The primacy of culture: The current growth (or manufacture) of consensus within fascist studies

Journal of Contemporary History

Volumn 37, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 21-43

  Griffin, Roger ^a  

^a OXFORD BROOKES UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0344395071     PISSN: 00220094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/00220094020370010701     Document Type: Review

References (118)

1. Hugh Seton-Watson, 'Fascism, Right and Left', Journal of Contemporary History, 1, 1 (January 1966), 183.
2. Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (New York 1965).
3. Or, for that matter, Franco-Israeli: see Zeev Sternhell's urbane but devastating critique of Nolte's metapolitical musings in Walter Laqueur (ed.), Fascism: A Reader's Guide (Harmonds-worth 1979), 395-9.
4. E.g. Laqueur (ed.), Fascism, op. cit. (1st edn London 1976);
5. G.L. Mosse, International Fascism (London and Beverly Hills 1979);
6. Stein Larsen et al., Who Were the Fascists? (Oslo 1980);
7. Stanley Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Definition (Madison, WI 1980).
8. Cf. the observation of Robert Paxton: 'Following a period of active study of generic fascism in the 1960s and 1970s, strongly influenced by Marxism, scholarly activity shifted about 1975 away from generic fascism to particular cases. . Now the study of generic fascism is reappearing. . .'. 'The Five Stages of Fascism', The Journal of Modern History, 70 (March 1998), 1. However, at this level of generalization I would date the 'decline' (at least in the general perception of the state of play in the hunt for the fascist minimum) to the early 1980s (cf. note 4).
9. 'Whatever happened to Fascism?' in Jane Caplan (ed.), Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class. Essays by Tim Mason (Cambridge 1995), 331.
10. Peter Drucker, The End of Economic Man (New York 1995; 1st edn 1937);
11. A. James Gregor, Interpretations of Fascism (New York 1997; 1st edn 1974) with new introduction; Michael Ledeen, Universal Fascism (New York 1998; 1st edn 1972);
12. Juan Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Colorado 2000; 1st edn 1975);
13. George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution (collection of previously published essays written between 1961 and 1996 with a new introduction, Madison, WI 1998).
14. Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism. 1914-1945 (New York 1995);
15. Walter Laqueur, Fascism. Past, Present, and Future (New York 1996);
16. Richard Thurlow, Fascism (Cambridge 1999);
17. A. James Gregor, Phoenix. Fascism in our Time (New Brunswick, NJ 1999);
18. Paxton, 'The Five Stages of Fascism', op. cit.; Zeev Sternhell, new introductory essays to the revised French editions of his trilogy on French fascism, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français; La Droite révolutionnaire 1885-1914;
19. Ni droite ni gauche. Morphologie et historiographie du fascisme en France (Fayard 2000).
20. Notably Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London 1991);
21. Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London 1996);
22. Mark Neocleous, Fascism (Buckingham and Minneapolis 1997);
23. Aristotle Kallis, Fascist Ideology (London 2000);
24. David Baker, Models of Fascism: Examining the Fascist Matrix (London forthcoming).
25. David Roberts, 'How not to Think about Fascism and Ideology, Intellectual Antecedents and Historical Meaning', Journal of Contemporary History, 35, 2 (April 2000), 208.
26. E.g. his new (4th edn) of Der Faschismus. Ursachen und Herrschaftsstruktur. Eine Einführung (Heilbronn 1998).
27. Neocleous, Fascism, op. cit.
28. David Renton, Fascism, Theory and Practice (London 1999).
29. For example, several of Sternhell's major works were published in the 'fallow' 1980s, as was Neil O'Sullivan's Fascism (London and Melbourne 1983).
30. I summarized the area of common ground (consensus) on the fascist minimum in the introduction to International Fascism. Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus (London 1998), 14.
