THE BIRTH OF FASCIST IDEOLOGY Zeev Sternhell with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri THE BIRTH OF FASCIST IDEOLOGY FROM CULTURAL REBELLION TO POLITICAL REVOLUTION Translated by David Maisel PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY Copyright 1994 by Princeton University Press Translated from Zeev Sternhell, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, Naissance de l’idéologie fasciste. Copyright 1989 Librairie Arthème Fayard, Paris Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sternhell, Zeev. [Naissance de l’idéologie fasciste. English] The birth of fascist ideology : from cultural rebellion to political revolution / Zeev Sternhell, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri : translated by David Maisel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-03289-0 ISBN 0-691-04486-4 (pbk.) 1. Fascism—Europe—History. I. Sznajder, Mario. II. Asheri, Maia. III. Title. D726.5.S7413 1994 320.5′33′094—dc20 93-17629 CIP This book has been composed in Bitstream Caledonia Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Third printing, and first paperback printing, 1995 Printed in the United States of America 357910864 To the memory of Jacob L. Talmon Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction Fascism as an Alternative Political Culture 3 Chapter One Georges Sorel and the Antimaterialist Revision of Marxism 36 The Foundations of the “Correction” of Marxism 36 Antirationalism and Activism: The Social Myths 55 Anti-Cartesianism and Pessimism 71 The Junction of Sorelianism and Nationalism 78 Chapter Two Revolutionary Revisionism in France 92 The “New School” 92 Applied Sorelianism 99 The Emergence of Socialist Nationalism 118 Chapter Three Revolutionary Syndicalism in Italy 131 Twenty Years: 1902–1922 131 The Primacy of Economics and the Revision of Marxist Economic Doctrine 143 Sorel, the Mobilizing Myth of the Revolutionary General Strike, and the Lessons of Reality 152 Chapter Four The Socialist-National Synthesis 160 The Myth of the Revolutionary War 160 From the Libyan War to the Interventionism of the Left: The Imperialism of the Workers, the Syndicate, and the Nation 163 National Syndicalism, the Productionist Solution, and the Program of Partial Expropriation 177 From the Carta del Carnaro to Fascist Syndicalism 186 Chapter Five The Mussolini Crossroads: From the Critique of Marxism to National Socialism and Fascism 195 Within the Orbit of Revolutionary Syndicalism 195 viii CONTENTS The Intellectual Realignment of a Socialist Militant 206 National Socialism 215 The State and Dictatorship: From National Socialism to Fascism 227 Epilogue From a Cultural Rebellion to a Political Revolution 233 Notes 259 Bibliography 315 Index 327 Acknowledgments THIS WORK is an expanded and improved version of a book published in France in 1989 and represents the results of an inquiry begun several years ago. It is also some time since several Ph.D. students in the history and political science departments of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, whose work I had the privilege of supervising, began to interest themselves in the growth of Fascist ideology. In so doing, some of these young scholars came to investigate certain paths I had indicated in previous works. This applied particularly to the process of transition of the Left toward fascism. Some of these studies have now come to fruition. Two of them have been incorporated into this book, to which each brings its own contribution. Chapters 3 and 4 are by Mario Sznajder, a specialist in Italian revolutionary syndicalism. Only a concern for presentation and a desire to offer the reader an integrated text caused me to revise their structure. Most of the material that enabled me to write Chapter 5 was provided by Maia Asheri, who has completed a study of early Italian fascism. Thus, many of the qualities this work may possess can be ascribed to my collaborators, but since the intellec- tual responsibility for the book and its general conception is mine, I am prepared to take the blame for its weaknesses. As in all such cases in the last eighteen years, this book has benefited from the assistance of Georges Bensimhon. Whether it is a matter of essential problems or of the French language, Georges Benshimon has allowed no omission, no obscurity to pass him by. My gratitude toward this friend far exceeds anything I am able to express in these few lines. The initial idea for this book took shape in my mind in 1983–1984, when I was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. The book progressed at Columbia University, where I spent profit- able months in the summer of 1986, and two years later, thanks to an invita- tion from the French government, I enjoyed an especially rewarding period of work in Paris. The main part of the work, however, was carried out in 1986–1987 