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Old March 1st, 2014 #3
Alex Linder
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[the intellectual roots of fascism]

"The Birth of Fascist Ideology"

- mussolini founded movement in 1919, was in power by 1922 - three years!
- at ten-year celebration in 1932, inscriptions read: BELIEVE, OBEY, FIGHT and ORDER, AUTHORITY, JUSTICE - "the Holy Trinities of the new order that had replaced the hated liberal democratic system"
- slogan: war is to man as childbirth is to woman
- slogan: better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep
- "it is easy to understand why fascism is seen as little more than a nihilistic, authoritarian, and violent movement that is best comprehended in terms of psychology rather than rational thought"
- "most influential" academic definition stresses its style (leadership and propaganda) and its "negation" (hostility to communism) rather than its positive intellectual content
- eatwell insists fascism is not just slogans, like liberalism-Marxism-socialism-conservatism, it's a real ideology too. (conservatism is not normally considered an ideolgy, it's normally considered anti-ideological (Kirk))
- what in fascism appealed to intellectuals, as well as fighters?

- roots of fascism: Enlightenment: idea that people top kings, and individuals top people: individual will and decision can determine outcomes, not just fate. at first this led to liberalism - individual rights and limited government; later this liberalism kept name but transformed into socialism (the old way came to be known as classical liberalism).
-- fascists don't like liberalism/individualism-and-limited-state -- classic liberalism -- because it puts money-seeking over spiritual values, and it creates warring classes and rifts between government and people
-- fascists don't like liberalism/socialism (today's liberalism, or much closer to it) because it supports property-communism (abolition of private property) and racial-universalism (brotherhood of man)
- fascism was both a reaction to and product of the Enlightenment. it rejected the modern man (described in points above) but it agreed with the idea of the will of the people creating a new order through violence
- eatwell says, even so, that only a "handful" of academics "who have accepted that fascism has some form of intellectual core" (this speaks to the leftism of academics: no politics they don't share is actually serious)
- figures: elements in Rousseau prefigure fascism: idea of "general will" arising among a people, overcoming social divisions
-- Rousseau liked small states not big ones and homogeneity - looked to city-states of ancient greece
-- Rousseau's general will might not be perceived by people hence they'd need to be forced to be free (note similarity to marx's false consciousness). anyone can speak in the name of The People (just as anyone can speak in the name of god); this can easily lead to dictatorship by those who know best; it certainly justifies dictatorship
- figures: Hegel: cited as forerunner
-- saw history as process
-- illiberal in that he did not trust masses or abstract reason - a position more typical of conservatism than fascism
-- saw Enlightenment severing people from tradition, producing alienation rather than liberation
- movements: romanticism: reaction to abstract reason: focus on historical-national rather than universal-timeless; worship of nature; exaltation of (artistic) genius over mass mediocrity
-- political romanticism would involve desire for strong leader, not bourgeois compromiser, creating a national rebirth
-- hostility to material values increasingly translates into anti-jewism in 19th century: "the jew was pilloried as the epitome of capitalist materialism -- a view particularly prevalent in the German volkisch movement, which railed against the evils of urban, industrial society"
- movement: holistic nationalism: began as people over kings and church (leftist - self-determination for all peoples); became more rightist over 19th century. change from overthrowing regimes to securing them via social unity
-- figure: Maurice Barres: French journalist: prophet of rootedness (enracinement), involving a mystical union between the living and the dead (doesn't sound too dissimilar to ur-modern-conservative Edmund Burke's ideas).
-- barres' new nationalism was hostile to first-wave Enlightenment nationalism (The People) and its individualistic materialism. "born a man, died an accountant"
-- new nationalism arose out of opposition to universalism
- movements: racialist thinking (science or near-science)
-- hostility to others goes back to Greeks - it in itself is perhaps the true universalism. but now, in 19th century, you can put science there to back this difference-feeling
-- figure: Arthur de Gobineau: Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1850s, read widely after 1870s). theme: struggle between white, yellow, black = history.
