BTW, I agree with the assessment of Islamism as a form of fascism.
I think the desire to hang fascism on Hegel and Marx is a reaction by the right to the desire of the left to hang it on the right.
I am browsing through JSTOR, a database of scholarly journals, and so far I've seen the following listed as historical antecedents to fascism: Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Carlyle, who I believe were conservative, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who I believe was a nationalist anarchist, and Rousseau who probably qualifies as on the left, not sure exactly where.
Also Machiavelli, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Bodin, Donoso Cortes, Bonald, Sorel, and I think I'll stop the list here. The first three I've read, can't classify, never heard of the last four (I've heard of Sorel, maybe, name rings a bell.)
At any rate, my definition of fascism is borrowed from historian Robert O. Paxton:
"1) primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual;
2) the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action against the group'e enemies, internal as well as external;
3) dread of the group's decadence under the corrosive effect of individualism and cosmopolitan liberalism;
4) closer integration of the community within a brotherhood (fascio) whose unity and purity are forged by common conviction, if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
5) an enhanced sense of identity and belonging, in which the grandeur of the group reinforces individual self-esteem;
6) authority of natural leaders (always male)throughout society, culminating in a national chieftan who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny;
7) the beauty of violence and of will, when they are devoted to the group's success in a Darwinian struggle." Robert O. Paxton, "The Five Stages of Fascism," The Journal of Modern History Volume 70, Issue 1 (March, 1998), 1-23, at 6-7.
Paxton states that "early fascisms were so ubiquitous that we can hardly attribute their origin to any particular national intellectual history. George Mosse has fingered post-Enlightenment Germany; Sternhall, France at the turn of the century, followed by Italian disciples. A body of thought that one can call "protofascist" appeared even in the United States at the turn of the century. Brooks Adams, scion of a great New England dynasty, descendent of two presidents of the United States, lamented the moral decline of the United States as a result of the concentration of financial power. Later on, in 1918, Adams believed he had found the remedy to American decline in an authoritarian regime directing a state socialism. After the first World War, the United States, too, entered the 'magnetic field' of European fascisms. 'Colored shirt' movements sprang up, such as the 'Silver Shirts' or 'S.S.' of William Dudley Pelley." Id. at 11-12.
Brooks Adams, like his brother Henry, was anti-Semitic, and repulsed by the flood of Southern European and Eastern European immigrants at the turn of the last century.
Paxton suggests that the historial antecdence to fascism was the Ku Klux Klan, which was set up during Reconstruction to restore an overturned social order. "The Klan constituted an alternative civic authority, parallel to the legal state, which, in its founders' eyes, no longer defended their community's legitimate interests. In its adoption of a uniform (white robe and hood) as well as its techniques of intimidation and its conviction that violence was justified in the cause of the groups' destiny, the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe." Id. at 12. |
