Conservatives said little in 1918, but tried quietly to restore a world in which armed force settled relations among states. The French prime minister Georges Clemenceau and his chief of staff General Ferdinand Foch tried (with some disagreement between themselves about how far they could go) to establish permanent French military supremacy over a weakened Germany.
The third contender was the world’s first functioning socialist regime, installed in Russia by the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917. Lenin demanded that socialists elsewhere follow his successful example, set democracy aside, and create dictatorial conspiratorial parties on the Bolshevik model capable of spreading revolution to the more advanced capitalist states. For the moment he carried with him some Western democratic socialists who did not want to miss the long-awaited revolutionary train. Where liberals wanted to keep the peace by satisfying national claims and conservatives wanted to keep it by military preparedness, Lenin wanted to establish a worldwide communist society that would transcend national states altogether.21
No camp had complete success. Lenin’s project was contained by late 1919 within Russia, after liberals and conservatives together had crushed brief local Soviet regimes in Budapest and Munich and risings elsewhere in Germany and in Italy. It survived in Russia, however—the first socialist state—and in communist parties around the world. Wilson’s project was supposedly put into effect by the peace treaties of 1919–20. In practice, however, it had been partially modified in a conservative direction by the national interests of the Great Powers and by the hard facts of contested national and ethnic frontiers. Instead of a world of either satisfied nationalities or dominant powers, the peace treaties created one divided between the victor powers and their client states, artificially swollen to include other national minorities (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania), and vengeful loser states (defeated Germany, Austria, and Hungary, and unsatisfied Italy). Torn between a distorted Wilsonianism and an unfulfilled Leninism, Europe seethed after 1919 with unresolved territorial and class conflicts.
This mutual failure left political space available for a fourth principle of world order. The fascists’ new formula promised, like that of the conservatives, to settle territorial conflicts by allowing the strong to triumph. Unlike conservatives, they measured strong states not only by military might but by the fervor and unity of their populations. They proposed to overcome class conflict by integrating the working class into the nation, by persuasion if possible and by force if necessary, and by getting rid of the “alien" and the “impure." The fascists did not want to keep the peace at all. They expected that inevitable war would allow the master races, united and self-confident, to prevail, while the divided, “mongrelized," and irresolute peoples would become their handmaidens.
Fascism had become conceivable, as we will soon see, before 1914. But it was not realizable in practical terms until the Great War had wrenched Europe into a new era. The “epoch" of fascism, to quote the German title of the philosopher-historian Ernst Nolte’s classic work of 1963, “fascism in its epoch,"22 opened in 1918.
Intellectual, Cultural, and Emotional Roots
How Europeans understood their war ordeal amidst the wreckage of 1919 was shaped, of course, by prior mental preparation. Deeper preconditions of fascism lay in the late-nineteenth-century revolt against the dominant liberal faith in individual liberty, reason, natural human harmony, and progress. Well before 1914 newly stylish antiliberal values, more aggressive nationalism and racism, and a new aesthetic of instinct and violence began to furnish an intellectual-cultural humus in which fascism could germinate.
