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Home , Ernst Nolte, Robert Paxton, Roger Eatwell, Roger Griffin

Trevor Erlacher Te Specter of : Defning the “F-Word”

In one sense—a moral sense—there could hardly be more agreement today on the subject of fascism as a general, interwar European political phenomenon.1 Liberals, conservatives, and socialists all concur on the immorality of fascism. Of all its conventional varieties, German National in particular has come to epitomize our notion of malevolence, serving as a guidepost to righteous certitude in an otherwise postmodern world of doubt, ambiguity, and fruitless debate. American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, used as the cornerstone of his infuential postwar doctrine of Christian Realism. Nazism has also provided a common point of reference for the most hackneyed arguments against ethical relativism. traces Indeed, Nazism’s present-day status as evil par excellence has led to an unfortunate proliferation of the so-called reductio ad Hitlerum in daily conversation, political rhetoric, and Internet forums.2 All of the other putative varieties of

1 Fascism, that is, with a little ‘f,’ to distinguish it from its Italian namesake. 2 This phenomenon is summed up in Godwin’s Law, formulated by American attorney Mike Godwin, partly in jest, to state that as a given “online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler or the Nazis approaches 1.” The result, Godwin argues, is a trivialization of . See Andrew McFarlane, (2010-07-14). “Is it ever OK to call someone a Nazi?”. BBC News Magazine. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/10618638. Retrieved 2011-05-01. 244 Trevor Erlacher

fascism—including the original, (which we typically regard, despite its chronological priority and extreme brutality, as an entirely more benign, even humorous, junior partner)3—derive the better part of their historical guilt from association with the apogee (or nadir) of fascism in the Tird Reich. Yet, this moral certitude does not extend to the academic debate about what fascism, as a political genus, is. It also remains unclear whether we can legitimately categorize National Socialism under “fascism.” Only Italian Fascism, due to its name, is invariably designated as fascist, and even in this case scholars have argued that Nazism actually represented the more “fascistic” of the two.4 Te following discussion is typical insofar as it considers only the cases of Italian Fascism and Nazism. Other potential —the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Romanian , the Croatian Ustasha, Peronist Argentina, Showa Japan, and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, to name just a few—inspire far less agreement about classifcation and rarely enter treatises on fascism’s defnition until afer it has been established on the basis of the Italian and, usually, the German exemplars. A clear and concise defnition of fascism is needed, but a real consensus on what that might entail has yet to emerge. Is fascism an ideology, a collection of movements and regimes, or both? Is it lefwing, rightwing, or “radical centrist”? Is fascism confned to the interwar period? Is a resurgence of it still possible, and if so, how do we know it when we see it? Tis paper presents a brief critical survey of some of the most prominent attempts to solve these defnitional conundrums.5 Approaches to defning generic fascism can be divided into four categories, all of which are problematic for diferent reasons and motivated by diferent concerns. Te frst is the Marxist approach, which takes fascism to be a symptom of late ’s desperate struggle against the working class. Te second will be referred to as the ideological approach, which intellectual starting with Ernst

3 R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini (Londen: Hodder Education, 2005), 35. 4 This position is implied by Paxton’s five-stage program of fascist development, since Nazi alone reached the fifth stage and “experienced full radicalization,” whereas Italian Fascism habitually lapsed into mere “military dictatorship.” Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2005), 23, 150. 5 More specifically, it will evaluate the arguments of Stanley G. Payne, Robert O. Paxton, George L. Mosse, , , Zeev Sternhell, Gilbert Allardyce, Roger Eatwell, Geoff Eley, and Martin Kitchen. 245 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of

Nolte have typically favored. Te third is the functionalist (or structuralist) approach, which attempts to understand fascism “in time” as the sum total of its deeds in specifc contexts rather than its ideas and rhetoric. Te fourth, or nominalist, approach argues for a rejection of the other three as logically fawed, philosophically unjustifable, and detrimental to the study of history. Te latter position represents the most rational, modest, and easily defensible of the four, although its acceptance entails a renunciation of the purported heuristic, didactic, and political advantages of an umbrella concept to incorporate all ostensible instances of “fascism.”

