The last few decades have witnessed a proliferation of studies on fascism, nationalisms of different kinds, and the dictatorships of the right in interwar Europe. New perspectives, new approaches and new sets of problems have emerged in almost every case. All this activity has enabled us to appreciate that these new lines of research in turn generate new debates, which at times go beyond the arguments that dominated the field for virtually the whole of the twentieth century, but at others seem explicitly or implicitly connected to these earlier discussions, and intertwined with them.
Of course, progress in research and changes in approach have never been entirely linear nor uniformly accepted in the same way, nor have they been reflected in all aspects of any particular field to the same extent. In this regard, the phenomenon that has taken centre stage in all debates and most caught the attention of the public has unquestionably been that of fascism. The advances made in the study of fascism over the last half-century are undeniable, and this has had a decisive impact, in different ways, on the overall picture mentioned above. However, one consequence of this emphasis has been that the role of reactionary nationalism has almost always been obscured precisely by the prominence of fascism, a situation that we seek to correct in the current volume.
Given this complex picture, it is necessary to begin this collection with a rapid overview of the historical evolution of the historiography on fascism, which will help us to evaluate the current situation with greater precision. We can locate the point of departure of the main lines of recent renewal in the crisis of the great theories on the subject, of the great paradigms. Following Renzo de Felice, we may begin by recalling the three major “classical” interpretations of fascism that emerged at the same time as its rise: the liberal interpretation, also known as that of the parenthesis or moral sickness; the analysis that could be called radical-democratic, or the theory of historic defects; and finally, understood in its broadest sense, the Marxist analysis (De Felice 2017). At the same time, we can also see the ways in which the great overarching historical paradigms that predominated in the years from 1945 almost to the end of the twentieth century were interlinked with these “classical” interpretations of fascism.
It is clear that theories of totalitarianism, broadly speaking, were associated with the liberal interpretation. In part, because both regarded fascism as the opposite of liberalism, in part due to these theories’ initial tendency and subsequent determination to identify together fascism and communism as similar phenomena, and lastly because they focused attention on the masses and their relationship with elites. There were also differences, however, not the least being that theories of totalitarianism ultimately reduce the masses to an aggregate of individuals, isolated, atomized and easily manipulated by external totalitarian elites. 1 The desire to identify together fascism and communism, for its part, led to a relative lack of interest in exactly who made up these elites, which social interests they represented or just what was the specific nature of their ideology or political culture, in short, in what their ideas and their project actually consisted of.
At the opposite extreme from the liberal interpretation was the “radical-democratic” approach, which pointed out the supposed defects or absences in particular societies—a weakness of the Enlightenment, failed bourgeois revolutions—so that the pre-democratic elites, and not the masses, became the basis for explanations of fascism. In broad terms, there were undoubtedly close connections between these analyses and subsequent theories or perspectives on modernization in general. Most of all, because on the back of these approaches a hegemonic status was effectively acquired in the historiographies of many countries by ideas of the failure of their bourgeois, industrial or national revolutions, as the case might be. In these conceptions, older notions of backwardness were articulated in a manner that conceded a decisive role to the traditional or feudal elites. Within this general approach, moreover, we should note the existence of at least two major currents. Firstly, the one constituted by what can properly be called theories of modernization, with an economicism reflected in the attribution of the very appearance of fascism to different levels of economic development, albeit that in the earliest formulations of these ideas emphasis was placed on the pact made between traditional and modern elites in order to demobilize the subaltern classes in the period of transition from traditional to modern societies (Organski 1965). Less purely economicist in style was the line of argument that established connections between the absence of a bourgeois revolution, the hegemony of feudal elites and the subordination of the bourgeoisie. This basic approach was shared, for all the possible variations between them, by, among others, the ideas of a Barrington Moore, the Sonderweg theory of a uniquely German path from aristocracy to modernity and the successive developments of Gramscian theories. The distinction between these two currents is not an idle one, among other reasons because some variations of the theories of modernization lead ultimately to a convergence with significant aspects of theories of totalitarianism, as when, for example, they attribute “modernizing” objectives to antidemocratic elites, whether fascist or communist (Gregor 1979).
