Gregory Claeys: Imperial Skeptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 38, Number 3, Fall 2011.

 

In his 1917 essay Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, V. I. Lenin highlighted a then-recent study by the British economist J. A. Hobson. No Marxist (as Lenin immediately observed), Hobson nonetheless shared the Marxian assumption that economic interests largely determined political behavior, including empire building. Given the wide distribution of Lenin’s book, Hobson’s name often stands alone at ‘the beginning of the end’ of British imperialism. Not all the names of earlier anti-imperialist writers have been forgotten, but the fact of their anti-imperialism often has been. Claeys provides a much fuller and more finely textured account of anti-imperialism in British political thought than any previously available. He concludes too trendily, ascribing to his thought “the foundational ideals of modern identity politics” (290); what he has found turns out to be more interesting than that.

European imperialism found justification in Christian evangelism—Catholic and Protestant—whose advocates viewed with suspicion “indolent savages” who “committed the crime of living in an environment where little effort sufficed to attain a sufficiency” (13). For this violation of the curse of Adam (somewhat redolent of the atmosphere prevailing in a university faculty), “millions were enslaved and worked to death,” Claeys tartly observes. Imperialism also found justification in modern natural right as integrated into the philosophic accounts of the law of nations. Emer de Vattel, for example, argued that peoples who refuse to cultivate the soil and instead live by plunder “fail in their duty to themselves, injure their neighbors, and deserve to be exterminated like wild beasts of prey.” Other, more pacific peoples who merely tend flocks, hunt animals, and gather edibles injure no persons but do “occupy more land than they would have need of under a system of honest labor, and they may not complain if other more industrious Nations, too confined at home, should come and occupy their lands” (17). Theodore Roosevelt could not have said it more concisely—nor, as you might imagine, did he. Both writers were following John Locke’s Essay on Civil Government. Critics of this argument (including Diderot, Kant, and Herder) found no influential readership in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

The first important British anti-imperialists came not from the natural-rights or the Continental protohistoricist schools but from the liberal utilitarians Richard Cobden and John Bright—free traders (today we would call them libertarians) who rejected all intervention in the domestic concerns of foreign countries as ultimately unprofitable. But the main intellectual influence on British anti-imperialism came from Auguste Comte the founder of positivism, who derived his ideas from his “spiritual master,” Nicolas de Condorcet. As is well known, Condorcet stands at the pivot of the transition of European Enlightenment thought from natural right (by then in its Rousseauan form) to historicism; anticipating human progress toward humanistic universalism, Condorcet comes off rather as a Hegel without the massive and intricate historical/ontological dialectic. Comte elaborated a new social science, inventing the term “sociology” for it; ruled by industrialists, “including engineers and scientists,” Comtean social science called for an initial dictatorship not of the proletariat but of the scientists, to be followed by a degree of democratization as the masses relinquished their old religion for an altruistic “Religion of Humanity”—guided, to be sure, by a new priesthood “living in colleges, and trained in science, but without celibacy,” and teaching the altruistic creed. “Live for others” (48-50). For his British readers, anti-imperialism followed from this humanitarianism. Wedded to the evolutionist-historicist thought of Darwin, positivism optimistically assumed that no coercion would be needed to aid the march of progress; therefore, both balance-of-power geopolitics and imperialism wasted time and resources (including lives) while encouraging retrograde selfishness and atavism. Positivism began to become popularized in Great Britain in the late 1840s, at the time of Chartism at home and other revolutionary stirrings on the Continent.

