The Magic of the Extreme: On Fascism, Modernity, and Capitalism

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to re-examine the relationship of fascism – up to and including its German National Socialist variant – to modernity, generally, and to capitalism, more specifically. Outlining a general conceptual framework within which these questions might be addressed, the article seeks to move beyond the habitual positing of abstract antinomies to a more dialectical approach to the questions posed. In the first part of the discussion, it is maintained that fascism and its extremism were quintessential phenomena of the modern age, while fiercely resistant to modernity. In the second, and concluding, part, it is argued that fascism was profoundly indebted to capitalism even as it was, in other ways, passionately opposed to it.

KEYWORDS:

• Fascism
• National Socialism
• modernity
• Nietzsche, Friedrich
• political extremism
• capitalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ishay Landa is Associate Professor of modern history at the Israeli Open University, in Ra’anana. His research interests include political theory – especially fascism, Marxism, and liberalism – and popular culture. He has written four books: The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture (Lexington, 2007), The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism (Brill, 2010), The Roots of European Fascism: 1789–1945 (in Hebrew, the Open University Press, 2015), and Fascism and the Masses: The Revolt Against the Last Humans, 1848–1945 (Routledge, 2018). His essays and lectures deal with diverse topics such as fascism, consumerism, religion and atheism, and take on different writers and thinkers, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, or J. R. R. Tolkien. He has won several scholarships, among them a Post-doc fellowship with distinction: ‘Gerhard Martin Julius Schmidt Minerva Fellowship,' for a research conducted at TU Braunschweig, Germany (2006–2008), and more recently, the Alon Fellowship for Outstanding Young Researchers, awarded by the Council of Higher Education, Israel (2009–2012).

Notes

1 This article assumes, in agreement with most historians of fascism, that for all its special characteristics, German National Socialism was a member of the broader fascist political family. See, for representative studies: Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Roger Griffin, (ed.), Fascism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Michael Mann, Fascist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). In fact, this article suggests that the unique toxicity of Nazism, which many scholars have underlined, stemmed largely from the ultraist nature of its fascist character.

2 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London and New York: Verso, 1999), p. 3.

3 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 17.

4 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 123.

5 Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York and London: The New Press, 2003), p. 153.

6 For a criticism of the post-Enlightenment entailed by the Frankfurt School, see, for instance, Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Dark Side of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 2.

7 As Enrico Corradini influentially put it. See Adrian Lyttelton, (ed.), Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), p. 149.

8 For Hitler’s emulation of British imperialism, see, for example, Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 1999 [1939]), pp. 144–5, and Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932–1945, vol. 1 (Wiesbaden: R. Löwit, 1973), pp. 75–76.

9 See Stefan Ihrig, Justifying Genocide. Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2016), part 4.

10 As discussed in Carroll P. Kakel III, The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

11 Bob Cannon, “Towards a Theory of Counter-Modernity: Rethinking Zygmunt Bauman’s Holocaust Writings,” Critical Sociology, vol. 42, no. 1 (2016): p. 50.

12 Ulrich Beck, The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), pp. 1–5.

13 See also, for defense of progress as a dialectical rather than linear process, Denis Mäder, Fortschritt bei Marx (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010).

14 Not to be confused with ‘modernism,’ a distinct historical and cultural phenomenon that was in some ways outright opposed to modernity. I return to this important point below.

15 As argued, for example, by the following studies: Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013) and Timothy Brennan, Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014).

16 Carl Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren 1947 bis 1958, ed. Martin Tielke (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2015), p. 283. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of non-English sources are mine.

17 See, for instance, Carl Schmitt, Die Diktatur. Von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2006), pp. 13–15.

18 “Interrogation of Carl Schmitt by Robert Kempner (I-III),” Telos, vol. 72 (1987): p. 104.

19 Carl Schmitt, Staat, Großraum, Nomos. Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1916–1969, ed. Günther Maschke (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995), pp. 582–5.

20 Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 234.

21 Cannon, “Towards a Theory”; Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 70–86; Marsha Healy, “The Holocaust, Modernity and the Enlightenment,” Res Publica, vol. 3, no. 1 (1997): pp. 35–59; Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity. Philosophical Essays (London and New York: Verso, 2017), pp. 22–23.

22 Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, vol. 18 (Florence: La Fenice, 1958), p. 70.

23 Quoted in Rick Wilford, “Fascism,” in Robert Eccleshall et al., (eds.), Political Ideologies: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 212.

24 See, for instance, Alice Gallin, Midwives to Nazism: University Professors in Weimar Germany (Macon, GA: Mercer, 1986); Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933–1939 (London: Phoenix, 1998), p. 59.

25 The most authoritative source documenting the Enlightenment’s egalitarian and democratic thrust are Jonathan Israel’s comprehensive studies, beginning with the groundbreaking first volume: Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

26 Beck, The Reinvention of Politics, p. 63.

27 Ibid.

28 Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 19, p. 261.

29 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 2006).

30 See Cannon, “Towards a Theory,” pp. 52–55; Yaacov Lozowick, Hitler’s Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002); David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (London: Heinemann, 2004).

31 Eichmann, as quoted in Lozowick, Hitler’s Bureaucrats, p. 32.

32 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, p. 91.