31. This definition is cited in Stanley Payne's review article, 'Historical Fascism and the Radical Right', Journal of Contemporary History, 35, 1 (January 2000), 110. In the light of the present article I would now modify it to read: 'Fascism is a genus of modern politics which aspires to bring about a total revolution in the political and social culture of a particular national or ethnic community. While extremely heterogeneous in the specific ideology of its many permutations, in its social support, in the form of organization it adopts as an anti-systemic movement, and in the type of political system, regime, or homeland it aims to create, generic fascism draws its internal cohesion and affective driving force from a core myth that a period of perceived decadence and degeneracy is imminently or eventually to give way to one of rebirth and rejuvenation in a postliberal new order.'
32. See the essay by Roger Eatwell, 'On Defining the Fascist Minimum: The Centrality of Ideology', Journal of Political Ideologies 1, 3 (October 1996), who, despite his criticisms of Payne and myself, is still very much a member of the 'club', as is demonstrated by his basic definition of the fascist minimum as a form of 'holistic third-way nationalism' in Fascism, op. cit., 11.
33. E.g. John Whittam, Fascist Italy (London 1995), 1.
34. See Thomas Burger, Max Weber's Theory of Concept Formation, History, Laws, and Ideal Types (Durham, NC 1976), esp. 127-9.
35. Payne, 'Historical Fascism and the Radical Right', op. cit., 109-11.
36. E.g. Paul Hayes, Fascism (London 1973);
37. A.J. Gregor, Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship (Princeton, NJ 1979);
38. O'Sullivan, Fascism, op. cit.;
39. Peter Brooker, Faces of Fraternalism: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan (Oxford 1991);
40. and more recently Laqueur, Fascism. Past, Present, and Future, op. cit.
41. Renton, Fascism, op. cit., 24. In an article for Searchlight, 290 (August 1999), 24-5, 'Fascism is more than ideology', Renton makes an even more openly unfounded accusation that a revisionist intent underlies the 'new consensus', when he claims that 'the danger of the academic approach to fascism lies in the path it treads from an idealist definition of fascism to a positive description of fascism. The argument that fascism equals Mussolini and not Hitler [which within the new consensus only Sternhell's position comes close to approximating] is an argument for a positive reevaluation of fascism.' This sort of 'positive treatment of Mussolini' he then refers to explicitly as 'one factor contributing towards the new-found respectability of the MSI/AN', Italy's 'post-fascist' political party.
42. T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago 1970) -
43. the degree of intellectual freedom actually enjoyed in the 'Free World' has been radically called into question in a more sinister key by such classic texts as Herbert Marcuse, One-dimensional Man (London 1964)
44. and Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York 1988).
45. E.g. John Pollard, The Fascist Experience in Italy (London 1998);
46. It will be interesting to see the relationship to the new consensus which informs David Baker's forthcoming book on theories of generic fascism, but given his enthusiastic endorsement of one variant of it in his biography of A.K. Chesterton, The Ideology of Obsession (London and New York 1996), he is unlikely to be one of its most vitriolic critics.
47. Alexander De Grand, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: The Fascist Style of Rule (New York and London 1995), 2, 77-8.
48. Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship (4th edn London 2000).
49. R.J.B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London 1998), 226.
50. Particularly The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Harvard 1996).
51. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship, op. cit., 24-9.
52. Ibid., 228-9. There is a strong suspicion that Bosworth is guilty of tarring with the same brush of 'culturalism' all specialist publications on fascism with a cultural/aesthetic focus. This leads him to confuse traditional empiricists with an anthropological bent, such as George Mosse and Emilio Gentile, with scholars demonstrably influenced by the 'linguistic turn' of the early 1990s, when anglophone scholars 'discovered' the relevance to fascist studies of a postmodernist, post-structuralist or deconstructionist preoccupation with texts and discourses, rather than facts and causes - e.g. Barbara Spackman, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi and, above all, Andrew Hewitt: see especially his Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-garde (Stanford, CA c.1993).
