Political Extremes

A conceptual history from antiquity to the present

Uwe Backes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415500500
• eBook ISBN: 9781135259433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Comunismo, poscomunismo y socialismo

The Western tradition of the constitutional state, with its ancient roots, defines political extremes as the epitome of that what must be absolutely rejected. It highlights tyranny, despotism, despotic rule, non-autonomy, ruthless enforcing of interests as 'extreme', contrasting this to a virtuous mean which guarantees moderation. In this volume, the culmination of twenty years of extensive research, Uwe Backes provides a conceptual history of the notions "extreme" and "extremism" from antiquity to the present day.

The terminological history of political extremes had been related for more then two millennia with the term mesotês used in the Aristotelian ethics and the theory of mixed constitution. Both doctrines influenced the republicanism of the North Italian city states and later the United States of America as well as British parliamentarism. The positions of moderation and extremes were not joined until the course of the French Revolution with the distinction of right- and left-wing, and this is how it still exists today in the intellectual-political geography. This unique source based study reconstructs these developments from ancient times to the present.

Tracing the history of the concept of political extremism from Ancient Greece to the present day, this is an invaluable resource for scholars of democracy, extremism and political sociology.

1
Introduction

1 Significance of the topic

Age of Extremes, published for the first time in 1994, was the title of the book in which English social historian Eric Hobsbawm took stock of the ‘short twentieth century’.¹ The excesses of inhumanity, the way for which was paved by the outbreak of World War I, appear to be ‘extremes’. Whether it had to do with the ‘initial catastrophe of the twentieth century’ (George F. Kennan) or should rather be called the catalyst reaction to conditioning factors from the nineteenth century remains an open question.² In any event, the civil society of warring states in its totality, but particularly the German Reich operating on several fronts, was placed in the service of a collective struggle for life and death for the first time in history. The gigantic material battles of the ‘total war’, as it was later described by Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff³ with programmatic intent, carried the European nations to the utmost limits of their material productivity. As a result of the war and its aftermath, the livelihoods of countless people became endangered. Millions of soldiers lost their lives, many returned home mutilated and emotionally broken, unable ever again to integrate themselves into civil society. The institutional structure of the constitutional states with its power controls and guaranteed rights that had formed in the course of centuries began to waver under the onslaught of new kinds of soon-to-be-called ‘totalitarian’ extreme political movements. With World War I, political ‘monsters’ such as Hitler, Lenin and Stalin, as Hans-Peter Schwarz portrayed them, came to the fore ready to sacrifice hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of lives for their hubris-driven political visions.⁴ Without World War I, neither the Russian Revolution nor, probably, the Bolshevik coup d’état in October 1917 in St Petersburg would have happened. Under Lenin and Trotsky, the new rulers in the Kremlin began a historically unexampled ‘cleansing’ of Russian society of all those social ‘pests’ that were seen as an obstacle to the great goal of the world revolution.⁵

The break with history and the conversion to the new empire of socialism/ communism justified a pitiless settling of a score not only with all those who denied themselves to the great project or openly opposed it, but also with the ideologically defined ‘objective enemies’⁶ who, on the basis of their social roles and functions, were to be exterminated as historically ‘antiquated’ classes and ‘parasitic’ groups. This goal was hardly covered up. One of the most revealing texts about Lenin’s cleansing ideology (‘How is the competition to be organized’), which clearly exemplifies the Bolsheviks’ break with the basic moral norms of the Jewish–Christian as well as the humanistic tradition, found admission into the official edition of Lenin’s oeuvre. In ‘achieving the single common aim’, the leader of the revolution demanded his followers

to clean the land of Russia of all vermin, of fleas – the rogues, of bugs – the rich, and so on and so forth. In one place half a score of rich, a dozen rogues, half a dozen workers who shirk their work (in the manner of rowdies, the manner in which many compositors in Petrograd, particularly in the Party printing-shops, shirk their work) will be put in prison. In another place they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third place they will be provided with ‘yellow tickets’ after they have served their time, so that everyone shall keep an eye on them, as harmful persons, until they reform. In a fourth place, one out of every ten idlers will be shot on the spot.⁷

