Some Issues in the Intellectual History of Fascism

FOR ABOUT three-quarters of a century, almost all academic discussion concerning Mussolini’s Fascism1 has tended to imagine the movement it animated, and the regime it informed, as entirely lacking a reasoned rationale. It early became commonplace to attribute to Fascism a unique irrationality, accompanied by a ready recourse to violence. Fascism, it has been argued, was full of emotion, but entirely empty of cognitive content. Fascists were, and are, understood to have renounced all rational discourse, in order to “glorify the non-rational.” Their ideology, movement, revolution, and behavior were made distinctive by the appeal to two, and only two, “absolutes”: “violence and war.”2 Before the advent of the Second World War, some analysts had gone so far as to insist that “fascism” was the product of “orgasm anxiety,” a sexual dysfunction that found release only in “mystic intoxication,” homicidal hostility, and the complete suppression of rational thought.3 Marxists and fellow travelers argued that since Fascism was “the violent attempt of decaying capitalism to defeat the proletarian revolution and forcibly arrest the growing contradictions of its whole development,” it could not support itself with a sustained rationale. Its conceptions were “empty and hollow,” finding expession in “deceitful terminology” consciously designed to conceal the “realities of class-rule and class-exploitation.”4 For many, “Fascism [was] essentially a political weapon adopted by the ruling class . . . that takes root in the minds of millions . . . [appealing] to certain uncritical and infantile impulses which, in a people debarred from a rational, healthy existence . . . tend to dominate their mental lives.” Fascism, in general, constituted a “flight from reason,” advancing “the