International Fascist Co-Productiion by Ishay Landa

Contrary to the notion of the immunity of the English temperament- stereotypically reserved, practical, moderate, understated -to such continental extravagances as fascism, the British intelligentsia at the beginning of the 20th century was awash with continental influences, above all by Nietzsche, who exercised an enormous impact on the ideological and cultural climate. Such influences, whose political and social effect was overwhelmingly to boost elitism and opposition to democracy and perceived ‘massification,’[1] were documented by the literary critic John Carey in his iconoclastic book on The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). These belligerently elitists currents of thought, so prevalent among the British upper and middle classes, even led Carey, in the book’s final pages ,to stress the affinities between such ideology and the worldview of none other than Hitler:


In the introduction to his edition of Hitler’s ‘Table  Talk’, Hugh Trevor-Roper maintained that Hitler’s ideas on culture were ‘trivial, half-baked and disgusting. This seems questionable .At least, there are marked similarities between the cultural ideals promulgated in the Fuhrer’s writings and conversation and those intellectuals we have been looking at( 198).[2]

These ‘similarities’ are such to warrant, in Carey’s view, the following conclusion (208): ‘The tragedy of Mein Kampf is that it was not, in many respects, a deviant book but one firmly rooted in European intellectual orthodoxy.”  More recently, Dan Stone has questioned the accepted notion that English culture and fascism were dichotomous. Challenging ‘the view . . . which dismisses British fascism as a pale imitation of its continental counterparts,’ Stone argues that

There was a well-developed indigenous tradition of ways of thinking which, while hey cannot be called ‘fascist’- not before 1918 at any rate – can certainly seen as ‘proto-fascist’ . . .I am proposing . . .that we reassess the intellectual provenance of proto-fascist ideas in Britain, suggesting ways that may be found to quite a large degree in Nietzsche and the eugenics movements, movements that represented the ‘extremes of Englishness.[3]


Fixing their gaze above all on cultural matters, Carey and Stone assume that British proto-fascism remained politically barren. Carey, for one, imagines that the elitist trends he discusses were simply manifestations of unsettled intellectualism, and shows little interest in pursuing their concrete social and  political ramifications. Stone ,for his part, accepts the conventional notion that political fascism was a total failure in Britain. He correspondingly suggests that ‘British fascism failed not because it was an imitative movement, but because mainstream conservatism did not need to co-opt is ideas in order to remain in power.’ This is a valid point concerning the marginality of open fascism in Britain. But as we have seen(previous blog post),with the aid of political historians, British  ‘mainstream conservatism’ was itself, to a degree, co-opted by fascism. This  was possible because fascist currents were in reality not so unrelated to the British mainstream as one might imagine.

In the international – perhaps better said western- co-production that was fascism, Britain’s main contributions, apart from the imperialist model itself which so inspired fascists, were indeed Social Darwinism and eugenics. These ingredients were to prove of such importance to the fascist project in general and the National Socialists one in particular, so as to complicate any attempt at employing a reverse Verfremdungseffekt. Mann, however, is undeterred. Insisting on the non-fascist nature of the northwest, he re-circulates the wide-spread belief that British eugenics was fundamentally different than the German version, in that the former concerned predominantly class, not race: ‘Though Social Darwinism encouraged eugenicism everywhere, the northwest saw the reproduction of the lower classes rather than the ‘lower races’ as the main problem’  (Fascists, 82). Stone, however, in a study largely dedicated to a re-examination of British eugenics and racism ,challenges precisely such apodictic affirmations. He argues that ‘although class concerns were a major factor behind the ideas and inquiries of the British eugenicists, no less importance was a concern with race. British eugenics cannot be so simply be separated from the ostensibly ‘harder’ continental school, since re-thinking, so often over-looked by the historians, was integral to the worldview of the British eugenicists’ (95). Stone maintains that the origins of the distinction – in his view a mythical one- between British and German eugenics, are to be traced back to the attempt of the British eugenicists to establish retroactively a racial difference between themselves and the German counterparts. And yet he cannot find any evidence for such a self-serving distinction in the times preceding the war, when the reputation of eugenics was not yet shattered by the revelation of Nazi atrocities. He insists, on the contrary, that back then, ‘even among the most moderate figures among British eugenicists, racial and class considerations blurred into one another’ (99).

