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Appendix: More on Methodology Appendix: More on Methodology Over the years my fi rst monograph, The Nature of Fascism (1991), has been charged by some academic colleagues with essentialism, reductionism, ‘revisionism’, a disinterest in praxis or material realities, and even a philosophical idealism which trivializes the human suffering caused by Hitler’s regime. It is thus worth offering the more methodologically self-aware readers, inveterately sceptical of the type of large-scale theorizing (‘metanarration’) that forms the bulk of Part One of this book, a few more paragraphs to substantiate my approach and give it some sort of intellectual pedigree. It can be thought of as deriving from three lines of methodological inquiry – and there are doubtless others that are complementary to them. One is the sophisticated (but inevitably contested) model of concept formation through ‘idealizing abstraction’1 which was elaborated piece-meal by Max Weber when wrestling with a number of the dilemmas which plagued the more epistemologically self-aware academics engaged in the late nineteenth-century ‘Methodenstreit’. This was a confl ict over methodology within the German human sciences that anticipated many themes of the late twentieth-century debate over how humanities disciplines should respond to postmodernism and the critical turn.2 The upshot of this line of thinking is that researchers must take it upon themselves to be as self-conscious as possible in the process of constructing the premises and ‘ideal types’ which shape the investigation of an area of external reality. Nor should they ever lose sight of the purely heuristic nature of their inquiry, and hence its inherently partial, incomplete nature. One important inference to be drawn is that, instead of insisting on the superiority of their interpretation over ‘rival’ approaches, they should proactively seek out its potential for complementing those based on other empirical research, premises, and concepts. The second source of insight – again BCT (Before the Cultural Turn) – is offered by the deceptively simple advice which Karl Popper gave for solving the problems posed by, fi rst, the intrinsic open-endedness of the historical process, and, second, the irreducible complexity of all human reality, and, third, the consequent element of arbitrariness or ‘subjectivity’ intrinsic to the attempt to analyse any segment of it. Popper’s proposed strategy for resolving 370 Appendix: More on Methodology 371 the fi rst dilemma is for all researchers – and ideally political ideologues as well – to fi rmly resist the urge to mistake the patterns and trends they have detected in phenomena for historical ‘laws’, particularly the predictive ones that generate what he terms (confusingly, given its confl icting connotations) ‘historicism’, or what in ‘postmodernese’ would be called ‘totalizing discourses’ or ‘metanarratives’. Furthermore, Popper recommends that academics speculating nomothetically – in the search for basic patterns or generic features in phenomena – should be on their guard against confusing corroborative evidence with the ‘proof’ or ‘verifi cation’ of a hypothesis, especially since its formulation in the context of the human sciences can rarely conform to the criterion of falsifi ability which he regarded as crucial to the experimental sciences. The prospect of providing closure to any fundamental issue of disputed interpretation in the human sciences is thus a mirage. However, Popper did not see such restrictions on objective knowledge or defi nitive interpretation as delegitimizing historiography as such, even of the most speculative variety. This is demonstrated by his own metanarrative on the history of progress, and the obstacles to progress, in human knowledge, The Open Society and its Enemies, published within months of the end of the Second World War. As for the thorny issue of objectivity raised by the proliferation of possible perspectives, Popper suggests that ‘The only way out of this diffi culty is, I believe, consciously to introduce a preconceived selective point of view into one’s history; that is, to write that history which interests us’,3 and, I would add, to present our fi ndings in such a way that they are likely to interest others working in the same fi eld. Objectivity thus reveals itself as a methodology for producing useful knowledge, the way a theory is formulated and applied, and not the inherent property of ‘facts’, let alone a spuriously ‘theory-less’, or ‘personality-free’ state achieved by the mind that seeks them. The third line of thinking congruent with the concept of ‘reflexive metanarrative’ that I have so deliberately and self-consciously introduced is to be found, appropriately enough, in works by specialists concerned with repelling the perceived threat posed by the cultural turn to their discipline. One example is the defi ant conclusion of Richard Evans’ robust, both stylistically trenchant and empirically argued defence against the vehement criticisms that some of the more fundamentalist upholders of postmodernist relativism – the irony is intentional – have