Week 5
Fascism
SOCI 229
Lecture I: September 30th
A Quick Reminder
Response Memo Deadline
Your third response memo—which has to be between 250-400 words and posted on our Moodle Discussion Board—is due by 8:00 PM today.
A Quick Reminder
An Election Is Looming Over the Horizon
A Quick Reminder
The Midterm Paper
Midterm Paper Deadline
Your midterm papers are due by 8:00 PM on Friday, October 25th.
A Quick Reminder
The Midterm Paper
More information will be provided on Wednesday.
Who’s Fascist? — Part I
Is This Person Fascist?
Yes? No? Maybe So?
Is This Person Fascist?
Yes? No? Maybe So?
Is This Person Fascist?
Yes? No? Maybe So?
Is This Person Fascist?
Yes? No? Maybe So?
Is This Person Fascist?
Yes? No? Maybe So?
Is This Person Fascist?
Yes? No? Maybe So?
Is This Person Fascist?
Yes? No? Maybe So?
Does Fascism Still Matter?
Seven Reasons To Still Take Fascism Seriously
(1) Fascism and Modernity
Fascism was not a mere sideshow in the development of modern society. Fascism spread through much of the European heartland of modernity. Alongside environmentalism, it was the major political doctrine of world-historical significance created during the twentieth century. There is a chance that something quite like it … will play an important role in the twenty-first century. Fascists have been at the heart of modernity.
(Mann 2004, 1, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Seven Reasons To Still Take Fascism Seriously
(2) Fascism and the Nation-State
Fascism was not a movement set quite apart from other modern movements. Fascists only embraced more fervently than anyone else the central political icon of our time, the nation-state, together with its ideologies and pathologies.
(Mann 2004, 1, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Seven Reasons To Still Take Fascism Seriously
(3) Fascism and Exclusionary Beliefs
Most fascists, leaders or led, believed in certain things. They were not people of peculiar character, sadists or psychopaths, or people with a “rag-bag” of half-understood dogmas and slogans flitting through their heads (or no more so than the rest of us). Fascism was a movement of high ideals, able to persuade a substantial part of two generations of young people (especially the highly educated) that it could bring about a more harmonious social order.
(Mann 2004, 3, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Seven Reasons To Still Take Fascism Seriously
(4) The Demand Side of Fascism
Few fascists were marginals or misfits. Nor were they confined to classes or other interest groups who found in fascism a “cover” for their narrow material interests. Yet there were “core fascist constituencies” among which fascist values most resonated … [T]he core fascist constituency enjoyed particularly close relations to the sacred icon of fascism, the nation-state.
(Mann 2004, 3, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Seven Reasons To Still Take Fascism Seriously
(5) Fascist Movements and Careers
We must also take seriously fascist movements. They were hierarchical yet comradely, embodying both the leadership principle and a constraining “social cage,” both of which heightened commitment, especially by single young men for whom the movement was almost a “total institution.”
(Mann 2004, 3, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Seven Reasons To Still Take Fascism Seriously
(6) Fascism and Human Suffering
We must take “hardened” fascists seriously in a far more sinister sense, as the eventual perpetrators of great evil. We must not excuse or relativize this but seek to understand it. The capacity for evil is an essential human attribute, and so is our capacity to commit evil for what we believe to be moral purposes. Fascists were especially self-deluded. We need to know more of the circumstances in which we humans do this.
(Mann 2004, 3–4, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Seven Reasons To Still Take Fascism Seriously
(7) The Return of Fascism?
We must take seriously the chance that fascists might return. If we understand the conditions that generated fascists, we can better understand whether they might return and how we might avoid this. Some of the conditions that generated fascism are still present.
(Mann 2004, 4, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Fascism — The Broad Strokes
The Basics of Fascism
A Definition
“… fascism is the pursuit of a transcendent and
cleansing nation-statism through paramilitarism.”