53. The distinction between a postmodernist and pre-postmodernist concern with culture in fascist studies, as in all historiography, is an important one which space precludes me from developing in this context. Clearly I share the concern of 'real' historians such as Richard J. Evans (In Defence of History, London 1997) that, taken to extremes, applying the postmodernist preoccupation with 'discourse', instead of causes, to historiography can subvert the essence of the discipline (not that the postmodern mindset can abide 'essences'). In particular, it can encourage scholars to reduce fascism uncritically to an aestheticizing, depoliticizing set of myth-laden 'texts', and to become overly concerned with describing the contents of its cultural production rather than locating it within concrete historical events and processes.
54. The best works written after the linguistic turn, e.g. Emily Braun's Mario Sironi and Fascist Modernism. Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge 2000), avoid such pitfalls and make a real contribution to fascist studies. One implication of this article is that the 'culturalist' trend in historiography is to be welcomed if it is increasingly informed by a judicious blend of the best of postmodernism tempered by the best of historical 'modernism', as embodied in George Mosse and Emilio Gentile, and perhaps enriched by a greater awareness of the relevance of sophisticated cultural anthropologists, such as Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz.
55. Gregor, Phoenix, op. cit., 189, 30-1, 47, 138, 162.
56. For ample empirical evidence of this relevance see particularly Ian Kershaw, Hitler (London 1998), vol. 1: Hubris, 431-52.
57. Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche, op. cit., 116.
58. In English: Antonio Costa-Pinto, 'Fascist Ideology Revisited: Zeev Sternhell and his Critics', European History Quarterly, 6, 16 (1986);
59. Robert Wohl, 'French Fascism Both Right and Left: Reflections on the Sternhell Controversy', The Journal of Modern History, 61 (1991);
60. Sternhell, 'Fascist Ideology' in Walter Laqueur (ed.), Fascism: A Reader's Guide, op. cit., 325-406.
61. If the embryonic distinction between ideological and concrete fascism has been gestating in Sternhell's mind for some time, this at least helps to explain his inclusion of the Iron Guard in his encyclopedia definition of fascism as a fusion of left and right, which is deeply anomalous given Codreanu's profound hostility to the left in all its forms. See his article 'Fascism' in D. Miller (ed.), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought (Oxford 1986).
62. Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (New York 1972);
63. idem, French Peasant Fascism: Henri Dorgère's Greenshirts and the Crises of French Agriculture 1929-1939 (Oxford 1997).
64. Martin Blinkhorn's Fascism and the Right in Europe 1919-1945 (London 2000) also criticizes the staticity of the 'new consensus' approach and argues for a less abstract, regime-oriented model while actually corroborating its essentials.
65. Paxton, 'The Five Stages of Fascism', op. cit., 1, 4. The subsequent quotations are taken from pages 9, 21, 11, 6-7, 7, 22, 23.
66. Notably Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London 1974), and Kühnl, Der Faschismus, op. cit.
67. A recent example is Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich. A New History (London 2000) who eschews any discussion of nazism's relationship to fascism, but writes a vigorous defence of the totalitarian paradigm and makes extensive use of the term 'political religion'. (Incidentally, the terms in which he portrays the ideological contents of nazism's 'pseudo-religious' dimension are profoundly compatible with the concept of fascism suggested by the new consensus.)
68. Aristotle Kallis, 'The "Regime-Model" of Fascism: A Typology', European History Quarterly, 30, 1 (2000).
69. Kallis attempts to apply his own version of a 'practical' definition of fascism to a comparative study of Italian fascist and nazi imperialism in (the misleadingly entitled) Fascist Ideology. Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922-1945 (London 2000).
70. Kallis is much more open about his acceptance of the consensual definition of fascist ideology as a form of revolutionary nationalism as a basic premise of his attempts to elaborate the 'regime-model' of fascism: see Kallis, Fascist Ideology, op. cit., 35, 38 (where he talks of 'national palingenesis'), and 'The "Regime-Model" of Fascism', op. cit., 96.
