Fascism: The Career of a Concept

by Paul Edward Gottfried

"For historians, [ Fascism ] offers clear and provocative insights and arguments, and the very detailed notes are especially helpful.... Recommended." ― Choice What does it mean to label someone a fascist? Today, it is equated with denouncing him or her as a Nazi. But as intellectual historian Paul E. Gottfried writes in this provocative yet even-handed study, the term's meaning has evolved over the years. Gottfried examines the semantic twists and turns the term has endured since the 1930s and traces the word's polemical function within the context of present ideological struggles. Like "conservatism," "liberalism," and other words whose meanings have changed with time, "fascism" has been used arbitrarily over the years and now stands for a host of iniquities that progressives, multiculturalists, and libertarians oppose, even if they offer no single, coherent account of the historic evil they condemn. Certain factors have contributed to the term's imprecise usage, Gottfried writes, including the equation of all fascisms with Nazism and Hitler, as well as the rise of a post-Marxist left that expresses predominantly cultural opposition to bourgeois society and its Christian and/or national components. Those who stand in the way of social change are dismissed as "fascist," he contends, an epithet that is no longer associated with state corporatism and other features of fascism that were once essential but are now widely ignored. Gottfried outlines the specific historical meaning of the term and argues that it should not be used indiscriminately to describe those who hold unpopular opinions. His important study will appeal to political scientists, intellectual historians, and general readers interested in politics and history.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Political Science

226 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2015

About the author

Paul Edward Gottfried is the editor of Chronicles and a former Horace Raffensperger professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Dietrich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since stumbling across Gottfried’s impressive critical study of Leo Strauss, I’ve started exploring his other work. I’ve found his books learned, intelligent and thought provoking. This book on fascism is no exception.

Gottfried provides a conceptual roadmap of his topic by identifying many important theoretical questions dealt with by scholars of fascism. These include but are not limited to the following: Is it possible to identify an essential character that the various movements and regimes labeled fascist shared? Is fascism a right wing or left wing phenomenon? Is fascism bounded to a particular historical time and place, or does it have the potential to reemerge in very different contexts? Was Hitler’s Germany simply a more radical form of the fascism present in Italy, or is Naziism better classified with Stalinist Russia as an example of the modern problem of totalitarianism? Gottfried also provides a review of the literature pertaining to fascism, contextualizing and making judgments concerning the different scholarly interpretations that have emerged over time. Further, he examines and takes issue with how the term fascism has become such a rhetorical weapon among political partisans of various stripes, much to the detriment of genuine historical understanding. This is quite a lot to pack into such a slender book.

Gottfried thinks one is justified speaking of a generic fascism, and that it was exemplified in Italy. He calls fascism a Franco-Italian phenomenon, because many of the ideas that came to fruition in Italy were born in France during the 19th c, as the right reacted to laicism and the human rights doctrine of the Third Republic. Gottfried thinks that fascism is best understood as the counterrevolutionary imitation of the revolutionary left. It was thus a spatially and temporally bounded right-wing phenomenon, the product of interwar Europe. Its thinking betrayed a Latin cast of mind, and it especially appealed in countries whose modernization was uneven. Fascism was obviously different from the traditional conservatism to which it was nevertheless related. It was “constructivist” in outlook, creatively seeking to establish organic, hierarchical societies rather than conserve old orders, which by that point had dissolved or were in the process of dissolution. So, the fascist task was novel, but the emphasis on national particularity, cultural identity, and hierarchy was identifiably right wing. Also, unlike the traditional conservatives and various other right-wing groups, the fascists had adopted from some of their left wing adversaries a somewhat mystical appreciation of violence as purifying and world constituting. Gottfried calls the fascists the “revolutionary right.”

Gottfried also distinguishes fascism from Naziism. To be clear, Gottfried thinks the eclectic Nazis did include some fascist elements, along with heavy borrowings from Stalin and Hitler’s own feverish imagination. However, like Stalin’s Russia, but unlike Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany is most properly considered a totalitarian phenomenon. Gottfried sides here with the “totalitarian model,” originally put forward by the democratic left, but embraced and developed by others as well, such as religious minded conservatives and thinkers (often classical liberals) especially focused on the developing managerial state. Those who embraced this model saw totalitarianism as radically anti-traditional because of its quest to achieve total control, and as a threat to humanity that transcended left/right distinctions. Gottfried considers Hannah Arendt as perhaps the most consistently insightful spokesperson for the totalitarian model; he thinks her book The Origins of Totalitarianism is one of the most important books of the 20th century.

