Abstract
Since the 1980s the historiography of fascism has produced a series of works that share a determination to ‘take fascism seriously’ — as a distinct ideological, political, and social phenomenon. Whether theoretical, classificatory or comparative, these works may have differed substantially in terms of their understanding of the essence of ‘fascism’ and the optimal methodological framework for its analysis; but together they brought about a significant recalibration of analytical tools, charting new — and mostly fruitful — avenues of interpretation and further research. Moving steadily away from the barely theorized and indiscriminate ‘survey’ paradigms of the 1950s and 1960s, ‘fascism’ started to gradually emerge as a coherent and distinct ‘ism’, rooted in wider intellectual currents of its historical context but underpinned by distinct and novel ideological-political qualities that were now seen as crucial to its formation and conceptual understanding.1 Gradually recognized as a ‘third-way’ ideology,2 sharing specific elements from existing worldviews but propagating a new kind of ‘revolutionary’ synthesis that went beyond existing political templates, ‘fascism’ came to be regarded as the vertex of ideological and political radicalism in inter-war Europe — not only across the full left-right spectrum but also within the political space of the European right. It was considered ‘totalitarian’ as opposed to ‘authoritarian’, radical as opposed to conservative, active and mass-mobilizing (populist) as opposed to passive and top-down, even ‘revolutionary’ as opposed to reactionary.
Keywords
- Liberal Democracy
- Demonstration Effect
- Political Space
- Nazi Regime
- Fascist Regime
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Notes
A. Kallis, ed., The Fascist Reader, London, Routledge, 2003, Introduction;
A. Kallis, ‘El concepto de fascismo en la historia anglófona comparada’, in J. A. Mellon, ed., El fascismo clásico (1919–1945) y sus epígonos, Madrid, Tecnos, 2012, pp. 15–70.
Z. Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1994.
A. C. Pinto, ‘Fascism: a “revolutionary” right in interwar Europe’, in N. Atkin and M. Biddiss, eds, Themes in Modern European History, 1890–1945, New York, Routledge, 2009, pp. 215–242 (here 221);
M. Blinkhorn, Fascism and the Right in Europe, 1919–1945, London, Longman, 2002, pp. 43–44.
A. Kallis, ‘“Fascism”, “Para-fascism” and “Fascistization”: on the Similarities of Three Conceptual Categories’, European History Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2003, pp. 219–250 (here 234–242).
R. O. Paxton, ‘The Five Stages of Fascism’, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, No. 1, 1998, pp. 18–20.
R. O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, New York, Vintage Books, 2005, pp. 148–170.
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M. Mann, Fascists, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 44–48.
R. Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, New York/London, Routledge, 1991, pp. 120–145; Kallis, ‘“Fascism”, “Para-fascism” and “Fascistization”’, pp. 220–221.
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Cf. G. Cappoccia, Defending Democracy: Reactions to Extremism in Interwar Europe, Baltimore, ML, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, p. 229.
I borrow the term (and focus on) ‘departure’ in this context from the excellent work by D. D. Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe, Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 2006, Chs 1, 9; cf.
D. D. Roberts, Historicism and Fascism in Modern Italy, Toronto/Buffalo/London, University of Toronto Press, 2007, p. 40. As will become clear, however, from the text that follows, I use the term in a postliberal, anti-democratic sense (also suggested by Roberts) without the specific notion of a ‘totalitarian direction’.
R. Eatwell, ‘The Nature of “Generic Fascism”: The “Fascist Minimum” and the “Fascist Matrix”’, in U. Backes, ed., Rechtsextreme Ideologien in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Bohlau Verlag, Colgone, 2003, pp. 93–137.
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M. A. Frese Witt, The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2002, p. 149.
D. P. Tryphonopoulos, The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, Ontario, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992, pp. 102–103. See also, more generally,
M. Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2013.
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Quoted in S. G. Payne, Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism, Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1961, p. 77.
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G. Balakrishnan, The Enemy. An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, London, Verso, 2000, p. 122.
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On the concept of ‘contagion’ in history and political science see S. P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Norman, OK, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, pp. 100–102; and, in general,
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See, for example, G. Albanese, Alle origini del fascismo. La violenza politica a Venezia 1919–1922, Padova, II Poligrafo, 2001; and the classic work of
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J. Petersen, ‘The history of the concept of totalitarianism in Italy’, in H. Maier, ed., Totalitarianism and Political Religions, London/New York, Routledge, 2004, pp. 1–21 (here 14–15). On political pilgrimage see
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M. Cuzzi, L’Internazionale delle Camicie Nere: I CAUR, Comitati D’Azione per l’Universalità di Roma, 1933–1939, Milan: Mursia, 2005, pp. 327–346;
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ACS, SPD, Carteggio Ordinario (CO), 137.389, b.379 (file for Gömbös); cf. G. Réti and T. J. DeKornfeld, Hungarian-Italian Relations in the Shadow of Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1940, New York/Boulder, CO, EEM-Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 347.
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I. T. Berend, Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001, pp. 309–310.
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Cf. the similar metaphor used by one of the most distinct thinkers of the twentieth-century European radical right, J. Evola, Fascism viewed from the Right, Rome, G. Volpe, 1974, p. 62.
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L. Whitehead, Democratization. Theory and Experience, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002.
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Kallis, A. (2014). The ‘Fascist Effect’: On the Dynamics of Political Hybridization in Inter-War Europe. In: Pinto, A.C., Kallis, A. (eds) Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137384416_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137384416_2
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