71. Arguably Payne does something similar when he introduces into his minimum such elements as 'mass mobilization, the Führerprinzip', and the tendency to 'normatize war and/or military values', which holds true for the dominant forms of fascism in the 1930s but is far from universally true of its contemporary manifestations. See Payne, A History of Fascism, op. cit., 14.
72. I must confess that I fall into the same trap in The Nature of Fascism, op. cit., when (e.g. on p. 44) I stress both the mass-movement, 'populist' dimension of fascism as a movement and the 'imminence' of the national rebirth in the fascist mindset. Neither of these criteria hold for many varieties of neo-fascism, some of which spurn popular mobilization and are prepared to sit out the 'interregnum' indefinitely: see Roger Griffin, 'Between Metapolitics and Apoliteía: The New Right's Strategy for Conserving the Fascist Vision in the "Interregnum", Modern and Contemporary France, 8, 2 (February 2000).
73. The phrase is an allusion to Kevin Coogan's Dreamer of the Day. Francis Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (New York 1999), a brilliant study of the shadowy, phantasmagorical world of the postwar neo-fascism, most of which would be quite invisible through the taxonomic lenses applied by Neocleous, Renton, Sternhell, Gregor, De Grand, Paxton or Kallis.
74. See Roger Griffin, 'Interregnum or Endgame? Radical Right Thought in the "Post-fascist" Era', The Journal of Political Ideologies, 5, 2 (2000), 163-78.
75. Pier-Giorgio Zunino, L'ideologia del fascismo (Bologna 1985);
76. Walter Adamson, Avant- Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge, MA 1993);
77. Jeffrey Schnapp, Staging Fascism (Stanford, CA 1996);
78. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA 1996);
79. Günter Berghaus, Fascism and Theatre (Oxford 1996);
80. Marla Stone, The Patron State (Princeton, NJ 1998);
81. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities (Berkeley, CA 2001).
82. For the new trend in taking seriously the Italian fascist regime's 'myths, beliefs and values' see Sergio Luzatto, 'The Political Culture of Fascist Italy', Contemporary European History, 8, 2 (1999), 317-34.
83. Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities. Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis 1996);
84. Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self. The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca, NY 1997).
85. Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff (eds), Fascist Visions. Art and Ideology in France and Italy (Princeton, NJ 1997).
86. E.g. for Spain Sultana Wahnón, 'The Theatre Aesthetics of the Falange' in Berghaus (ed.), Fascism and Theatre, op. cit.
87. For Britain a significant contribution to the new trend has already been made in Thomas Linehan, British Fascism 1918-39 (Manchester 2000)
88. and another important work in the same vein promises to be Tom Linehan and Julie Gottlieb (eds), Cultural Expressions of the Far Right in Britain (London 2002).
89. E.g. Jeffrey Schnapp and Barbara Spackman (eds), Fascism and Culture [special issue], Stanford Italian Review, 8, 1 (1990);
90. R.J. Golsan (ed.), Fascism, Aesthetics, Culture (Hanover and London 1992);
91. Alice Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality (Minneapolis 1994).
92. E.g. Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertizing under Fascism (Minneapolis 1995);
93. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle (Berkeley, CA 1997). See Roberts, 'How not to Think about Fascism', op. cit., and Luzzatto, 'The Political Culture of Fascist Italy', op. cit. on the conceptual and methodological deficiencies of much current work on the 'cultural' aspects of Italian fascism.
94. Roberts, 'How not to Think about Fascism', op. cit., 208.
95. 'Modernity under the New Order: The Fascist Project for Managing the Future', Thamesman Publications (Oxford Brookes School of Business imprint), 1994. Downloadable at: http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/humanities/staff/ moderni.txt