(Mann 2004, 13, EMPHASIS ADDED)
The Basics of Fascism
A Second-Level Escalation
Fascism represents a kind of second-level escalation beyond … “mild nation-statism.” The first escalation came in two parallel forms, one concerning the nation, the other the state.
(Mann 2004, 2, EMPHASIS ADDED)
The Basics of Fascism
A Second-Level Escalation
Regarding the nation, aspirations for democracy became entwined with the notion of the “integral” or “organic” nation. “The people” must rule, but this people was considered as one and indivisible and so might violently exclude from itself minority ethnic groups and political “enemies” (see my forthcoming volume, The Darkside of Democracy, chap. 1, for more analysis of this).
(Mann 2004, 2, EMPHASIS ADDED)
The Basics of Fascism
A Second-Level Escalation
Regarding the state, the early twentieth century saw the rise of a more powerful state, seen as “the bearer of a moral project,” capable of achieving economic, social, and moral development … The combination of modern nationalism and statism was to turn democratic aspirations on their head, into authoritarian regimes seeking to “cleanse” minorities and opponents from the nation. Fascism, the second-level escalation, added to this combination mainly a distinctively “bottom-up” and “radical” paramilitary movement.
(Mann 2004, 2, EMPHASIS ADDED)
The Basics of Fascism
A Second-Level Escalation
“Fascism thus presented a
distinctively paramilitary extreme version of nation-statism.”
(Mann 2004, 2, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Fascist Thought
Among Its Intellectuals
Fascist intellectuals often drew on the following ideas, themes and motifs—
The blending of nationalism and syndicalism.
“Nations, not classes, were the true masses of modernity” (Mann 2004, 7).
The pursuit of moral salvation or purification through a heroic, corporatist state — but in a decidedly anti-materialist guise.
A fierce opposition to the “bourgeois” institutions underlying the “liberal parliamentary state.”
Paramilitary violence—or “moral murder”—against corrupt elites.
A vision of fascistic pursuits as moral crusades.
A Fascist Core?
Nolte (1965) argued that fascism has three core, animating features—
Anti-Marxism
Anti-Liberalism
Anti-Conservatism
Mann (2004) disagreed.
A Fascist Core?
There are other definitions to consider.
A Fascist Core?
Stanley Payne is now the preeminent comparative historian of fascism. He says the fascist core comprises Nolte’s three anti’s, plus a list of other items: nationalism, authoritarian statism, corporatism and syndicalism, imperialism, idealism, voluntarism, romanticism, mysticism, militarism, and violence. Quite a list! He narrows this down into three categories of style, negations, and programs, though these are more abstract than substantive qualities.
(Mann 2004, 10, EMPHASIS ADDED)
A Fascist Core?
A Fascist Core?
We define fascism as a hypernationalist, often pan-nationalist, anti-parliamentary, anti-liberal, anti-communist, populist and therefore anti-proletarian, partly anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois, anti-clerical, or at least, non-clerical movement, with the aim of national social integration through a single party and corporative representation not always equally emphasised; with a distinctive style and rhetoric, it relied on activist cadres ready for violent action combined with electoral participation to gain power with totalitarian goals by a combination of legal and violent tactics.
(Linz 1976, 12–13, EMPHASIS ADDED)
A Fascist Core?
To Mann (2004), this definition is, at once,
too broad and too imprecise.
A Fascist Core?
How about Roger Griffin’s influential theorization of palingenetic revival?
For a relevant reading, see Griffin (1996).
A Fascist Core?
In Mann’s (2004) view, the idea of palingenesis does not
sufficiently reckon with the issue of power.
A Fascist Core?
A myth cannot be an agent driving or integrating anything, since ideas are not free-floating. Without power organizations, ideas cannot actually do anything. What is lacking here is any sense of power. Indeed, even a sense of practicality seems to be lacking in such a definition. Surely, fascists must have offered something more useful than the mythical rebirth of the nation. Who would vote for this?
