Abstract
Without imputing desirability or success, many scholars have come to take European fascism seriously as innovative, modern and even revolutionary. Doing so might seem to buttress long-standing ways of distinguishing genuine fascism, as manifested in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, from contemporaneous regimes in Spain, Portugal, Austria and elsewhere that long seem to have exploited some of the trappings of fascism for merely authoritarian or reactionary purposes. These latter were ‘para-fascist’, in the termynology that Roger Griffin adopted 20 years ago, using ‘para’ in its dictionary sense as an alteration, perversion or simulation of the real thing.1
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Notes
R. Griffin, The Nature of Fciscism, London, Routledge, 1993, p. 121.
M. Vincent, ‘Spain’, in R. Bosworth, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 362–379.
M. Mann, Fascists, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 2–4, 97, 110, 112.
Among prominent examples: Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, p. 47; P. Morgan, Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945, London, Routledge, 2003, p. 192; Mann, Fascists, p. 1.
S. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945, Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995, p. 494.
For my earlier critique of Sternhell, see D. Roberts, ‘Hοw not to think about fascism and ideology: Intellectual antecedents and historical meaning’, in D. Roberts, Historicism and Fascism in Modern Italy, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2007, pp. 173–200. See also pp. 18–20 in the introduction. My review of
Z. Sternhell’s The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2010, appeared in The American Historical Review, December 2010, pp. 1519–1521.
R. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007;
D. Roberts. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007;
D. Roberts, ‘Fascism, modernism and the quest for an alternative modernity’, Patterns of Prejudice 43, no. 1, 2009, pp. 91–95.
Ibid., p. 99; M. Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1997, pp. 29–30, 46–47.
R. Eatwell, ‘Reflections on fascism and religion’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 4, no. 3, Winter 2003, pp. 145–166; see especially p. 160.
See R. Eatwell, ‘Universal fascism? Approaches and definitions’, in S. Larsen, ed., Fascism outside Europe: The European Impulse against Domestic Conditions in the Diffusion of Global Fascism, New York, SSM-Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 33 for his one-sentence definition, featuring ‘third way’, and p. 34 for his elaboration on the notíon.
D. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, New York, Hill & Wang, 1993, pp. 134–136, 187–188, 271–272.
Michael Burleigh notes that official statements of fascist doctrine, including, most prominently, Gentile’s portions of Mussolini’s well-known 1932 encyclopaedia entry on fascism, Gentile’s portions of Mussolini’s well-known 1932 encyclopaedia entry on fascism, ‘were routinely characterized by a pretentiously woolly religiosity, whose opacity (in any language) faithfully reflected the philosophical tone of the times’. See M. Burleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror, New York, Harper Perennial, 2007, p. 62.
R. Wohl, The Generation of 1914, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1979, pp. 201–202. For Gentile’s career, see G. Turi’s thorough and balanced Giovanni Gentile: Una Biografia, Florence, Giunti, 1995. I discuss Gentile in
D. Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics, Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 2006, pp. 130–142, 184–187, 299–305.
G. Gentile, Origini e dottrina del fascismo, Rome, Roma, 1929, pp. 43–48, especially pp. 46–48. This piece is included in G. Gentile, Politica e cultura, vol. 1, ed. H. Cavallera, Florence, Le Lettere, 1990, vol. XLV in the standard edition of Gentile’s works; see pp. 373–410. An English translation, condensing the original, appeared in Foreign Affairs 6, January 1928, pp. 290–304. A. Gregor provides his own exemplary translation of the complete work under the title Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, with Selections from Other Works, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction, 2002. For Pellizzi’s conception, see
C. Pellizzi, Problemi e realtà del fascismo, Florence, Vallecchi, 1924, pp. 157–65. Although Emilio Gentile sometimes invokes myth too loosely, his point about the centrality of the ‘myth of the new state’ is convincing and important. See
E. Gentile, Il mito dello stato nuovo dall’antigiolittismo al fascismo, Rome and Bari, Laterza, 1982.
‘Political religion’ points toward a crucial differentiating dimension, but this author insists on the limitations of the category because it does not do justice to — indeed, it proves a way of sidestepping — novelty and historical specificity. The dimensions at issue are better understand as a corollary of totalitarianism itself; see D. Roberts, ‘“Political religion” and the totalitarian departures of interwar Europe: On the uses and disadvantages of an analytical category’, Contemporary European History 19, no. 4, November 2009, pp. 379–412.
On the complexity of Gentile’s role in the regime, including the objections among other fascists to his influence, see A. Tarquini, Il Gentile dei fascisti: Gentiliani e antigentiliani nel regime fascista, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2009.