Te Bestiary: A Typology of Typologies I. Te Marxist Approach Self-identifed Marxists of diferent stripes made the frst attempts to understand fascism analytically as a generic breed of shortly afer its appearance in the early 1920s. Nevertheless, prior to Hitler’s rise to power, many of them remained skeptical about the potential for fascism to take root anywhere other than Italy. Writing in 1928, Italian Communist Palmiro Togliatti expressed his belief that Fascism could not be exported to other countries, because of the degree to which the economic and class relations peculiar to Italy determined its existence: “A movement of the ‘fascist’ type, like the one in Italy, would have the greatest difculty in conquering power elsewhere.”6 Antonio Gramsci proposed a similar, -like explanation of Italy’s descent into fascism, arguing that the Risorgimento was a “missed revolution” that had burdened the country with a tortured social and political development thereafer.7 In his 1944 pamphlet, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It, Leon Trotsky argued that fascism was a reactionary mass movement of the petty bourgeoisie under the aegis of the capitalist class—their true enemies—against a bewildered and disorganized proletariat. Trotsky did not, however, regard fascism as an inevitable outcome of the crisis of capitalism. Instead, he argued for its latency in any capitalist society, holding the Communist Party’s incompetence, complacency, and cowardice responsible for fascism’s rise to power in Italy

6 Palmiro Togliatti, “On the Question of Fascism,” in Aristotle A. Kallis, ed., The Fascism Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), 109. 7 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison (New York: Weidenfled and Nicolson, 1971). 246 Trevor Erlacher and Germany.8 More sophisticated Marxist interpretations of fascism have appeared since, though the list-making method of defnition has retained its appeal. Martin Kitchen, for example, has posited ten distinguishing marks of fascism, each with a decidedly economistic favor.9 On the basis of these criteria, Kitchen efectively limits fascism to Germany and Italy, while insisting that many other places came close to ftting his defnition, and that refusing to recognize fascism as a possibility in the postwar context “would make it impossible to analyze fascist dangers in the present day.”10 Writing in the 1970s, Kitchen warned of the likelihood, given the economic problems at the time, of a resurgent “neo-fascism” in capitalist countries. Te tactical value of the term “fascism” as a general concept for use in -era socialist politics thus constituted Kitchen’s principal justifcation for the adoption of his ten-point defnition. More recently, one of the most nuanced, nonpartisan, and self-critical statements of the problem from a Marxist perspective has been that of Geof Eley, who nevertheless retreats to the trite position that fascism was nothing other than the “counterrevolutionary” outgrowth of the interwar “crisis of capitalism”

8 Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (New York: Pathfinder, 1996). 9 They are as follows: 1) Fascism “is a phenomenon of developed industrial states”; 2) “fascist movements are triggered off by a severe socioeconomic crisis”; 3) “fascism is a response to a large and organized working class”; 4) it “recruits its mass following from a politicized, threatened, and frightened petite bourgeoisie”; 5) “fascist regimes are characterized by an alliance between the fascist party leadership and the traditional elites of industry, banking, the bureaucracy, and the military”; 6) fascism was intended to “stabilize, strengthen and, to a certain degree, transform capitalist property relationships and to ensure the social and economic domination of the capitalist class”; 7) “fascism is a terror regime which dispenses with all of the trappings of parliamentary ”; 8) “fascist movements use ideology deliberately to manipulate and divert the frustrations and anxieties of the mass following away from their objective source”; 9) “fascist regimes pursue aggressive expansionist foreign political aims”; and 10) fascism displays a “greater degree of intensity” in more developed societies. Martin Kitchen, Fascism (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976), 83-91. 10 Ibid. 247 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

in countries with potent workers’ movements.11 Insofar as capitalism is still with us, therefore, fascistic movements and regimes could still appear wherever the prevailing economic order is challenged.12 Te Marxist approach to the problem of defning fascism has attempted to bring the phenomenon into line with ’s historiosophy. It casts the struggle against fascism in terms of the broader struggle against capitalism as such, efectively confating the two and laying the crimes of the former at the door of the latter.13 Methodologically, the Marxist approach has lef a clear mark on the early attempts of social historians to come to grips with fascism as an “extremism of the center” or a reactionary outburst on the part of the rural and lower middle-class “losers” of cultural and economic “modernization.”14 It remains unclear, however, whether

