ABSTRACT
Approaching the dense literature on fascism for the first time, students of history and politics might be forgiven for wondering how it is possible for specialists to explain the phenomenon in such contradictory ways. Most striking, perhaps, is the difference between comparative-analytic studies of fascist ideologies which interpret fascism as a millenarian revolt against the degenerative impact of modernity, and political-economic studies which link fascism to the economic and social-structural crisis of capitalism. In recent years, the former approach has been in the ascendant, to the detriment of our understanding of the problem. Revisionist historians have created the impression of a ‘new consensus’ in fascist studies which is – on closer inspection – founded less on scholarly agreement than a conscious rejection of historical materialism as a valid methodological framework. Also striking are attempts to identify the continuity of ‘unreason’ in fascism and poststructuralism. In an effort to combat the ‘philosophical anarchism’ of modern social theory, intellectual historians such as Wolin (2004) suggest obliquely that because both fascists and poststructuralists question the premises of occidental rationalism and American cultural leadership, there is an equivalence between the right-wing assault on democracy in fascist and neoconservative ideology and the poststructuralist critique of the democratic basis of western culture. Not only do arguments of this kind ignore the obvious substantive distinction between radical right-wing and radical left-wing criticisms of liberalism in an attempt to implicate the ‘soft totalitarianism’ of the left as an amoral betrayal of Enlightenment universalism, but are oblivious to the real and present danger implicit in neoconservative, neofascist and right-wing fundamentalist attacks on emancipatory politics.
