Two Faces of Fascism

When I began working as a graduate student in German history in the mid-1990s, the study of Nazi Germany still stood under the influence of the Sonderweg debate and the Historikerstreit, with their respective concern over German peculiarities in general and the putative uniqueness of the Holocaust in particular. It was not then self-evident to all scholars of modern German history that Germany's troubled path to modernity had not been completely shaped by intrinsic factors, and utterly without comparative implications. Since my doctoral advisor was named David Black-bourn I was perhaps particularly sensitive to these questions. Nonetheless, if there was then a paradigm at all in twentieth century German history, it was these themes that constituted it, and one had to reckon with the major scholars who had made the case for uniqueness. David Blackbourn himself used to tell his students, "You have to work through Wehler to work past him."

How long ago this now seems. To be sure, German particularities still seem to linger within Fascist studies, as some scholars questing after "the fascist minimum" argue for leaving Nazi Germany out of the calculation as the outlier that throws out the mean. Yet today no scholar will venture outside without a decent cover of comparative clothing. Nothing happens solely within one country anymore; we are all transnationalists now. The two stimulating, though very different, books under review make this point abundantly clear. To be sure, these books concern themselves with the subdiscipline of "fascist studies," which could hardly be anything but comparative. But their authors are historians, and so these works serve as a good indicator of where we are now.

David D. Roberts's Fascist Interactions could be taken as a summation of Professor Roberts's long career. His concern is, as he tells us in the opening line, to "assess the current state of 'fascist studies"' and suggest a path forward for future research (viii). The book takes the form of an extraordinarily erudite literature review. Roberts seems to have read absolutely everything on the experience of fascism and other forms of authoritarian politics across Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century.

The book unfolds in three main sections. Part one explores the present state of "fascist studies." Here Roberts's essential critique is that the field has become too bogged down in questions of definition and classification. He makes much the same argument here that Robert Paxton made nearly fifteen years ago in his Anatomy of Fascism, that fascism, whatever it may have been, has to be appreciated both in action and over time—and that a static definition of fascism is one which will entirely miss the essence of the thing that is being studied. A particular virtue of this book is that Roberts goes out of his way to de-centre Germany and Italy in the broader story of fascism: he argues for an approach that allows the "originality" of fascisms elsewhere to be fully apprehended by scholars, rather than simply seen as pale and unsuccessful variants of the real story going on in Rome and Berlin.

In the second part Roberts makes his case for seeing various fascisms as "braided hybrids"—in other words, as much of the more recent literature in individual cases has done, he takes a close look at the international influences and connections that ran between fascist and other radical right movements in various countries, and between fascism and the conventional political right in particular countries. He makes a particularly astute and telling point when he argues that fascism cannot be understood if one studies only fascism: it is crucial to study fascism in its interactions with authoritarians, conventional conservatives, democrats, and socialists within the political spectra of the various countries.

The third part sets out Roberts...