The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  To be sure, political behavior requires choices, and choices—as my critics hasten to point out—bring us back to underlying ideas. Hitler and Mussolini, scornful of the “materialism" of socialism and liberalism, insisted on the centrality of ideas to their movements. Not so, retorted many antifascists who refuse to grant them such dignity. “National Socialism’s ideology is constantly shifting," Franz Neumann observed. “It has certain magical beliefs—leadership adoration, supremacy of the master race—but [it] is not laid down in a series of categorical and dogmatic pronouncements."73 On this point, this book is drawn toward Neumann’s position, and I examined at some length in chapter 1 the peculiar relationship of fascism to its ideology—simultaneously proclaimed as central, yet amended or violated as expedient.74 Nevertheless, fascists knew what they wanted. One cannot banish ideas from the study of fascism, but one can situate them accurately among all the factors that influence this complex phenomenon. One can steer between two extremes: fascism consisted neither of the uncomplicated application of its program, nor of freewheeling opportunism.

  I believe that the ideas that underlie fascist actions are best deduced from those actions, for some of them remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language. Many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions. In chapter 2 I called them “mobilizing passions":

  a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;

  the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;

  the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;

  dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

  the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

  the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;

  the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;

  the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;

  the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

  Fascism according to this definition, as well as behavior in keeping with these feelings, is still visible today. Fascism exists at the level of Stage One within all democratic countries—not excluding the United States. “Giving up free institutions," especially the freedoms of unpopular groups, is recurrently attractive to citizens of Western democracies, including some Americans. We know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular “march" on some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national “enemies" is enough. Something very close to classical fascism has reached Stage Two in a few deeply troubled societies. Its further progress is not inevitable, however. Further fascist advances toward power depend in part upon the severity of a crisis, but also very largely upon human choices, especially the choices of those holding economic, social, and political power. Determining the appropriate responses to fascist gains is not easy, since its cycle is not likely to repeat itself blindly. We stand a much better chance of responding wisely, however, if we understand how fascism succeeded in the past.

  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

  Fascism set off a tidal wave of ink. Renzo De Felice included 12,208 books and articles in a bibliography devoted largely to Italian Fascism.1 Even more has been published about Hitler and Nazism. Another substantial list of works has been devoted to fascism in other countries, plus numerous studies of generic fascism. Obviously, no lone scholar, however diligent, could possibly master all the literature of all the fascisms. This bibliographical chapter is, therefore, necessarily selective. All I can do here is present a personal choice of works that were particularly helpful to me: by marking turning points, defining major interpretations, or covering essential aspects with authority. Many of them contain detailed bibliographies for more specialized reading. I make no claim to completeness.

  I. General Works

  The most authoritative narrative history of all fascist movements and regimes is Stanley G. Payne’s prodigiously learned A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), but it describes better than it explains. Pierre Milza, Les fascismes (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1985), is also well informed and wide-ranging. The most influential recent attempt to define fascism comes from Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1994), and International Fascism: Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus (London: Arnold, 1998), though his zeal to reduce fascism to one pithy sentence seems to me more likely to inhibit than to stimulate analysis of how and with whom it worked.

  Short introductions to fascism are legion. Kevin Passmore’s Fascism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) is very brief but lively. Three of the most recent short introductions take sharply contrasting directions. Mark Neocleous, Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), adopts a cultural-studies approach in which fascism reflects the dark side of modernity and capitalism, driven not by interests but by images of war, nature, and the nation. Philip Morgan, Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945 (London: Routledge, 2003), presents a careful and thorough historical narrative. He stops in 1945, but Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London: Penguin, 1996), devotes half his limited space to the postwar period.

  An excellent introduction to the rise of Nazism is Anthony J. Nicholls, Weimar and the Rise of Hitler, 4th ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Conan Fischer, The Rise of the Nazis, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), assesses the party’s broad appeal.

  The classic short introduction to Mussolini’s Italy is Alexander De Grand, ItalianFascism: Its Origins and Development, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). Other useful brief introductions include Philip Morgan, Italian Fascism 1919–1945 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995); John Whittam, Fascist Italy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); and Pierre Milza, Le fascisme italien, 1919–45 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997).

  A wide range of countries receive stimulating discussion in Stein U. Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, Jan P. Myklbust, eds., Who Were the Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1980). Older collective works that remain valuable include Walter Laqueur, ed., Fascism: A Reader’s Guide (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976); Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber, eds., The European Right: A Historical Profile (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966); and two volumes edited by Stuart J. Woolf, Fascism in Europe (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), and The Nature of Fascism (New York: Random House, 1968).

  Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, Nazism 1919–45: A Documentary Reader, rev. ed., 4 vols. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995–98), offers an outstanding collection of documents, accompanied by illuminating commentary. Documents on Italian fascism are collected in Charles F. Delzell, ed., Mediterranean Fascism, 1919–1945 (New York: Harper, 1970); Adrian Lyttelton, ed., Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile (New York: Harper, 1975); John Pollard, The Fascist Experience in Italy (London: Routledge, 1998); and Jeffrey Schnapp, A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). The Delzell volume contains some documents from Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal as well. See also Hugh Thomas, ed., Selected Writings of José Antonio Primo De Rivera (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972). Eugen Weber, ed., Varieties of Fascism (Melbourne, FL: Krieger, 1982), includes an interesting sampling of fascist texts from all the aforementioned countries plus Britain, Norway, Belgiu
m, Hungary, and Romania, chosen to illustrate Weber’s thesis of the revolutionary nature of fascism.

  II. Interpretations of Fascism

  Renzo De Felice found fault with many general approaches in Interpretions of Fascism(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). He finally came to believe that each regime was unique and that no general interpretation works. Pierre Ayçoberry, The Nazi Question (New York: Pantheon, 1981), and Wolfgang Wippermann, Faschismustheorien, 7th ed. (Darmstadt: Primus/NNO, 1997), discuss various interpretations and their problems. See also Ernst Nolte, ed., Theorien über den Faschismus, 6th ed. (Cologne, Berlin: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1984).

  Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy,2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1966), remains the most substantial analysis of the concept of totalitarianism. Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), expertly reviews the long debate about it. The concept is attacked and defended in Carl J. Friedrich, Benjamin R. Barber, and Michael Curtis, Totalitarianism in Perspective: Three Views (New York: Praeger, 1969).

  Authoritarianism is best defined and its borders with fascism most clearly traced by Juan J. Linz, “Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes," in Fred Greenstein and Nelson Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science, vol. 3: Macropolitical Theory (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975), pp. 175–411, reprinted and updated in Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000).

  III. Biographies

  The preeminent biography of Hitler is now Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: Norton, 1999), and Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2000). Kershaw relates the dictator to the society that imagined him, and that “worked toward" its leader without needing to be forced. Among many earlier biographies, Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1962), intelligently fits together the man and his circumstances. Joachim C. Fest, Hitler (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1974), has vivid detail.

  Brigitte Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), is the fullest account of Hitler’s youth. Harold J. Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), examines a crucial early step in Hitler’s career. The temptation to psychoanalyze Hitler was irresistible. An early example, Walter C. Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 1972), was prepared for U.S. policy-makers during World War II. The 1970s brought Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God (New York: Basic Books, 1977), and Rudolf Binion, Hitler Among the Germans (New York, Oxford, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1976). The most recent study, Fredrick C. Redlich, M.D., Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), is more cautious. Judging a psychoanalysis of Hitler of “little value" because of the scarcity of evidence (p. xiv), Dr. Redlich reviews Hitler’s medical history and draws a psychological profile.

  Eberhard Jäckel insists in Hitler’s World View: A Blueprint for Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) that Hitler had a program, despite the inevitable opportunistic adjustments. That his social Darwinism applied to economy and society as well as to international relations is shown by Henry A. Turner, Jr., “Hitlers Einstellung zu Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 2:1 (1976), pp. 89–117.

  The fullest biography of Mussolini in English is now R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini(London: Arnold, 2002). It presents the Duce as a clever but hollow opportunist. Pierre Milza, Mussolini (Paris: Fayard, 1999), now available only in French and Italian, is well informed, balanced, and thoughtful. Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (New York: Knopf, 1982), is condescending, and thin on the broader setting. Also in English is Jasper Ridley, Mussolini (London: Constable, 1995), a fluent and reasonably accurate short biography by a nonspecialist. Alessandro Campi, Mussolini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), is a suggestive brief assessment. Still valuable for the early years is Gaudens Megaro, Mussolini in the Making (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938). Luisa Passerini, Mussolini imaginario: Storia di une biografia, 1915–1939 (Bari: Laterza, 1991), gives a fascinating look at how Mussolini was presented to Italians, but his images were more the result of his power than an explanation for it.

  The biography of reference is the uneven and idiosyncratic but exhaustively documented Renzo De Felice, Mussolini, 7 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1965–97), not quite finished at the author’s death in 1996.2 De Felice’s massive work and his fluctuating opinions are usefully assessed by Borden W. Painter, Jr., “Renzo De Felice and the Historiography of Italian Fascism," American Historical Review 95:2 (April 1990), pp. 391–405; by Emilio Gentile (De Felice’s student) in “Fascism in Italian Historiography: In Search of an Individual Historical Identity," Journal of Contemporary History 21 (1986), pp. 179–208; and more critically by MacGregor Knox in “In the Duce’s Defense," Times (London) Literary Supplement, February 26, 1999, pp. 3–4.