at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My acknowledgments are due to its director, Menachem Yaari, and to the whole administrative staff headed by Shabtai Gairon and Bilha Gus. The invitation to pass a year in this center of research relieved me of my teaching responsibilities and allowed me to devote myself entirely to the preparation of this book. Our seminar of multidisciplinary research, in which Amatzia Baram, Sana Hassan, Menachem Friedman, George Mosse, Emmanuel Sivan, Michael Walzer, and Jay Winter in particular took part, was a source of great enrichment for me. As an assistant to this group, Anat x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Banine could not be faulted. Most of the reading and writing for the English edition of this book was done during the year 1991–1992, which I was happy to spend at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Wash- ington, D.C. I want to thank the center’s director, Charles Blitzer, and the director of fellowships, Ann Sheffield, for providing me with the opportunity to work in an outstanding intellectual environment and make the best use of my time. Special thanks are due to the staffs of the following libraries: the National and University Library in Jerusalem, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Italian National Libraries and Archives in Rome, the libraries of the universities of Columbia and Princeton, and the Library of Congress. I am grateful to the S. A. Schonbrunn Foundation and the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University for the finan- cial assistance I received in most stages of my work on this book. My final thanks go to David Maisel for an excellent translation, to Lauren M. Osborne, Editor, History and Classics, for her good advice along the way, and to Dalia Geffen for her skills and devotion in editing the manuscript. —Jerusalem, Fall 1992 THE BIRTH OF FASCIST IDEOLOGY INTRODUCTION Fascism as an Alternative Political Culture THIS BOOK is based on two assumptions. The first is that fascism, before it became a political force, was a cultural phenomenon. The growth of fascism would not have been possible without the revolt against the Enlightenment and the French Revolution which swept across Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Everywhere in Eu- rope, the cultural revolt preceded the political; the rise of the Fascist move- ments and the Fascist seizure of power in Italy became possible only be- cause of the conjunction of the accumulated influence of that cultural and intellectual revolution with the political, social, and psychological conditions that came into being at the end of the First World War. In that sense, fas- cism was only an extreme manifestation of a much broader and more comprehensive phenomenon. The second assumption, which follows from the first, is that in the devel- opment of fascism, its conceptual framework played a role of special impor- tance. There can be no doubt that the crystallization of ideology preceded the buildup of political power and laid the groundwork for political action. Fascism was not, in Benedetto Croce’s famous expression, a “parenthesis” in contemporary history. It was not, as he thought, the result of an “infection,” of a period of “decline in the consciousness of liberty” following the First World War.1 It was not the product of some kind of “Machiavellian” renais- sance to which twentieth-century Europe fell victim. Contrary to what Friedrich Meinecke and Gerhard Ritter have sought to convince the genera- tion after the Second World War, fascism was an integral part of the history of European culture.2 Similarly, fascism was not a sort of shadow cast by Marxism, as claimed by Ernst Nolte, whose brilliant and well-known book continues the work of Meinecke and Ritter. One should also not exaggerate the “anti” quality of fascism; fascism was not only a form of antiliberalism (to use the expression of Juan Linz, the writer of a remarkable study). Nor was fascism a “variety of Marxism,” as claimed by A. James Gregor, a normally perspicacious scholar and the author of major works.3 Moreover, fascism cannot be reduced, as the classical Marxist interpretation would have it, to a simple antiproletarian reaction that took place at a stage of declining capitalism.4 Between these two extremes is an abundance of interpretations. With regard to the schol- 4 INTRODUCTION arly publications of the last twenty years, the reader should refer to the work of Karl Dietrich Bracher, Emilio Gentile, A. James Gregor, Roger Griffin, Pierre Milza, George L. Mosse, Stanley G. Payne, Fritz Stern, Domenico Settembrini, Jacob Leib Talmon, and Pier Giorgio Zunino.5 In Interpretations of Fascism, the highly respected doyen of Italian schol- ars, Renzo De Felice, has given us a survey of different interpretations de- serving of mention.