We can begin with what the first fascists read. Mussolini was a serious reader. The young Italian schoolteacher and socialist organizer read not so much Marx as Nietzsche, Gustave Le Bon, and Georges Sorel. Hitler absorbed rather by osmosis the fevered pan-German nationalism and antiSemitism of Georg von Schönerer, Houston Stewart Chamberlain,23 Mayor Lueger, and the Vienna streets, elevated into ecstasy in his mind by the music of Richard Wagner.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) has so often been accused of being fascism’s progenitor that his case requires particular care. Intended for the Lutheran pastorate, the young Nietzsche lost his faith and became a professor of classical philology while still extraordinarily young. For his remaining good years (he suffered permanent mental breakdown at fifty, perhaps related to syphilis) he invested all his brilliance and rage in attacking complacent and conformist bourgeois piety, softness, and moralism in the name of a hard, pure independence of spirit. In a world where God was dead, Christianity weak, and Science false, only a spiritually free “superman" could fight free of convention and live according to his own authentic values. At first Nietzsche inspired mostly rebellious youth and shocked their parents. At the same time, his writing contained plenty of raw material for people who wanted to brood on the decline of modern society, the heroic effort of will needed to reverse it, and the nefarious influence of Jews. Nietzsche himself was scornful of patriotism and the actual anti-Semites he saw around him, and imagined his superman a “free spirit, the enemy of fetters, the non-worshipper, the dweller in forests."24 His white-hot prose exerted a powerful intellectual and aesthetic influence across the political spectrum, from activist nationalists like Mussolini and Maurice Barrès to nonconformists like Stefan George and André Gide, to both Nazis and anti-Nazis, and to several later generations of French iconoclasts from Sartre to Foucault. “Nietzsche’s texts themselves provide a positive goldmine of varied possibilities."25
Georges Sorel (1847–1922) exerted a more direct and practical influence on Mussolini. A retired French engineer and amateur social theorist, Sorel was fascinated by what kinds of causes were capable of awakening “in the depths of the soul a sentiment of the sublime proportionate to the conditions of a gigantic struggle" so that “the European nations, stupefied by humanitarianism, can recover their former energy."26 He found the best examples at first in the revolutionary syndicalism we have already encountered as Mussolini’s first spiritual home. The syndicalist dream of “one big union," whose all-out general strike would sweep away capitalist society in “one big night" and leave the unions in charge, was what Sorel called a “myth" — a galvanizing ideal capable of rousing people to perform beyond their everyday capacities. Later, at the end of the war, Sorel concluded that Lenin best embodied this ideal. Still later he was briefly impressed by Mussolini (who was, in turn, Sorel’s most successful disciple).27
Also important for the fascist assault on democracy were social theorists who raised pragmatic doubts about the workability of this relatively young form of government. Mussolini referred often to Gustave Le Bon’s La Psychologie des foules (The Psychology of Crowds, 1895). Le Bon took a cynical look at how passions rose and fused within a mass of people who could then be easily manipulated.28 Mussolini also enrolled in the courses of Vilfredo Pareto at the University of Lausanne in 1904 when he was living in exile to escape Italian military service. Pareto (1848–1923), son of a Mazzinian exile in France and a French mother, was a liberal economist so frustrated by the spread of protectionism in the late nineteenth century that he constructed a political theory about how the superficial rules of electoral and parliamentary democracy were inevitably subverted in practice by the permanent power of elites and by the irrational “residues" of popular feelings.
At the summit of the intellectual scale, the major intellectual development of the end of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the reality and power of the subconscious in human thought and the irrational in human action. While Bergson and Freud had absolutely nothing to do with fascism, and indeed suffered personally from it, their work helped undermine the liberal conviction that politics means free people choosing the best policies by the simple exercise of their reason.29 Their findings—particularly Freud’s—were spread and popularized after 1918 by direct wartime experiences such as battlefield emotional trauma, for which the term “shell shock" was invented.