In some respects, Gottfried’s book presents a declension tale regarding our understanding of fascism. Gottfried thinks the rise of a “post-marxist” (or neo-marxist) left has warped our understanding of fascism and helped turn the term into an especially powerful polemical tool. This neo-marxist left is “no longer guided by Marx’s socioeconomic critique of capitalism but…expresses predominantly cultural opposition to bourgeois society and its Christian and/or national components.” As part of its rhetorical arsenal, this neo-marxist left stigmatizes those who disagree with its lifestyle liberation/ internationalist agenda as fascists or “right wing extremists.” Gottfried thinks calling fascist those who, for example, favor restricted third world immigration or do not support gay marriage is an ahistorical abuse of the term.

To the extent that there is “theory” behind this rhetorical strategy, it is found in the Frankfurt School’s idea that fascism is the unfortunate end product of a late capitalist society that fails to turn left, and that “the authoritarian personality,” a defective, alienated product of late capitalism that resists needed cultural and economic change and helps pave the way for fascism, remains an unconquered threat. Gottfried does not think much of this perspective, and maintains it is based on extremely shoddy “scholarship” that dresses up ideological preferences in social scientific garb. However, the Frankfurt School has proved profoundly influential, in large part because The Authoritarian Personality was written for the “edification” of post WWII American progressive intellectuals, who embraced its ideas and whose power to spread them at home and abroad was especially strong. In addition, The Authoritarian Personality entailed a cleverly pernicious built-in way to pathologize dissent, since to disagree was presumably to betray one’s own authoritarian tendencies. Ironically, though the neo-marxists have helped undermine the popularity of the totalitarian model ( by equating fascism with Naziism and rehabilitating communists into reliable anti-fascist allies) they themselves have helped facilitate an emerging “soft despotism” that some totalitarian model theorists warned against, one in which governmental power has been enhanced and expanded to protect various forms of “diversity,” while dissenters are marginalized through political correctness.

The neo-marxists are not the only ones Gottfried takes to task for using the term fascism for polemical reasons. He attacks a recent trend by Republican journalists that equates leftist/liberal collectivism with fascism. Gottfried views the contemporary Republican party itself as so collectivist that present attempts to demonize Democrats as fascists over shared practices smacks of hypocritical partisanship. In addition, he also notes that to consider collectivism inherently left-wing betrays an ignorance of the range of historical right-wing theory and practice. (However, Gottfried thinks it understandable that Republicans, after being beaten over the head with the fascist label for some time, have decided to fight back by reciprocating. And he also identifies and thoughtfully examines serious intellectuals and scholars who view fascism as a left-wing phenomenon. Though he disagrees with them, he respects them more than the journalists.) Gottfried also takes issue with a neoconservative tendency to occasionally label various current regimes as fascist so as to garner popular support for a more interventionist foreign policy. His own considered understanding of fascism as spatially and temporally bounded is intended to bring to light to the superficiality of such efforts, though once again, Gottfried carefully examines and respectfully disagrees with certain genuine scholars who do think of fascism as capable of reemerging in different times and places.

Gottfried says fascism “should interest readers not because it characterizes the present or is likely to dominate the future but because of what it once exemplified.” Gottfried’s study of fascism is intended to help one recover the distinction between the essentialist right (of which fascism, by emphasizing particularity, identitarian politics, and hierarchy, was a real-though not particularly impressive-example) and the essentialist left. That this distinction is currently effectively buried demonstrates the practical triumph of the essentialist left in the modern West. For instance, even the so-called “establishment right” in America, says Gottfried, is animated by leftist values such as equality and human rights it wishes to spread universally around the globe. In America, as in other current Western contexts, the political opposition to openly leftist parties can be considered “right-wing” only in a relational sense. Even then, a lack of differing principles means that the Republicans over time are steadily driven further left as they pragmatically give ground to various progressive agendas spearheaded by their adversaries. Both Republicans and Democrats are complicit in the spread of a post-marxist left-inspired “soft despotism” at home and abroad.