Perhaps on the grounds of a humanist/universalist sympathy for which nothing human was foreign, British positivists inclined toward praising the religions of the conquered. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt celebrated Islam, hoping that Africans would convert to it as a means of avoiding absorption into Europe (37); consistent with the Religion of Humanity, Blunt stipulated that Islam modernize its teachings on slavery, marriage, concubinage, and divorce (40). Blunt, Richard Congreve—a lapsed Aristotelian teaching at Oxford—and Frederic Harrison also praised Hinduism and even showed distinct sympathies for Irish Home Rule. The most influential of the British positivists, Harrison likely turned against imperialism in reaction to “the bombardment in 1863 of Kagoshima in Japan, where a city of 100,000 persons was destroyed in reprisal for the murder of one Briton” (84). Oddly, Harrison blamed Christianity for this atrocity—claiming that “on the Christian theory, the Japanese are absolutely inferior to Christian Britons, whereas “on the human theory [i.e., positivism] they are relatively our equals, occasionally our superiors, and essentially our brothers” (85). Evidently none too conversant with Christian theology, Harrison more soberly blamed the massacre on “the devilish antipathies of race” and the imperial ambitions of British aristocrats “pandering to the English merchant” (86).

Comte envisioned a world organized as a federation of small states. “The state had to be relatively small, akin to the Greek polis or perhaps Holland” (97-98). Modern nation-states and the empires they built launched the masses of the world’s people to subordination, squalor, and death. “Little-Englandism” followed from this. Little England would combine compact size with modern industry; like all of its sister statelets around the world, it would confederate peacefully under the “spiritual direction” of the Religion of Humanity (100). This vision could readily accommodate the socialism that gained intellectual adherents in the later nineteenth century. The following century proved disappointing to such visions; Claeys bravely contends that “the Positivists had not failed Humanity; humanity had failed the Positivists” (114). One might say that humanity had failed Humanity, as it so often does; reportedly, God has been no less disappointed.

As a social and political movement positivism “did not survive its second generation of leaders” (118). Prussian militarism and the arrival of the United States as an increasingly well-armed world power, along with the new, harsher creed of Social Darwinism, all dampened the spirits of positivists. But a portion of positivism lived on in socialism—an influence much attenuated by the sympathy for imperialism among the British working classes and by the Marxian argument that imperialism represented a necessary historical advance over sack-of-potatoes peasant societies. Still, imperialism itself, modernizing force though it may be, was slated for destruction along with the capitalism that directed it. William Morris’s famous utopian-socialist prose poem News from Nowhere embellished Little-Englandism with a synthesis of modern egalitarianism and medieval charm. But many of the Fabian socialists, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and the Webbs, judged imperialism indispensable to efficiency, civil service, and the advance of internationalism. Such Independent Labour Party luminaries as Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie eventually endorsed “not anti-imperialism but an alternative imperialism” “based on assumptions, if not of British superiority then at least of a British genius for administration that was of benefit to the colonized” (201). “Many socialists thus moved relatively easily towards a position of seeing the empire as a potential socialist commonwealth, capable of extending the benefits of socialist civilization to the less developed regions of the world” (227).

J. A. Hobson took a middling position. He concurred with both capitalist and later socialist thinkers (and ultimately with Vattel, against Comte) that “if a nation or the government of a nation holding possession of a piece of territory refuses to utilize fully its resources or to permit others to do so or otherwise makes itself a nuisance to its neighbors, or to the international public, the sacred rights of nationality ought not to protect it from coercion imposed on behalf of the general good of nations” (243). “These peoples have no natural or inalienable right to withhold the natural resources of their country from the outside world, and they cannot develop them without the assistance of that outside world” (258). He rejected, however, the imperial claim to a right to run over national claims altogether in great-power rivalry in the late nineteenth century’s ‘scramble for empire.’ In this, he sided with the Comtian Little-Englanders. With the socialists, he insisted that the social and economic inequalities of capitalist societies drove such societies outward in search of wider markets and more wealth. Unlike most Fabian socialists he did not accept a radically internationalist program for the internationally-needed development of weaker, nonmodern societies. In this, “he adopted the standard Positivist party line respecting nationalism, namely that a balanced and unchauvinistic patriotism was a natural focal point for human affection and identity” (261).

“Natural” turns out to be a pregnant word. Beyond the notion of “Humanity,” Hobson saw the need of a “spirit of religion [that] must transcend humanity, seeking a One which is higher and holier” (279). This One turns out not to be God, except perhaps in Spinoza’s sense; it is nature. “It had been Positivism’s failure to include nature, save as a contribution toward the progress of humanity, that was responsible in part for the slight hold Comte and his disciples attained” (280). Hobson called for “a recognition of nature as the larger and higher value” (280). Driven out with a pitchfork, nature returned—if only in a form more evocative of the mystical forms of our contemporary ‘environmentalism’ than of natural right, ancient or modern.