11 Geoff Eley, “What Produces Fascism: Preindustrial Traditions or a Crisis of the Capitalist State,” Politics and Society 12, no. 53 (1983): 53-82. In his article, it is worth noting, Eley casts the nominalism advocated by this essay as a consequence of the “Philistine cry of despair” that “‘reality’ is simply too ‘complex.’” The point, however, is not that the world itself is too complex, but that the meanings of some of the words coined to describe it are too contested and imprecise to serve any heuristic purpose beyond the most rudimentary levels of understanding. “Fascism” in the sense of a generic phenomenon is one such term. This is evidenced by the fact that it has introduced far more confusion and dissent than clarity and consensus into the study of actual instances of putative “fascism”: if we take fascism seriously, then it sends us on an infinite detour into semantics rather than a shortcut to discovery and comprehension. 12 According to Eley, fascism was for “capitalism” and against “socialism,” despite the myriad claims of leading fascists to the contrary. Eley thus considers the concept of generic fascism “useful both for understanding of the global right in the twentieth century and also for finding analytical tools for grappling with current rightwing reactions in our embattled world.” Quoted from Eley’s announcement for a workshop in October 2012 at the University of Notre Dame entitled “Fascisms Then and Now: Italy, Japan, Germany.” http://history.nd.edu/events/2012/10/24/13494-fascisms-then-and- now-italy-japan-germany/ [accessed March 30, 2013] 13 The “totalitarian” interpretation of fascism, popular in the West during the Cold War, is the obverse of this thinking. It maintains that fascism, like Stalinism, is a kind of , from which it follows that the crimes of the former are also the crimes of the latter and the legitimate struggle is against modern, antiliberal regimes as such in the name of personal freedom and pluralism. This school of thought is not treated in any detail here because it does not aim to define fascism, but describes fascist regimes within the overarching rubric of totalitarianism. See Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge: Press, 1965); and Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1976). 14 See Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 126-79; and Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 433-52. 248 Trevor Erlacher fascism was a “reactionary” or modernizing force.15 Moreover, fascism’s broad support in Italy and Germany among classes other than the petite bourgeoisie, including the urban working class, suggests a fundamental faw in attempts to defne fascism in terms of the typical social composition and economic interests of putatively fascist movements and regimes. Whether they see fascism as the fnal, inevitable stage of capitalism’s development—its desperate reaction against progress in the face of the ascendant toiling masses—or a type of political formation confned to nations exhibiting specifc socioeconomic qualities, those working from the scafold of have understood fascism as a dormant potentiality in all modern capitalist societies. Doubts concerning the term’s ontological validity notwithstanding, recognition of the ever-present threat of “generic fascism” to their conception of progress constitutes their chief argument in favor of its retention in historiographical and political discourses.

II. Te Ideological Approach Te ideological approach attempts to defne fascism as a discrete ideology, rooted in preceding intellectual traditions. Te typically liberal- democratic theorists of this mold maintain that fascism should be understood as comparable with the ideas of , conservatism, , and socialism from which it derived. Under this view, fascism was a positively formulated alternative worldview that we should not reduce to an empty negation of these more reputable ideologies. Teir approach stands in sharp contrast to the once prevailing attitude that dismissed fascism as purely nihilistic and devoid of intellectual content. Tey reject the Marxist understanding of fascism as a manifestation of the class struggle under capitalism determined by “material forces,” noting that fascism enjoyed widespread appeal among intellectuals, avant-garde artists, and all classes of interwar Italian and German society. Tey argue that fascism derived its mass appeal from an initially revolutionary (i.e. socialist) ideology, and that ideas determined its content as much as anything else. To a large extent, this approach constituted a reaction to Ernst Nolte’s

15 See Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., “Fascism and Modernization,” World Politics 24, no. 4 (July, 1972): 547-64; Wolfgang Sauer, “National Socialism: Totalitarianism or Fascism?” American Historical Review 73, no. 2 (Dec., 1967): 404-24; and James A. Gregor “Fascism and Modernization: Some Addenda,” World Politics 26, no. 3 (April, 1974): 370-84. 249 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

work on the question, which problematized the common designation of fascism as a rightwing rejection of socialism. In the 1960s, Nolte controversially presented three theses about fascism. Firstly, he confned fascism to the interwar period, which he called the “era of fascism,” on the basis of fascism’s novelty and its specifcity to the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Secondly, he argued that the Bolshevik Revolution, and Marxism more generally, made fascism possible and thinkable. Nolte defned fascism as “anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modifed methods, always, however, within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy.”16 Nolte thus argued for the impossibility of situating fascism on the traditional lef/right political spectrum. T irdly, he reconceptualized fascism as a metapolitical phenomenon, calling it “resistance to transcendence.”17 Tis fnal item is rather too abstruse and ancillary to the broader historiographic debate to warrant coverage in any detail here. To simplify greatly, however, by “transcendence” Nolte meant the progressive human liberation from tradition in the social, moral, political, technological, material, intellectual, and spiritual spheres. Nolte insisted on the substantial degree of continuity between fascism and preceding intellectual currents stretching back to Charles Marraus and Actione Français. He also proposed six points for a “fascist minimum”—anti-, anti-liberalism, anti-conservatism, the Führerprinzip, the party-army, and the aim of totalitarianism—which later scholars have incorporated in whole or in part into their own theories of fascism. Intellectual historians since Nolte have treated fascism not so much as a rejection of socialism as an attempt to reconfgure it in combination with presumably antithetical values and infuences. A. J. Gregor, for example, has interpreted Italian Fascism as a coherent ideology of “dissident Marxism” that produced a “developmental dictatorship.” He bases his account on the intellectual development of Mussolini and his followers, noting their indebtedness to socialist ideas and lifelong loyalty to the desirability of mass

