Table Of ContentThe Nature of Fascism
The Nature of Fascism
Roger Griffin
First published in Great Britain in 1991
by Pinter Publishers Limited
Reprinted 1993
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016
Transferred to Digital Printing 2006
© Roger Griffin
Typeset by Florencetype Ltd, Kewstoke, Avon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-415-09661-8
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 0-415-09661-8
Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some
imperfections in the original may be apparent
Contents
Preface
Preface to the paperback edition
Acknowledgements
1. The ‘Nature’ of Generic Fascism
2. A New Ideal Type of Generic Fascism
3. Italian Fascism
4. German Fascism
5. Abortive Fascist Movements in Inter-war Europe
6. Non-European and Post-war Fascisms
7. The Psycho-historical Bases of Generic Fascism
8. Socio-political Determinants of Fascism's Success
Postscript
Glosssary
Index
For Mariella
Preface
There are moments when from above the horizon of the mind a new constellation dazzles the eyes of
all those who cannot find inner peace, an annunciation and storm-siren betokening a turning point in
world history, just as it once did for the kings from the East. From this point on the surrounding stars
are engulfed in a fiery blaze, idols shatter into shards of clay, and everything that has taken shape
hitherto is melted down in a thousand furnaces to be cast into new values.
The epiphany to which the German Ernst Jünger was alluding here on the first
page of his novel, Battle as Inner Experience, was bound up with his personal
experience of front-line combat during the First World War. However, his words
express a central component of all revolutionary sentiment: that privileged
moment when frustration and despair in the contemporary state of human affairs
are suddenly transfigured into the visionary sense of an imminent
metamorphosis, a new world.
There is no need to be a modern Nostradamus to predict that all societies
which operate the Judaeo-Christian scheme of historical time will, as the year
2000 approaches, be rife with speculations about the immediate fate of the
world. Prophets of doom will vie with Utopian futurologists in announcing
competing visions of decadence and renewal as our fin de siècle gives way to the
third millennium, a prospect laden with mythic force even for ‘modern’ minds.
The collective sense of an historical watershed can only be reinforced by a
number of major transformations in the perceived and objective structures of
world society: the rise of fundamentalist, separatist and tribal nationalisms; the
overthrow or dissolution of oppressive state communisms through revolutionary
and gradualist democratic movements; the proposal of a ‘new world order’
safeguarded by a United Nations which finally lives up to the visionary ideals
which led to its foundation; the growing realization of how imminent ecological
catastrophe might be, and the efforts to transform a suicidal and biocidal modern
civilization into an indefinitely sustainable framework for all terrestrial life,
including that of our own species. To say that humanity is at a crossroads may
for once not be a piece of ethnocentric rhetoric.
At such a time it may well be asked if an investigation into ‘the nature of
fascism’ can really justify the intellectual, publishing and paper resources
expended on it. After all, if by ‘fascism’ we mean Fascism and Nazism and
movements which sought to emulate them, it comprehensively failed in its bid to
lay the foundations of a post-liberal society immune from the evils which it
attributed to liberalism and socialism, despite the horrendously destructive
persecutions and wars it unleashed. The New Order in which nations would be
refounded on ‘healthy’ principles and the New Man who would inhabit it
remained a chimera. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War it was
only too natural that the human sciences devoted considerable resources to
explaining the meteoric trajectory traced by Nazism and Fascism before they
both burnt out and to investigating kindred movements which had not achieved
power but were symptoms of the same international crisis. Half a century on, in
an age dominated by dreams, not of the reborn national community but the
international one, does a preoccupation with the definition and dynamics of
fascism have any direct ‘relevance’ except as a contribution to a well-established
sub-discipline of history already overflowing with data and theories?