This book strikes me as both a solid introduction to fascism and a sophisticated treatment of the subject that even scholars with different opinions could profit from. In addition, it ends up providing a broad, sweeping outlook on contemporary history that serves as a framework from which to approach Gottfried’s other books, such as his critical look at the conservative movement in America and his study Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, Paul Gottfried studies fascism as a historic political phenomenon and as a modern-day concept subject to misuse and abuse. Gottfried posits that while scholars argue about the definition of fascism and its essential features, in popular practice the term “fascism” has been applied so arbitrarily that it may be difficult to deduce what it means without knowing the mindset of the speaker. Many recent accusations of fascism are merely attempts to identify fascism with whatever the speaker happens to dislike, associating it with Nazi atrocities. Gottfried calls this the “fascist branding iron,” and asserts, “It is inadmissible to apply ‘fascist’ to whatever the speaker finds viscerally repulsive.”

Gottfried never mentions Antifa specifically in this book, perhaps because it was published in 2016, before Antifa became headline news. But he does note, “In this widening crusade against neo-fascism, all ‘insensitive’ or unprogressive positions have been indiscriminately branded as fascistic. Anti-fascism typically entails equating every form of politically incorrect protestation, whether directed against gay marriage or the introduction of Sharia law into European countries, into fascist intolerance and then inventing some kind of linkage between the punitive outrage and those atrocities committed in Nazi Germany.”

I think there is a lot of truth in the excesses of the fascist labeling and equating to Nazism. Hoping to understand Gottfried’s current read on Antifa, I read his most recent article “The Sacralization of Black Lives Matter” (Chronicles, December 18, 2020). Here, Gottfried makes liberal uses the iron himself, as evidenced by these two sentences from the piece: “Last I checked, BLM appeared to be the PC-authorized equivalent of the Nazi Brown Shirts, brutal thugs who prey on the weak and push racist mumbo-jumbo,” and “…the entire Democratic Party seems to have formed an alliance with black Nazis and their underlings.”

So, four years after writing a book excoriating people who label anyone they don’t like as fascists or Nazis, this author brandishes the branding iron he condemns others for using. I now know the mindset of this speaker.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gottfried examines a range of conceptions of fascism (mostly academic, some journalistic) and, with the surgical precision and clear-eyed sobriety with which I have come to associate his writing, makes a series of important arguments about the nature of fascism:

1. There is an ‘essentialist’ Right and an ‘essentialist’ Left—these terms are not merely relational.

2. There is a generic fascism, which resembles the Italian fascist movement but is at least partly distinct from it.

3. This generic fascism is distantly related to classical conservatism at least genealogically.

4. Generic fascism is ideologically distinct from German Nazism, and the two are linked together in the popular mind because of the military alliance between Hitler and Mussolini.

5. Generic fascism belonged to a specific temporal–spatial context (Franco-Italian societies in interwar Europe) and, whether or not Hitler had come along, would have had a limited temporal existence.

6. Generic fascism was a movement of the Right (specifically, the revolutionary Right), but it was heavily influenced by elements of the Left—especially Anarchist and Syndicalist strains of thought.

7. And, finally, for all these reasons, it is inadmissible to apply the term “fascist” to whatever one finds objectionable.

Gottfried draws from a wide range of academic as well as primary sources to build his arguments and gives all perspectives a fair hearing. I found this book to be engaging, enlightening, and compelling in its conclusions.

[The American Conservative]

The term “fascism” is employed with such regular enthusiasm by everyone from political activists to celebrities and academics that our pundits could be forgiven for assuming that fascists lurk behind every corner and at every level of government. MSNBC host Keith Olbermann accused the Bush administration of fascism. Thomas Sowell has called President Obama a fascist. A quick online search yields accusations that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are fascists. The term “Islamofascism” circulates widely, and groups as dissimilar as campus Social Justice Warriors and the leaders of the National Rifle Association have been dubbed fascist.

It’s clear why fanatics or dogmatists would label their opponents with the f-word: rhetorical play scores political points. But is there ever any truth behind the label?

http://www.theamericanconservative.co...

