Antifascists, too, drew on these authors. Even some German völkisch writers rejected Nazism. Oswald Spengler, for example, despite the Nazis’ enthusiasm for his work, always refused to endorse National Socialism. “Enthusiasm," he wrote in 1932, apparently with Hitler in mind, “is a dangerous burden on the road of politics. The pathfinder must be a hero, not a heroic tenor." 51 The poet Stefan George, whose dream of a purified community of peasants and artists led by a cultivated elite was attractive to some Nazis, refused their offer of the presidency of the German Academy. Horrified by the coarse violence of the Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilungen, or SA), George went into voluntary exile in Zürich, where he died in December 1933.52 One of his former disciples, Colonel Count Klaus Schenk von Stauffenberg, tried to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. Ernst Niekisch (1889–1967), whose radical rejection of bourgeois society was linked to a passionate German nationalism, cooperated briefly with Nazism in the middle 1920s before becoming a bitter opponent on the Left. The Austrian theorist of corporatism Othmar Spann was enthusiastic for Nazism in 1933, but the Nazi leadership judged his form of corporatism too anti-statist and they arrested him when they took over Austria in 1938.53
In Italy, Gaetano Mosca, who influenced Fascists by his analysis of the inevitable “circulation of elites" even within democracies, was one of the senators who stood up to Mussolini in 1921. He signed Croce’s AntiFascist Manifesto in 1925. Giovanni Prezzolini, whose zeal to redo the Risorgimento had inspired the young Mussolini,54 grew reserved and left to teach in the United States.
Intellectual and cultural preparation may have made it possible to imagine fascism, but they did not thereby bring fascism about. Even for Sternhell, the ideology of fascism, fully formed, he believes, by 1912, did not shape fascist regimes all by itself. Fascist regimes had to be woven into societies by choices and actions.55
The intellectual and cultural critics who are sometimes considered the creators of fascism actually account better for the space made available for fascism than they do fascism itself. They explain most directly the weakness of fascism’s rivals, the previously ascendant bourgeois liberalism and the powerful reformist socialism of pre-1914 Europe. Concrete choices and actions were necessary before fascism could come into being, exploit that weakness, and occupy those spaces.
A further difficulty with tracing the intellectual and cultural roots of fascism is that the national cases differ so widely. That should not be surprising, for two reasons. Some national settings, most notably successful democracies but also troubled countries like Russia where dissent and anger still polarized to the Left, offered fascism few openings. Moreover, fascists do not invent the myths and symbols that compose the rhetoric of their movements but select those that suit their purposes from within the national cultural repertories. Most of these have no inherent or necessary link to fascism. The Russian Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose love of machines and speed equaled that of Marinetti, found his outlet as a fervent Bolshevik.
In any event, it is not the particular themes of Nazism or Italian Fascism that define the nature of the fascist phenomenon, but their function. Fascisms seek out in each national culture those themes that are best capable of mobilizing a mass movement of regeneration, unification, and purity, directed against liberal individualism and constitutionalism and against Leftist class struggle. The themes that appeal to fascists in one cultural tradition may seem simply silly to another. The foggy Norse myths that stirred Norwegians or Germans sounded ridiculous in Italy, where Fascism appealed rather to a sun-drenched classical Romanità.56
Nevertheless, where fascism appealed to intellectuals it did so most widely in its early stages. Its latitudinarian hospitality to disparate intellectual hangers-on was at its broadest then, before its antibourgeois animus was compromised by the quest for power. In the 1920s, it seemed the very essence of revolt against stuffy bourgeois conformity. The Vorticist movement, founded in London in 1913 by the American poet Ezra Pound and the Canadian-British writer and painter Wyndham Lewis,57 was sympathetic to Italian Fascism in the 1920s. Its champions showed just as well as Marinetti’s Futurism that one could be rebellious and avant-garde without having to swallow the leveling, the cosmopolitanism, the pacifism, the feminism, or the earnestness of the Left.
But the intellectual and cultural changes that helped make fascism conceivable and therefore possible were both broader and narrower, simultaneously, than the fascist phenomenon itself. On the one hand, many people shared in those currents without ever becoming fascist supporters. The British novelist D. H. Lawrence sounded like an early fascist in a letter to a friend, twenty months before the outbreak of World War I: “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds, but what our blood feels and believes and says is always true."58 But when the war began, Lawrence, married to a German woman, was horrified by the killing and declared himself a conscientious objector.
On the other hand, fascism became fully developed only after its practitioners had quietly closed their eyes to some of their early principles, in the effort to enter the coalitions necessary for power. Once in power, as we will see, fascists played down, marginalized, or even discarded some of the intellectual currents that had helped open the way.
