ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relationship of fascism to mass politics. How did fascism react to the historical trend of increased power from below? While originally there was a nearly universal agreement among scholars that fascism was fiercely anti-democratic, and that it emphatically rejected the principle of popular sovereignty ushered in by the French Revolution, this is no longer a consensual view. George Mosse, for example, had argued that fascism was in fact predicated on the heritage of the French Revolution, embodying a new, mass politics, relying on Rousseau’s “general will.” More recently, Dylan Riley proposed to define fascism as a form of “authoritarian democracy.” By looking at both the voting patterns in Italy and Germany and the goals and measures of fascist movements, it is shown that there is no good reason to regard fascism as advancing any form of democracy, “authoritarian” or otherwise. On the contrary, fascism ejected the masses from political participation as hermetically as it could and systematically destroyed their independent political and social power bases. Another central issue that is addressed in this chapter is the irresistible rise of what I propose to term “majoritarian interpretations” of Italian fascism and of German National Socialism. Fascism is now recurrently presented as a fundamentally majoritarian oppression of minorities with the consent of the majority and, indeed, to its benefit. This interpretation reinforces the old liberal matrix, according to which fascism was “the tyranny of the majority.” In critique of the majoritarian view it is pointed out that fascism was based, in fact, on the oppression of the vast majority of the subjects, that its rule, while doubtlessly popular in certain circles, relied on a vast apparatus of terror, and that it harmed, rather than furthered, the vital interests of most people.