[Roy · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is fascim? A counter revolutionary movement, a revolutionary movement? Right or left? Why is Fascist name calling equated with all the right, Nazism and everything that deviates from woke or the left?
Gottfried separates and explains every nuance and the difference between this movements. A fascist is not a Nazi nor a Nazi is a Traditonalist. Excellent research as usual with this author and fairly objective which is to be lauded, especially on the Nazism subject, since Gottfried is jewish and you can sense his distaste for the Reich.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is fascism? Generically, it is a political philosophy, but what is its content? The word today is almost always used simply as an infinitely flexible synonym for “enemy of the Left,” but fascism was once a real thing, even though it has long disappeared from actual politics. Paul Gottfried, who has forgotten far more of history and politics than you or I know, wrote this book to closely analyze and, to the extent possible, systematize fascism. He consigns fascism strictly to the past, a creature born of a unique historical moment, the interwar period. But his subtle and penetrating analysis offers food for thought about the political systems of the future, which we can be sure will be very different from those of the present.

Gottfried says his aim is to “trace the evolution of fascism’s polemical function within the context of our own ideological struggles.” Tracing the polemical role of the term “fascism” is really secondary in this book, however, to tracing fascism analytically, both in the eyes of its proponents and its opponents. “Fascism should interest readers not because it characterizes the present or is likely to dominate the future but because of what it once exemplified. It was a movement of the revolutionary Right, a force that now exists in the West as an isolated or only remotely approximated curiosity.” This, while certainly true, ignores the question of whether a revolutionary Right will exist in the future. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Fascism is hard to study both because of the polemics surrounding it, and because it manifested in different forms at different times (hence the “career” referred to in the subtitle). There is a little flavor of apophatic theology here, the study of what fascism is by studying what it is not, but the attentive reader will be rewarded. Regardless, what Gottfried offers is explicitly not any particular thesis or theses about fascism. Rather, he “proceeds as a collection of studies dealing with various interpretations of fascism from the time fascist movements became a historical force in the 1920s.” Because fascism is not a unitary phenomenon, he looks at fascism from several angles, responding to a wide range of writers on the topic, from Hannah Arendt to Stanley Payne to Ernst Nolte to Augusto Del Noce, and many less famous. (It is amusing, or perhaps frightening, to the reader when examining the footnotes, seeking more information about a work Gottfried cites, to realize that most of the works Gottfried refers to, originally written in German, or French, or Italian, have never been translated, and that Gottfried read them in their original languages.)

Crucially, various “interpretations of fascism [became] popular at different times, often in response to changing political climates.” This lends the book somewhat of a capsule flavor; as Gottfried explores different lines of thought, many partially or wholly incompatible with each other. If there is a central claim, however, it is that fascism was ephemeral, because “fascist ideology did not wear well outside of its time and culture.” Most viscerally, this was because after World War II it was inaccurately, though predictably, lumped in with National Socialist ideology and crimes, making any endorsement of fascism radioactive. No fascist government of any sort has existed since the war. Fascism, moreover, “was inseparably related to the interwar period and to the threat to the bourgeois order that then existed.” It is not that every interwar Right movement or leader was fascist; quite the contrary. Gottfried rejects without discussion, as obvious, the silly claim that leaders such as Francisco Franco and Miklós Horthy were fascist (rather, they “came out of the non-fascist Right”). As far as the period since the war, Gottfried claims that Western patterns of political thought in today’s world are so antithetical to fascist modes of thought that fascism simply cannot exist in any meaningful fashion.

If fascism is not simply the authoritarian Right, what is it? “Can one define fascism in any place and at any time in terms of a consistent body of ideas, as opposed to a mere reaction against movements or ideologies that the fascists were resisting?” Yes, is the answer, more or less, but there is a lot of possible variation in the answer. Gottfried seems most sympathetic to Stanley Payne’s typology, which notes characteristics common to all fascist systems, typically arising out, but heavily modifying, existing opposition to Left destruction of national traditions: “a permanent nationalistic one-party authoritarianism”; “the search for a synthetic ethnicist ideology”; a charismatic leader; a corporatist political economy; and “a philosophical principle of voluntarist activism unbounded by any philosophical determinism.” Gottfried accurately summarizes this as a “grab bag of ideas,” and notes that how these characteristics might manifest must necessarily differ by situation. For example, fascists opposed both parliamentarianism and Communism, as Left constructs. Yet at the same time men of the Left sometimes became fascist, and vice versa, suggesting more commonality that might at first be admitted—not commonality in ideas, but commonality in the personality and focus of those attracted to the system. Gottfried also notes that one distinguishing characteristic of fascism is its willingness to resort to violence in response to the Left—force itself was viewed as redemptive, and also the quintessential revolutionary act.

