"Why do you want to put your ideas in order?": Re-Thinking the Politics of Ezra Pound

In 1982, criticism on Ezra Pound’s monetary and political views was so limited that Peter Brooker noted those who had addressed those subjects had either relegated them to biography or treated them with “reasoned apologia or regret.” ¹ However, over the next decade, a multitude of books and essays appeared which critically examined the convergence of Pound’s politics and poetry. ² This was unquestionably a development that was both salutary and long overdue: to cite only one example, Robert Casillo’s The Genealogy of Demons begins with a thorough and devastating analysis of the evasions and half-truths through which too many critics attempted to justify Pound’s totalitarian sympathies and his anti-Semitism. At the same time, however, reading these various studies of Pound (as of many other writers and thinkers) one gets the sense that they do nothing to rectify George Orwell’s complaint that “the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” ³ While “Fascism” is nothing like a unitary political movement, nearly all of the studies of Pound’s political affiliations lack an historical perspective which is sufficiently attentive to the nuances, ambiguities, and vagaries which marked the varieties of Fascism, not to mention the even more prominent idiosyncrasies which characterize Pound’s political thought. In fact, with the exception of his anti-Semitism and a few celebrations of Mussolini’s corporatism, there is little in Pound’s thought that is quintessentially Fascist: even in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, his celebration of the Duce, he has little to say about the specifics of Mussolini’s regime. Instead, Pound’s politics can be described more accurately as a particularly totalitarian form of the cult of personality. Pound has a Confucian-influenced belief in the power of a strong leader, whether he be Sigismundo Malatesta, Thomas Jefferson, Benito Mussolini, V.I. Lenin, or Huey Long, and this faith is so strong that Pound repeatedly suggests that the actual ideology and accomplishments of the man are less important than his character and his insight. What is perhaps more surprising than casting Mussolini as a Confucian is casting him as a Poundian: Mussolini, in Pound’s depiction, comes to embody all the contradictions and apparent incoherences of both Pound himself and the Cantos. This is no extenuation of Pound; instead, I believe this type of nuanced critique helps to demonstrate why and how so many writers and thinkers became attracted to the various forms of Fascism.

As an effective political movement, Fascism was relatively short-lived. In 1920 Mussolini still framed the word Fascism with scare quotes, indicating its status as a neologism; twenty-five years later, both Hitler and he were dead. In that time, some incredibly diverse movements had been described by themselves or others as Fascist. These movements sometimes changed substantially: there are significant differences between the Mussolini of 1919 who preached a Sorelian doctrine of popular violence, and the Mussolini of the late 1930s who moved closer to the Catholic Church and monarchy. Perhaps more important was the lack of a coherent theoretical base. A truism which recurs in histories of Fascism is that it had no Marx or Engels, but instead relied on heteroclite mixtures of syndicalism, invented histories, idiosyncratic readings of Nietzsche, nationalism, racialism, and—importantly—Marx himself. That difficulty suggests an additional problem, which is that many literary critics have operated from an understanding of Fascism in which it is seen as essentially opposed to Marxism. This perspective presents binaries that seem clear and comfortable: Fascism is reactionary, while Marxism is revolutionary; Fascism is nostalgic, while Marxism looks toward a future utopia. However, this tidy opposition is a serious distortion. Georges Valois, founder of the French Faisceau, nicely summarized the views of many Fascists when he argued that his group was “neither of the right nor of the left.” Zeev Sternhell, who reworked Valois’ phrase for the title of his book on French Fascism, notes that “. . . in France the sources of the Fascist movement, as well as its leaders...