Ali A. Allawi: T.: The Crisis of Islamic Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Originally published in the Claremont Review of Books. Fall 2009.

 

Retired, near the end of his life, Charles de Gaulle wondered about history, “what Rome called Fortune.” He said to his friend André Malraux, “No historian has attempted to analyze the most singular element of History: the moment when the current passes. For us or against us.” Rome rose, declined, fell, but what “gives a soul to a people?”—or an army, the general added. What disorients that soul, inducing it to lose its way? A statesman or a military leader can rally his people, but there are knowable “limits to action,” as even the Caesars and Napoleon learned.

In France de Gaulle had seen the current shift more than once. He also saw a larger current, in the world. “There remains but one generation separating the West from the entry of the Third World onto the scene.” Malraux observed, “It is the end of empires,” but de Gaulle replied, “Not only of empires. Gandhi, Churchill, Stalin, Nehru, even Kennedy, it is the funeral cortege of a civilization.” Malraux speculated that the West might be replaced by “Mao” (meaning some combination of Chinese nationalism and communism) and “to some degree” by “Nasser” (that is, by Arab or perhaps more generally Third-World nationalism). De Gaulle offered a correction. “Mao, oui. L’Islam, peut-être.” Arab nationalism, so visible at the end of 1969, when the two men conversed, would not shift the new current or guide it. But Islam—dismissed, disparaged religiosity—might do so. As an army officer, de Gaulle had known Syria in the early 1930s, writing to his wife that we French, with our mission civilisatrice, “have not made much of an impression here.” Had he sensed the undercurrent even then?

Ali A. Allawi sees the direct the now-surfaced current has taken. In The Crisis of Islamic Civilization he wants to understand how and why “the spirit of Islam” has declined and whether it might be revived. A Sufi Muslim who returned to his native Iraq after Americans deposed the tyrant Saddam Hussein, Allawi found not liberation there but sectarian murder and corruption. After serving as minister of defense and minister of finance in the new governments, he retreated to an academic appointment at Princeton University, giving himself time to think about his country and his religion. Like de Gaulle, he wants to understand how and why the current passes—specifically with respect to the decline of he takes to be the genuine “spirit of Islam”—and how that decline might be reversed. He attends to Islam as a set of religious beliefs and as a distinct civilization, a mode and order of civility, wondering whether “a modern society, with all its complexities, institutions and tensions” can “be built on the vision of the divine.”

In the decades since de Gaulle and Malraux spoke, Islamic observance has increased worldwide, and what is called ‘political’ Islam has gone from the once-obscure writings of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and Pakistan’s Syed Abul A’ala Maududi to being the lifeblood of real regimes and real revolutionary movements. By ‘political’ Allawi means the kind of rule Machiavelli’s prince practices: the acquisition of men and things in an exhibition of virtuosity for the benefit of the prince. But according to Allawi, Islamic civilization—that sense of balance, of proportion, “between the individual and the collective” and “between this-worldliness and other-worldliness”—has been ruinously undermined, “undergoing a monumental crisis.”

For Muslims, the modern West lacks genuine civilization, overemphasizing individuality in the pursuit of worldly success. Much of the modern East, with Japan in the lead, now pursues such success, too—albeit corporately, not individualistically. West and East alike conjure the impersonal and therefore uncivilized forces of markets and technologies, and succumb to a moral relativism that renders their conquests empty. (As Malraux asked de Gaulle, “Why conquer the moon, if only to commit suicide there?”) Allawi argues that the followers of Allah underestimate the modern West, assuming that they have little or nothing to learn from the adherents to imperfect religions. One may nonetheless think that Muslims correctly judge the atheist currents of the new Western irreligion, consonant with Machiavellianism, for being against the ummah, the body of believers. In particular, Western modernity substitutes Machiavelli’s invention, the centralized and acquisitive modern state, for the tribes and loosely confederated empires of Muhammad’s day, for the ummah, and for the European feudal societies that the armies of the ummah so often conquered.

