Part 2 – Fascism and Totalitarianism
Part 3 – Fascism as the Unconquered Past
Part 4 – Fascism as a Movement of the Left
Part 5 – The Failure of Fascist Internationalism
Part 6 – The Search for a Fascist Utopia (You are here)
Part 7 – A Vanished Revolutionary Right and Addendum – Fascism and Modernization
Part 8 - Discussion and Conclusion
Chapter 6
This chapter begins with Gottfried introducing us to Karl Mannheim, writer of Ideology and Utopia. The work looks at distinguishing between the two terms in the title. To do this, Mannheim looks at the visions given in the latter half of the second millennium by various European groups.
…Mannheim explores are the apocalyptic expectations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant radicals, the hope for an Age of Reason embraced by the eighteenth-century liberal bourgeois, the harmonious hierarchical society evoked by German and French conservatives in the early nineteenth century and thought to be “realizable” in a postrevolutionary future, and the Marxist view of a socialist world order.
Of particular interest to Mannheim was a vision he called the “romantic-conservative counterutopia”. This was a defensive vision to be used as an intellectual/theoretical counter by conservatives who thought their order was under attack. In this vision, the present was a utopia and the past was where it came from. Thus, liberals were fools for trying to create false realities, history was the supreme teacher, and governments that relied on artificial constitutions were to be mocked.
The key concept to be taken from this “counterutopia” is the focus on “becoming”. Mannheim describes it as such.
“There is a wonderful sense we have,” says [Friedrich] Stahl, “that something truly exists. This is your father, your friend, through whom you have arrived at this position in life. Why am I this? Why am I exactly what I am? And the apparently incomprehensible nature of this situation can only be grasped by recognizing that our being cannot be reduced to thought, that it is not logically necessary but has its source in a higher, free power.”
The tie-in to fascism should be obvious to an attentive reader, since Gottfried has spent many words now describing it as a force created in response to socialism/communism. For Ernst Nolte, there is a direct line from German thinkers in the 1840s who were reacting to the Left Hegelians and the fascists of the 20th century, as both glorified irrationality and authority’s mystical sense in response to their opponents who used reason as the basis for political reform.
Where the fascists and conservative differed is the temporal circumstances they were in. The fascists were acting in a world where bourgeois societies were well-established. They were revolting against the status quo, not defending it. Even their conception of a “people” was one used by the leftists in Mannheim’s studies. The old right did not believe in the population being a “mystical source of spiritual energy that informed the nation.” Instead, the people were those subjects who obeyed authority.
Is there anything there?
That said, we do need to ask if fascism actually had a vision of the future. Was there some vision that radically departed from both the past and the contemporary left?
Gottfried points to people like Jose Antonio and Ledesma Ramos as people who did just that. They looked towards Catholic social teachings, indicating corporatist organization and communal participation. How this would come about wasn’t ever fully worked out, but for these and other Falangist architectural heroes, national syndicalism was the solution.
Gottfried gives three alternatives the fascists may have embraced. The first is the about biological struggle between races and ethnicities, known by its association with the Nazis. There is a non-violent form found in the 19th-century writings of Count Gobineau and Heinrich Gumplowicz which just asserts that history never ends but amounted to ethnic struggle with transient victories providing interruptions.
The second comes from Gentile’s work. History in this view is an unending process in which every individual’s ethical will is part of a multitude that is “actuated by the state as the ‘means’ through which individuals could rise above their particularities and become part of a spiritual whole.” World history, in this sense, is a world court.
The third is about selectively reclaiming the past. All fascist movements did this, Gottfried explains, but some more than others. The Latin manifestations were bigger on this, attempting to update history for counterrevolutionary purposes. In all movement, however, you would find themes of decadence and renewal. History never tended towards a universal society of equals, but arresting deterioration was entirely possible.
Why studying fascism matter
This section is an abrupt turn because it feels out of place with the parts about fascist utopias, but Gottfried turns to the question of why studying fascism (and not “fascism” as any particular side might define it) matters.
Put simply, studying fascism would indicate how far most modern political parties are from the term. Fascism belongs to the right, but most definitely not the same way that the GOP or Germany’s Christian Democrats do. Fascism wasn’t the only “Right” of its time, nor did all fascists fight for Hitler (some understandably fought against him when he invaded their countries).
Gottfried doesn’t believe you could make Nazi ideology ever workable in the West – there’s simply too much ethnic mixing. Insofar as you could call this an “ideology of diversity”, an alternative to that ideology may not exist.
Then there’s an pivot, one that goes after people who might argue that fascism is left-wing because the modern US right uses anti-state and individual rights rhetoric.
This brings the reader back to the question of how fascists could be on the Right, and even on the far Right, if the Right is now identified, at least in the United States, with individual self-fulfillment.
I don’t think “individual self-fulfillment” is how we identify the right in the US or even how some might self-identify that way, there’s a substantial religious population who would not agree with such a term. But assuming this is an accurate definition, Gottfried answers this question with the following.
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The right and left are contextually defined, so just because the fascists fought one enemy with one set of ideals doesn’t mean the current American right has to fight that same enemy. To the modern US right, the state must be opposed because it doesn’t support right-wing policies.
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There’s nothing inherently right-wing about individual rights. European conservatives typically identify individualism as a left-wing idea. In America, the left has used the language of individual rights as a weapon found in the Bill of Rights and that traditionalists don’t want used against them. Thus, they defend what they don’t believe.
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Appealing to constitutionally guaranteed individual rights is not something that belongs to the historic right. Rather, this may indicate the limited range of options for critics of the modern administrative state.
Fascism, Gottfried argues, never had a chance for being an overpowering historical force. It simply did not build mass movements large enough except in unevenly modernized countries (excluding the Nazi regime). They might have survived a bit longer than most if all things went well, but their failure indicates how difficult a right-wing movement would find it to oppose the “ascendancy of the modern left”.
To summarize, Fascism offered distinct utopian visions even if it did not believe in a universal one. This was in reaction to and used the terminology of those offered by the socialists and Marxists. A few alternative visions existed, with a major one being national syndicalism. Fascism is an undoubtedly right-wing phenomenon which modern right-wingers cannot wholly break association from. That said, Nazism would never work in the modern West, and fascism stood very little chance of winning to the extent that socialism/communism/Marxism did.
I hope you enjoyed! Next time, we’ll go over Chapter 7 – A Vanished Revolutionary Right.
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Notes -
Tangent to this, one might find interesting the recent comment I wrote about the lack of modern utopias that is characteristic of our era and the void it leave in us.
The gist starts at the half of my comment, ctrl find "The salient message I have"
https://www.themotte.org/post/240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/45193?context=8#context
Also it is disappointing to see that themotte.org does not support the disruptive feature that are text fragments https://web.dev/text-fragments/
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