With the formation of the Communist International in Spring 1919, the attempts by the ‘Centre of World Revolution’ began to subjugate the workers’ movements of the European states to directives from Moscow. In countries such as Germany and Italy, the efforts by the Communist International sections to strengthen their influence and to drive forward their revolutionary goals led from numerous violent struggles all the way to attempted revolts.⁸ The fascio di combattimento, founded in Italy in 1919 by Benito Mussolini, a leading representative of prewar socialism, saw itself foremost as a task force against the dangers of bolshevism.⁹ In Germany, too, from the ranks of brutal and disappointed war veterans returning from the front, militant nationalist formations were recruited that were assigned to paramilitary units against the ‘red danger’, fought bloody battles with left-wing extremist fighting units and appeared in terrorist actions against representatives of the system.¹⁰ They achieved their identity in large part from the defence against the ‘red beast’,¹¹ developed new stylistic and propagandistic forms of expression, which created an awareness among their contemporaries with the ‘March on Rome’. Fascism and its offshoots in other European countries, in connection with the charismatic leader cult and palingenetic ultra-nationalism,¹² became the incarnation of a new extreme right¹³ despite obvious borrowings from socialism and revolutionary syndicalism.

This also drew Adolf Hitler, a recruit from World War I, whose right-wing, extremist, aggressively anti-Semitic movement took power in Germany in 1933, sweeping away the Weimar constitutional system already distorted by authoritarianism and erected a regime which, with its officially binding ideology reminiscent of religion, the absolute design claim of the unified party, the socially mobilizing mass organizations, its communication monopoly, its extensive repression apparatus and the internment camps, showed essential parallels with the Soviet system.¹⁴ In 1939, the two totalitarian states formed an alliance against the Western democracies to mark their respective spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. The short period of collaboration between these ideological antagonists ended with Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union and the beginning of a racially ideological conquest and extermination campaign in the east, which, after the US entered the war, led to the systematic, industrially organized elimination of European Jewry.¹⁵

Anyone listening carefully to the war speeches by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels could guess what was meant by the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’. In the well-known speech at the Sportpalast on 18 February 1943, in which Goebbels propagated the idea of ‘total war’ after the demise of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, ‘international Jewry’ constituted the ‘demon of decline’, which carried out its destructive work in the capitalist system of the USA as well as in Bolshevik Russia. In this light, only National Socialism (NS) was able and willing to put the Jewish greed for power in its place to avert the threatened decline of the occident. This called for a bundling of all available energies and a ruthless use of every possible means: ‘Today, the most radical is just radical enough and the most total is just total enough to lead to victory! (Hails of bravo, applause)’.¹⁶ The ‘most radical’ and the ‘most total’ included genocide, which Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler acknowledged in front of the SS-Gruppenführers as a Herculean task of higher morals. In this select circle, the extreme was openly addressed as the ‘extermination of the Jewish people’ and, in a complete reversal of basic moral concepts, was raised to the rank of a heroic deed as a ‘never to be written glorious chapter of our history’.¹⁷

The NS regime which, by virtue of its economic, social and foreign policy successes, enjoyed the support of large parts of the populace until into the first phase of the war,¹⁸ not only brought misery and death to the Jews and other peoples but also led to a historically unrivalled act of self-destruction. Beyond the extermination of millions of human lives, the war led to the destruction of German cities and to the expulsion of millions of Germans from their homeland. Within a very short time, the power vacuum that had come about in the east was taken up by the Soviet Union, now allied to the Western forces. It extended its totalitarian rule structure to large parts of Eastern and Central Europe. In the Soviet-occupied part of Germany, the efforts towards a multiparty system that started immediately after the war quickly gave way to a communist dictatorship with a unified party, controlled mass organizations, a binding ideology, a communication monopoly as well as an extensive surveillance and repression system.

The end of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) regime and the other communist systems in Central and Eastern Europe became possible only with changes in the Soviet Union. The radical change in Poland connected with the name of Solidarno

giving the signal and the reforms introduced under the cues of glasnost and perestroika by the new secretary general of the communist party, Mikhail Gorbachev, paved the way for the fall of the Iron Curtain, the system transformation in Eastern Central Europe and, thus, the end of European and German separation. The second millennium break, however, came only in the year 1991, as Hobsbawm rightfully placed it, as a successful military putsch by the army, the KGB and party cadres in Moscow would have reversed some of the things that had been achieved in previous years in the direction of more democracy and legal security within the satellite belt of the Soviet Union. The fall of the USSR can be understood as a historically unrivalled event in as far as never before had a world power fallen at the height of its military power without first having suffered a military defeat.