Alternatively, the stress placed on the antidemocratic nature of the feudal and post-feudal elites makes possible a convergence between the focus on failed revolutions and—think only of Gramsci—Marxist approaches. As we know, the latter have been characterized above all by an analysis of fascism within the framework of class struggle, understanding it essentially as a form of bourgeois reaction, a useful instrument for capitalist socio-economic interests, even when such theories also note the significance of its petit-bourgeois component (Beetham 1983). Nevertheless, Marxist authors have also been able to observe that an interpretation based on class interests was ultimately insufficient by itself as a means of explaining the dynamics of fascism, given both its power of social attraction and the accumulated evidence that fascists possessed particular final goals of their own, what Mason has called “the primacy of politics” in fascism (Mason 1995).
If we have devoted some time to this overview, necessarily condensed and in very broad terms, of the major paradigms for the analysis of fascism as they existed virtually up until the last years of the twentieth century, we have done so precisely in order to highlight the key elements in the subsequent crisis of these same ideas, the points of departure for the renovation of studies on the subject and, also, their limitations.
For, what was it that the focuses on totalitarianism, on modernization or on Marxist concepts had in common, in general terms? In first place, the near-fundamental leading role they accorded to elites, whether capitalist, “feudal” or totalitarian. In second place, and consequently, the reduction of the “masses”, seen as open to being manipulated, repressed or crushed, to an entity that was in large part undifferentiated. In third place, a relative or absolute lack of attention paid to the fascist as historical subject, who might be portrayed simply as an agent of big capital, a figure subjugated by traditional interest groups or just dispensable. In fourth place, a near-complete lack of knowledge of fascist ideology, since this was considered to be non-existent (the liberal interpretation), purely reactionary and irrational (in Marxist analyses) or a matter of indifference (in focuses on modernization or theories of totalitarianism). In fifth place, the consolidation of an image of fascism as an abstract entity always identified with actual fascist states or regimes. And finally, this is the most corrosive and extraordinary of the paradoxes, fascism became a historical phenomenon that existed independently of the facts of whether fascists existed or not, but at the same time also a category within which, due to this same lack of differentiation, the most varied regimes could be included.
How, then, did the demolition of many of these suppositions come about in different areas of historiography? We can summarize the changes that have occurred in terms of the following specific fields—the rediscovery of the fascist subject, of their culture, their ideology and of masses with features and faces.
Thus, fifty years ago Ernst Nolte (1966) already made a major contribution by shifting the spotlight onto the ideological origins of fascism and encouraged an avalanche of fresh studies on fascism in general. Shortly afterwards, Renzo de Felice (1975) recognized the existence of particular social and ideological profiles in a fascist movement that could be separated analytically from the regime itself. In the same years, the studies of George L. Mosse (1974) on German culture also opened up a new way forward that would have a decisive influence on subsequent studies, in highlighting the importance of aesthetics in politics, civic religion and mythical thinking in general. Emilio Gentile (1975, 1993), concerned from the beginning with the problem of the ideological origins of fascism, connected with the ideas of Mosse in the emphasis he laid on the central role of political religion in fascist Italy.
For his part, Zeev Sternhell (1978) called our attention strikingly to the importance of the cultural crisis or revolution in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, to locate the first fascist ideology in France prior to the First World War, considering it a peculiar synthesis of a revised version of Marxist ideas with a new tribal nationalism. The central importance of culture in fascism was again argued forcefully by Roger Griffin (1993, 2002), who also put forward a new characterization of fascism as a political ideology—as a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism—which was suggestive enough to give a new impulse to debates around fascism in general. His most recent contributions on fascist modernism (Griffin 2007) also interlink, moreover, with a range of approaches that from different perspectives all tend to highlight the elements that fascism possessed of being an alternative form of modernity (Peukert 1993; Bauman 1991; Gentile 2003; Eley 2013).
Of course, this brief survey cannot be remotely exhaustive, although it does help us to locate some of the dividing lines in current historiography. Equally, even among those who distance themselves from any supposed or substantive “cultural” or “essentialist” view of fascism, the importance of the ideas of these movements is now recognized. This would be the case with Robert Paxton (1998, 2004) or Michael Mann (2004), who otherwise give more attention to contextual, functional or sociological aspects.
This undeniable cultural re-emergence of the fascist as individual and historical subject has been reinforced, perhaps as a more “negative” factor, by the relegation to a secondary level of the previously all-powerful processes or actors that had practically predetermined everything. This has been the case with “grand capital” or “monopoly capital”, due to the extent to which more detailed research tended to undermine old myths and highlight the great...