  IV. Creation of Movements and Taking Root

  A thoughtful reflection on the beginnings of fascism is Roberto Vivarelli, “Interpretations of the Origins of Fascism," Journal of Modern History 63:1 (March 1991), pp. 29–43.

  The dominant approach to fascism’s beginnings has been to trace its ideological lineage. Important works in this vein on Italy include Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’-ideologiafascista: 1918–1925 (Bari: Laterza, 1982), and Zeev Sternhell, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, The Origins of Fascist Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). The intellectual and cultural roots of Nazism have been studied most influentially by George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (New York: Howard Fertig, 1998) (orig. pub. 1964), and Fritz R. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974) (orig. pub. 1961).

  To understand fascism’s later course and following, however, one must also look at the political and social settings and ask how fascism came to represent certain specific interests and engage important allies. Regional differences were also important. The most sophisticated and probing account of how fascism became powerful in one Italian locality is Paul Corner, Fascism in Ferrara (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Other good local studies of how Italian fascism took root include Frank M. Snowden, Violence and Great Estates in the South of Italy: Apulia 1900–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany, 1919–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Anthony L. Cardoza, Agrarian Elites and Italian Fascism: The Province of Bologna, 1901–1926 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Francis Jay Demers, Le origini del fascismo a Cremona(Bari: Laterza, 1979); A. Roveri, Le origini del fascismo a Ferrara, 1915–25 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971); Simona Colarizi, Dopoguerra e fascismo in Puglia (Bari: Laterza, 1971); and Alice Kelikian, Town and Country under Fascism: The Transformationof Brescia, 1915–1926 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Jonathan Steinberg, “Fascism in the Italian South," in David Forgacs, ed., Rethinking Italian Fascism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), pp. 83–109, clarifies the special way Fascism penetrated the clientelism of the mezzogiorno.

  For the local rooting of Nazism, the reader should not miss the compelling narrative of William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a SingleGerman Town, rev. ed. (New York: Franklin Watts, 1984). Rudy Koshar has done important work on “the process by which the intermediary structure was taken over by the Nazis." See his “From Stammtisch to Party: Nazi Joiners and the Contradictions of Grassroots Fascism in Weimar Germany," Journal of Modern History 59:1 (March 1987), pp. 1–24, and his local studies: “Two Nazisms: The Social Context of Nazi Mobilization in Marburg and Tübingen," Social History 7:1 (January 1982), and Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). See also Anthony McElligott, Contested City: MunicipalPolitics and the Rise of Nazism in Altona, 1917–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).

  N
azism in particular German states is the subject of important works by Jeremy Noakes, The Nazi Party in Lower Saxony (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); Geoffrey Pridham, Hitler’s Rise to Power: The Nazi Movement in Bavaria, 1923–1933 (London: Hart-Davis MacGibbon, 1973); Johnpeter Horst Grill, The Nazi Movement in Baden, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); and Rudolf Heberle, From Democracy to Nazism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1970) (on Schleswig-Holstein).

  Conan Fischer evokes the violent, ideologically contradictory subculture of the SA in Stormtroopers (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983). The fullest study now is Peter Longerich, Die braune Bataillone: Geschichte der SA (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989).

  Preconditions: Jürgen Kocka thought the persistence of powerful pre-industrial elites was the most important precondition for the growth of fascism. See his “Ursachen des Nationalsozialismus," Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (Beilage zur Wochenzeitung Das Parlament ), June 21, 1980, pp. 3–15. Geoff Eley replied with an argument favoring capitalist crisis as the main precondition, in “What Produces Fascism: Preindustrial Traditions or a Crisis of the Capitalist State?" Politics and Society 12:2 (1983), pp. 53–82. Gregory M. Luebbert proposed in Liberalism, Fascism or Social Democracy: Social Class and the Political Origins of Regimes in Interwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), that the most important variable is political coalition building: liberalism prevailed in political systems where labor accepted gradual amelioration and where both labor and family farmers supported liberal reformers, while fascism thrived where labor was militant and where, under crisis conditions, frightened urban liberals and family farmers looked for reinforcements. The political scientists Gisèle de Meur and Dirk Berg-Schlosser set up a system for analyzing multiple political, economic, and social variables to show where fascism was likely in “Conditions of Authoritarianism, Fascism, and Democracy in Interwar Europe," in Comparative Political Studies 29:4 (August 1996), pp. 423–68. They point out the difficulties of comparing a very large number of variables for a relatively small number of cases; their approach necessarily leaves out leaders’ individual choices.