Whence did fascism arise? Was it an organic tendency, called forth by varying political situations, or something purely reactive, arising in response to the Left’s ascension? Gottfried observes that fascism filled the gap when an older Right system, typically in Europe the aristocratic one, disappeared, but was it merely reacting to what came next? Ernst Nolte, a famed German scholar who died in 2016 at the age of ninety-three (like many prominent scholars of fascism, a leftist, which tends to cloud objective analysis of the fascist phenomenon), was the major exponent of what might be called “fascism as pure reaction.” He saw the interwar fascist movements as a “counterrevolutionary imitation of the revolutionary Left.” Unlike the Left, however, it offered no transcendence, no transformation, merely a holding action against political enemies. This limited its appeal. Counterpoised to this point of view are those analysts who see fascism as embodying significant futurist elements, the promise of a new age, generated organically, rather than as a reaction—but a vision based in reality, not seeking utopia.

Gottfried sees no real contradiction here—a movement can be both reactive and “elicit mass enthusiasm and [be] considered by its followers as speaking for the future.” Certainly, when they were in the ascendant, because they were seen as offering something better, the National Socialists were often greeted “with ecstatic enthusiasm . . . as [their] armies rolled across western Europe.” After all, “The fascists, including their more savage Nazi cousins, were perceived as the enemies of the Bolsheviks and the Jewish allies of international Marxism.” That is, they fought against the Left, the enemy of mankind, but also offered a vision of the future that was not merely “not Left.” This offering was extremely popular at the time, but that truth is hidden today. (However, following Nolte, Gottfried concludes that in no sense was National Socialism fascism—they “ran a highly eclectic totalitarian operation, which borrowed from fascism as well as Stalinism and, perhaps most of all, from Hitler’s feverish imagination.”) This perspective seems correct to me. A political system opposed to the Left does not need to ape the transformative demands of that tendency; merely promising a better future, easy to do in a society destroyed by the Left, as any society run by the Left is inevitably destroyed, is certainly adequate. It does seem, however, that fascism only arises, at least historically, when the Left has fully embarked on its ruination of a particular nation, and existing Right structures have shown themselves incapable of putting down the evil.

Gottfried examines the claim that fascism itself, like its enemies, was totalitarian, one most often made by Left historians, notably Emilio Gentile, as well as various famous discussions of totalitarianism, notably Hannah Arendt’s. It may seem obvious that fascism, most clearly on display in Italian fascism, the only actually fascist government ever to organically come to power, controlled the lives of the people to a great degree, especially given Mussolini’s famous declaration of “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” But Italian fascism was largely aspirational, full of “rhetoric and iconography” that did not match reality. The only states that truly had a totalitarian level of control, and using that control broke down or controlled intermediary social structures, were Communist ones (in the interwar period of focus here, Soviet Russia) and National Socialist Germany (though Gottfried notes that despite this facile comparison, common for decades, the truth is that the latter was internally far less totalitarian than Soviet Russia). Viewed from another angle, totalitarianism is the result of the successful imposition of a political religion; fascism has never actually been such a religion in practice. Viewed from a third angle, totalitarianism is shown by the final implementation of a managerial state, something the ex-Trotskyist James Burnham explicated most clearly in The Managerial Revolution. Common to all these threads is the distortion of reality and the removal of anything separating the citizen from the state. Fascism, by contrast, is corporate, not totalitarian. The state and people are, in theory, fused not as a result of top-down control, but through cooperation, guided and encouraged by the state, and intermediary institutions remain, critical to maintaining corporatism. This can be seen, for example, in economic matters, where commerce changed very little in Mussolini’s Italy (or, for that matter, in Adolf Hitler’s Germany).

