The nature of fascism
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‘fashion fascism’
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‘health fascists’
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(which shows how contagious this loose usage is!)
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the word has suffered an unacceptable loss of precision within academic circles as well
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the term’s inflation seems to have spread like a semantic virus, contaminating even the social sciences where key words are supposed to operate under controlled conditions.
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Like colonialism, imperialism and the First World War before it, Fascism was thus accommodated without too much soul-searching
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left-wing opposition to Nazism in the last years of Weimar was tragically split.
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both the generic and the inflated use of the term was to become established in left-wing academic usage well before the outbreak of the Second World War.
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Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935 which had characterized fascism as ‘the most open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital’
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may be on the far right of the spectrum of parliamentary politics but have no revolutionary plans to overthrow liberal democracy as such.
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By assuming fascism to be an essentially anti-proletarian force, they play down its antagonism to the ethos of laissez-faire economics, consumerist materialism and the bourgeoisie, and are unable to take seriously its claim to be the negation of nineteenthcentury liberalism rather than its perpetuation in a different guise.
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At one extreme there are those who treat fascism as little more than a twentieth-century radicalization of the extreme right
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Then there are scholars who see fascism as an essentially new force, distinct from the radical right
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there are those who treat it as an international phenomenon which found its most complete ‘paradigmatic’ expression in Nazism and Fascism
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position conflicts head-on with the conviction that there is unquestionably a family of generic fascisms but that Nazism is too different (too ‘biologically’ racist)
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are Italian Fascism and Nazism related and if so how, and are they part of a wider phenomenon? If there is a generic fascism, is it one confined to Europe, or has it a global dimension?
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What is the relationship between fascism and conservatism, the radical right, totalitarianism, modernization, nationalism, racism, socialism, capitalism, imperialism?
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did fascism, if its generic existence is accepted, have a ‘real’ ideology, or is it right to say that it had ‘the form of an ideology but without the specific content’?
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was fascism ultimately a revolutionary form of ‘nihilism’, as Rauschning postulated about Nazism, or just plain ‘evil’,
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The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought
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a third way between liberalism and communism which is neither ‘right’ nor ‘left’
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a rigid dichotomy which causes thinkers in inter-war France to be classified as either ‘democratic’ or ‘fascist’, thus ignoring the existence of, for example, a powerful current of political Catholicism which sought to forge a viable alternative to liberalism, communism and fascism
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He asserts dogmatically that ‘fascism is not a generic concept’, and then, somewhat tautologically, that ‘the word fascismo has no meaning outside Italy’
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‘the study of fascism becomes every year a more daunting and bewildering task’
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‘fascism’ there is not even a consensus about whether there is a unique genus of animal in the menagerie of political phenomena to merit a distinctive name.
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any new theory of fascism must take full account of how the existing maze of diverging definitions first came into being.
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definitional minimum,
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clarify how fascism relates to a number of other social scientific terms
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historical scholarship
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fascism is broadly on a par with such concepts as ‘liberalism’, ‘socialism’, ‘conservatism’ or ‘nationalism’
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I do not wish to deny the validity of empirical investigations of fascism which attach central importance either to
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I do however question the heuristic value of using such criteria as the basis of ideal types of generic fascism
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Similarly, when the liberal ideal of society is given institutional form it also generates characteristic constitutional, legal and economic structures (for example representative assemblies, independent judiciaries, stock exchanges), yet these are not taken as the starting point for defining liberalism.
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fascism’s ‘anti-’ dimension, I find this particularly unhelpful and misleading. Liberalism is anti-despotism, and Marxism is (or was) anti-capitalist, which merely demonstrates that every ideology rejects certain values as a corollary of what it stands for.
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to search for a minimal definition of fascism based on its ideology is to lose sight of the material socio-economic conditions and objective political context which formed the preconditions
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fascism never had any major theorists to rank with Locke or Marx,
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approaching fascism primarily in terms of political theory and the history of ideas is misleading
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Marxist assumptions about ideology do not apply here, particularly ones suggesting that (i) it is extensively determined by the socio-economic infrastructure, (ii) is rooted in ‘false consciousness’ and (iii) results in the ‘mystification’ of an essentially anti-socialist, and hence untenable, political system.
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(this trichotomy seems more appropriate than the usual dichotomy between ‘conservative’ and ‘revolutionary’ suggested in Mannheim,
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The utopia of an ideology can never be fully realized in practice,
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ideologies embrace both the spoken and unspoken assumptions which ensure that all behaviour and actions ‘make sense’
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it owes its power to inspire action and provide a sense of reality to the fact that it is rooted in pre-verbal, subconscious feelings and affective drives
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utopian revolutionary
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overthrow the existing order
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oppressive
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idealism and self-sacrifice.
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irrational drives and mythical assumptions.
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homogeneous ideological or mythic core.
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‘mythic’ to refer to the inspirational, revolutionary power which an ideology can exert whatever its apparent rationality or practicality (as opposed to ‘mythical’ which connotes imaginary or fictitious), bringing it close to the way ‘utopia’
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‘Palingenetic myth’ and ‘populist ultra-nationalism’
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Fascism: a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.