(Mann 2004, 12, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Mann’s Definition
A Definitional Framework
Mann’s Overarching Definition
“… fascism is the pursuit of a transcendent and
cleansing nation-statism through paramilitarism.”
(Mann 2004, 13, EMPHASIS ADDED)
A Definitional Framework
Mann’s (2004) definition includes five key terms—
Nationalism
Statism
Transcendence
Cleansing
Paramilitarism
(1) Nationalism
As everyone recognizes, fascists had a deep and populist commitment to an “organic” or “integral” nation, and this involved an unusually strong sense of its “enemies,” both abroad and (especially) at home. Fascists had a very low tolerance of ethnic or cultural diversity, since this would subvert the organic, integral unity of the nation.
(Mann 2004, 13, EMPHASIS ADDED)
A Question
Can we complicate Mann’s (2004) definition of nationalism?(2) Statism
Fascists worshiped state power. The authoritarian corporate state could supposedly solve crises and bring about social, economic, and moral development … Since the state represented a nation that was viewed as being essentially organic, it needed to be authoritarian, embodying a singular, cohesive will expressed by a party elite adhering to the “leadership principle.”
(Mann 2004, 14, EMPHASIS ADDED)
(3) Transcendence
Fascists rejected conservative notions that the existing social order is essentially harmonious. They rejected liberal and social democratic notions that the conflict of interest groups is a normal feature of society. And they rejected leftist notions that harmony could be attained only by overthrowing capitalism. Fascists originated from the political right, center, and left alike and drew support from all classes … Fascist nation-statism would be able to “transcend” social conflict, first repressing those who fomented strife … and then incorporating classes and other interest groups into state corporatist institutions.
(Mann 2004, 14, EMPHASIS ADDED)
An Important Caveat
[T]ranscendence was … never actually accomplished. In practice most fascist regimes leaned toward the established order and toward capitalism. Fascists lacked a general critique of capitalism (unlike socialists), since they ultimately lacked interest in capitalism and class. Nation and state comprised their center of gravity, not class. This alone brought them into conflict with the left rather than the right since Marxists and anarchists, not conservatives, tended to be committed to internationalism.
(Mann 2004, 15, EMPHASIS ADDED)
(4) Cleansing
Because opponents were seen as “enemies,” they were to be removed, and the nation cleansed of them. This was fascist aggression in action. It is distressing that we have recently become familiar again with “ethnic cleansing,” though cleansing of political enemies has been less publicized in the late twentieth century.
(Mann 2004, 16, EMPHASIS ADDED)
(5) Paramilitarism
Paramilitarism was both a key value and the key organizational form of fascism. It was seen as “popular,” welling up spontaneously from below, but it was also elitist, supposedly representing the vanguard of the nation. Violence was the key to the “radicalism” of fascism … What essentially distinguishes fascists from the many military and monarchical dictatorships of the world is this “bottom-up” and violent quality of its paramilitarism.
(Mann 2004, 16, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Group Discussion I
Folk Understandings of Fascism
In recent years, many people have been described as fascist—from political entrepreneurs to lay individuals. How can we think about the term’s popularity and social resonance?
Folk Understandings of Fascism
Do “folk” understandings of fascism map onto Mann’s (2004) sociological treatment of the term? Why or why not?
Group Discussion II
Fascism’s Analytic Utility
As a construct, does fascism provide any analytic utility?
Does it say anything about moralized political conflict or the broader social world that concepts like populism, ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism do not?
Group Discussion III
Fascism and the Far Right
In your view, is fascism a far right phenomenon?
Or is it something else entirely?
Lecture II: October 2nd
The Midterm Paper
Guidelines for your midterm papers can be found online.
Review
A Question
What are the five key constructs implicated in Mann’s (2004) definition of fascism?The Supporters of Fascism
A Middle Class Movement?