In response to Western moral relativism and politique statism, Muslims pray but they also tyrannize and terrorize one another, failing to integrate their inner, devout lives with their public conduct. Although “dozens of nation-states…claim, one way or another, to be guided by Islam,” Allawi sees “few signs that anything like this has been taking place.” He insists that Islam is the only religion that might go beyond a mere critique of modernity to reestablish civilization or genuine politics without sacrificing modernity’s benefits, most notably the discovery of modern science. But he does not go so far as to deem this likely.

Allawi describes how Islamic civilization advanced for a millennium after Muhammad, “nearly always…coeval with rule by Muslims over Muslims”—and, it might be added, rule by Muslims over non-Muslims. The believers held that the Islamic world flourished according to divine right and with divine aid, morally and politically. With respect to morality, the Koran teaches that “there are no human virtues as such,” only divine gifts to individual souls, who cultivate those gifts by observing Islamic law, as reflected in Islamic politics. “The specifically Islamic form of political life” consisted of several elements. The first was empire, but of the pre-modern, non-statist, decentralized sort. Governmental functions included the administration of sharia law and military defense as well as “expansion and conquest.” Kingship was the characteristic Muslim regime, undergirded by a society of tribes and other kinship associations, which Allawi calls “key” to a personal rule that avoided the arbitrariness of modern absolutism and tyranny.

The Egyptian monarchy was the first regime effectually to subordinate Islam to modernity, including nationalism and statism, although the project was undertaken most dramatically in Turkey under the regime of Kemal Ataturk. “Political” Islam arose even earlier, in the 18th century, in “the uncompromising and literalist monotheism” of Muhammad ib Abd al-Wahhab, who allied with the then-obscure House of Saud. Under the pressure of modernism and Islamism—to which Allawi adds Western imperialism—”by the end of the nineteenth century, the territorial, cultural and psychological unity of Islamic civilization had been torn apart.” The dichotomy between modernizing secularists and self-described fundamentalist reformers of Islam—both severed from the faith’s spiritual roots—more or less guaranteed Muslims’ political weakness from then until now.

Allawi provides an informative, melancholy survey of some lonely figures who opposed both secularism and the non-spiritual, legalistic, and often militaristic forms of Islam. These men include Muhammad Iqbal, “the great poet of modern Islam” and a defender of Sufi spirituality as “the realization of God’s absolute uniqueness through the uniqueness of the individual”; Badiuzzaman Said Nursi, a Kurdish scholar in Turkey who upheld a civil-associational strategy against statism; and the Algerian scholar Malek Bennabi, who attempted to explain Islam’s decline in Gibbon-like terms, as a complacent triumphalism leading to the absorption of foreign spiritual toxins.

Israel’s stunning victory over Arab armies in 1967 fatally discredited the nationalist and socialist modernizing regimes behind those armies. The enrichment of the Saudis, and thereby of the Wahhabis, in the 1970s, along with the 1979 Iranian revolution brought political Islam to power in core Islamic states. Allawi argues that this was too little, too late. Scriptural literalism depends upon an understanding of the relevant language, but the Arabic language, the language of the Koran, had lost much of its original meaning, as many words took on definitions adapted to the concepts of modernity. (For example, in modern Arabic deen means religion; in Koranic Arabic it means “the indebtedness of the created to the Creator,” a debt discharged by following the ways of life —the regime—of God as revealed in “Islam or the unsullied revealed religions,” Judaism and Christianity.) The schools in which Muslims now learn Arabic teem with modern notions—secularism, historicism—far removed from Islam learning. As for the madrassas, insofar as they teach political Islam they too lack spirituality, contenting themselves with an “entirely Sharia-defined,” legal-literalist Islam. This is the Islam of the Wahhabists and their offshoots the Salafists, who “radicalize Sunni Islam by weakening its connection with the classical schools of law,” which had been “moderate, restrained and subtle in their decisions,” being sensitive to circumstances of place and of peoples. “The death knell for Islamic law is sounding,” Allawi writes. “All its vitality, originality and appositeness fades away, turning it into a massive manual with rulings often drawn from the shoddy scholarship of bigoted clerics and Islamic activists with little jurisprudential training.”