Whoever speaks of the twentieth century as the age of the extremes, and not only – like Hobsbawm – sets his sights on the excesses of inhumanity but also the isomorphies of certain political ideologies and movements, may give the impression that the extremes had unfolded only at the beginning of World War I and that some last death throes and a final demise were all that was left to be reckoned with in the twenty-first century. However, ideological trends reaching far back to the past had preceded the creation process of the, often called totalitarian, extremist regimes.¹⁹ In the 1840s, an intensive analysis had taken place in Europe due to the new phenomenon of ‘communism’, which, in theory, could be traced back to the great utopias of a Plato, Morus and Campanella and, in practice, to ascetic, religious communities of late Antiquity that cultivated personal poverty (such as the Essenes at the Dead Sea or the therapists at north Egyptian Lake Mareotis).²⁰ Essential humanist roots lay in radical enlightening ideas such as those supported by Helvetius, Holbach, Morelly and Mably. Historians of ideas such as Jacob Talmon saw one root of left-wing totalitarianism in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the ‘general will’. In connection with a ‘popular sovereignty taken to the extreme’,²¹ the idea of a rational, predeterminable common good had supposedly favoured political ideas such as the Jacobins had tried to put into practice from time to time during the French Revolution. The development of the French Revolution could be described as a changeable struggle between the more strongly pragmatic supporters of a social power equilibrium and advocates of pure revolutionary ideals as they had found their expression during the ‘terreur’ and in the ideas of François Noël Babeuf. The Jacobin ‘terror of virtue’ and Babeuf’s agrarian communism were interpreted by Talmon as ‘the two earliest versions of modern political Messianism’.²² When Babeuf’s ‘conspiracy of equals’ was discovered, he and some of his loyal followers had to pay for his plans with their lives. Yet, the fascination with communism did not end there. In 1828, the publication of a book by a collaborator (Philippo Buonarotti), in which the humanity-cheering undertaking was drawn up, ensured new supporters.²³ The same went for Etienne Cabet’s model state Ikaria where, according to the plans of the ‘dictator’ Ikar and thanks to the extensive rational planning by a wise ‘committee’, the people, relieved of a great deal of suffering, led a carefree life in peace, health and prosperity.²⁴ Ideas of this sort met with approval from German tradesmen living in Paris and were introduced in Switzerland and to the German-speaking realm among others by Wilhelm Weitling, a journeyman tailor inspired by Christianity.²⁵ The critical reception of the demanding socialist systems of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen reached a first peak in the years before the 1848/1849 Revolution.²⁶ In the following decades, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels snubbed this ‘utopian socialism’²⁷ and sought to support communism scientifically, most of all by a history of philosophy based on Hegel’s dialectics placed on an economic foundation and at the same time sharply separating the doctrine from anarchism. Thus, these ideological foundations were laid long before communism achieved world status as a result of Lenin’s acquisition and the doctrinal design of Marx and Engels’ ideas, their canonization after the October Revolution and the Soviet Union’s extraordinary development of power.

This applied no less to the new extreme right, which was beginning to unfold in many states of the world according to the pattern of Italian fascism. Karl Popper, in his history of ideas’ derivation of totalitarian ideologies, referred to Plato’s ideal state, which he interpreted as a programmatic political design. Simultaneously, he emphasized its hierarchic anti-egalitarian and racist tendencies, for the common ownership of women, children and possessions was to have been connected to a caste-like separation of rulers/guards and servants as well as the idea of an aristocratic warring master race led by philosopher kings, which obtained its hereditary substance through eugenic selective breeding, was relieved of having to earn a living and had the sole right to education and carrying weapons.²⁸ In his historical derivation of ideas, Jacob Talmon started much later. Among others, he interpreted Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s closed trade state as a model in which nationalist and socialist ideas met in a new kind of synthesis.²⁹ In her work about The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt tried to recapture the humanist roots of anti-Semitism, nationalism and racial imperialism, which reach far back into the nineteenth century.³⁰

As the comparison with the programmes of a monarchic absolutist right shows, these ideas broke in some ways with the traditional patterns of the legitimization of autocratic rulership, God’s divine providence as well as patriarchal views. New ideological forms had already developed in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, which lent new attractiveness to the extreme right by adapting originally ‘left’ elements. This already applied to Bonapartism, which, not without success, tried to unite tradition...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Extremism and Democracy
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Series editors’ preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Extremes, mean, moderation and constitutional mixture in Antiquity and the Middle Ages
• 3 Extremes and the tradition of the mixed constitution from early humanism to the age of democratic revolutions
• 4 Extreme ideologies in the political laboratory of the nineteenth century
• 5 Extremism at the beginning of the ‘age of extremes’
• 6 Extreme terms in the political language of German ideocracies
• 7 Extremism as an element of the official/ semi-official language of the Federal Republic of Germany
• 8 Lines of development of the extremism concept in the twentieth century
• 9 Political extremism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index