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.
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