Allawi defends a version of Islam that accommodates the variety of Islamic sects as well as resident non-Muslims. He points to the 11th-century theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who made arguments similar to those of Hugo Grotius and some Orthodox Jewish scholars. For these thinkers, the solution to the theological-political question required no endorsement of a natural right to worship peacefully, but rather an acknowledgment o a shared core of beliefs, small in number but indispensable to the health of human souls and societies alike. Within Islam, this is the conviction that there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Messenger. This Islamic liberalism, so to speak, allowed Shia Muslims to hold high offices under the (Sunni) Abbasid Caliphate, much to the astonishment of today’s Wahhabists and Salafists. “The closing of the Islamic mind,” he avers, “at least in this respect, is very much a modern phenomenon.”

He suggests that if Muslims had glimpsed the Enlightenment’s glare from a distance, they might have followed a Tocquevillian path from monarchy and tribalism to some more republican form of self-rule. But “the maturing of Islam’s political culture into the modern period was thwarted by the violent disruption of Islam’s civilization by European powers.” Absent this imperialism, Islam could have produced, on “its own impetus,” “its own version of checks and balances on rulers and its own system of rights and duties, compatible with its own legacy.” He finds a basis for Islamic self-government in “a short but decisive Quranic verse [Koran 42:38]”: “[The Muslims’] communal business is to be transacted in consultation among themselves.” Allawi prefers an expansive reading of the term “themselves,” maintaining that it refers to the “entire community; in effect, across the entire adult population,” not merely tribal elders or adult males. In this he might be said to register two other Tocquevillian themes, those of social democratization and political republicanism.

Would such a “civilized” politics include non-Muslims in the ruling body? Allawi does not say if “accommodation” means shared rule. He inclines to brush aside non-Muslim reservations concerning such matters. To associate Islam “with fanaticism and violence” has become a “deeply rooted” habit “in the psyche of westerners.” But in places like Southeast Asia, he asserts, Muslim conquests were mostly not conquests at all but voluntary conversions “prompted by the example of Muslim merchants.” And dhimmitude—the subordination of non-Muslim minorities in majority-Muslim regimes—was primarily an attempt to protect those minorities.

This description of peaceable, accommodating Islamic rule might be more reassuring if it were more believable. From its beginning, Islam came to sight as a fighting faith. It combined the military conquest and civil rule seen in ancient Israel with the universality of Christianity; Islam has always been imperial in its ambitions. Like the experienced merchant he was, Muhammad never hesitated to negotiate his way to the next expansion, whenever possible; but neither did he shrink from the use of force, especially in the last decade of his life. His successors shrank from it a great deal less.

Today, Allawi writes, “the issue is whether Muslims want to create and dwell in a civilizational space which grows out of their own beliefs without disrupting the world of others.” Indeed so, but would Muhammad approve? And if he would approve such a strategy as a temporary measure, would he deem ‘live and let live’ a godly policy after such a civilization were achieved?

Allawi’s testimony itself gives pause. Although “the idea of human rights can be traced both to biblical sources and to the notion of a natural law which would be separate from divine revelation,” modern human rights derive from Western convention or “tradition.” Such modern “ideals” as liberalism, democracy, and secularism, if adopted by Islam, would destroy its “separate civilizational space.” For example, Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees not only the right to choose your religion but to “change it”—a violation of Islamic law, which permits conversion to Islam but never from Islam. This means that Muslims must insist that what’s ours is ours and what’s yours is—negotiable, a stance impossible to reconcile with natural right, ancient or modern, and not easy to reconcile with either the Hebrew or the Christian Bible.

