ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author reviews fatal assault on the traditional Marxist approach to National Socialism came from a Marxist, the late Tim Mason, who argued that it was the primacy of politics rather than that of economics which characterized National Socialism in its most potent and destructive phase. He also reviews researches and discussions to address the broad question of the mentalite of the businessmen of Europe and North America during this period and their relationship to state interventionism and state controls in what had turned into an anti-liberal era. The author suggests that the role of enterprises in the period of Fascism was heavily influenced and deeply determined by the crisis in capitalism that began in the First World War and that deepened in the Depression and the dirigiste regime change in political economy that followed in its wake. They found themselves totally on the defensive in their confrontation with the dominant political forces.