33 Heidegger as quoted in Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 168. For a lucid dissection of the unappealing affinities between Arendt’s and Bauman’s critique of modernity, on the one hand, and Heidegger’s outlook, on the other hand, see Cannon, “Towards a Theory,” pp. 61–63.

34 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 150.

35 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, p. 83.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 See, Jill Stephenson, “Nazis, Class and Justice,” The Historical Journal, vol. 38, no. 1 (1995): pp. 221–9.

39 Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 21, p. 425.

40 For these numbers, see, respectively, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2001), p. 126, and Ian Campbell, The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National Shame (London: Hurst & Company, 2017), p. 329.

41 Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, p. 126.

42 Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 21, p. 425.

43 For a useful, short refutation of the view of Hegel as proto-‘totalitarian,’ see Franz Grégoire, “Is the Hegelian State Totalitarian?” in Jon Stewart, (ed.), The Hegel Myths and Legends (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), pp. 104–8.

44 Darré, cited in Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, pp. 113–4.

45 As classically stated by Georgi Dimitroff in the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935, fascism was ‘the most open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital’; quoted in Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 3.

46 Two salient cases are Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1961) and Henry Ashby Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

47 For this view, and a useful survey of the historical debate, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (New York and London: Verso, 2017).

48 William Shakespeare, King John (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 [1623]), pp. 98–99.

49 Ibid., p. 99.

50 He characterized himself in 1934 as ‘a disciple of Friedrich Nietzsche,’ in Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 26, p. 235.

51 Wolfram Pyta, Hitler: Der Künstler als Politiker und Feldherr. Eine Herrschaftsanalyse (Munich: Siedler, 2015), Kindle edition, location 5301.

52 Thomas Mann, “Nietzsches Philosophie im Lichte Unserer Erfahrung,” Gesammelte Werke in Dreizehn Bänden, vol. IX (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1974), p. 702.

53 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 184.

54 Norbert Elias, The Germans (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 118.

55 Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 157–8. This passage is also an example of the fascist antagonism toward mass consumption, an important facet of fascist ideology, which I have analyzed elsewhere: Ishay Landa, Fascism and the Masses: The Revolt Against the Last Humans, 1848–1945 (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 278–305.

56 Ishay Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2009). Consider also Zeev Sternhell’s observation that the proto-fascist Sorelians and the champions of the free market economy ‘were in complete agreement on the most extreme principles of economic liberalism,’ in Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, trans. David Meisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 45.

57 Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 447.

58 Ibid., pp. 151–2.

59 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 128.

60 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 142.

61 Valentine de Saint-Point, “Manifesto della donna futurista,” I manifesti del futurismo (Florence: Lacerba, 1914), pp. 70–73.

62 Aredgno Soffici, “Contro i deboli,” Lacerba, vol. 1, no. 1 (1913): pp. 3–4.

63 Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 255.

64 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 164.

65 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1993 [1939]), p. 706.

66 Ibid., p. 421.

67 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York and London: Harper Perennial, 2008).

68 Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism: 20th Anniversary Edition (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

69 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

70 Ibid., p. 62.

71 José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Escritos y Discursos: Obras Completas (1922–1936), ed. Agustin del Río Cisneros (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1976), digital file, pp. 484–5.

72 Ernst Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Munich: Piper, 1984), p. 515. The last part of this 1963 study, which deals with fascism as a reaction to the revolutionary thrust of modernity, remains vital reading.

73 See Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 281).

74 Giovanni Gentile, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism: With Selections From Other Works, ed. A. James Gregor (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007), p. 52.

75 Mark Bassin, “Race contra Space: The Conflict between German Geopolitik and National Socialism,” in Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca, (eds.), Hitler’s Geographies: The Spatialities of the Third Reich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), Kindle edition.

76 Ibid., location 2840.

77 Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 388.

78 In Lyttelton, Italian Fascisms, p. 47.

79 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 396.

80 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 51.

81 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 506.

82 The Nizkor Project: http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/h/himmler-heinrich/posen/oct-04-43/ausrottung-transl-nizkor.html.

83 Nietzsche’s defenders frequently invoke his aversion to antisemitism to dismiss any connection between his ideas and Nazism. This protective claim overlooks the fact that Nietzsche’s thought included the readiness to annihilate millions, and could hence not be extricated from proto-fascism, even if the target of the violence did not necessarily remain the same (for a recent exploration of the substantial affinities between Nietzsche’s ideas and fascist ideology see Ronald Beiner, Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018)). And this holds true quite apart from the fact that Nietzsche’s attitudes to Jews and Judaism were by no means unambiguously positive, consisting of a striking mix of empathy and hostility. For a balanced account, see Robert C. Holub, Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem. Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). For my own effort to decode Nietzsche’s seemingly contradictory stance vis-à-vis Judaism, see Landa, Fascism and the Masses, pp. 361–6.

84 In Landa, Fascism and the Masses, chap. 7.

85 Joseph Roth, Die Filiale der Hölle auf Erden: Schriften aus der Emigration (Cologne: KiWi, 2003), p. 52.

86 See Meiksins Wood, The Origin, pp. 185–92.

87 Ulrich Beck has pointed to this irresolvable tension in one of his books, whose German title was highly revealing: “Freedom or capitalism”; Ulrich Beck, Freiheit oder Kapitalismus. Ulrich Beck im Gespräch mit Johannes Willms (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000).