Fascists (review)

This book is part of a major two-book project on extreme ideologies (the second of which is still to emerge at the time of writing) by this world-renowned comparative/historical sociologist. This first volume is based on Mann's researches (mainly through secondary sources) on classical fascism in six European countries—Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Spain. Mann asks why fascism rose to such prominence, a question he attempts to answer by studying the individuals and groups who became fascists, both in terms of their beliefs, and who they were.

Mann begins by distinguishing between the dominant school of "idealist" theorists who focus on fascists' beliefs and doctrines, and in particular their "ultra-nationalism," often expressed in terms of "political religion," and the "materialist" school which focuses on the specifically petit bourgeois/bourgeois class basis of fascism and links to big capitalism—specifically through Marxist analysis. Mann rejects such explanations of the origins of fascism, and offers instead a new model based on four "sources of social power": ideological, economic, military, and political. He argues that social movements achieve ideological hegemony and thereby control of the means of production (the economic), physical violence (the military) and centralized state (the political), and that fascism arose as a specific response to simultaneous crises in all these areas. However, he devotes rather more attention to the military and political causes than the economic and ideological factors than is traditional.

His theoretical starting point is the argument that the nation-state represents the central political institution of the twentieth century and "Fascism thus presented a distinctively paramilitary extreme version of nation statism [and] . . . was only the most extreme version of the dominant political ideology of our era" (2). Mann defines classical fascism as the pursuit of "a transcendent and cleansing nation statism through paramilitarism" (13). This has four main aspects. The aim of the first aspect, cleansing nationalism, was to achieve an "organic" and "integral" nation, expressed at its most extreme and exclusive in Nazi biological racism. Statism, the second, was a totalitarian belief in state power exercised through corporatism and authoritarianism linked to forms of "Führerprinzip." The third, transcendence, wasa belief thatsocial conflict would be transcended when private interests were subsumed under national interests, and social welfare realized through corporatist institutions (although never realized in power). Finally, the fourth aspect was paramilitarism, an activist and militarized political force, organizing direct action and violence against its opponents. Fascists are viewed by Mann as authentic "revolutionaries of the right," based on the national-state, which, Mann argues, "made fascist revolutionary, though not in the conventional left/right terms" (17). Indeed, Mann sees fascist ideology as highly significant in the context of the period: "As they said themselves, fascists were not mere 'reactionaries' nor 'stooges' of capitalism or anyone else. They offered solutions to the four economic, military, political, and ideological crises of early twentieth century modernity. They propounded plausible solutions to modern capitalism's class struggles and economic crises. They transmitted the values of mass citizen warfare into paramilitarism and aggressive nationalism. They were a product of the transition of dual states toward 'rule by the people,' proposing a less liberal and more 'organic' version of this rule" (364).

Mann moves on to explain fascism's rise in two phases. First, through a more general upsurge of authoritarian rightism, due to a series of economic, political, military, and ideological crises linked to World War I, without which, he argues, there would have been no opportunity for fascism to properly emerge. He devotes a great deal of detail to analyzing these four overlapping crises and the manner in which they prepared the ground for the emergence of fully-fledged classical fascism and the positive reception it would receive in some influential quarters, especially in Italy and Germany. He concludes that fascism was a "principled ideology" offering what appeared to be "plausible solutions" to contemporary crises.

Mann then moves on to the second part of his analysis, examining and explaining the typical fascist sociological profile, although he views...