Another Question
Is this question—that is, attempting to understand fascism’s sociodemographic foundations—related to the supply or demand side of the phenomenon?A Middle Class Movement?
What kinds of people became fascists, and what did they want fascism to accomplish? Curiously — since these are movements denying the importance of classes — class theorists dominate the answers. They see fascism as the product of class conflict and economic crisis, its main accomplishment being to solve the crisis by repressing the working class. Thus it was supported by other social classes.
(Mann 2004, 17, EMPHASIS ADDED)
A Middle Class Movement?
Marxists have understood the significance of violence and paramilitarism in fascism. Otto Bauer said that fascism was “the dictatorship of the armed gang.” But Marxists tend to discount fascist beliefs, reducing them to their supposed socio-economic base. Since class and capitalism are universal features of modern societies, fascism is also a universal potentiality. Yet since other social structures were just as universal across the early twentieth century, these might also imprint themselves on a single generic fascism.
(Mann 2004, 17–18, EMPHASIS ADDED)
A Middle Class Movement?
Class-based treatments often position fascism a middle class movement — i.e., in opposition to the working and upper classes.
A Middle Class Movement?
Scholars who champion these treatments “accept that some fascists were anticapitalist but believe that far more were antisocialist.”
(Mann 2004, 19)
A Middle Class Movement?
“Under fascism, capitalism would be controlled, but socialism destroyed. For — it is said — the middle class feared the threat from below more than that from above.”
(Mann 2004, 19, EMPHASIS ADDED)
A Middle Class Movement?
Other class-based theorists pushed further still—arguing that fascism represented the failure of liberal capitalism.
Still others emphasized socioeconomic deprivation and status threats. These scholars “saw the deprived, the losers, the marginal, the uprooted as flocking to fascism — ‘a true community of bankruptcy,’ declared Löwenthal.”
(Mann 2004, 19, EMPHASIS ADDED)
A Middle Class Movement?
To some theorists, fascism was even understood as a tool of capitalists to ward off the proletarian masses.
A Middle Class Movement?
Yet Another Question
Did Mann (2004) agree with these class-based perspectives?A Middle Class Movement?
The Answer
Not really.A Middle Class Movement?
According to Mann (2004), class-based theories explained something but ignored fascists’ own beliefs, dispositions and moral orientations.
A Middle Class Movement?
Fascists were motivated by a highly emotional struggle to cleanse their nation of “enemies,” and so they indulged in reckless aggression and terrible evil. That aggression and evil usually did not benefit them materially. Fascists were too aggressive for their own good — especially in their keenness for war. They were chronically overconfident about what the new man could achieve. And though material interests drove forward some of the atrocities against Jews and other “enemies” (looting was ubiquitous), genocide is another matter.
(Mann 2004, 22, EMPHASIS ADDED)
A Middle Class Movement?
Mann (2004) critiqued “idealist” explanations, too.
A Middle Class Movement?
There is a gaping hole between ideology and social base. We can fill it by recognizing nation-statist and paramilitary constituencies of support, alongside class constituencies. Class theories do have considerable truth content. Fascism borrowed heavily from class ideologies and organizations, was obsessed with the threat of “Bolshevism,” and was sensitive to class interests. Kitchen is correct: We should understand fascism’s social base and functions. Yet “social” should not be equated with “class.”
(Mann 2004, 23, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Core Fascist Constituencies
Fascism’s Social Base
There were three core fascist constituencies—
Constituencies Favouring Paramilitarism
Constituencies Favouring Transcendence
Constituencies Favouring Nation-Statism
(1) Constituencies Favouring Paramilitarism
The fascist core consisted everywhere of two successive generations of young men, coming of age between World War I and the late 1930s. Their youth and idealism meant that fascist values were proclaimed as being distinctively “modern” and “moral.” They were especially transmitted through two institutions socializing young men: secondary and higher education, encouraging notions of moral progress, and the armed forces, encouraging militarism.