The insane rantings of the Frankfurt School get a whole chapter to themselves, as they relate to how postwar Americans understood fascism. The Frankfurt School offered a distilled view of the supposed progress of man from oppressive social relations to total emancipation, the essence of Left thought. American victory in World War II gave these men carte blanche to spread their poison, with the cooperation and funding of an unwitting government and clueless ruling class. In 1950 several of these men published an enormously-influential tendentious propaganda study, The Authoritarian Personality, which purported to show that European fascism, in the form of America’s recently defeated enemies and manifesting itself primarily as a free-floating “prejudice,” was growing roots in the United States, and had to be stamped out by implementing total left-wing domination of government, culture, and society. (The same men were largely in charge of the Fragebogen, the detailed questionnaire administered to the vast majority of Germans after the war, as part of the denazification campaign, in practice also a giant exercise in advancing left-wing domination).

As a result of the efforts of the Frankfurt School, much ink was spilled in this period about the supposed psychic burdens of Western societies, which pointed towards and tended to fascism, but which could be corrected with a combination of leftist education, called, no surprise, “democratic instruction,” and aggressive government oppression. Most of all, this “anti-fascism” declared that any form of Western identitarian politics must be savagely suppressed wherever even the smallest element of it might appear. A main tool for this was the definition of “democracy” as rejecting any right-wing element, regardless of electoral activity—if any political action was not authorized as egalitarian and universal, meaning advancing Left goals, it was ipso facto illegitimate. In this frame, objection to, or discussion of, totalitarianisms of the Left is completely forbidden, if at any time there is a feeling of equation between Left and Right—and accompanying this has been the rise of the cult of the Holocaust, used as a cudgel against any modern Right tendency, and a rationale for ignoring Left crimes of much greater magnitude in both deaths and time. The ideology and practice of the Frankfurt School has dominated Western European (especially German) and, to a somewhat lesser degree, American politics for seventy-five years. Only very recently has it begun to show cracks.

This line of thinking, however, is wholly absent from another line of thought with far less power, but which is still sometimes observed—the idea that fascism is itself a movement of the Left. Those who hold to this perspective are an odd assortment, combining throne-and-altar traditionalists, such as Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who object to fascism as progressive and secular, with those who point to political measures taken, primarily under Italian fascism, that resonate today as left-wing, primarily welfare-state actions. The latter has a long history; anti-New Deal conservatives in America claimed that fascism had come to America in the form of Franklin Roosevelt (Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Three New Deals discusses these parallels). It is true enough that interwar American progressives thought highly of Mussolini, and that their collectivism was antithetical to traditional American political thinking, with its emphasis on flinty individualism. Gottfried has some limited sympathy for these analyses, but concludes that while fascism isn’t identifiable with any flavor of the traditional Right, that does not make it Left in any meaningful sense. Again citing Payne, he notes that what is “Right” can include revolutionary doctrines that are not Left—and even within fascist-adjacent regimes, such as Austrian clericalists or the Rumanian Iron Guard, there are notable differences in philosophy, without the slightest Left tendency.

This section does have the most amusing section of a dense book, in which Gottfried dismisses Jonah Goldberg, the best-known modern proponent of the equation of fascism with leftism (he wrote a whole book making the claim, Liberal Fascism), as an intellectual lightweight and all-around tool, without once directly insulting him. Goldberg is merely an example of the eternal habit of loser American “conservatives” of adopting the premises and terminology of their victorious enemies, and then pointing out hypocrisy, believing that somehow this will magically defeat the Left, which cares not at all about hypocrisy. It is also here that Gottfried derides the term “Islamofascism,” and notes that whatever you may think about Vladimir Putin, that George Will beclowns himself by telling the world that Putin is presiding over a “fascist revival.” He scorns these types of uses, pointing out that “Fascism in practice is something other than failing to keep up with social changes introduced long after the Second World War.”

In another chapter, Gottfried discusses how, despite efforts by various men, fascism was never able to become an international creed, or to exist in any form, even a truncated form, beyond any one specific country. Fascist internationalism was an obvious play in response to the seductive extranational power of Bolshevism, but it never caught on, despite the best efforts of various intellectuals and men of action. This is not surprising, given that those who made headway as fascists were strictly national revolutionaries, who “predictably failed at redefining themselves as internationalists of the Right,” a problem Bolshevism never had. Mussolini made some half-hearted stabs at expanding fascism beyond Italy’s borders, but soon enough had plenty to occupy him at home, and dropped the idea. The man who worked hardest for the fascist internationalist goal was Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader. His motivation was in part to avoid a repeat of World War I, through advancing European unity, and in part because modernization under the fascist banner was seen as the best way to end the Great Depression. Mosley, a fascinating character only touched on here, offered the best thought-out flavor of fascism, rejecting racialism and focusing on economic matters. In practice, however, and with the men he attracted to his banner, his party was rough around the edges, and anyway his program wasn’t that much different than standard welfare-state offerings, which did not carry the baggage Mosley, who had accepted money from Mussolini, did.

