‘All in the extended family’: the Pandora's box of conservatism and fascism reopened

Abstract

The article attempts to reanalyze the relationships between conservatism and fascism in a historical and comparative perspective. This analysis is premised on the view that to fully understand and explain conservatism requires reexamining its comparative-historical relations to fascism, and, alternatively, understanding and explaining the second presupposes taking account of the first. The thrust of the issue is whether and to what extent conservatism constitutes or develops into fascism, and, conversely, whether the latter represents or results from the former. The central argument and finding is that under certain social conditions and historical constellations conservatism eventually evolves into or functions as fascism. Alternatively, fascism universally represents and reproduces conservatism.

Keywords:

• conservatism
• fascism
• anti-liberalism
• authoritarianism

Notes

1. However, Hinchman (1984, p. 262) suggests that Germany's was ‘highly vulnerable to totalitarian movements’ in part by virtue of its rationalist (Hegelian) elements, namely ‘a citizenry suspicious of and unaccustomed to political involvement’ and ‘a highly trained, professional corps of civil servants who often made policy when elected governments could not’. Hinchman (1984, p. 262) adds that ‘astonishingly few citizens in Weimar Germany, when the threat of Nazism became plain, were actually willing to defend their state (as opposed to their Volk)’.

2. In turn, Durkheim implicitly contradicted Nazism by remarking that Slavic people belonged to the ‘Aryan race’. In fact, the Nazis contradicted themselves by taking and raising ‘blond’ Slavic (Polish, Russian, etc.) children without parents to replenish the dwindling supply of ‘Aryans’ in Germany.

3. For instance, according to liberal Austrian economist Mises (1969, p. 31): ‘Bismarck and his military and aristocratic friends hated the liberals so thoroughly that they would have been ready to help the socialists get control of the country if they themselves had proved too weak to preserve their own rule’. Alternatively, he states that German liberalism ‘had not yet fulfilled its task when it was defeated by étatism, nationalism, and socialism’ (Mises 1969, p. 23), though he lumps into the latter, and so conflates it with, communism, even a liberal welfare state (e.g. the New Deal, etc.) or social democracy, virtually anything save laissez-faire capitalism.

4. Michels (1968, p. 34) remarks that, for example: ‘King Frederick William IV of Prussia threatened to abdicate whenever liberal ideas were tending in Prussian politics to gain the upper hand over the romanticist conservatism which was dear to his heart’.