16 Ernst Nolte, “The ‘Era of Fascism’ and the Uniqueness of Fascist Ideology,” in Kallis, The Fascism Reader, 152. 17 Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Actione Français, Italian Fascism, National Socialism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965). 250 Trevor Erlacher

mobilization and revolution despite their turn to nationalism, idealism, and activism, all of which, Gregor argues, were also typical of Marxist movements throughout the twentieth century.18 Gregor’s revision doubts Italian Fascism’s conventional identifcation with Nazism, and hence the notion of a generic fascism, but this has proved largely inconsequential for the on fascism as a whole.19 Nevertheless, Zeev Sternhell has followed his lead on key points. Sternhell rejects the designation of generic fascism as a rightwing ideology, recasting it as an anti-materialistic, anti-rationalistic, and nationalist revision of Marxism combined with a revolutionary syndicalist “cult of heroism, vitalism, and violence.”20 Sternhell emphatically places Nazism in a category of its own for its biological determinism and racialist anti-Semitism, neither of which fgured into Italian Fascism.21 Following Nolte, Gregor, and Sternhell, George L. Mosse presented a refned and infuential defnition of generic fascism as ideology with his 1979 article, “Toward a General Teory of Fascism.” For Mosse, fascism was an “‘attitude toward life,’ based upon a national mystique which might vary from nation to nation. It was also a revolution, attempting to fnd a ‘Tird Way’ between Marxism and capitalism, but still emphasizing ideology over economic change, the ‘revolution of the spirit’ of which Mussolini spoke, or Hitler’s ‘German Revolution.’”22 Mosse included Nazism in his defnition, while remaining sensitive to its unique “style,” ideological pedigree, and origins in the “occult.”23 Shortly thereafer, Stanley G. Payne elaborated on the concept of generic fascism in a similar key, arguing that popular

18 See A. J. Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Gregor, Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 19 R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998), 79-80. 20 Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 12. 21 Juan Linz, for example, who understood fascism as an “ideal type” (in the Weberian sense) whose status as a “latecomer” necessitated its ideological negations. He also pointed to fascism’s positive aspects (populist welfare, exultation of work, collectivism, etc.) and its “distinctive style” as defining features. Juan Linz, “Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes,” in Kallis, The Fascism Reader, 64-69. 22 George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (London: Howard Fetig, 1999), 42. 23 Ibid., 95-136. 251 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

opinion obliged historians to provide a working defnition for the “fascist minimum” assumed in everyday parlance, despite the difculties inherent in doing so, and despite the possibility that the nominalists and skeptics who deny the existence of such a thing may, afer all, be right.24 Payne’s somewhat cumbersome typology incorporates Nolte’s three negations and adds two sets of points, termed “ideology and goals” and “style and organization,” respectively. Payne distinguishes between fascist movements and fascist regimes, identifes six varieties of fascism, and provides a list of criteria separating fascism from “right .”25 Also stressing the importance of treating fascism as an intellectual phenomenon, Roger Eatwell favors moving beyond the right/lef political dichotomy, carefully discriminating between “propaganda” and “ideology,” and advocating a “spectral-synthetic approach” that emphasizes fascism’s penchant for assimilating divergent elements from liberal, conservative, and socialist thought.26 At the forefront of these more recent attempts to produce a general theory of fascism, Roger Grifn has optimistically proclaimed the emergence of a “new consensus” among Payne, Eatwell, and himself.27 Grifn’s defnition of generic fascism, as parsimonious as they come, nevertheless depends on several specialized terms in need of defnition themselves. He calls fascism “a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.”28 For Grifn, this phrase sums up the “lowest-common denominator” of the “ideal type”29 of fascism. Roughly speaking, Grifn means that, at minimum, a program aimed at the regenerative rebirth of a given nation out of some perennial decadence into a new order characterized by non-autocratic yet non-representative and non-pluralistic government informed all fascisms. All of these defnitions emphasize fascism’s ideological component, and the necessity of an elaborate, generic, working defnition to serve as