Such questioning of the relative uprightness of ‘northwestern’ eugenics (assuming, that is, that class eugenics is somehow less pernicious than racial ones, is complemented, for example, by Stephan Kuhl’s  excellent book [4], which amply documented the many ideological affinities and manifold concrete collaboration which existed between Nazi eugenicists and American ones. And he too, had to show this expressly in defiance of post-War notions that American eugenics was somehow ‘different’ and less insidious than the Nazi variety.

One must indeed question the very attempt to chart a genealogy for racial prejudice as distinct from that of class.

Was not Gobineau himself, the originator of modern racism, adamant that racial difference allegedly existed between the French classes, the working masses being descendants of the Gallic Celts, bourgeoisie and particularly the aristocracy being the heirs of the Franks?[5] Similarly, in his incomparable denunciation of eugenics, indeed of the British variant with which he was familiar, Chesterton pointed out ‘the strange new disposition to regard the poor as a race.[6] While not identical, racial and class prejudice were thus from the beginning woven together, and subsequently fed upon each other in diverse and complex ways, which can hardly be sorted out with recourse to the supposed geo-ideological line separating north and west from center, east and south. And surely it is vacuous to assume that the western heritage, once Germany is excluded, was relatively free from racial bias?

Clearly racism deeply informed the ideology and the practice of western imperialism, to the point of occasionally justifying, even, genocide? I have already cited Karl Pearson, a leading British eugenicist and Galton’s disciple, to that effect; let us now listen to a voice that as certainly not shrill within the British political landscape of the time nor, it may be assumed, especially prone to echo continental, fascist notions, namely that of Churchill:

I do not agree that a dog in a manger has a final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a very great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. [7]

.  .  .  .  Addressing eugenics in the USA, too, it would be a vain effort to try to separate the bias of race from that of class. In a best selling polemic against the ‘democratic theory’, the American eugenicist Madison Grant retorted:

Those engaged in social uplift and in revolutionary movements are therefore usually very intolerant of the limitations imposed by heredity. Discussion of these limitations is also offensive to the advocates of the obliteration, under the guise of internationalism, of all existing distinctions based on nationality, language, race, religion and class. Those individuals who have neither country, nor flag, nor language, nor class . . . very naturally decry and sneer at the value of these attributes of the higher types.[8]


Elevated race and class are as a matter of course ‘the attributes’ of ‘higher types’. Far from posing to incommensurable problems, this is a discourse in which race and class are interchangeable, which allows one to switch seamlessly from one to the other, as the following sample of Grant’s rhetoric nicely illustrates:

To admit the unchangeable differentiation of race in its modern scientific meaning is to admit inevitably the existence of superiority in one race and the inferiority in another. Such an admission we can hardly expect  from those of inferior races. These inferior races and classes are prompt to recognize in such an admission the very real danger to themselves of being relegated again to their former obscurity and subordinate position in society. Their favorite defense of these inferior classes is the unqualified denial of the existence of fixed inherited qualities, either physical or spiritual, which cannot be obliterated or greatly modified by a change of environment. [xxvii-xxix]


For Grant, as for his implied readers, the social question is clearly a racial question, and the racial struggle is a social struggle:

The insurgence of inferior races and classes throughout not merely Europe but the world, is evident in every dispatch from Egypt, Ireland, Poland, Rumania, India and Mexico. It is called nationalism, patriotism, freedom and other high-sounding names, but it is everywhere the phenomena of the long suppressed servile classes rising against the master race. [xxxi]


Another American eugenicist, S. K. Humphrey, regarded as ‘inevitable that class lines shall harden as a protection against the growing numbers of the underbred, just as in all previous cultures However remote a cataclysm may be, our present racial trend is towards social chaos or a dictatorship.’ Grant’s protégé, Lothrop Stoddard, who considered ‘the negroes’ one of the ‘existing savage and barbaric races of a demonstratively low average level of intelligence’, was equally convinced that ‘as civilization progresses, social status tends to coincide more and more closely with racial value . . . the upper social classes containing an even larger proportion of persons of superior natural endowments while the lower social classes contain a growing proportion of inferiors.’

