ABSTRACT
Fascism is distinguished from liberalism by the aestheticization of struggle and the glorification of paramilitary violence as primary features of political action. Whereas liberals seek to isolate or minimize the disruptive impact of violence – seeing war as the distinctive activity of military specialists – for fascists ‘creative violence’ is contrasted with the insipid cowardice of liberal intellectualism: violence is not just a means to an end, but an intrinsic value in itself. This reflects the influence of revolutionary thinkers like Sorel (1907) on the development of fascist syndicalism, but it also reflects the determinate relationship between violence, power and modernity, and the impact of colonialism on the internal-political development of European nation-states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