24 Stanley G. Payne, “The Concept of Fascism,” in Kallis, The Fascism Reader, 83. 25 Ibid., 84-88. 26 Roger Eatwell, “Towards a New Model of Generic Fascism,” in Kallis, The Fascism Reader, 71-80. 27 Roger Griffin, International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (Arnold, 1998), 14-16. 28 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: Routledge, 1993), 26. 29 ’s category for sociological and historical inquiry, on which more later. 252 Trevor Erlacher

a framework for future inquiries into individual fascisms and comparisons among them, but diverge markedly in their focuses and conclusions. Tis is not surprising, given the fact that they do not agree on which regimes and movements to include in their analyses of fascism, and therefore depart from markedly diferent empirical bases.30 Tis too is not surprising, because the aim of their common endeavor to defne generic fascism presupposed the absence of a defnition or set of objective criteria that would indicate which regimes and movements make for permissible subjects of comparison in the frst place. Tus the very nature of this debate precludes the arrival of its participants at a standard position acceptable to all interested parties.

III. Te Functionalist Approach Te work of Vichy specialist Robert Paxton departs from the above approaches in its deemphasis of ideology, shifing the defnitional debate away from what fascists “said” to what they “did.”31 In place of the usual attempts to treat generic fascism as a collection of doctrines and, at the very least, intended actions, Paxton ofers a fve-stage, ontogenic account of the various fascisms. Tese fve stages are: 1) movement formation; 2) creation of a party; 3) seizure of power; 4) exercise of power; and 5) radicalization and entropy. Paxton regards his model as more dynamic, historical, and sensitive to contingency than the ones ofered by Grifn, Payne, and others.32 Paxton maintains that the enormous discrepancy between what fascists say before they obtain power and what they do with it afer they have acquired it necessitates this approach. Paxton understands fascism as a “process,” not an “essence,” whose diversity in diferent national contexts is attributable to the fact that it did not make claims to legitimacy on the basis of some “universal scripture”—as in Marxism, liberalism, etc.—but what it considered to be “the most authentic elements of its own community identity.”33 Paxton denies that fascism is a “true ‘ism,’” noting its disdain for universal principles and intellectual consistency, and the absence of any founding fascist thinker or manifesto. Tus, Paxton’s account

30 By contrast to Griffin, Payne, Linz, Mosse, and Eatwell, prolific Mussolini biographer and student of fascism Renzo de Felice joins Sternhell and Gregor in excluding Nazism from the family of fascisms. 31 Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2004), 10. 32 Ibid., 23. 33 Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism” in Kallis, The Fascism Reader, 89-96. 253 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

of fascist ideology is almost entirely functionalist, that is, he imagines fascists changing their positions extemporaneously according to the needs of the moment, irrespective of their earlier pronouncements, and without following any underlying logic (apart from certain, unconscious patterns of historical development). Nevertheless, entirely against the proclaimed spirit of his approach, Paxton ofers a meaty, single-sentence defnition of fascism at the end of Te Anatomy of Fascism:

Fascism may be defned as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but efective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.34

Additionally, Paxton ofers a set of nine “mobilizing passions,” which he denies the dignity of designation as “reasoned propositions,” preferring to think of them as “visceral feelings,” unstated in “fascist public language” yet evident in fascist actions.35 He regards this as his concession to scholars who defne fascism as an ideology, and claims the middle ground between their position and fascism as “freewheeling opportunism.” In setting out to present his new conception of generic fascism, Paxton honors a tradition in fascism studies by blaming nearly everyone who preceded him for needlessly complicating the term. He blames the Marxists and lefists of the interwar period for failing to grasp that fascism was “an authentic mass popular enthusiasm and not merely a clever manipulation of populist emotions by the reactionary Right or by capitalism in crisis.” He blames the imitators who adopted and continue to adopt the outward appearance of fascism, but lack its substance. He blames the fascists themselves for presumptuously difering so much from one another in time and space. He blames the scholars who have adopted the allegedly

34 Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 218. 35 Ibid., 219-20. 254 Trevor Erlacher

