The Nature of fascism: proceedings of a conference held by the Reading University Graduate School of Contemporary European Studies;

by Editor. Woolf S.J.

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261 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1968

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a collection of papers and discussions from a conference on fascism held at Reading University in the UK in 1967. It is organized into four sections, each of which was a panel at the conference. I have discussed each panel separately below, but overall the emphasis is on fairly outdated political science and sociology with limited historical insights. Many of the participants held to a Marxist line, with the only variety being the degree of orthodoxy espoused. A few provide some interesting statistical analyses, but very few have turned to original sources. This book is probably only of interest to specialists, and even they will find that much of it is so old as to be no longer relevant. I did find a few useful ideas in it at least, but mostly because I am so widely-read on the subject.

The first section, on “Fascism and the Polity,” possibly appears first simply because this was the first session at the conference. The papers do not serve especially well as an introduction to the subject, but they are worth examining for a specialist. They all reflect political science approaches to the study of fascism. The first, by N Kogan, is the shortest, but probably the best. It quickly offers a working model of what is meant by the concept of fascism, which the other authors would have benefitted from considering. The most interesting section is his brief consideration of what is meant by the homo fascistus, in which he concludes that this did not represent a new courage or new strength in the individual, but rather a new servility. The other pieces both reflect the influence of Marxism on poli sci in the 1960s, as they are both variations on the classical Marxist theory of fascism. This theory states that fascism is “the last stage of capitalism” in decline, a sort of desperate effort to restrain proletarian revolution and retain power for the bourgeoisie. The second paper, by A.F.K. Organski, departs from this theory by positing a struggle within the ruling classes between “traditionalist” and “modernist” forces (these terms are never defined), and suggesting that the tipping point into fascism occurs at the point where the two are more or less evenly matched, and must compromise in order to maintain their own interests. His conclusion returns to more typical Marxist determinism as he says that “fascism is a last-ditch stand by the elites to prevent the expansion of the system over which they exercise hegemony. The attempt always fails.” The final paper by J. Sole-Tura is completely straightforward in adhering to the Marxist (indeed Stalinist) line, as he argues that fascism is a movement utilized by the bourgeoisie to inflict violence on the proletariat and prevent their political mobilization.

The next section, “Fascism and Society, is surprisingly a considerable improvement. It could as easily have been titled “Fascism and Class,” since both papers propose to examine Fascism in terms of class, but the sociologists who contributed to this section appear to have been more or less free of Marxist influence, so are able to offer more interesting perspectives on the issue. At thirty pages, G. Germani’s paper is the longest in the book so far. Most of that space is taken up by analysis of the historiography of sociological discussions of fascism, including a good deconstruction of the Marxist approach and the methodologies which followed it. When he finally gets around to a bit of original discussion, comparing Fascism in Italy to Peronism in Argentina, he falls somewhat short, utilizing conceptions of “mobilization” that would have benefitted from better definitions. The short paper by S.L. Andreski that follows, however, corrects this by pointing out that “mobilization” actually refers to two separate phenomena, only one of which actually relates to the rise of fascism. Better than that, he offers the first really new idea (to me) that this volume presents: he suggests dividing our concept of fascism between “populist” and “pro-establishment” variants of fascism. I would have preferred simply the phrases “anti-“ and “pro-establishment,” leaving the conflicted concept of populism out entirely, but that is a quibble. His argument allows for the examination of “semi-fascisms” such as Franco’s regime in Spain, which in no way sought to undermine the traditional power of the military or the clergy, and to oppose them to more strident fascisms such as National Socialism, in which all traditional authorities were subjugated by the party.

