Like all historiography, theories of totalitarian
dictatorship and of the revolutionary movements (Jacobin, fascist, bolshevist)
from which they emerge involve a melange of discrete approaches to
social and historical studies that privilege either materialist or historicist
factors as the prime movers of social reality. The former invariably emphasize
the primacy of economic forces in the aetiology of social development, whereas
the latter lay stress on cultural influences and practices to account for the
political choices and orientations of societies. The materialist approach is
couched ultimately on a conception of human need or necessity, leading to a
seemingly determinist “science” of social organization and development, whereas
the historicist approach advances a hermeneutic understanding of social
outcomes that gives greater sway to the human will or spirit. Bluntly put,
historical materialism canvasses the sphere of necessity, whilst historicism
ponders about the sphere of freedom. In between these two extremes lies a
variety of historiographical combinations depending on whether the theory
favours a pessimist or realist or eristic exegesis of human action or a more
optimist and humanist or co-operative version. Historicist theories of
totalitarian dictatorship object to a separate concept of totalitarianism
because their reliance on the idiosyncrasy of human decisions and the
primacy of qualitative cultural expression is incompatible with the comparative
approach of materialist theories which base themselves instead on the homogeneity
and homologation of quantitative human material needs. (We use the term
historicism with a meaning diametrically opposed to that of Karl Popper in The
Poverty of Historicism. Two of the best accounts of historicism as a theory of
history originating in Classical German Idealism can be found in F. Meinecke, Historism,
and in A. Negri, Studi sullo storicismo tedesco.)
As can be easily discerned from our foregoing
initial study of theories of revolutionary movements, we prefer a periodization
of these movements that tends to shift the focus and weight of historical
aetiology from the materialist to the historicist depending on the specific
phase or stage of their development. Remarkably (great minds think alike!), we
have recently discovered that this is the approach taken by Robert Paxton in
his The Anatomy of Fascism – with a periodization in five stages to our
more compact one comprising only three. We object, however (great minds often
disagree!), to Paxton’s description of his learned and compendious survey of
the literature and the evidence as an “anatomy”, because anatomies are
necessarily syn-chronic and not dia-chronic as all historical
studies must be. Indeed, we may go further and argue (as we did in our study of
Joseph Schumpeter’s “evolutionary economics”) that anatomies exclude historical
time altogether because they place each anatomical item in a functional
relation to the others such that these relations are purely classificatory in a
functional sense wholly unrelated to their physio-logical evolution.
Evolution is necessarily historical for the
simple reason that it is not pre-determined; it is physio-logical, in
other words, it involves a physis (nature) that is open to human
interpretation either as a telos, a destiny, or as pure contingency, as
an a-methodon hyle (form-less matter). It is therefore incongruous to
speak of the anatomy of fascism for the simple fact that fascism is a
historical category – and therefore a fluid living reality that cannot be
reduced or reified into a series of structures or members or organs or limbs in
a purely classificatory and functional or mechanical sense. Paxton’s great
merit, in our view, is to have placed the study of fascism as a historical
phenomenon in a far more disciplined context than most other studies between
the materialist and the historicist extremes.
Yet another divergence from Paxton’s approach is
less a disagreement than a difference of emphasis and, more seriously, an
inversion of the analytical perspective regarding the historicist
interpretation of fascism. Paxton’s study itself offers a salutary corrective
to the extreme historicism of the “cultural analysis” that has prevailed
recently in this area of historical study, possibly as a reaction to the
excessive determinism of more materialist, and particularly Marxist, theories
of fascism. Nevertheless, due partly to his innate eclecticism and genuine
gallantry, we feel that Paxton has failed to confront the historicist approach
with a firm critique of its exceedingly idealist or idiographic
bias. This bias is epitomised in G. L. Mosse’s important studies on the origins
of “the fascist revolution” which hinge on what he calls “the
nationalization of the masses”. This is clearly from the outset a
“cultural” interpretation of fascism because it lays stress on the importance
of nationalism as a political philosophy, on a par with racism to which
it is implicitly ideologically tied, as the root cause of the propagation of
inchoate and incipient fascist ideology in “the masses”.
