ABSTRACT
Fascism glorified the use of force and war as the noblest of human activities, and it denounced liberalism, capitalism, democracy, socialism, and communism. Fascism and its most virulent German variety were spawned by the collapse of the bourgeois cultural order triggered by the Great War. Jarring transformations brought about by these accelerating changes had captured the attention of European sociologists who noted in their work the disruptions of traditional social relationships brought about by what today we recognize as the advancement of modernization. In their view, the varieties of fascism represented the last desperate stage of the bourgeois elite's struggle to maintain their wealth and privileges against the claims of working-class revolution. Fascism's relationship to modernity was complex and ambivalent, but it does reveal to us how certain forms of political movements and ideologies can engineer anti-modernizing sentiments into channels that maximize the powers of party and state.