European Nazis, for their part, highly valued such theories. Hitler himself, in a private correspondence with Grant, thanked him for writing The Passing of the Great Race and said that ‘this book was his Bible’ [Kuhl: 85]. The highly representative figure of Hans F. K. Gunther, for example, admired Grant and Stoddard, saw them as state-of-the-art racial thinkers and often referred to them in his own works. And he was thoroughly of one mind with them with regard to class as a racial attribute. Stoddard complained against the ‘crushing burden of taxation throughout Europe, which hits especially the increase of the upper and middle classes,’ and demanded that ‘the habitual paupers should be prevented from having children, ’otherwise become a ‘harmful and unfair’ yoke on the the ‘thrifty and capable members of society who pay the taxes.’ And his German counterpart articulated the same middle-class social-cum-racial sensibility:

The deeply penetrating de-nordization of the World War was followed in all Western peoples, even those who had not taken part in the War, by de-nordization through the ever-increasing burden of taxation, which imposes a further restriction on the number of children precisely on those classes richest in Nordic blood. Nordic blood- as Grant put it- is now being effectively taxed away throughout the West. The economic tearing apart of the middle class hits precisely the Nordic stream of the population which rises through this class, keeping down its birth-rate.’ [1929]

Against this literally blood-sucking taxation on the Nordic bourgeoisie , this ever escalating assault by welfare institutions, there is only one adequate response, and this was attempted in only one country, the United States of America: ‘The strong increase in inferior hereditary qualities caused by the 19th century ought to have been met by a correspondingly active interest among the nations in the problem of eugenics, an interest which in turn should have led to the legal measures which have today been adopted by the United States’. For a prominent German eugenicist as Gunther, soon to play an important part in the Third Reich, it is America- how strange!- that leads the way in matters pertaining to race and to class, and Germany, if she knows what is good for her, ought to follow suit . . .

Fascism, an open one at any rate, did not take hold of the reigns of power in Britain and America, but without the major contribution – ideological, economic, political- of industrialists, scientists, thinkers and artists, it may have been unthinkable elsewhere. Let us therefore beware of over-‘alienating fascism, or over-localizing it. The real Sonderweg (‘special path’), it appears, is not a German, or an Italian, or a Spanish, or an Austrian way, but the way of the west.

[1] Giving this a materialistic twist, and reversing cause and effect, we could say that structural elitism and opposition to democracy allowed such theories as Nietzsche’s to become so popular.

[2] Among the many intellectuals here alluded to are George Gissing, W. B. Yeats, D H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, Wyndam Lewis, and Rayner Heppenstall

[3]Stone, Lawrence. 2002 [1972] Breeding Superman, Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain. Liverpool University.

[4] Kuhl, Stefan. 1994 The Nazi Connection. Eugenics, American Racism, and German National-Socialism. Oxford University Press.

[5] George Lukac’s account (Die Zerstorung der Vernunft. 1962. Luchterhand. 579-91) of the distinctly class origins of modern racism and of Gobineau’s foundational role remains highly instructive.

[6] G. K. Chesterton 1922, Eugenics and Other Evils; Cassell and Company. 142

[7]quoted by Anderson, Perry. 2001. “Scurrying Towards Bethlehem.” New Left Review 10, page 9

[8] Grant, Madison. 1936 The Passing of the Great Race. Or the Racial Basis of European History. Scribner’s Sons. xx

British Interwar Crypto-Fascism by Ishay Landa

Commonly, the abortive experience of Oswald Mosley’s BUF provides historians with seemingly hard evidence that fascism was, in Britain, a foreign political breed, bound to come to nothing. But this is to take cognition only of explicit, nominal fascism. For Stanley G. Payne [1],for instance, the British Union of Fascists was ‘a contradiction in terms, a sort of political oxymoron,’ given that, at most, it might have united ‘a variety of totally insignificant grouplets using the name fascism . . .each pettier and more irrelevant than the others.’ Quite so; but what about groups not ‘using the name of fascist’? One more time we come up against an issue that has been at the center of this book ever since the Introduction, namely the difference between political rhetoric and reality, ideology and practice, between names and substances.

