ABSTRACT
Much attention, perhaps too much, has been paid in the above analysis of the principal trends in the intellectual background of fascism to the German tradition. It should be stressed, therefore, that although Germany provided an intellectual tradition conducive to the rise of fascism in that country, it was not an intellectual tradition totally different or cut off from the rest of Europe. I do not agree with Butler’s view that the German outlook on society represents a type of national Doppelgänger—‘the triumph of the night-side of the German soul’. 1 It is too easy to explain fascism almost totally in terms of Germanity and to ignore the contributions made to its theory by the rest of Europe. It is too easy to see fascism as a German phenomenon and not as a circumstance of European history. That nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany provided a suitable historical background for the flowering of fascism in its most powerful form is undeniable, but mutations existed almost everywhere in Europe, and, in some cases, outside.