(Mann 2004, 26, EMPHASIS ADDED)
(1) Constituencies Favouring Paramilitarism
Since the appeal was mainly to young men, it was also distinctly macho, encouraging an ethos of braggart, semi-disciplined violence, in peacetime encouraging militarism to mutate into paramilitarism. The character of fascism was set by young men socialized in institutions favorable to moralizing violence and eventually to murder.
(Mann 2004, 26, EMPHASIS ADDED)
(2) Constituencies Favouring Transcendence
Fascists tended to come from sectors that were not in the front line of organized struggle between capital and labor. They were less likely to be workers in urban, manufacturing settings … They were less likely to be small or large businessmen or their managers. Yet they were not “marginal” or “rootless.” Their social location was (for the interwar period) relatively secure. But from their slightly removed vantage point they viewed class struggle with distaste, favoring a movement claiming to transcend class struggle. Of course, in most cases transcendence was not achieved.
(Mann 2004, 27, EMPHASIS ADDED)
(3) Constituencies Favouring Nation-Statism
Fascists’ backgrounds appeared rather heterogeneous. They tended to have had military experience, be highly educated, work in the public or service sectors and come from particular regional and religious backgrounds … [T]here was a principle of unity amid these varied attributes: Fascists were at the heart of either the nation or the state. Some “nation-statist” locations were similar across countries.
(Mann 2004, 27, EMPHASIS ADDED)
(3) Constituencies Favouring Nation-Statism
Soldiers and veterans above all, but also civil servants, teachers, and public sector manual workers were all disproportionately fascist in almost all the countries of mass fascism … Religion was almost everywhere important, reinforcing organic nation-statism (except in Italy, where the Church was transnational).
(Mann 2004, 27, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Who’s Fascist? — Part II
Are These People Fascist?
Yes? No? Maybe So?
Are These People Fascist?
Yes? No? Maybe So?
Are These People Fascist?
Yes? No? Maybe So?
Are These People Fascist?
Yes? No? Maybe So?
Are These People Fascist?
Yes? No? Maybe So?
Group Discussion IV
Are All the Fascists Dead?
A Thought Experiment
Towards the end of his book, Mann (2004, 353) compellingly asks—“[a]re all fascists dead ones?”
Are All the Fascists Dead?
A Thought Experiment
Let’s assume they’re not—and imagine two potential realities.
Are All the Fascists Dead?
A Thought Experiment
Are All the Fascists Dead?
A Thought Experiment
Which scenario is more realistic? Why? Where would our presidential candidates land along these stylized distributions?
The Patriarchal Family and Fascism’s Mythic Past
Fascist Strategies
In How Fascism Works, Stanley (2018) explores a suite of fascist political strategies and motifs like—
Invoking a Mythic Past
Propaganda
Anti-Intellectualism
Law and Order
Etc.
Gender, Family and Fascism
As Stanley (2018) argues, fascist conceptions
of the mythic past are deeply gendered.
Gender, Family and Fascism
The patriarchal family is one ideal that fascist politicians intend to create in society—or return to, as they claim. The patriarchal family is always represented as a central part of the nation’s traditions, diminished, even recently, by the advent of liberalism and cosmopolitanism.
(Stanley 2018, 28, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Gender, Family and Fascism
We will explore more of Stanley’s (2018) ideas about fascism, the
mythic past and gender next week.
Gender, Family and Fascism
In a short piece juxtaposing conservatism and
fascism, Ganz (2022) also highlights the relationship between masculinity and fascistic pursuits.
Gender, Family and Fascism
Conservatives tend to emphasize the patriarchal and staid parts of traditional masculinity—the stern but beneficent father as pillar of community stability and so forth—but the fascists’ cult of masculinity is hyper-macho, vitalistic, and explicitly centers violence and war.
(Ganz 2022, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Group Discussion V
Gender and Exclusionary Politics
Generally speaking, how do you think gender is implicated in the politics of exclusion?
See You Monday
References