Allawi assures his readers that Islam is the only major religion that rules no major state—or “core state,” to use Samuel Huntington’s term—and therefore harbors no new empire. Perhaps so, but hasn’t that made terrorism all the more attractive to radical Islamists? Neither the destruction of the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon, nor the attempted attack on the White House could make America collapse, but they were to say the least vigorous attempts in that direction, and part of a larger war of attrition against the United States and, in principle, all regimes radical Islamists anathematize—a fair number, as it happens. Allawi wants sharply to distinguish classical Islamic rule from modern Islamist tyranny, but the two do rather bleed together at times, despite his best efforts. He doesn’t help his case by insisting that “the war against terror was really a war against Islam itself.”

These criticisms should not detract too much from what Allawi does well. He strikes me as a successor to the sober, moderate Muslim scholars he admires and writes about with such feeling. In deploring the attempt by modern liberalism to ‘privatize’ religion, to reduce its authority in public life, and at the same time insisting that Muslims govern themselves justly and civilly, has he not, through his very virtues, effectively ‘privatized’ himself within the ummah? Can his  form of Islam, whether the true Islam or not, ever find a home—except in exile? Is he finally, despite his longings, most nearly at home in the natural-rights republic, where George Washington welcomed Catholic, Jews, and Quaker so long as they “demean themselves as good citizens”?

Michael Mann: Fascists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 42, Number 3, May/June 2006.

 

As an antidote to that most ‘Machiavellian’ of Machiavelli’s inventions, the State, early liberals and their Marxist enemies alike looked to civil society. Resistance to statist tyranny can come—will come—’from below,’ whether in the form of markets, as in Adam Smith, civil associations, as in Tocqueville, or a triumphant working class, as in Marx. But what if the elements in civil society turn deliberately uncivil, scorning peaceful economic competition, local self-government, and working-class solidarity for the stern virtues (and vices) of paramilitary nationalism? The social egalitarianism undergirding the modern state might then yield a new, self-made aristocracy, crueler yet than the industrial elites Tocqueville feared. And further, what might cause modern life to take such a turn?

Before publishing this book, political sociologist Michael Mann already stood apart from most of his peers as a scholar of statism. His monumental study The Sources of Social Power offers a comparative account of political societies ancient and modern, replacing simplistic ‘base-superstructure’ models of sociopolitical causation with what might be visualized as a quintuple helix: the consideration of economic, military, political, and ideational institutions and movements, along with statesmanship or ‘leadership’ as independent variables which, taken together, bring political communities to liberty or tyranny. Although Mann’s acceptance of ‘power’ as his analytical touchstone tends to elide qualitative distinctions—the characteristic blind spot of the modern social scientist–the subtlety of his understanding of power proves highly instructive, despite this self-inflicted professional deformation.

The Sources had one other deficiency. Mann wrote too much of it in that most unfortunate of dialects, sociologese. I am delighted to report that Fascists exhibits few traces of such lingo; this time, Mann writes sturdy English, jargon-free.

He begins by saying what fascism was, and who the fascists were. To the characteristic nation-statism of modern political thought fascism added a paramilitarism aimed not merely at seizing control of the modern state and defending the nation but at the purification of the nation. “Fascism saw itself as a crusade. Fascists did not view evil as a universal tendency of human nature. Fascists, like some Marxists, believed that evil was embedded in particular social institutions and so could be shed. The nation was perfectible if organic and cleansed,” and thus unified, fraternal.

In principle and practice fascists despised peacefulness, moderation, and the commercial way of life. Marxism and marxisante critics nonetheless tax them with that adjective of maximum insult, ‘bourgeois.’ Not so, Mann remarks: Fascism “drew support from all classes,” as befits an ideology that “ultimately confounds material interest theories.”

This does not imply that fascism arose in no particular social context, however. The period between the world wars, with its economic depression and its rapid political and social democratization saw the prolongation of the crisis of authority for existing aristocratic and haute-bourgeois classes. “They overreacted, reaching for the gun too abruptly, too early,” reaching ‘down’ for military support among armed factions in civil society—that is, to generations of young men whose teachers had taught the superiority of progress over tradition. A general “crisis of liberalism’—first war, then depression—might have caused fascism to engulf all of Europe, but Italy, Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Romania were the ones that succumbed. Why?

