ABSTRACT
I might start with the paradox that, having written extensively on non-
democratic regimes, fascism, and breakdown of democracies, I have not yet systematically linked these three areas of interest and research.1 The reasons
for this are many. Some of them were accidental, such as the fact that the
writings appeared in the context of work that focused on each problem area
separately. Yet there is also an intellectual one, one that I shall try to
develop here: although the three themes are undoubtedly interconnected in
many cases, they are quite distinct in many other cases. Totalitarian and
authoritarian regimes have existed and will continue to exist without
fascism playing a role in their development – unless, of course, we stretch the concept of fascism to the point where it becomes unrecognizable and
useless. What is more, there both have been and will continue to be break-
downs of political democracy in the absence of fascist movements, and these
will lead to regimes that cannot be characterized as fascist. These are the
fundamental reasons why I have discussed these three great problems of
twentieth-century politics without linking them systematically. Nevertheless:
between the two world wars, one finds sufficient cases for which the three
were connected in one way or another to warrant an attempt at a more systematic analysis of the relationship between them.