“time-honored convention” of taking fascism for granted as a “body of thought.” Lastly, he blames people in general for the ways in which they have used and abused the word “fascism,” turning it into the “most banal of epithets.”36 Yet Paxton beseeches us not to allow these difculties to discourage us. “A real phenomenon exists,” he writes, simply asserting what he needs to prove. Paxton rejects the purported “nominalism” of scholars like Sternhell, , and others, who refuse to grant the possibility of a theory of fascism that incorporates Nazism, writing that “the term fascism needs to be rescued from sloppy usage, not thrown out because of it,” and that “it remains indispensable” to an understanding of the twentieth century and the avoidance of any future repeat of its horrors. Paxton eschews the “medieval bestiary” approach, which lays out every individual instance of fascism in great detail without making any generalizations about the features common to all of them. He rejects the “essentialism” of Grifn et al., who aim to construct an “‘ideal type’ that fts no case exactly.” He argues that such approaches “condemn us to a static view, and to a perspective that encourages looking at fascism in isolation.”37 An evidently mifed Grifn gave this account of his and others’ work on fascism a sharp rebuke on the pages of Te American Historical Review. Reviewing Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism, Grifn turns the accusation of “essentialism” back onto Paxton, writing that he “presents the empirical facts about the genesis and assault on power of particular fascisms as illustrating the fve stages he has identifed a priori, which is closer to essentialism than anything that has fowed from the pens and computers of those he criticizes.”38 Furthermore, Grifn maintains that Paxton does not understand what constitutes an “ideal type” in the Weberian sense of the term. “Ideal types,” according to Weber, are deliberately fctive and intended only for heuristic and taxonomic purposes, not the positing of essences.39 Te user of an “ideal type” must modestly and openly concede the ethical and epistemological subjectivity of his or her perspective, which

36 Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism” in Kallis, The Fascism Reader, 89-96. 37 Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 21. 38 Roger Griffin, review of The Anatomy of Fascism, by Robert Paxton, The American Historical Review 109, no. 5 (December 2004): 1531. 39 Stanford Encyclopedia of , “Max Weber,” 5.2, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/#IdeTyp (accessed 5/2/2011). 255 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

is more than can be said for Paxton, each of whose fve stages constitutes an “ideal type” without his saying so. Moreover, Paxton based his last three stages of fascist ontogeny—from the “seizure of power” to “radicalization/ entropy”—on a mere two cases (Fascist Italy and ), which is entirely insufcient for the generalizations he makes therefrom. Finally, Grifn accuses Paxton of tautologically arriving at his wholly unoriginal and partially inaccurate characterization of fascism40—which Paxton presents at the very end of his monograph as if it could be somehow inferred from the evidence produced in the preceding pages—through a “pre-established defnition of what distinguishes a fascist regime from an authoritarian one.”41 Te latecomer Paxton’s functionalist approach to fascism commands fewer followers than the ideological approach espoused by Grifn and company and faces a number of the same problems. Paxton has not escaped essentialism, but he refuses to embrace nominalism in the same way that the ideological school of fascism has through their employment of the “ideal type.” Instead, he imagines that there is some third way between the two extremes that consists of a rehistoricization of fascism, but having failed to map out this middle road to the satisfaction of the feld, Paxton simply vacillates between both camps.

Te Case for Nominalism In 1979, Gilbert Allardyce published “What Fascism Is Not: Toughts on the Defation of a Concept,” an article attacking the very notion of a generic fascism. Allardyce argues that historians have continued to use the word fascism despite the fact that they do not agree on an adequate defnition. Te essence of an international fascism, beyond the Italian original, continues to elude historians: “Whether they envision fascism as the tool of class interests or the expression of more impersonal forces—the revolt of the masses, the moral crisis of civilization, totalitarianism, or the modernization process—they generally understand it in terms of something

40 Without his consent, Griffin places Paxton in the ranks of the new consensus alongside himself, Payne, Eatwell and Mosse. He also points out the “goal of external expansion” in Paxton’s definition does not apply to the fascisms he otherwise acknowledges in Spain, Britain, and Romania, and that “uneasy collaboration with elites” applies only to Nazism and Fascism. 41 Roger Griffin, review of The Anatomy of Fascism, 1531. 256 Trevor Erlacher

more fundamental and important to history.”42 Allardyce maintains that the available evidence never supported the idea of a generic fascism. Tus, the more historians learned about personalities and movements, the more they diverged from one another in their overarching interpretation of the ostensibly real universal phenomenon. “Few historians, however, have lost confdence that further research will unearth the ‘missing link’ that unites individuals and parties in a generic fascism,” he writes. “In this sense the notion of generic fascism exists in faith and is pursued by reason.”43 Allardyce calls for the application of Ockham’s razor to fascism, which he denies the status of a “generic concept,” an “ideology,” or anything universalistic: “Te time has come for historians to admit what Mussolini himself was forced to recognize: universal fascism is an illusion.” Tweaking the term for application to the broad sweep of putative fascisms generates a pure abstraction, devoid of specifc content and therefore entirely useless as a methodological tool: “Full of emotion and empty of real meaning, the word fascism is one of the most abused and abusive in our political vocabulary.” Tus Allardyce argued that “the concept of fascism” should go the way of the word “romanticism,” and be “de-modeled, de-ideologized, de-mystifed, and, above all, de-escalated.” In closing his essay, Allardyce seconded Nolte’s suggestion that historians confne fascism to the period from 1919 to 1945. We may be stuck with it, but we should nevertheless try to “limit the damage” by relegating it to interwar Europe and rendering it “a foreign word again, untranslatable outside of a limited period in history.”44 Tere is still much to recommend Allardyce’s prescription, though Eley dismisses it as “pointless.”45 Te antinominalists on the other side of the debate have been repairing the damage done by it ever since. But a real consensus on the defnition of generic fascism has yet to emerge, even among similar-minded intellectual historians Payne, Grifn, Eatwell et al. All of the formulations surveyed here are equally valid, but by that same token they are all equally invalid. Te meanings with which we imbue our words are necessarily arbitrary, but this is no mark against them provided