The problematic of fascism in England, I take it, cannot be reduced to the BUF and adjacent ‘grouplets.’ And while historians overwhelmingly tend to look at British fascism strictly through the prism of expressly fascist groups, contemporary observers, among them some of the most incisive, approached affairs with a political outlook more subtle as well as more profound, less concerned with epithets and more with fundamental social and economic interests. Churchill’s idea that Mussolini’s new political experiment had provided ‘the ultimate means of protections’ for every ‘great nation’ was a commonplace rather than an oddity. We may consult a figure as different from the future Prime Minister as the novelist Evelyn Waugh who, in 1936, commended the ostensible civilizing effects of the Italian occupation of Abyssinia. Similarly, writing in 1938, and without bothering to refer to Mosley. He made it quite clear that fascism in Britain is by no means an impossibility, and if it remained unlikely at the time of writing this was decidedly not on account of any immanent incompatibility with the English character. Quite the contrary, the English disposition, or more specifically the disposition of the English middle class, was eminently suitable for embracing fascism, according to Waugh. It was only that the middle class had not been forced to go to such lengths by strictly external circumstances, namely because the Marxist challenge had not been strong enough:

[Fascism] is a growth of certain peculiar soil, principally in needs two things- a frightened middle class who see themselves in danger of extinction in a proletarian state, and some indignant patriots who believe that their country, through internal dissention, is becoming bullied by the rest of the world. In England we had something like a Fascist movement in 1926, when the middle classes broke the General Strike. We have a middle class that is uniquely apt for strenuous physical adventures, amenable to discipline, bursting with ‘esprit de corps’, and a great fund of patriotism . .  it  is quite certain that England would become Fascist before it became communist; it is quite unlikely to become either  . . .[2]

Elsewhere (146), Waugh clarifies that what holds true for the English middle class in general also applies to his own, personal case: “if I were a Spaniard I should be fighting for General Franco. As an Englishman, I am not in the predicament of choosing between two evils. I am not a Fascist nor shall I become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism. It is mischievous to suggest that such a choice in imminent.” For Douglas Lane Paty statements such as these show that Waugh’s conservatism never ‘veered to Fascism’. I see them calling for another interpretation. To my mind, the rather show how Waugh, by his own admission, and by extension the English bourgeoisie, was a potential fascist; what distinguishes him as an Englishmen from the actual fascists in other countries  was not any substantial ideological disagreement but a matter of expediency: in other countries, one was forced to make a choice, pressed to the corner by the proletariat of one respective country, in a way that Waugh and his middle-class compatriots were not. Or rather they had been so threatened in 1926, but were unable to subdue the forces of ‘communism,’ with a kind of provisional, rough-and-ready fascism, suitable to meet the emergency of the General Strike.

 Fascism, of course, is ‘evil,’ something which is so much pleasanter and more convenient to do without. But it is clearly preferable to general strikes. It is unappealing in the sense that bitter medicine is: you don’t take it unless you have to, unless the workers start to get unruly in earnest. There is this no distinctly English, principled argument against such evil, one that pushes it beyond the pale, say the liberal commitment to the rule of law or to democracy (far from it: Waugh unswervingly admits he is ‘no more impressed by the ‘legality’ of the Valencia government than are English Communists by the legality of the Crown, lords and Commons); it is simply the fact that such evil, under the political and social circumstances presently prevailing in England, is not yet a necessary evil. One winders: how many Spaniards, Italians and Germans would have become ‘fascists’, would have rallied to Franco, Mussolini and Hitler, were they not convinced that such was the only, last-ditch response to Marxism, in both its revolutionary and reformist incarnations?