It is one of the premises underlying this book that it is precisely in the
turbulent social and ideological climate of the late twentieth century that the
dynamics of fascism and the place it occupies in the unfolding of modern history
can best be understood by the non-fascist. Fascism was no freak display of anti-
modernism or of social pathological processes in the special paths of
development followed by a few nation-states. Its raw materials were such forces
as militarism, racism, charismatic leadership, populist nationalism, fears that the
nation or civilization as a whole was being undermined by the forces of
decadence, deep anxiety about the modern age and longings for a new era to
begin, all of which are active ingredients in contemporary history. What made it
possible for these ingredients to be forged together into popular, and even mass
movements in the inter-war period and for two of them, Fascism and Nazism,
eventually to erect a new type of single party state, was an extraordinary
conjuncture of acute socio-political tensions resulting directly or indirectly from
the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Fascism is thus very much a
child of the twentieth century. At a time when ethnic nationalisms are displaying
increasing virulence, and even the most dispassionate armchair politician or
contemporary historian is torn between premonitions of cataclysm and hopes of
a new dawn, it makes smaller demands on the ‘historical imagination’ to
understand the perverse mythic logic which underlies the fascist project of
destroying the old order so that the nation can be created anew.
Hopefully it will be shown that when the elusive ‘fascist minimum’ is defined
strictly in terms of the reborn nation and the post-liberal society which will
supposedly underpin it, the resulting ideal type is not only more concise and
‘elegant’ than those formulated to date but provides new insights into the
dynamics of individual fascist movements. Clearly, a book on the ‘nature of
fascism’ written on this basis will be an exercise in the applied history of ideas.
As such it will pay the scantiest attention to the myriad events in which each
fascist movement is enmeshed or the particular sociopolitical and economic
factors which facilitate or inhibit its success, but will instead focus on the core
ideology of fascism. Given the vast range of diverse phenomena in which this
ideology manifests itself, the text which results will necessarily be short on
detail and original research but long on theorizing and judgments based on
secondary sources.
Considerations of space preclude all but the most fleeting allusions to the
extensive primary sources of fascist ideology subsumed within the analysis this
book offers, especially in Chapters 3 to 6. (Incidentally, all translations of
quotations or passages taken from books published in languages other than
English are my own.) The result is a book which as far as its register and format
are concerned, addresses itself primarily to undergraduates, non-academic
researchers and to sixth-form or high school teachers, as well as to postgraduates
and (more hesitantly) experts working in this field. Obviously these represent
two quite different constituencies of readers. The first will clearly need to avail
themselves of secondary works on some of the phenomena which I treat so
schematically, as well as of ‘rival’ generic theories, if they are to gain an
adequate grasp of specific aspects of the many issues I touch on and a rounded
view of the debate as a whole. I trust that the abundant (but far from exhaustive)
bibliographical references to (mainly English-language) sources will be helpful
to this end. The second group will be acutely aware of the contentiousness of the
theory I develop and the considerable simplifications and omissions which its
exposition has necessitated. I would be very grateful, both for my own research
purposes and for the sake of improving any revised edition that might be
contemplated, if readers of either category would write to me personally care of
the Humanities Department of Oxford Polytechnic to point out sections of the
argument which are confusing or obscure, to put me right on particularly
disturbing empirical gaffes and lapses or to point out material which might
corroborate or refine my thesis on fascism but of which I seem to be oblivious.
In the case of Fascism and Nazism, the only two fascisms to have formed a
government autonomously as a result of a successful (and partly ‘legal’) assault
on state power, I have integrated my analysis into an historical overview of their
evolution from movement to regime. This is for the benefit both of the general
reader new to the subject and of those experts familiar with one but not the other.
To bring out the structural kinship in the political ecology and geology of the
many more highly disparate varieties of fascisms which in one way or another
remained abortive revolutionary movements, Chapters 5 and 6 provide satellite
photos, or artist's impressions, of vast areas of fascist terrain, parts of which may
be well trodden by some readers on the ground but completely new to others.
My aim throughout has not been to offer a ‘potted history’ of fascism but rather
to throw into relief the high degree of cohesion which ‘structurally’ underlies the
extraordinary surface heterogeneity of its ideology and at the same time to
identify the veins of regularity which run through the apparent chaos of the fates
which befall its various manifestations. Such a book clearly runs the risk of
being neither the fish of a general reader nor the fowl of a specialist text, but I
hope that all those fascinated by the enigma of fascism will find that, like the
curate's egg, it is at least edible in parts.
Roger Griffin
Oxford, February 1991