-- figure: Houston Stewart Chamberlain: influenced by composer wagner, who became his father in law. book: Foundations of the 19th century (1900). influenced not just ideas of fascism but its style. pulling together wagner's history and mysticism with modern science - and without gobineau's pessimism.
- hostility to Enlightenment rationalism is not the same as irrationalism
- figures: Darwin: Origin of Species (1859). ideas: natural selection. Survival of fittest. easy transfer to politics. but could go either way: state stays out, lets the inferior die out; or state protects the better from being driven out by the lower but stronger (gresham's law, essentially: bad money drives out good money, mutatis mutandis applied to race).
-- rise of eugenics
--- figure Ernst Haeckel: worried that morality will interfere with natural selection (boy is that the case in 2014! not just for niggers either; all kinds of white defectives are state subsidized)
-- rise of social sciences: elite theory: figures: Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels. idea: all societies are run by elites; difference is social composition of elite and permeability to outside would-be entrants
--- psychology: figure: Freud: idea: man is driven by unconscious desires. is not the rational actor shaping his own fate of Enlightenment supposition
---- figure: Gustave Le Bon: book: The Psychology of Crowds (1895): idea: crowd as emotive mass easily influenced by demagogues: very widely read: hitler and mussolini certainly familiar with it.
- philosophy: figures: nietzsche and georges sorel: right and left (primarily): show danger of casually calling fascism rightist.
-- nietzsche: ideas: focus on irrational; belief west was sinking due to individualist-materialist decadence brought on by slave religion of christianity; humanism and secular socialism are later forms of this slave religion! they "promote universalism and encourage pity for weak rahter than respect for the strong"
--- nietzsche: idea: superman will rise above herd and restore spiritual values, overcoming nihilism and turning politics into aesthetics (as opposed to ordinary democratic pandering)
- figure: sorel: idea: darker view of human nature (than most socialists) - men are divided into economic-rational and emotive-collective. idea: socialists must worry about production, not just distribution! idea: working class only led to revolutionary consciousness by myths - via slogans. idea: "general strike" to bring down social order. associated with french syndicalists (trade unionists).
-- "it is far from clear that Nietzsche or Sorel would have supported the fascist movements that emerged after 1919"
- fascism as socialism with myths and private property - owes a lot to Sorel, probably more than to Nietzsche. both N and S worried about general (decadent-materialist) european man more than individual nations. nationalism creates myths that can move the people, as WWI showed. sorel opposed biological racism.
- fascism as a new ideological synthesis emerging pre-WWI...
- fascism: core ("was clear"): i: appealing to masses with populist propaganda. key metaphor: rebirth. old? new? picks up christian idea too, for wider appeal.
-- core idea ii: synthesis as key philosophical approach. new society with old values. create a "new man" growing from deep national roots. economic development BUT within a national community. integrate the individual and the community where they've been set adrift and at odds.
- heart of fascism: reviving the nation. creating a new man in a new social order. with economic growth, but more agreement on social goals - a Third Way. HOLISTIC-NATIONAL RADICAL THIRD WAY. still, more style than programs. and much demonization of enemies. flexible enough to permit more biological approach in germany and cultural in italy. yet distince from conservative
authoritarianism in franco's spain, where they're not trying to make a new man.
- "affective-communal and "rational-economic" - this is where it can gain broad appeal. the collectivism of the left without the economic insanity, and the private property of the right without putting economic growth above everything else, including borders and citizenship.
- fascist views: human nature: SYNTHESIZED left and right: sort-of new man. not claim man is totally plastic, like soviets or Enlightenment rationalists, but do believe people, though "constrained by nature and talents," can be "remolded in a more communal and virile society."
-- views: geopolitics: nation/region/race as driving force of history, hence need for strong military.
-- views: political/economic structures: set by 1919: THIRD WAY
-- views: propaganda: great need for it. celebrate the great leader, get people to buy in to new values.
- all these ideas were floating before 1914. the war changed the sorelites ideas from general strike to nationalism as the effective myth. fascism as specific parties really took off after WWI.

This was the general cross-national intellectual, social and political background from which fascism emerged. From here we go to specific men and movements within specific nations.

Last edited by Alex Linder; March 1st, 2014 at 10:48 PM.