Enigmas of Fascism

REVIEWS Was fascism a revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary phenomenon? This question has always been the central dividing-line in the literature about it. If fascism was revolutionary, then it belongs with communism as a variant of totalitarian politics, and offers yet another example of the disasters to which twentieth-century revolutions led—Hitler and Stalin as twin monsters of the age. If, on the other hand, fascism was counter-revolutionary, then its place in European history looks quite different. Rather than standing as a warning against the dangers of revolutionary ideology, its success in defeating socialism can be seen as laying the groundwork for the spread of liberal-democratic capitalism thereafter, with the disappearance of any radical threat to the bourgeois order in postwar Germany and Italy, or post-Franco Spain. Interpretations of fascism are thus intimately bound up with alternative readings of the history of the twentieth century as a whole. The appearance of two new books on the subject, by Michael Mann and Robert Paxton, each in their own way of high quality, illustrates this pattern vividly once again. Mann, the world's most prolific historical sociologist, is best known for his magisterial Sources of Social Power, which runs (so far) from neolithic times to the Belle Epoque. He has recently offered a critical assessment of the Bush Administration's foreign policy, Incoherent Empire.