At the bottom of the intellectual scale, a host of popular writers reworked an existing repertory of themes—race, nation, will, action— into harder, more aggressive forms as the ubiquitous social Darwinism. 30 Race, hitherto a rather neutral term for any animal or human grouping, was given a more explicitly biological and hereditarian form in the late nineteenth century. Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton suggested in the 1880s that science gave mankind the power to improve the race by urging “the best" to reproduce; he invented the word “eugenics" for this effort. 31 The nation—once, for progressive nationalists like Mazzini, a framework for progress and fraternity among peoples—was made more exclusive and ranked in a hierarchy that gave “master races" (such as the “Aryans," a figment of nineteenth-century anthropological imagination) 32 the right to dominate “inferior" peoples. Will and action became virtues in themselves, independently of any particular goal, linked to the struggle among the “races" for supremacy.33
Even after the horrors of 1914–18 had made it harder to think of war as the sort of bracing exploit admired by Rudyard Kipling, Theodore Roosevelt, or the early Boy Scout movement, some still considered it the highest human activity. If the nation or Volk was mankind’s highest attainment, violence in its cause was ennobling. Beyond that, a few aesthetes of violence found beauty in the very extremity of masculine will and endurance demanded by trench warfare.34
New forms of anxiety appeared with the twentieth century, to which fascism soon promised remedies. Looking for fears, indeed, may be a more fruitful research strategy than a literal-minded quest for thinkers who “created" fascism. One such fear was the collapse of community under the corrosive influences of free individualism. Rousseau had already worried about this before the French Revolution.35 In the mid-nineteenth century and after, the fear of social disintegration was mostly a conservative concern. After the turbulent 1840s in England, the Victorian polemicist Thomas Carlyle worried about what force would discipline “the masses, full of beer and nonsense," as more and more of them received the right to vote. 36 Carlyle’s remedy was a militarized welfare dictatorship, administered not by the existing ruling class but by a new elite composed of selfless captains of industry and other natural heroes of the order of Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great. The Nazis later claimed Carlyle as a forerunner. 37
Fear of the collapse of community solidarity intensified in Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century, under the impact of urban sprawl, industrial conflict, and immigration. Diagnosing the ills of community was a central project in the creation of the new discipline of sociology. Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), the first French holder of a chair in sociology, diagnosed modern society as afflicted with “anomie"—the purposeless drift of people without social ties—and reflected on the replacement of “organic" solidarity, the ties formed within natural communities of villages, families, and churches, with “mechanical" solidarity, the ties formed by modern propaganda and media such as fascists (and advertisers) would later perfect. The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies regretted the supplanting of traditional, natural societies (Gemeinschaften) by more differentiated and impersonal modern societies (Gesellschaften) in Gemeinschaftund Gesellschaft (1887), and the Nazis borrowed his term for the “people’s community" (Volksgemeinschaft) they wanted to form. The early-twentieth-century sociologists Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Roberto Michels contributed more directly to fascist ideas. 38
Another late-nineteenth-century anxiety was decadence: the dread that great historic nations were doomed by their own comfort and complacency to declining birth rates39 and diminished vitality. The best known prediction of decline, whose title everyone knew even if few waded through its prose, was Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West, 1918). Spengler, a German high school history teacher, argued that cultures have life cycles like organisms, passing from a heroic and creative “Age of Culture" to a corrupt “Age of Civilization" when rootless masses, huddled in cities, lose contact with the soil, think only of money, and become incapable of great actions. Thus Germany was not alone in its decline. In a second volume (1922), he suggested that a heroic “Caesarism" might still manage to save things in Germany. Modernization, Spengler feared, was sweeping away rooted traditions. Bolshevism would carry destruction even further. He advocated a spiritual revolution that would revitalize the nation without altering its social structure.40
Enemies were central to the anxieties that helped inflame the fascist imagination. Fascists saw enemies within the nation as well as outside. Foreign states were familiar enemies, though their danger seemed to intensify with the advance of Bolshevism and with the exacerbated border conflicts and unfulfilled national claims that followed World War I. Internal enemies grew luxuriantly in number and variety in the mental landscape as the ideal of the homogeneous national state made difference more suspect. Ethnic minorities had been swollen in western Europe after the 1880s by an increased number of refugees fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe.41 Political and cultural subversives—socialists of various hues, avant-garde artists and intellectuals—discovered new ways to challenge community conformism. The national culture would have to be defended against them. Joseph Goebbels declared at a book-burning ceremony in Berlin on May 10, 1933, that “the age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit." 42 Though Mussolini and his avant-garde artist friends worried less than the Nazis about cultural modernism, Fascist squads made bonfires of socialist books in Italy.