In his penultimate chapter, “The Seach for a Fascist Utopia,” Gottfried uses the German sociologist Karl Mannheim’s thoughts on ideology as the springboard for a fascinating discussion, involving a close examination of the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile. Among other matters, he discusses whether fascism can today even be considered to be on the Right, given that at least in the United States, today what is Right is “now identified . . . with individual self-fulfillment.” But generally, fascism made no attempt to “guarantee a happy future for the human race,” the leftist utopian vision of the future, derived from the so-called Enlightenment. Fascism tends even to reject progress, at least as an abstract goal, “or more particularly, the kind of progress associated with the spread of equality and cultural and social homogenization,” and therefore utopian thinking tied to human improvability is alien to it. Men may be called to participation in improvement of the human condition, but there is no end point forecast or seen as possible. Renewal is more the focus than remaking.

Ultimately, Gottfried sees fascism as something that was never going anywhere. “Fascism’s chances for becoming an overpowering historical force were . . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Christine Silk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not a quick afternoon read. The arguments are not easily reduced to Twitter-sized sound bites (even though we all chuckle in agreement when we read the current internet meme: “Everyone who disagrees with me is a fascist!”). Pay attention to the wealth of information Paul Gottfried provides, and the dividends will be many. You’ll discover the differences between totalitarianism versus authoritarianism, fascism versus Marxism, why generic fascism had a Latin flavor, and whether fascism is the same as nationalism. You’ll learn surprising tidbits, such as the fact that thinkers on the left first pointed out similarities between Nazism and Stalinism – a comparison that Gottfried explores further.

Here’s the burning question: Are Nazism and fascism the same thing? Chapter 7 tackles this question head-on. Spoiler alert: Gottfried makes a convincing case that Nazism was its own phenomenon, and not fascism in the generic sense.

One of my favorite sections is Gottfried’s discussion of the feuds among American political parties. Leftists claim that right-wing conservatives are fascist. American conservatives argue that fascism is a leftist movement. So which is it, left or right? Will the real fascists please stand up?

Gottfried skillfully untangles the mess and offers a useful framework that you don’t normally see in political analysis: namely, collectivist versus individualist. Collectivists support a large, invasive welfare state. Individualists support minimal government and free-market solutions in lieu of a welfare state. Why is this important? Because, as Gottfried points out, some prominent conservatives who equate leftism with fascism are building “on a tradition of argument extending back to the 1930s that is integrally related to the American case against the welfare state. We are urged to believe that what passes for American progressive policies are adaptations of fascist corporations” (p. 100). The problem, as he astutely notes, is that conservatives who accuse the left of fascism for expanding the welfare state are also guilty of expanding the welfare state (albeit at a different rate and in different areas of life). As Gottfried correctly notes (and as anyone who has been paying attention can attest): “Periodic expansions of the American welfare state have generally received endorsement from both national parties” (p. 99). This critique is spot-on, and I wish more people -- particularly those who make public policy and those who claim to be in favor of smaller government -- paid attention to it. Not surprisingly, Gottfried gives libertarians a fair hearing, since they tend to make the clearest arguments based on the collectivist/individualist framework.

Gottfried’s analysis here and throughout the book is gripping. He is a fair-minded historian who presents primary-source evidence without injecting his own biases. His knowledge is deep, and his ability to grasp philosophical concepts is impressive. He doesn’t resort to the obvious virtue-signaling traps that are so tempting to anyone writing on this subject, such as recounting war atrocities to prove for the millionth time that Hitler and Mussolini were bad guys. I particularly liked his five-page analysis of Sir Oswald Mosley, an English aristocrat and leader of the British Union of Fascists who was married to Diana, one of the fascinating Mitford sisters. It is easy to see Mosley as a naive at best, or mendacious at worst, but Gottfried’s description puts everything into perspective so that you can understand how a smart and cultured British man like Mosley became a Fascist and stayed that way to the end. His is an example of how the zeitgeist can grip the minds of intelligent people and turn them into devotees of trendy ideas, all the while convincing them that they are on the vanguard of a utopia that will solve mankind’s problems once and for all.

