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“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
-President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies, April 1938
Seven years after FDR spoke these words, every major European polity associated with fascism had collapsed. While Mussolini’s regime proudly touted the wonders of fascism, no major power has openly identified itself as fascist since 1945. Yet seventy years later, the word is commonly used in contemporary political debate. Fascism shows no signs of retiring to the graveyard of forgotten, obsolete political factions, even though no one with any meaningful power will admit to being a fascist.
This starting point led to our interest in Fascism: The Career of a Concept, by Paul Gottfried. Gottfried is a scholar of intellectual history; in this book, he provides a series of disjointed studies on fascism. While some attention is paid to the origins of fascism, the main focus is on the evolution of the term’s use since the movement’s peak popularity in the 1930’s. He charts the many competing points of view that accompanied the changes and expansions in the meaning of the term while arguing that we should stick to a narrower, more accurate definition which resembles the original Italian fascism.
This is discomforting and perilous territory to step into. Gottfried goes to lengths in the book to reassure the reader that he has no crypto-fascist motive or love for the Nazi tyranny that forced his Jewish family to flee from Europe. Instead, Gottfried insists that the word has a specific meaning that is dangerously diluted when reduced to an insult hurled at anyone who disagrees with the political left. As a scholar who is a clear stickler for definitions and nuance, he may have taken issue with Roosevelt’s simplistic definition above. Gottfried traces the expansion of fascism’s meaning in the popular mind to the scholarship of Ernst Nolte, who he expresses great admiration for. However, Nolte’s idea that national socialism was a form of radical fascism made it convenient to lump together the ideology of Hitler and Mussolini as being fundamentally indistinguishable. In Gottfried’s view, Marxist scholars started from this point and worked outward to paint all rightist ideas as fascist and evil. This flowed into popular rhetoric, whereas most scholars of the subject still recognize a distinction between Italian fascism and German national socialism.
The grand arc of Gottfried’s narrative begins with positioning “generic” fascism – the fascism of Mussolini’s Italy – as a form of revolutionary rightism. Drawing on the work of leading scholars in this field, he makes the controversial argument that the way this ideology manifested is inextricably linked to corporatist ideas, revolutionary methods and attitudes that were mainly relevant to Catholic countries during the interwar years. As far as Gottfried is concerned, fascism has minimal relevance outside of that historical context. Gottfried also argues that Hitler’s national socialism and the fascist puppet governments he installed around Europe should be viewed as their own separate categories. For example, he argues that the latter usually consisted of authoritarian, clerical rightists who opportunistically collaborated with the Nazis to come to power. While we’ve listed some of the most explosive arguments in the book above, Gottfried also takes pains to describe scholarly views on the relationships between fascism and totalitarianism, leftism, internationalism, utopianism and the Frankfurt School’s placing of fascism into a historical narrative.
Our initial reaction to all of these arguments was hesitance to post. This is an incredibly dense work geared more toward academics rather than laypeople. We’re hardly qualified to conclusively judge Gottfried’s work; mainstream scholars gave mixed reviews but did acknowledge the book as a work of serious scholarship. We did, however, get past our hesitance and decide it was worth bringing this book to the attention of Citizen Scholar readers. One reason for doing so is that this book is a powerful reminder of the complexity of intellectual history. Gottfried draws on a wealth of knowledge to expose a mind-blowing diversity of perspectives within groups that we’d generally consider to be ideologically uniform. Examples that come to mind include Benito Mussolini’s political faction and the Frankfurt School – these groups are ultimately composed of individuals with complex, scarcely coherent views who are in turned influenced by many other individuals and ideas. We can dislike fascism or Marxism while simultaneously acknowledging that people held these views for more complex reasons than just that they were bad people.
The other reason we concluded this book was worth writing about was how much it made us question a key assumption we had. We began the book nodding along with the author’s assertion that fascism has a specific meaning which should be preserved rather than be allowed to expand into uselessness. We’re still sympathetic to that view in theory, but were surprised by how skeptical we grew over the course of the book. On the one hand, we agree that it’s wrong to falsely smear any right winger as a fascist. On the other hand, language evolves naturally over time. Are the distinctions between fascism and national socialism meaningful enough that Gottfried has to write whole books policing the distinction? The truth matters, but this distinction may be more important for academic purposes than for clearly practical ones. Ideally, we can get to a point where we simultaneously acknowledge the nuance in these comparisons without dismissing the obvious links and cross pollination. We welcome your thoughts on these matters!
All the best,
The Citizen Scholar Team
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Discussion #43: Fascism: The Career of a Concept, by Paul Gottfried