In those countries, modern or democratized liberalism had not established itself before modern or democratic nationalism did. Aristocrats could ‘manage’ the transition from old to new regime on the basis of liberalism—as they did in Britain, Tocqueville’s model. Aristocrats could and did become captains of industry, in alliance with commercial middle classes. After the militarizing and state-building debacle of the Great War, followed by the advance of democracy in the war’s aftermath, commercial republicanism endured in places where constitutionalism had been established before 1900 and where that constitutionalism had more or less de-politicized religion (whether Catholicism or Protestantism).

Such regimes flourished in northwestern Europe. In the Latin/Mediterranean and Slavic/Central and Central European region (except Czechoslovakia), political liberalism had enjoyed no such stable establishment before the war. This geographic division of regimes cut through Germany, where Prussia had come to dominate the liberal southwest and the free-trade port cities of the north; it also cut through France, where eventually the Vichy regime enjoyed much support in the south and the Resistance centered in the north. Social egalitarianism could become paramilitary in these illiberal settings. It became so to such an extent as to form the social basis for founding new regimes after defeat in war discredited the milder authoritarianism of the pre-war regimes. In Germany, divided ideationally among liberalism, socialism, and authoritarianism, it took the additional shock of economic depression to tip things over.

To recur to Tocqueville’s terms, then, social democratization before and after the Great War was a universal feature of modernity; in Europe, the Great War and the Great Depression were also universal. The difference between a commercial-republican outcome and a fascist outcome derived from the success or failure of the institutional dimension of Tocquevillian political science—particularly the establishment of some parliamentary control over militaries and the settlement of church-state questions. In Mann’s words, “Institutionalized liberal states successfully rode out the crisis.”

Just as many ‘mainline’ Christian churches in the northwest wedded themselves to democratizing ideologies of ‘progress,’ churches in southern, eastern, and central Europe attempted “not to reject modernism but to resacralize it”—only theirs was a progressivism that scorned democracy. Not only churches, but military academies, universities, and high schools circulated extreme nationalist and paramilitary convictions in illiberal regimes before and after the Great War. Wilsonian efforts to liberalize such sentiments found themselves overmatched. (One might add that Wilsonianism itself, a mild species of progressivism that had abandoned the natural-rights constitutionalism of the American Founders, might have difficulty in principle when answering progressivisms of the ‘Left’ and ‘Right.’)

The handful of fascist states precludes any thoroughgoing comparative analysis; Mann hence turns to case studies, beginning with Italy. Refusing to claim that he understands fascists better than they understood themselves, he wisely lets their writings tell him what they were about.

A unique coalescence of nationalism and working-class politics made Italian fascism possible. In a way, Garibaldi had done his work too well. Italian nationalists shared working-class hostility to the Italian state, equally regarding that state “as a sham, its conservative and liberal parliamentarians representing only the rich,” not the nation. For their part, many labor organizers preferred syndicalist inclusion to Marxist division, “incorporating all productive occupations into the proletariat” and so opening the way for the claim that ‘proletariat’ and ‘nation’ meant much the same thing. Far from ‘reactionary,’ Italian fascism shared ‘futurist’ enthusiasms for technocratic-industrial society, unified by the military élan of former soldiers (“trench power,” as the Duce called it) and the youths who wished they had been soldiers. Fascism was a movement of older and younger brothers. In this line, Mann finds what may be the quintessential Mussolini quotation: “Democracy has deprived the life of the people of ‘style’: that is, a line of conduct, the color, the strength, the picturesque, the unexpected, the mystical: in sum, all that counts in the life of the masses. We play the lyre on all its strings: from violence to religion, from art to politics.”