Evidently, then, to speak of “the nationalization of
the masses” already prejudges the issue of the social causation of the origins
and formation of fascist movements because this phrase leaves out the question
of who exactly – what social agency – promoted this nationalization and,
secondly, it leaves out the question of why and how “the masses” came to
dominate social reality in advanced industrial capitalist societies. The inversion
of the historicist approach that we are advocating will be immediately
perceptible if we examine the converse phrase, “the massification of the
nation”, which quite obviously inverts the arrow of causation from the
spread of nationalist ideology to the formation of mass society. For whereas
nationalism is clearly an ideological notion, which leaves open and unexplained
the vital questions of how and why masses came into existence, how
and why nationalism arises and, worse still, how and why nations
have emerged in the first place, the notion of massification of the nation or
mass society refers instead to the material economic developments that affect
the production and reproduction of a society, and specifically those
developments brought about by the spread of capitalist industry and the
concentration of capitalist enterprise, both of which factors can explain how
and why masses were formed, how and why nations emerged and, as a
corollary of the establishment of nation-states, how and why nationalism
could flourish as an ideology!
Long before “the masses” can be “nationalized”, both
masses and nations must be brought into existence! It is likely therefore that
a study of the causes of the creation of mass society will tell us much more
about how nationalism arose; whereas no amount of studies on nationalism will
ever be able to explain how a society came to be massified, be shaped
into a nation, and thereafter become prone to the nationalist
virus. The historicist approach assumes the existence of mass society
and of the nation-state and then describes but does not explain
how mass society was ideologically induced into nationalistic fervour. The
reason why historicism cannot explain the rise of nationalism as a potent
political ideology aimed quite obviously at asserting the domination of one
nation-state over other nation-states is that any proper explanation of
nationalism must account first of all for the rise of nation-states, as the
name implies, and then for the formation of those popular “masses” without
whose “nationalization” it would have no historical weight.
The trouble with “cultural” or historicist accounts
of fascism and of nationalism as its precursor is that the very
idiosyncrasy of the various nationalisms and fascisms – their singularity
within separate nations – fails to explain why they arose contemporaneously in
all the different European nations that then came into political conflict and open
warfare. If indeed nationalism and then fascism was the result of cultural
factors, it is then almost impossible to establish how national cultures that
were so dramatically idiosyncratic as to be incomparable could give rise to
political transformations and forms of national organization that were almost
identical! From a cultural viewpoint, nationalism makes little sense because
each nationalism is, from the perspective of inter-national conflict, so
astoundingly similar to all other nationalisms! The cultural historicist
theory of fascism is unsatisfactory for the simple reason that it claims to
provide a theory of “fascism” when in fact it is from the outset constitutionally
confined to the mere description of the different national fascisms as
phenomena sui generis, as unique and distinct national experiences easy to
contrast but almost impossible to compare.
On the contrary, the historical materialist theory
explains how expanding capitalist industry led first to the formation of
industrial cities and to a population explosion, then to the concentration of
capitals by bourgeoisies that consolidated their politico-economic power around
monarchic state apparatuses which then in turn metamorphosed into elaborate
parliamentary regimes representing at first only bourgeois and aristocratic
parties of notables until the rise of organized working classes forced the
extension of mass electoral suffrage, resulting finally in the formation of
mass political parties vying for the control of parliamentary government majorities.
Before we tackle the historical materialist theoretical
perspective on fascism and totalitarian dictatorships, we ought to mention one
more important foundation for the critique of “cultural” and historicist
explanations founded overwhelmingly on the ideological notion of “nationalism”.
Presumably, the entire rationale of attributing the rise of fascist movements
to nationalism is to alert us against this ideological phenomenon. The problem
with this rationale, however, is that the line between patriotism and
nationalism is extremely hard to draw. Yet, in reality, where conflicts between
nations and nation-states are involved, it is well-nigh impossible to counter
one nation’s “nationalism” in its pejorative sense without a healthy dose of “patriotism”
in the ameliorative sense – for the simple reason that when a nation resorts to
brute force, little else other than countervailing and superior brute force will
be able to quell the brutality of the opposing nation! With all due respect
for the left-wing enemies of “nationalisms”, the reality remains that when we
are confronted by evil – as in the case of totalitarian dictatorships – the only
way for us to counter it is to be united in our patriotic resolve to defeat it
decisively! The empty, powerless moralizing of opponents of “nationalism”
is one more – and perhaps the greatest – criticism that can be moved against
these kinds of tiresome and pathetic historical (hysterical, rather) exercises.
(The literature on nationalism is almost as endless as it is tiresome and
vacuous: see, generally, works by John Breuilly and Ernest Gellner. More
fruitful perspectives are to be found in the work of E.J. Hobsbawm.)
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