The discovery of the role of bacteria in contagion by the French biologist Louis Pasteur and the mechanisms of heredity by the Austrian monk-botanist Gregor Mendel in the 1880s made it possible to imagine whole new categories of internal enemy: carriers of disease, the unclean, and the hereditarily ill, insane, or criminal. The urge to purify the community medically became far stronger in Protestant northern Europe than in Catholic southern Europe. This agenda influenced liberal states, too. The United States and Sweden led the way in the forcible sterilization of habitual offenders (in the American case, especially African Americans), but Nazi Germany went beyond them in the most massive program of medical euthanasia yet known. 43
Fascist Italy, by contrast, though it promoted the growth of la razza, understood in cultural-historical terms,44 remained little touched by the northern European and American vogue for biological purification. This difference rested upon cultural tradition. The German Right had traditionally been völkisch, devoted to the defense of a biological “people" threatened by foreign impurities, socialist division, and bourgeois softness. 45 The new Italian nationalism was less biological and more political in its determination to “do over" the Risorgimento that had been corrupted by liberals and weakened by socialists. It claimed the right of Italians as a “proletarian nation" to a share of the world’s colonies. If it were true that every nation, whatever its superficial democratic gadgetry, was really run by an elite, as the sociologists Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and the disillusioned German socialist émigré Roberto Michels were telling Italians at the end of World War I, then Italy must look to the creation of a worthy new elite capable of running its new state and leading Italian opinion, by “myths" if necessary.46
Fascists need a demonized enemy against which to mobilize followers, but of course the enemy does not have to be Jewish. Each culture specifies the national enemy. Even though in Germany the foreign, the unclean, the contagious, and the subversive often mingled in a single diabolized image of the Jew, Gypsies and Slavs were also targeted. American fascists diabolized blacks and sometimes Catholics as well as Jews. Italian Fascists diabolized their South Slav neighbors, especially the Slovenes, as well as the socialists who refused the war of national revival. Later they easily added to their list the Ethiopians and the Libyans, whom they tried to conquer in Africa.
Fascist anxieties about decline and impurity did not necessarily point toward the restoration of some
antique golden age. Isaiah Berlin was surely stretching a point when he found a precursor to fascism in Joseph de Maistre in Restoration France, not so much by virtue of his conviction of human depravity and the need for authority as because of his “preoccupation with blood and death," his fascination with punishment, and his prophecy of “totalitarian society."47 But de Maistre offered only old-fashioned solutions: the unlimited authority of Church and King. Zeev Sternhell has established that socialist heresies belong among the roots of fascism, though they were not alone, of course.48 Other elements of the fascist mental universe—national unity, citizen participation—came from the bosom of liberal values.
Fascism’s place in the European intellectual tradition is a matter of heated dispute. Two extreme positions have been staked out. Zeev Sternhell considers fascism a coherent ideology that formed “an integral part of the history of European culture."49 According to Hannah Arendt, Nazism “owed nothing to any part of the Western tradition, be it German or not, Catholic or Protestant, Christian, Greek or Roman. . . . On the contrary Nazism is actually the breakdown of all German and European traditions, the good as well as the bad . . . basing itself on the intoxication of destruction as an actual experience, dreaming the stupid dream of producing the void." 50
In support of Sternhell, a whole repertory of themes had become available to fascism within European culture by 1914—the primacy of the “race" or the “community" or “the people" (the Volk, for Germans) over any individual rights; the right of the strongest races to fight it out for primacy; the virtue and beauty of violent action on behalf of the nation; fear of national decline and impurity; contempt for compromise; pessimism about human nature.
It is wrong, however, to construct a kind of intellectual teleology that starts with the fascist movement and reads backwards, selectively, rounding up every text or statement that seems to be pointing toward it. A linear pedigree that leads directly from pioneer thinkers to a finished fascism is pure invention. For one thing, nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century rebels against conformist liberalism, such as Nietzsche, and against reformist socialism, such as Sorel, are not seen whole if we pick out the parts that seem to presage fascism. Fascist pamphleteers who quoted from them later were wrenching fragments out of context.
The Anatomy of Fascism Page 5