Organizationally, fascists arranged themselves along military lines into units or sqadristi. “They caged and coerced their members into an enjoyable life of violence.” “Keeping morality and violence harnessed together was fascism’s perennial problem”—one readily solved, it seems, by invocations of warrior spirit. Martial virtues, long associated with aristocracy, democratized themselves during the mass movements of the Great War, a move prepared by the ideologists of the nineteenth century who had deplored the spiritlessness of mass embourgeoisement. But whereas such concerns produced in the United States nothing much more alarming than Teddy Roosevelt, in countries which looked at embourgeoisement as a foreign phenomenon, one that had yet to establish a strong presence socially and in political institutions, there was no moderating counterbalance to militant passions.

Unlike the Marxist ‘Left,’ fascists did not aim their violence at the Italian state. Rightly judging it both weak and sympathetic to communism, fascists never antagonized the state’s military or police divisions. Fascists also found ways to accommodate the Vatican, which also worried about Marxism, that competing Internationale. Under such circumstances, the proletarians folded. “Fascists had not conquered power. Rather, they had pushed close to it and done deals with nonfascist elites.”

Rejecting Hitler’s radical racism, Mussolini’s statism “sought not to urge factional differences but to envelop them all in a loose corporatism.” The fascist state in Italy did not lack pluralism. With a slightly malicious glance at Robert Dahl, one is tempted to call Italian fascism interest-group liberalism without the liberalism.

Germany and Hitler took the truly sinister turn, not only by identifying nationalism with biological racism but by linking national salvation from that racism so entirely to the person and the actions of the tyrant-leader, the supposed embodiment and guide of the race. With the Nazis, ‘civil-social association’ and ‘diversity’—today invoked as sure antidotes to excessive statism—proved useful tools for tyranny: “Germany had…a very strong civil society, and Nazis were at its hear,” organizing within labor unions, Protestant churches, social clubs, student fraternities, in addition to forming their own party cells. Employing both bullets and ballots, Nazis both intimidated and appealed to elites (properly) worried about communism. More, “workers were no less attracted to Nazism than were other classes”; Hitler divided the communists’ intended socio-economic base. Although the Great Depression proved an opportunity for a quick takeover, the necessary preparation had been completed by 1928, Germany’s “economic high point” of the decade. Capitalists themselves, however, mostly opposed the Nazis, who found more help among young army officers. Mann concludes that German democracy, unlike its better-established counterparts elsewhere, had “not yet institutionalized its rules of the game as the only rules in town”: The regime question remained very much alive in the minds of many Germans, “tired of class politics and German national weakness.”

The features of the Italian and German fascisms cannot be taken simply as characteristic of fascism. Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Spanish fascisms serve as additional case studies for Mann, who devotes substantial chapters to each, finding important local differences. In all these countries, nonetheless, “fascism was a product of a sudden, half-baked attempt at liberalization” amid social and ideational crises in the aftermath of a major war. Fascists “offered solutions to the four economic, military, political, and ideological crises of early twentieth-century modernity,” namely, the class struggles and boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism (to which they responded with corporatism), the ethos of mass warfare (appeal to with paramilitary élan), popular sovereignty (mass rallies, before and after that last competitive election), and the conflict between Enlightenment rationalism and Romanticism (which antagonists they attempted to synthesize). “We may not like any of their four solutions, but we must take them seriously. Fascists were and remain part of the dark side of modernity.”

Mann concludes with an incisive glance at fascist-like movements in the early twenty-first century. Although they share the “nationalist xenophobia” of the fascists, European rightists do not propose to end democracy. They voice anti-statist sentiments derived from modern liberalism and, most tellingly, they don’t really want to fight. The ethos of the commercial-republican regimes has done its work, so far.

Elsewhere, in places where commercial republicanism rules less pervasively, or not at all, fascism seems more likely. Mann acknowledges that some Hindus and more Muslims display fascist tendencies, but of course without the secularism of the real thing—cold comfort to their victims, but fascism was never the only murderous ideology in the world. Mann finds Russia a more likely candidate, except for the after-effects of generations of anti-fascist rhetoric there. He does not consider China, which displays elements of nationalism/racialism, militarism, statism, and capitalism which make it look rather like a giant version of Wilhelmine Germany. Might the Chinese be one major military defeat away from a fascist movement?

With Fascists, Michael Mann confirms his reputation as one of the finest political sociologists of his generation.