To focus only on the educated carriers of intellect and culture in the search for fascist roots, furthermore, is to miss the most important register: subterranean passions and emotions. A nebula of attitudes was taking shape, and no one thinker ever put together a total philosophical system to support fascism. Even scholars who specialize in the quest for fascism’s intellectual and cultural origins, such as George Mosse, declare that the establishment of a “mood" is more important than “the search for some individual precursors."59 In that sense too, fascism is more plausibly linked to a set of “mobilizing passions" that shape fascist action than to a consistent and fully articulated philosophy. At bottom is a passionate nationalism. Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history as a battle between the good and evil camps, between the pure and the corrupt, in which one’s own community or nation has been the victim. In this Darwinian narrative, the chosen people have been weakened by political parties, social classes, unassimilable minorities, spoiled rentiers, and rationalist thinkers who lack the necessary sense of community. These “mobilizing passions," mostly taken for granted and not always overtly argued as intellectual propositions, form the emotional lava that set fascism’s foundations:
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;60
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 leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s 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.
The “mobilizing passions" of fascism are hard to treat historically, for many of them are as old as Cain. It seems incontestable, however, that the fevers of increased nationalism before World War I and the passions aroused by that war sharpened them. Fascism was an affair of the gut more than of the brain, and a study
of the roots of fascism that treats only the thinkers and the writers misses the most powerful impulses of all.
Long-Term Preconditions
Longer-term shifts in fundamental political, social, and economic structures also helped prepare the way for fascism. As I pointed out at the beginning, fascism was a latecomer among political movements.61 It was simply inconceivable before a number of basic preconditions had been put in place.
One necessary precondition was mass politics. As a mass movement directed against the Left, fascism could not really exist before the citizenry had become involved in politics. Some of the first switches on the tracks leading to fascism were thrown with the first enduring European experiments with manhood suffrage following the revolutions of 1848.62 Up to that time, both conservatives and liberals had generally tried to limit the electorate to the wealthy and the educated—“responsible" citizens, capable of choosing among issues of broad principle. After the revolutions of 1848, while most conservatives and cautious liberals were trying to restore limits to the right to vote, a few bold and innovative conservative politicians chose instead to gamble on accepting a mass electorate and trying to manage it.
The adventurer Louis Napoleon was elected president of the Second French Republic in December 1848 by manhood suffrage, using simple imagery and what is called today “name recognition" (his uncle was the world-shaking Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte). Confronted with a liberal (in the nineteenth-century meaning of the term) legislature that tried in 1850 to disenfranchise poor and itinerant citizens, President Louis Napoleon boldly championed manhood suffrage. Even after he had made himself Emperor Napoleon III in a military coup d’état in December 1851, he let all male citizens vote for a phantom parliament. Against the liberals’ preference for a restricted, educated electorate, the emperor pioneered the skillful use of simple slogans and symbols to appeal to the poor and little educated.63
Similarly, in the new German empire he completed in 1871, Bismarck chose to manipulate a broad suffrage in his battles against liberals. It would be absurd to call these authoritarians “fascists,"64 but they were clearly pioneering in terrain that fascists would later master. By choosing to manipulate a mass electorate rather than to disenfranchise it, they parted company with both conservatives and liberals and with politics as then practiced, in the form of learned discussion among notables chosen by a deferential public to govern on its behalf.
Unlike conservatives and cautious liberals, fascists never wanted to keep the masses out of politics. They wanted to enlist, discipline, and energize them. In any event, by the end of World War I, there was no possible turning back to a narrow suffrage. Young men almost everywhere had been summoned to die for their countries, and one could hardly deny the full rights of citizenship to any of them. Women, too, whose economic and social roles the war had expanded enormously, received the vote in many northern European countries (though not yet in France, Italy, Spain, or Switzerland). While fascists sought to restore patriarchy in the family and the workplace, they preferred to mobilize sympathetic women rather than disfranchise them, at least until they could abolish voting altogether.65
European political culture also had to change before fascism became possible. The Right had to recognize that it could no longer avoid participating in mass politics. This transition was made easier by the gravitation of increasing numbers of middle-class citizens into conservative ranks, as their limited political demands were satisfied and as threatening new socialist demands took shape. By 1917 (if not before), the revolutionary project was immediate enough to alienate much of the middle class from the Left allegiance of its democratic grandparents of 1848. Conservatives could begin to dream of managing electoral majorities.