42 Gilbert Allardyce, “What Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept,” The American Historical Review 84 (1979): 367-68. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 385-88. 45 Eley, “What Produces Fascism,” 56. 257 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

only that they are useful, agreed upon, and understood by the people who use them to communicate. Te question, then, is how useful is the word “fascism” as a signifer of some generic, global phenomenon? In the absence of a defnition to which everyone can assent, the concept of generic fascism remains almost entirely useless, if not downright harmful, to the study of history. Te scholastic debates surrounding the term stand in the same relation to empirical, historical research and analysis as metaphysics to physics—the more we concern ourselves with the lofy, ephemeral realm of pure concepts, the less time and energy we have to devote to the study of what actually exists, which is the ’s prerogative. Similarly, the unending pursuit of a “fascist minimum” only distracts from the study of real instances of “fascistic” behavior. A common argument for the retention of the word “fascism” in academic discourse, and the worthiness of the quest for a generic defnition of it, holds that this will provide us with a framework for comparison among fascisms. Scholars have made a similar argument for retention of the word “totalitarianism,” yet the latter term has fallen almost completely out of favor with many historians for the same reasons that we should regard “fascism” as suspect. Decades of polemical, ideologically charged political use have irrevocably compromised the term “totalitarianism” for use in nonpartisan research. Yet the same is true of “fascism” to an even greater extent. Te diference is that lef-wing commentators have typically used the latter to demonize motley throngs of color-coordinated thugs or liberal-democratic regimes through association with National Socialism—the universally acknowledged standard of inhuman evil—whereas Cold-Warrior historians and political scientists have used the former to demonize the purportedly more redeemable in the same way. Te concept of totalitarianism, which always enjoyed a more coherent and consensus-approved defnition than “fascism,” lost its credibility because it failed to ft the reality of life under putatively totalitarian regimes. As an abstract model, it is inaccurate because it blows out of all proportion the power of the state to control society. Totalitarian theory posited a number of theses that proved false or exaggerated in the light of new data, particularly in the Soviet case. Mutatis mutandis, theories of generic fascism have proved unable to explain individual fascisms in any detail across the

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board, and inevitably come into confict with new fndings about specifc movements and regimes. Fortunately, comparative history requires neither of these terms. Nazism, Italian Fascism, and any number of other “fascist” movements can just as well be compared without a term to envelop them all as Stalinist Russia and the Tird Reich.46 Another argument for the retention of the word fascism in academic discourse possesses greater emotional and political appeal. Te Italian Lef, as Italian historian R. J. B. Bosworth has pointed out, considers fascism indispensable as a general model. By regarding Fascism’s collaboration with “the ultimate evil of Nazi Germany” in war and as “natural and inevitable,” and preserving the Italian Communist Party’s “myth of resistance,” the post-war Italian Lef can use the generic model to “check the rapacity of the rich, the sexism of men, the allure of a revived nationalism,” and “privilege the working class, trade unions, social humanism, [and] those groups, institutions and ideas which Fascism had opposed and oppressed.”47 Marxists have used and continue to use the concept of a generic fascism almost exclusively to castigate their political enemies, who are usually advocates of private property rights and free trade. For the purposes of antiliberal rhetoric, only the general term will do, because it can be defned to include Nazism and thereby carry all of the negative connotations of the Holocaust.48 Paxton’s chief argument against nominalism, as we have seen, is similarly pragmatic and value-laden. Tus he writes that “contemplating fascism, we see most clearly how the twentieth century contrasted with the nineteenth, and what the twenty-frst century must avoid.”49 And later, more ominously: “Armed by historical knowledge, we may be able to distinguish today’s ugly but isolated imitations, with their shaved heads and swastika tattoos, from authentic functional equivalents in the form of a mature fascist-conservative alliance. Forewarned, we may be able to detect the real thing when it comes along.”50 A resurgence of fascism is certain,

