[The
above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside
thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant. I
welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this
video.]
In “Il Gattopardo,” Guiseppe di Lampedusa said of the Sicilian nobility that, “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Robert Paxton asserts that the same can be said for the scholarship of fascism in “The Anatomy of Fascism,” his insightful analysis of the rise, entrenchment, and political development of this body of political movements in twentieth century Europe. Instead of arguing that fascism is “of the left” or “of the right,” Paxton both escapes those narrow confines while at the same time detailing why these categories are woefully inadequate. The book considers fascism’s development chronologically: first, the prerequisites for fascism, then how it “takes root,” how it gains power, and finally how it exercises that power. It should be noted here that the only two regimes Paxton considers in detail are those of Hitler and Mussolini. Others are mentioned in passing, but the deepest, most important lessons are drawn from these two cases.
Throughout most of the nineteenth century, politics was the business of the educated elite; the common man was often disenfranchised from the most important parts of the political process. It wasn’t until “the masses, full of beer and nonsense” (as Carlyle once acerbically noted) were fully integrated that fascism was possible.
Fascism is often associated with often any ideological stances, from anti-capitalism to anti-socialism to (perhaps most commonly) anti-Semitism. Paxton attempts to show that no one fascist regime espoused all of these ideas at the same time. For example, while fascists often did attack bourgeois capitalists for their flabby materialism, once they gained power, they often joined powers with them later in order to build political alliances. In fact, fascist hardliners usually fancied themselves as apolitical, and refused to engage in decadent liberal parliamentarianism. Of course, as history continually tells us, purity is no way to gain political power or legitimacy. It’s simply not enough to don a colored shirt and start beating up foreigners and minorities. Paxton describes how fully realized fascist mobilization took “a comparable crisis, a comparable opening of political space, a comparable skill at alliance building, and comparable cooperation from existing elites.”
Paxton states that, in the long term, all fascists regimes eventually devolve through a period of entropy in which they slough off their purist elements and become something much more resembling authoritarians than fascists. He refers to this as their period of “entropy,” whereby they undergo a kind of political and cultural normalization along the lines of political elites. He claims that the one regime that did not undergo this phase was Hitler’s Germany. The next-to-last chapter considers fascisms (or fascist-like regimes) in other parts of the world, especially Peron’s Argentina.
All of this is meant as a series of lessons which should enable us to, in the end, limn some of the fascism’s defining characteristics. His final analysis concludes that most successful fascisms have several common characteristics. Some of them include a “sense of overwhelming crisis,” “the primacy of the group … and the subordination of the individual to it,” “dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualism liberalism,” “the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason,” and “beauty of violence and the efficacy of the will.” While these aspects might not provide us with the fullest picture of fascism, it seems to provide a good baseline for scholarship, both past and future.
For a while, I have been reading “around fascism,” especially William Johnston’s “The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938.” I found Paxton’s book really valuable in providing the material to connect some really important dots as far as setting the political tone for the possibility of fascism. Also, one of the most wonderful resources in the book is the thirty-page, topically organized bibliographical essay. There is enough material in there to keep anyone interested in the subject reading for quite a while.
Throughout most of the nineteenth century, politics was the business of the educated elite; the common man was often disenfranchised from the most important parts of the political process. It wasn’t until “the masses, full of beer and nonsense” (as Carlyle once acerbically noted) were fully integrated that fascism was possible.
Fascism is often associated with often any ideological stances, from anti-capitalism to anti-socialism to (perhaps most commonly) anti-Semitism. Paxton attempts to show that no one fascist regime espoused all of these ideas at the same time. For example, while fascists often did attack bourgeois capitalists for their flabby materialism, once they gained power, they often joined powers with them later in order to build political alliances. In fact, fascist hardliners usually fancied themselves as apolitical, and refused to engage in decadent liberal parliamentarianism. Of course, as history continually tells us, purity is no way to gain political power or legitimacy. It’s simply not enough to don a colored shirt and start beating up foreigners and minorities. Paxton describes how fully realized fascist mobilization took “a comparable crisis, a comparable opening of political space, a comparable skill at alliance building, and comparable cooperation from existing elites.”
Paxton states that, in the long term, all fascists regimes eventually devolve through a period of entropy in which they slough off their purist elements and become something much more resembling authoritarians than fascists. He refers to this as their period of “entropy,” whereby they undergo a kind of political and cultural normalization along the lines of political elites. He claims that the one regime that did not undergo this phase was Hitler’s Germany. The next-to-last chapter considers fascisms (or fascist-like regimes) in other parts of the world, especially Peron’s Argentina.
All of this is meant as a series of lessons which should enable us to, in the end, limn some of the fascism’s defining characteristics. His final analysis concludes that most successful fascisms have several common characteristics. Some of them include a “sense of overwhelming crisis,” “the primacy of the group … and the subordination of the individual to it,” “dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualism liberalism,” “the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason,” and “beauty of violence and the efficacy of the will.” While these aspects might not provide us with the fullest picture of fascism, it seems to provide a good baseline for scholarship, both past and future.
For a while, I have been reading “around fascism,” especially William Johnston’s “The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938.” I found Paxton’s book really valuable in providing the material to connect some really important dots as far as setting the political tone for the possibility of fascism. Also, one of the most wonderful resources in the book is the thirty-page, topically organized bibliographical essay. There is enough material in there to keep anyone interested in the subject reading for quite a while.
No comments:
Post a Comment