Fascism: Career of a Concept deserves wide recognition because it accurately defines what fascism is in its historical context, and the
role it played in the intellectual and political milieu of the 20th century.

[Moses · Rating 3 out of 5]

A meandering and, by the author's own admission, unoriginal introduction to fascism. It is unsatisfactory as an explanation of fascist theory (indeed one is left feeling that fascist theory is a very thin veneer), and does not even claim to be a history of fascism in practice, although the author will bring in historical data (e.g. Hitler's embrace of the labor movement) to make a point.

It is hard to imagine who would profit from this book rather than from going directly to the sources Gottfried draws on so liberally (Strasser, Nolte, and Del Noce first among them) or to a straightforward history of fascism in practice in e.g. Italy or Spain.

[♡ India ♡ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't read this whole thing. But jesus, it didn't cover much of its intended focus; that being to look into how the semantics of fascism has evolved since its conceptualisation.

There was a lot of barely related whatnot scattered in between information that actually pertained to what the book was supposed to talk about. Of course this was annoying and partially the reason for why I didn't read this in full. And though the author states that his intent is not to try waver the reader's beliefs, his bias for conservatism leaks too much into his writing. For example, he writes how "Germany refuses to have a right." This was written relatively recently so I personally cannot find justification for this statement given the actual political state of Germany. Bias is a natural human instinct of course; when it's as prevalent as it was here however, especially when discussing a topic that is easy to misconstrue like political theory, it becomes an unavoidable issue. I don't say this implying that the intention of his bias is actually to try pull people over to conservatism. I'm instead saying that anyone interested in reading this should go into it with extra caution.

That being said, there was some note-worthy information here, whether it was directly related to the evolving semantics of fascism or not. So there's one star for that.

I'd finally like to mention that I'm not a professional on fascism — very far from it — meaning what I've written here might just all be a bunch of bullshit that shouldn't be given the time of day. I haven't read many books of this academic nature, so this review is merely a reflection from someone who isn't an intellectual of any sorts.

[Satya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitions are static but the world is not.

The concept of fascism has been re-interpreted in the century. For example, state corporatism played a role in its definition in the 1930s but not in the century.

Gottfried argues a historical definition of fascism for the 1930s. I agree but I think the concept of fascism has analytical value in analysing the language of politicians in the 2020s.

*This does not mean that they are fascists* but that the language has parallels to fascist politicians of the interwar period.

[Thomas D · Rating 3 out of 5]

This meandering work was difficult to get through at times. A decent summary of the granularity of historic fascist movements. Possibly more worth your time to read the primary sources referenced in this text if you’re looking for a deep dive on fascism.

[Indira Wolf · Rating 1 out of 5]

seriously tho, this was the bane of my existence.

[Vagabond of Letters, DLitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

7/10

[Matthew Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

With the discussion of “fascism” being in vogue, this is the best of them in my opinion.

[JC NoKey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Focusing on the circumstances that shaped a particular interpretation does not detract from the value of its content.

[Nathaniel Westermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aside from some conspicuous apologetics, this is a great book that provides a very in-depth history of the fascism concept.

[Marcas]

Gottfried's book on fascism brings much needed corrective to a misused and abused term. His iconoclastic thoughts on fascism and how it relates to other misunderstood phenomena is intricate throughout and impeccably researched. This is shown, for example, in his contextualising of totalitarianism, comparing amd contrasting regimes often lumped thoughtessly togther.

Paul's writing maintains a lucidity throughout and despite his self proclaimed inclinations to more European characteristics, is refreshingly far removed from the dry ideological conceit common to continental philosophy.

...A truly brilliant individual mind who by his unique vagrant and careless abandon, can offer honest insights into the complex history of a key concept in modern history; without such an understanding as this we will continue to suffer the consequences of the sorts of ideological metanarratives decried within.

[Bobby Daugherty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decent clarification of the meaning of Fascism. There are several examples of genuine Fascist given as well as why the people that pass liberals without giving them money are not necessarily Fascist.