96. Luzatto, 'The Political Culture of Fascist Italy', op. cit., 334.
97. E.g. Philip Coupland, 'The Blackshirted Utopians', Journal of Contemporary History, 33, 2 (April 1998), 255-72;
98. Charles Burdett, 'Journeys to Other Spaces of Fascist Italy', Modern Italy, 5, 1 (2000), 7-23.
99. Antonio Costa-Pinto, Salazar's Dictatorship and European Fascism. Problems of Interpretation (New York 1995);
100. The Blue Shirts. Portuguese Fascists and the New State (New York 2000).
101. Sheelagh Eastwood, Spanish Fascism in the Franco Era: Falanga Española de las JONS (New York 1988);
102. Stanley Payne, Fascism in Spain 1923-1977 (Madison, WI 1999).
103. Wahnón, 'The Theatre Aesthetics of the Falange', op. cit. A forthcoming book also informed by the new consensus is Joan Mellón (ed.), Orden, Jerarquía y Comunidad. Fascismos, Autoritarismos y Neofascismos en la Europa Contemporánea (Madrid, forthcoming).
104. Andreas Umland, Vladimir Zhirinovskii in Russian Politics: Three Approaches to the Emergence of the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia, 1990-1993, unpublished DPhil dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin (1998);
105. idem, 'Wladimir Shirinowskij in der russischen Politik: Einige Hintergründe des Aufstiegs der Liberal-Demokratischen Partei Rußlands', Osteuropa, 44, 12 (1994), 1117-31;
106. idem, 'The Post-Soviet Russian Extreme Right', Problems of Post-Communism, 44, 4 (1997), 53-61.
107. Stephen D. Shenfield, Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, and Movements (New York 2001) also uses a modified version of the new consensus in his investigation.
108. Alessandro Campi is editor of the series Fascismo/Fascismi which is publishing a series of non-Italian publications on generic fascism as part of an attempt to introduce Italian scholars to approaches to the subject of which they have to date remained generally (blissfully?) unaware. A significant book in this series promises to be Alessandro Campi (ed.), Il fascismo e i suoi interpreti (Rome 2001)
109. with essays by many of the 'major players', Italian and foreign, in the field. Meanwhile, Emilio Gentile has produced for the recent volume Le religioni della politica fra democrazie e totalitarismi (Roma, Bari 2000)
110. a seminal redefinition of totalitarianism in terms of the sacralization of politics and the attempt to realize a palingenetic vision of the 'new man' which he specifically applies to generic fascism. It has appeared in English as 'The Sacralization of Politics: Definition, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism', Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 1, 1 (Summer 2000).
111. Kershaw, Hitler, op. cit., vol. 1: Hubris, passim.
112. and he also produced Europäischer Faschismus im Vergleich, 1922-1982 (Frankfurt 1983).
113. He was recently involved in an impressive initiative in spreading the word further, namely an issue of Ethik und Sozialwissenschaft, 11, 2 (2000), 289-334
114. edited by Werner Loh. It was devoted to the question of generic fascism and is due to appear in book form as W. Wippermann and W. Loh (eds), 'Faschismus' kontrovers (Paderborn forthcoming). Conceived as a forum discussion, it featured an article by Wippermann making the case for the term fascism to be more widely used in the non-Marxist generic sense which he gives it (based on the premise that the Italian fascist regime can be construed as the 'real type' of generic fascism), followed by responses from thirteen German political scientists and historians as well as two Americans (Peter Fritzsche, Stanley Payne) and one 'Brit' (R. Griffin).
115. It is a curious paradox that, while it was US academics who pioneered the original drive towards conceptual sophistication in fascist studies, many of their most productive colleagues have yet to recognize the relevance of an ideal type of fascism which stresses its palingenetic thrust in such murky areas as neo-nazism, the 'new' Ku Klux Klan, and new forms of the pagan and religious right. See, for example, Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (New Brunswick, NJ 1998);
116. Jeffrey Kaplan, Radical Religion in America. Millennarian Movements from the Far Right to the Children of Noah (Syracuse, NY 1997).
117. Tim Mason, 'The Primacy of Politics. Politics and Economics in National Socialist Germany' in S. Woolf (ed.), The Nature of Fascism (London 1968), 165-95.
118. George L. Mosse, 'The Genesis of Fascism', Journal of Contemporary History, 1, 1 (January 1966), 19-20.