The democratic and socialist Lefts, still united in 1848, had to split apart before fascism could become possible. The Left also had to lose its position as the automatic recourse for all the partisans of change—the dreamers and the angry, among the middle class as well as the working class. Fascism is therefore inconceivable in the absence of a mature and expanding socialist Left. Indeed fascists can find their space only after socialism has become powerful enough to have had some share in governing, and thus to have disillusioned part of its traditional working-class and intellectual clientele. So we can situate fascism in time not only after the irreversible establishment of mass politics, but indeed late in that process, when socialists have reached the point of participating in government—and being compromised by it.
That threshold was crossed in September 1899, when the first European socialist accepted a position in a bourgeois cabinet, in order to help support French democracy under attack during the Dreyfus Affair, thereby earning the hostility of some of his movement’s moral purists.66 By 1914, part of the Left’s traditional following had become disillusioned with what they considered the compromises of moderate parliamentary socialists. After the war, looking for something more uncompromisingly revolutionary, they went over to Bolshevism, or, as we have seen, via national syndicalism to fascism.
After 1917, of course, the Left was no longer gathering itself and waiting for its moment, as it had been doing before 1914. It was threatening to march across the world at the head of a seemingly irresistible Bolshevik Revolution. The fright given the entire middle and upper classes by Lenin’s victory in Russia, and the anticipated success of his followers in more industrialized Germany, is crucial for understanding the panicky search during 1918–22 for some new kind of response to Bolshevism.
The fire-bells set off by Bolshevism transformed into emergencies the difficulties already faced by liberal values and institutions in the aftermath of World War I.67 All three key liberal institutions—parliament, market, school—dealt poorly with these emergencies. Elected representatives struggled to find the necessary minimum of common ground to make difficult policy choices. Assumptions about the adequacy of a self-regulating market, even if believable in the long run, seemed laughably inadequate in the face of immediate national and international economic dislocations. Free schooling no longer seemed sufficient by itself to integrate communities shaken by the cacophony of opposing interests, cultural pluralism, and artistic experiment. The crisis of liberal institutions did not affect every country with exactly the same intensity, however, and I will explore these varying national experiences in the next chapter.
Precursors
We have already noted that fascism was unexpected. It is not the linear projection of any one nineteenth-century political tendency. It is not easily comprehensible in terms of any of the major nineteenth-century paradigms: liberalism, conservatism, socialism. There were neither words nor concepts for it before Mussolini’s movement and others like it were created in the aftermath of World War I.
There had been straws in the wind, however. Late in the nineteenth century came the first signs of a “Politics in a New Key":68 the creation of the first popular movements dedicated to reasserting the priority of the nation against all forms of internationalism or cosmopolitanism. The decade of the 1880s—with its simultaneous economic depression and broadened democratic practice—was a crucial threshold.
That decade confronted Europe and the world with nothing less than the first globalization crisis. In the 1880s new steamships made it possible to bring cheap wheat and meat to Europe, bankrupting family farms and aristocratic estates and sending a flood of rural refugees into the cities. At the same time, railroads knocked the bottom out of what was left of skilled artisanal labor by delivering cheap manufactured goods to every city. At the same ill-chosen moment, unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived in western Europe—not only the familiar workers from Spain and Italy, but also culturally exotic Jews fleeing oppression in eastern Europe. These shocks form the backdrop to some developments in the 1880s that we can now perceive as the first gropings toward fascism.
The conservative French and German experiments with a manipulated manhood suffrage that I alluded to earlier were extended in the 1880s. The third British Reform
Bill of 1884 nearly doubled the electorate to include almost all adult males. In all these countries, political elites found themselves in the 1880s forced to adapt to a shift in political culture that weakened the social deference that had long produced the almost automatic election of upper-class representatives to parliament, thereby opening the way to the entry of more modest social strata into politics: shopkeepers, country doctors and pharmacists, small-town lawyers—the “new layers" (nouvelles couches) famously summoned forth in 1874 by Léon Gambetta, soon to be himself, the son of an immigrant Italian grocer, the first French prime minister of modest origins.
Lacking personal fortunes, this new type of elected representative lived on their parliamentarians’ salary and became the first professional politicians.69 Lacking the hereditary name recognition of the “notables" who had dominated European parliaments up to then, the new politicians had to invent new kinds of support networks and new kinds of appeal. Some of them built political machines based upon middle-class social clubs, such as Freemasonry (as Gambetta’s Radical Party did in France); others, in both Germany and France, discovered the drawing power of anti-Semitism and nationalism.70
Rising nationalism penetrated at the end of the nineteenth century even into the ranks of organized labor. I referred earlier in this chapter to the hostility between German-speaking and Czech-speaking wage earners in Bohemia, in what was then the Habsburg empire. By 1914 it was going to be possible to use nationalist sentiment to mobilize parts of the working class against other parts of it, and even more so after World War I.
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