Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-02T22:02:05.989Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A New Study of Fascism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Klaus Epstein
Klaus Epstein
Affiliation:
Brown University
Get access

Extract

Dr. Nolte's Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche is a work of exceptionally broad range that combines description, comparison, and interpretation in an admirable manner. It attempts three major tasks requiring skills rarely combined in a single historian: a general classification of Fascist systems aiming at a typology; a special examination of the main features of one pre-Fascist (Action Française) and two Fascist movements (in Mussolini's Italy and in Hitler's Germany); and an overall interpretation, in both historical and philosophical terms, of fascism as the dominant force of the period of European history extending from 1919 to 1945.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , January 1964 , pp. 302 - 321
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1964

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Such is, at least, the ideal case. In practice, even democratic regimes frequently fall into Fascist practices when combating communism, as the United States did in the McCarthy period. Is it needless to add that there is a world of difference between Fascist practices within a predominantly liberal system, and fascism per se?

2 Nolte finds considerable merit in all these interpretations, while adding his own in the concluding section. He has no use, on the other hand, for the “anti-German” interpretation (e.g., William L. Shirer's) that sees nazism only as the extreme manifestation of a perennially wicked German national character. Even if true, this approach is of no value in interpreting fascism as a general phenomenon—indeed, it precludes fruitful generalization by being hypnotized by the particular German case, which, while an especially odious species, can nonetheless be subsumed under the general genus of “fascism.”

3 These are admirably self-conscious in the best sense of the word. See his remarks on the weakness of the “typological” method (p. 52) and his refutation of possible objections to his own “phenomenological” method, which attaches great importance to the self-understanding expressed by fascism (pp. 53–55).

4 This theme is enlarged in a valuable article by Nolte, Ernst, “Marx und Nietzsche im Sozialismus des jungen Mussolini,” Historische Zeitschrift, Vol. 191 (1960), 249–335CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Nolte has discovered an important new source that documents the central role of anti-Semitism in Hitler's Weltanschauung: Eckart, Dietrich, Der Bohchewismus von Moses bis Lenin. Zwiegesprdch zwischen Adolf Hitler und mir (Munich 1924)Google Scholar. Nolte gives an excellent analysis in “Eine frühe Quelle zu Hitlers Antisemitismus,” Historische Zeitschrift, Vol. 192 (1961), 584–606Google Scholar.

6 Nolte gives an excellent account of Max Weber's criticism of the Utopian strain in Marxism in a special chapter (pp. 535–40). He notes–I think, with a tone of reproach—that Weber faced bourgeois society in a spirit of “hesitating courage.” His view of Weber is expressed at length in an important article: “Max Weber vor dem Faschismus,” Der Staat, 11 (1963), 1–24Google Scholar. Nolte shows in a provocative fashion that some of Weber's substantive views (e.g., his Freiburg Antrittsrede in 1895) possess a remarkable similarity to Hitler's and that his ambivalence towards the process of modernization might have proved a source of weakness in the face of fascism; he does not question, of course, that Weber would have become a foe of fascism if he had lived until 1933. Nolte also demonstrates that Weber's sociology shows little anticipation of fascism, and that the concept of charisma is misunderstood when applied to the Hitler-Mussolini type of leadership—facts indicating that fascism was “one of the least expected phenomena of political history and therefore one of the most difficult to explain” (p. 24).