Part 2 – Fascism and Totalitarianism
Part 3 – Fascism as the Unconquered Past
Part 4 – Fascism as a Movement of the Left
Part 5 – The Failure of Fascist Internationalism
Part 6 – The Search for a Fascist Utopia
Part 7 – A Vanished Revolutionary Right and Addendum – Fascism and Modernization (You are here)
Part 8 - Discussion and Conclusion
Chapter 7
The final chapter of this book is short. It starts with a summation of his views, but dedicates a great deal of words to criticizing a whole host of people who Gottfried seems to dislike.
We’ll start with mainstream US Republicans. In particular, Gottfried argues that Republicans claim to be on the right, but they “privilege in their discourse” things like human rights and equality. There’s no move to destroy the welfare state from Republicans, who are more than willing to preserve/expand these programs for themselves. It’s not even necessarily right-wing to dismantle the welfare state, Gottfried argues. As for talk about “traditional values”, Gottfried credits the fascists as at the very least honest about how they were constantly redefining their movement compared to American Republicans.
Gottfried details similar circumstances in Canada and Western Europe, but he describes Germany as unique being honest about a refusal to allow a genuine right-wing movement. Some, like sociologist Niklas Luhmann, have argued that insofar as there is a “right”, it should be Burkean in nature and defend the status quo, while the “left” should pursue emancipation even for those that don’t necessarily want it.
As for the left, Gottfried accuses them of trying to pigeonhole anti-Enligtenment thinkers into being the logical forefathers of the fascist and Nazi movements. He points to Zeev Sternhell, a historian of fascism as clear example of this. Sternhell’s book Les anti-Lumières du XVllle siècle à la guerre froide supposedly makes many errors, like trying to associate all Enlightenment critics into the same house or doing the same with Nazism and far less destructive forms like Mussolini’s Italy or Salazars’ Portugal.
But Gottfried isn’t content to leave it at this, and instead accuses Sternhell of hypocrisy. Why? Because Sternhell is a Jew and self-described “super-Zionist”. When it comes to Israel, he believes that Jews have the right to control their own fates and future. But he gets angry at people like Joseph de Maistre for saying the following.
There is no man as such; I have only encountered Frenchmen, Italians and Russians and from reading Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, I now know that Persians exist. As for mankind, I have yet to find such a thing.
Sternhell, Gottfried argues, essentially proves the truth in the Enlightenment’s critics’ philosophy – that things which are concrete, particularistic, and communal are what shape human identities.
Addendum
There’s one additional part to this book, which is about fascism and how it relates to modernization.
For Roger Griffin (a famous historian of fascism), modernity is the “localized emergence in…Europe of the reflexive mode of historical consciousness” that started in the late 18th century that ultimately legitimated the French revolutionaries and their fundamentalist war against tradition to replace it with something new. He notes here that there are two different definitions of modernism: one is about the artistic/philosophical movement, the other about “pedestrian” modernity that its critics (called modernists) would complain about. The latter are the people being discussed.
In any case, there was not really an alternative society modernists could point to, and they weren’t eager to retreat to the past either. Griffin argued that these people arose to combat the threat of nihilism as Western myths of progress lost credibility and modernity entered a period of liminality. The most prominent modernists were on the far left, but Gottfried argues that this is natural – modernism was overall optimistic about the future. That said, you could find a strain of modernism that led inexorably to the right – the literary modernists.
That said, Gottfried criticizes Griffin for trying to attempt, among other things, to convince the reader that right-wing sensibilities in reactionary modernism might jump out from 1945 into the present. For Gottfried, this is silly and assumes that fascism came to power due to no small influence by reactionary modernist artists and others like them.
There is more to this section, namely about to whether the Nazis were really traditionalists following their forefathers, but it’s largely uninteresting. Briefly, Gottfried reviews the work of historian Rainer Zitelmann. Gottfried commends him for his accurate depiction of the Nazis as “radically antitraditional” and trying to jump to the future but criticizes him over some arguments where he’s at pain to explain reality away.
To summarize, modern US Republicans are not as right-wing in the historical sense, having adopted important left-wing ideas and words into their minds. The left is politically motivated to inaccurately cast thinkers who rejected the Enlightenment as straight-line ancestors of the fascists and Nazis, with some people hypocritical as they reserve exceptions for particular groups to decide their own fates at the group level. There was absolutely a strain of modernist thinking that led to the right, found particularly among literary modernists, but the idea that their influence in the past or even in the present leads to fascism is entirely misguided.
That’s all for this book. I’ll have a follow-up post where I discuss my own thoughts, as I need time to reflect on everything as a whole.
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Notes -
Im just starting this series of posts. I found part two very useful: it helped me map what ideas Hannah Arent is famous for, and move them from "my unconscious biases" to "someone else's very convincing and extremely useful framework."
I'm very happy to find this with all seven sections finished, ready to be cued up for my next couple morning commutes. It was clearly more than just a couple hours work to do this, and I really appreciate the effort!
Thank you! I'm glad someone found it useful, that was my goal in writing all this up.
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