to compare a given system—in our case, Putinism—with this ideal type. Emilio Gentile can be recognized for having identified a number of central elements that can be used for the construction of such an ideal type. I will partially follow Gentile’s approach1 distinguishing four dimensions:
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organizational
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cultural
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ideological
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institutional
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Notes
E. Gentile (2004) Qu’est-ce que le fascisme? Histoire et interprétation (Paris: Gallimard), pp. 119–122. Emilio Gentile distinguished only three dimensions: organizational, cultural and institutional. He included ideology in the cultural dimension. I will present ideology as a separate dimension, because it stands apart from the nonverbal expressions of culture, such as symbols, greetings, life style, and clothing.
Cf. M. Mann, “The Contradictions of Continuous Revolution,” in I. Kershaw and M. Lewin (1997) Stalinism and Nazism—Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 140: “The most recent research on party members and voters shows that the Nazis were, as they claimed, a national party, a Volkspartei, drawing support from all social classes for their supposedly national goals.”
E. Voegelin (2007) Die politischen Religionen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag). First published in 1938. One month after its publication Voegelin got a Berufsverbot and was excluded from the university. He emigrated the same year to the United States.
P. Sloterdijk and H-J. Heinrichs (2001) Die Sonne und der Tod—Dialogische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), p. 68.
An example is Kurt Ludecke, one of Hitler’s early associates, who later recorded his impressions on first hearing him speak in 1922: “My critical faculty was swept away. (…) He was holding the masses, and me with them, under an hypnotic spell by the sheer force of his conviction (…) The gospel he preached [was] a sacred truth. He seemed another Luther. I forgot everything but the man; then glancing around, I saw that his magnetism was holding these thousands as one. (…) I experienced an exaltation that could be likened only to religious conversion” (in J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds) (1998) Nazism 1919–1945, Volume I—The Rise to Power 1919–1934 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press), p. 18).
An excellent analysis of the role the Hitler salute played in the disintegration of German civil society is made by T. Allert (2008) in The Hitler Salute—On the Meaning of a Gesture (New York: Picador). According to Allert, “the mistrust engendered by the Hitler greeting gave it a pernicious power. It restricted people’s options in presenting themselves to others (…) The German greeting (…) created distance (…) it helped pave the way for the individual’s self-negation (…) Mistrust combined with a readiness to denounce others formed a sinister hybrid that grew in the rotting soil of a languishing social sensibility” (p. 66). The result was that “people limited their social contacts and retreated into trusted, reliable circles of family and friends. Under these circumstances, a culture of universal suspicion flourished” (p. 67).
While attacking the socialism of socialists and Marxists, Hitler in a shrewd way appropriated the word “socialism” to coin the new concept of “national socialism.” J. Van Doom has showed that this appropriation of the title “socialist” by the Nazis was preceded by a process in which German socialism had become less internationalist and more nationalist, thereby unwillingly preparing this appropriation by the Nazis. (Cf. J. A. A. Van Doorn (2008) Duits socialisme—Het falen van de sociaal-democratie en de triomf van het nationaal-socialisme (German Socialism—The Failure of Social Democracy and the Triumph of National Socialism) (Amsterdam: Mets & Schilt)).
In his provocative book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg’s approach is the other way round. Goldberg goes so far as to ascribe many elements of fascism to traditions of the left. “Fascism,” according to him, “properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left” Q. Goldberg (2007) Liberal Fascism—The Secret History of the Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (London and New York: Penguin Books), p. 7).
A. Gillette (2008) Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (London: Routledge), p. 50.
Cf. A. Carioti (November 16, 2009) “Mussolini segreto nei diari della Petacci,” Corriere della Sera.
Robert Paxton called the first the normative state, the second the prerogative state. Between both a continuing battle was going on in which the prerogative state, by creating “parallel institutions,” wanted to implement its own policies and get rid of the constraints of the normative state (Paxton, o.c., passim). Erhard Eppler spoke about the Nazi Doppelstaat (double state), in which the civil Normenstaat (normative state) opposed the Maßnahmenstaat (decree state). (E. Eppler (2005) Auslaufmodell Staat (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). “The decree state,” wrote Eppler, “was totally incalculable and subject to barbaric arbitrariness” (p. 15).
C. J. Friedrich and Z. K. Brzezinski (1965) Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
R. J. B. Bosworth (2006) Mussolini’s Italy—Life under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915–1945 (New York: Penguin Press), p. 367.
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© 2013 Marcel H. Van Herpen
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Van Herpen, M.H. (2013). Defining Fascism: The “Thick” Method. In: Putinism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282811_8
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