46 Many of the contributors to a recent edited volume comparing Stalinism and Nazism have done superb work without recourse to the theory or the term “totalitarianism,” thus demonstrating its superfluity as a conceptual framework. See Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds. Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 47 Bosworth, Mussolini, 2. 48 Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 2-4. 49 Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 21. 50 Ibid., 205. 259 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

it would seem! Perhaps historians would do best to leave the soothsaying, moralizing, and cautionary tales to prophets, priests, and politicians. Something as terrible as Hitler’s reign could indeed happen again, but the entirely speculative fear of this possibility should not determine the way we write and interpret history. Tere are a number of logical problems with the attempts to defne fascism treated above. Nearly all of the arguments purporting to demonstrate the nature of a generic fascism rest upon some combination of an appeal to intuition, an appeal to the masses, and an appeal to authority. Only the latter two are informal fallacies, but even the frst is suspect for its imprecision and subjectivity. Te chief assumption of these arguments is that there are a variety of fascisms beyond the Italian case that we can or must identify on the basis of intuition, public opinion, and/or the opinion of experts. Stanley Payne, for example, employs the latter two, perhaps leaving the frst unstated, when he writes:

Given the difculty in arriving at a common defnition of the putatively fascist movements, it is always possible that the extreme nominalists and skeptics could be right, and that a true “fascist minimum” did not exist. Against such skepticism, we have the relative agreement of the majority of contemporary observers in the 1930s that a new form and style of politics had emerged in the radical new nationalist movements of Europe customarily called fascist, a position generally adopted by the majority of scholars and analysts since.51

In this way, Payne’s point of departure in defning fascism, like that of his peers, is sanctioned by two informal fallacies: 1) an argumentum ad populum or appeal to mass perception (i.e. “the majority contemporary observers”); and 2) an argumentum ad verecundiam or appeal to authority (i.e. “the majority of scholars and analysts”). A more delicate procedure is required to determine which movements and regimes to include in this majoritarian notion of fascism. At this stage, the personal convictions of a given theorist come into play. Italian Fascism is invariably included in the lineup without further comment, since it is, afer all, the frst and

51 Payne, “The Concept of Fascism,” in Kallis, The Fascism Reader, 83-84. 260 Trevor Erlacher only instance of fascism that proudly coined and bore the name “fascist.”52 Beyond this, a given scholar’s sympathy for or antipathy to Italian Fascism appears to determine whether or not they couple it with the second usual suspect, Nazism. Hence, Renzo de Felice—the “anti-anti-Fascist”—refuses to call National Socialism “fascism,” since this would refect poorly on a movement (i.e. Italian Fascism) that he regards as having had a positive, modernizing impact on his own country. An author like Roger Grifn, by contrast, has no such qualms about lumping these two regimes into the same category because he is not concerned that the Italian nation might look worse for it. Since there is no set of established, objective criteria for determining which regimes are fascist—and if there were, then the debate over fascism’s defnition would be solved—every single one of the arguments for a “fascist minimum” considered here constitutes a question-begging exercise in circular reasoning. Te proposition to be proved, that “fascism is x,” is assumed in the premise from which it is deduced, that “these regimes are or were fascist.” Te nominalist position holds that Italian Fascism, National Socialism, and all other similar phenomena are best understood on their own terms in the full richness of their individuality. Te positing of a term to encompass them all is a needless lexical innovation, doomed to be little more than the arbitrary refection of a particular, biased perspective, and contributing nothing but a distraction from the task of describing and explaining twentieth-century Europe. Language necessarily consists of generalizations and categories intended to organize our experience into manageable and communicable elements. In this sense, “fascism” is just as legitimate a word as any, but given the prevailing confusion about its meaning and the unlikelihood of this situation ever changing for the better, historians and political scientists should either get into the habit of providing their own personal defnition of it prior to every use, or retire it from their vocabulary altogether. Abandoning the cause of constructing a defnition of fascism compulsory for everyone will liberate all parties concerned from an insoluble debate. Unless the “Era of Palingenetic Ultra-Nationalism” catches on in the near future, there may be no escaping the habit of referring to fascism as

52 Even the Fallangists insisted they were “Spanish” not “fascist.” 261 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

a general interwar phenomenon in courses and textbooks on twentieth- century European history. Educators and historians should nevertheless adopt a healthy skepticism about the idea and encourage students and the public to follow suit. A consensus is not forthcoming and the specter of fascism continues to haunt us, ever evading the fnely calibrated instruments of our paranormal investigation into its true nature. Tough fascism sufered an ignominious defeat and death in the Second World War, its ghost enjoys a paltry victory in the aferlife, confounding the best eforts of scholars ever since to send it to hell for good.

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