laid at the door of ‘traditional’ historiography in general, and of his concept of historiography in particular: I will look humbly at the past and say despite them all: it really happened, and we really can, if we are very scrupulous and careful and self-critical, fi nd out how it happened and reach some less than fi nal conclusions about what it all meant.4 372 Modernism and Fascism The tack that Evans adopts in order to negotiate the murky and choppy waters of post-CT academia is broadly consistent with the conclusions which Marjorie Levinson drew from her attempt to ‘rethink historiography’ a decade earlier.5 These were summarized by the anthropologist Joan Vincent as ‘recon- structing the historicist project’ as one ‘conceived and conducted as a refl exive affair’.6 In fact, the cultivation of heightened methodological refl exivity as the precondition, if not for a ‘new beginning’ in the human sciences, then at least for a fairly normal service to be resumed in them without a debilitating sense of the illegitimacy of all interpretation and theorizing is a theme common to a number of works symptomatic of the post-positivist age.7 Given the emphasis on anthropological insights encountered in Chapter 3, it is appropriate that it is one account of anthropology’s response to postmodernism that perhaps provides the neatest formulation of the methodological spirit in which the metanarrative that unfolds in Modernism and Fascism has been conceived. In his contribution to the collective effort to ‘recapture anthropology’, Graham Watson situates the ‘reflexive anthropology’ he is advocating ‘near the middle’ of a continuum between ‘an ontology-cum-epistemology according to which our accounts of reality mirror reality’, and a diametrically opposed postmodern one where the very act of investigating reality actually constitutes it.8 It is in this intermediate zone, somewhere between a naïve objectivity and a paralysing subjectivism, that this book operates. It is a sustained exercise in the speculative interpretation of a relationship between two vast areas of data subsumed within two highly contested generic concepts or ‘isms’. The speculation is not arbitrary but controlled by attested empirical data and refl exive theorizing that extensively takes account of and draws on the work of other scholars. It has no pretensions of providing a defi nitive picture of modernism’s relationship to fascism, but neither can it be dismissed as an elaborate ‘fi ction’. This extensive ‘caveat lector’ assumes particular signifi cance in the context of the rampant syncretism that characterizes this book. It is in the nature of the hypothesis it is exploring that it seeks to synthesize and produce synergies between theories and insights culled from a wide range of disciplines in which, as a specialist in comparative fascist studies, I can claim no professional expertise. These include social psychology, social and cultural anthropology, the sociology of modernity, the theory and history of modernism, the history of art, modern (Western) intellectual, cultural, and social history, and the his- toriography of Fascism and Nazism. When researchers raid any neighbouring discipline for insights and data which lend themselves to being integrated within their argument there is a natural temptation to treat it as a homogeneous fi eld of studies, and to present any apparently corroborative data or theory that suits their case as if it were the authoritative take of that discipline on Appendix: More on Methodology 373 the issue. Given the contested nature of every position adopted within every branch of the humanities this is patently not the case. To take one example, the cohabitation of several schools of thought within social anthropology – structuralist, poststructuralist, constructivist, and so forth – means that all its key concepts and theories are highly contested, producing a proliferation of debates intensifi ed by the fact that, as we have seen, the discipline has gone through its own epistemological crisis under the impact of postmodernism. Again a judicious dose of reflexivity comes to the rescue here. The appropriation of a particular anthropological argument by a historian is legitimate as long as it is treated as no more than one component in the construction of an analytical framework, and not as ‘proof’ of that framework’s objective validity or ‘truth’. The resulting theoretical edifi ce, no matter how lofty and imposing in the knowledge it subsumes, the linguistic and stylistic register in which it is expressed, or the number of endnotes deployed and books cited in its validation, cannot be, and has no intention of being, ‘true’. Instead, its highest aim is to be found heuristically useful by other scholars in advancing knowledge and understanding in the specialist area on which it provides a perspective. It resembles the moving platforms that TV companies install to follow golf competitions, both substantial and temporary, and to be judged by what can be seen from them when a particular game is played, in this case investigating ‘modernism’s’ relationship to ‘fascism’.
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