G. Adinolfi, ‘Political elite and decision-making in Mussolini’s Italy’, in A. Pinto, ed., Ruling Elites and Decision-Making in Fascist-Era Dictatorships, New York, SSM-Columbia University Press, 2009, p. 49.
A. Pinto, ‘Elites, single parties and political decision-making in fascist era dictatorships’, Contemporary European History 11, no. 3, 2002, pp. 429–454. See also
D. Roberts, ‘Comment: Fascism, single-party dictatorships, and the search for a comparative framework’, Contemporary European History 11, no. 3, 2002, pp. 455–461, and Pinto’s response, ‘Reply: State, dictators and single parties — where are the fascist regimes?’ Contemporary European History 11, no. 3, 2002, pp. 462–466.
E. Gentile, La via Italiana al Totalitarismo: Il Partito e lo Stato nel Regime Fascista, Rome, Carocci, 1995, pp. 148–149.
I. Kershaw, ‘Hitler and the uniqueness of Nazism’, Journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 2, April 2004, p. 248.
See, for example, W. Sauer, ‘National Socialism: Totalitarianism or fascism?’ American Historical Review 73, no. 2, December 1967, pp. 419–422; and
E. Tannenbaum, The Fascist Experience: Italian Society and Culture, 1922–1943, New York, Basic Books, 1972, p. 50.
For a few indications of the synergy at issue, see D. Grandi, ‘I1 mito sindacalista’, from La libertà economica, July 31, 1920, now in his Giovani, Bologna, Zanichelli, 1941, p. 220; I. Balbo, Diario, 1922, Milan, A. Mondadori, 1932, p. 6;
S. Panunzio, Italo Balbo, Milan, Imperia, 1923; and
C. S.ckert, ‘La conquista dello stato nella concezione organica di Sergio Panunzio’, in I. Balbo, Corriere Padano, December 16, 1925, p. 1.
E. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 58.
D. Rodogno, Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation during the Second World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
M. Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2007. I treat this book in Roberts, ‘Fascism, modernism, and the quest for an alternative modernity’, cited above.
F. Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–1945, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2010, p. 165.
For example, Aristotle Kallis seems to take too much for granted in referring to ‘fascism’s own nature as millenarian political religion’. See A. Kallis, Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe, Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 2009, p. 321.
C. Iordachi, ‘God’s chosen warriors: Romantic Palingenesis, militarism and fascism in modern Romania’, in C. Iordachi, ed., Comparative Fascist Studies: New Perspectives, London, Routledge, 2010, pp. 316–357; see especially pp. 350, 354.
In his response to my comment, Pinto was right to charge that I was using the totalitarian-authoritarian binominal too indiscriminately. See ibid., p. 465. Not that it is any defence, but I note that the dichotomy is still widely used. Robert Paxton employs the term ‘authoritarian’ unapologetically for the traditional reasons, with extended use of the Franco example, in The Anatomy of Fascism, pp. 216–218. And whereas at this point in his argument, the contrast is with fascism, not totalitarianism, the later notion is implicit in his reference to ‘fascism’s urge to reduce the private sphere to nothing’ (p. 217). Eatwell still uses totalitarianism, though too conventionally, it seems to me, even as he ends up minimizing its import for understanding fascism. On the one hand, ‘In Nazi Germany’, as he sees it, ‘the ultimate goal was a form of totalitarianism, where other institutions would only exist under state or party control’ (Eatwell, ‘Universal fascism’, p. 35). On the other hand, in the last analysis, totalitarianism for Eatwell indicates a mere stylistic similarity between fascism and Soviet communism during the 1930s. It is thus secondary at best, because, as he puts it, ‘the totalitarian model omits a teleological dimension which separates these two isms (Eatwell, ‘Universal fascism’, p. 38). Although Paul Corner is not concerned with origins and aspirations in this instance, his usage of the totalitarian/authoritarian dichotomy to characterize modes of practice in fascist Italy seems appropriate and illuminating up to a point, but it would not help us distinguish fascist from para-fascist regimes. The latter could also be considered totalitarian as he uses the term. See P. Corner, ‘Italian Fascism: Whatever happened to dictatorship?’ Journal of Modern History 74, June 2002, pp. 348–350. So though the totalitarian/authoritarian dichotomy is still widely used, the applicability of both terms remains uncertain and subject to discussion.
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Roberts, D.D. (2014). Fascism and the Framework for Interactive Political Innovation during the Era of the Two World Wars. In: Pinto, A.C., Kallis, A. (eds) Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137384416_3
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