At this point, it will be no surprise that the third section, “Fascism and the Economy,” is dominated by Marxist analyses. At least these writers avoid the truly vulgar Stalinist interpretations of Sole-Tura and apply some more complex understandings to their subject. The first essay is that of the editor, S.J. Woolf, who is one of the few presenters with actual historical training. His piece is longer by a hair than Germani’s, but more original and interesting. His question is whether, in fact, there was an economic system particular to fascism, and whether this could be used to analyze whether a given regime was in fact fascist. To do this, he presents a fairly in-depth consideration of the transformations of German, Italian, and Japanese economies under their respective authoritarianisms, finding some rather interesting parallels. Although many more “idealist” (or intellectually-oriented) analysts would question the inclusion of Japan as “fascist” in the first place, I did find it interesting that the three Axis powers had so much in common, in particular the drive towards autarchy and a form of corporativism that at first worked to suppress labor unrest and then became increasingly interventionist and controlling at the management level. He then took this basic framework and looked at the Peron regime in Argentina and the Vargas regime in Brazil, finding that neither of them was truly fascistic in an economic sense, although both (and especially Peron) did intend to develop economies based on fascist lines, but found that conditions in their respective countries did not support this. The next essay is by S. Lombardini, an Italian professor of political economy, and thus the only economically-trained writer in this section. He analyzes the Italian economy under fascism, and its continuity with earlier Italian economic trends, in some depth. I found it fairly heavy going, with a lot of terminology that I only partly understand or not at all, but the end result seemed to contradict Woolf’s idea that a distinctively fascist economic system existed. Rather, it seems Mussolini continued the half-hearted measures toward a unified Italian economy that his predecessors had inaugurated. The final essay, Mason’s analysis of National Socialist Germany, is explicitly identified as being based in Marxist theory. As such, Mason’s argument is that economics, not ideology, was determinative in the rise to power of the NSDAP and in their policies. Much of this is based in class war arguments that the “ruling classes” of Germany supported the Nazis as the best hope for preventing a “working class” revolution (these classes are, of course, defined by industrial development, with peasants and vast agricultural land-owners lumped together as “petty bourgeois”). He follows this logic through a torturous path to actually come to a surprising conclusion by the end – ideology did actually become the determinant of policy under the “irrational” National Socialists! I found two sentences on page 193 especially illuminating: “[The National Socialists] tended to understand and to use…ideology as an instrument of domination, the contents of which could be manipulated almost at will. But in the end, the racial-ethical Utopia was taken so seriously by the political leadership, in particular by Hitler and the SS, that in decisive questions even the urgent needs of the system were sacrificed to it.”

The final panel was “Fascism and the Intellectuals,” and it seems to have been added just to give George L. Mosse a chance to speak. Indeed, Mosse’s paper is titled “Fascism and the Intellectuals.” Mosse is the only contributor that I was familiar with when I started this book, and he is significantly the only one identified by a complete name, rather than an initial and last name (more typical of the social sciences). He was, of course, a renowned historian at the University of Wisconsin, and had already published his groundbreaking The Crisis of German Ideology two years before this conference, and had been involved in founding the “Journal of Contemporary History,” one of the most important journals for the discussion of fascism. Therefore his inclusion is unsurprising, despite the fact that his intellectual-history approach to fascism is a major break with every other panelist to this point. Not surprisingly, his approach holds up much better today, being more rooted in culture than in materialism (or Marxism). He argues that fascism had an intellectual heritage, but that it was most important during the oppositional or out-of-power stage of fascist development. Fascists who lived to see fascism in power were often disappointed or even betrayed by its new directions. Still, he argues that one should not dismiss the intellectual appeal of fascism nor dismiss it as “anti-rationalist.” P Vita-Finzi, the other participant on this panel, gave a brief overview of the history of intellectuals and fascism in Italy, continuing past Mosse’s analysis to point out that intellectuals under a fascist regime often complied out of expediency or concern for their jobs, although, at least in Italy, fascism continued to have an intellectual appeal until shortly before the War. This paper is so short as to be more tantalizing than informative.

Each panel is followed by a “Discussion” section, but I didn’t get much out of reading these. It seemed as though each participant merely re-stated his basic position, and that they didn’t really listen to one another’s ideas. Tellingly, Mosse got the last word in the final discussion, which seems appropriate since he still has it today, when compared to the others at this conference.