ABSTRACT
The nature and development of the state is a central question in political theory, but with several exceptions (Fraenkel 1941; Neumann 1942; Poulantzas 1974; Kirchheimer 1941), few scholars have examined the implications of fascism for state theory. Conventional analyses focus on charismatic leadership and mass activism (Eatwell 2006; O’Sullivan 1983), depicting fascism as a new type of dictatorship which reversed the limited nature of liberal-democratic politics. Building on Rousseau’s concept of the general will, this ‘total state’ is contrasted with the liberal state in western Europe and the United States, where pluralism has traditionally been more entrenched, and where the continuity of the state as an autonomous, impersonal and sovereign political order has prevented the successful rise of extraparliamentary movements aimed at creating a new state with ‘vastly greater power but without the properly political power to remain independent of both the regime and the “people”’ (McGovern 2007: 160). Yet while an intuitive distinction can be drawn between bourgeois democracy and fascist Jacobinism, as we have seen there is no ‘permanent essence’ to liberalism that we can positively identify: imposing an impermeable barrier between liberalism and fascism makes it more difficult to determine whether the political organization of fascism constitutes an exceptional suspension of democratic norms (revealing the constitutional limits of bourgeois political society whose hegemony is predicated on the universalizing power of the legal-rational state), or a departure from the existing constitutional framework of liberalism (revealing the historical limits of the liberal state as a system of government). Schmitt’s (1921) famous distinction between ‘commissarial dictatorship’ and ‘sovereign dictatorship’ captures the difference between traditional law-preserving violence and sovereign law-creating violence, but brings us no closer to understanding ‘the forces that determine the transition from the first to the second . . . ’ (Agamben 2005: 8). On the contrary, argues Agamben, ‘such theories remain prisoner in the vicious circle in which the emergency measures they seek to justify in the name of defending the democratic constitution are the same ones that lead to its ruin’ (ibid.). In this sense,
the idea that the rule of law can be legitimately suspended to ‘defend democracy against itself’ obscures the extent to which a state of exception can become the norm in non-totalitarian states by integrating questions of security into the existing juridical framework of liberal politics.
