ABSTRACT

Fascism in Italy, Germany and elsewhere in western Europe was a response to certain problems inherent in the structure of liberal politics around the turn of the century: the adoption of universal suffrage, the crisis of nineteenth-century bourgeois political organizations, the development of socialist parties and trade unions and a growing impatience on the part of industrial and agrarian elites with the inadequacies of the existing parliamentary system. The First World War increased generational conflicts within the middle class, ideological polarization over the issue of the war and over the Bolshevik Revolution and rising expectations among all classes that fed both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary aspirations. But it would be wrong to see ‘fascism’ as merely a defensive manoeuvre on the part of a desperate and reactionary bourgeoisie to ward off inevitable revolution. The Fascist and Nazi movements were expressions of the expansion of the bourgeoisie and its desire to see society organized in ways that favoured its continued social ascent.