British interwar fascism is therefore not to be reduced to the BUF. In fact, even Mosley’s failure dos not seamlessly or necessarily attest to the alleged inadaptability of the foreign implant of fascism to British soil. It would be interesting to draw an analogy between the weakness of official fascism in Britain to that of official liberalism in Italy and Germany, but one would have to reverse the usual terms of debate: European fascists, the reader will recall, often complained of the fact that ‘liberalism’ in their country, was taken literally, understood truly to mean the limitless rule of the masses, whereas, in countries such as England, democratic liberalism was actually a camouflaged version of elite rule. By the same token, it is possible that Mosley’s movement failed to gain ground since it understood European fascism all too literally, as truly implying some Third Road between the classes, a genuine attempt to transcend class strife.

Something like this was suggested by a major contemporary, the Fabian Socialist Beatrice Webb, who prophesized that Mosley’s ‘New Party will never be born alive; it will be a political abortion.’ But her entirely correct prediction was based not in immanent unsuitability of fascism to England as much as it highlighted the fact that  Mosley’s plan failed to align itself clearly with the major social forces, either with the worker’s movement or with capitalism, thus falling ‘dead in a No Man’s Land between those who wish to keep and those wo wish to change the existing order.’ As the result of such vagueness, she added, there was nothing in Mosley’s program ‘that will grip any section of the population- the curious assortment of reforms . . .  have no emotional appeal – they excite neither love nor hate’ [3].

If these comments are anything to go by, then nominal fascism went flat in England not because it was too crass and aggressive to be incorporated into the local political landscape, but because it was not full-blooded enough to make itself appealing, not socially partisan enough to be relevant to any given constituency. It  appears as  if, contrary to the mainstream historians, what turned fascism attractive was not its promise for social transcendence, not its bid to water down either socialism or capitalism, but rather the prospect of a clear-cut resolution, only outwardly disguising itself as ‘neutral’ and ‘unbiased’.  Yet those truly neutral in a modern, class society, it seems, scarcely form a large enough constituency on which to build successful party.

Crypto-Fascism

In view of these long suppressed historical realities, it is in truth tempting to argue that there is a sense in which England, the hub of the liberal-democratic west, short of becoming fascist, did succumb to fascism, only that we were never notified of the fact.

This ties into the problematic of what Gaetano Salvmini, that astute and lucid observer with a remarkable capacity of sieving through countless details of political and social life and rescuing the important from the trivial, called ‘crypto-fascism’. As early as 1927, Salvemini classified three different forces set against democracy:

Democratic institutions are attacked not only from the left by the communists, but also from the right by crypto-fascists, who despair of destroying them and look to appropriate their most delicate organs in order to pervert them ,and by the fascists who attack them openly in thee hope of establishing a dictatorship of the capitalist class.[4]


In Prelude to World War II, Salvemeni wrote that during his study of international politics, his ‘opinion not only of the intelligence but also the moral integrity of the men who governed England in those years (as distinct from the British people) underwent a series of disastrous shocks.’ And he specified:

Under parliamentary, no less than under dictatorial governments, decisions, especially on matters of foreign policy, are taken, not by the peoples themselves, but by small groups of ‘experts’ who often deceive their peoples: see what happened in England in 1935 . . . from the end of 19245 to the autumn of 1935 all British Foreign Ministers worked more or less hand in glove with Mussolini . . .Mussolini is not the only villain in this book. The present writer . . .[does not] feel any respect, and admiration, any enthusiasm for Sir Austen Chamberlain, Sir John Simon, Sir Samuel Hoare, Stanley Baldwin or Neville Chamberlain.

In another book, Salvemini cited approvingly the views of many who in 1938 ‘;complained that England’s foreign policy was determined by a small circle of pro-German magnates,’ and referred to the ‘convincing evidence’; that the MPs of the Tory Party belong to a network of capitalist interests which have nothing to do with the masses of the British people.’[5] Clearly then, in Salvemini’s view, the British elite was vigorously practicing a brand of ‘crypto-fascism’, taking possession of ‘the most delicate organs of democratic institutions in order to pervert them.’

An the exiled Italian was not alone in detecting an important, if not concealed, parallel between the praxis of British democracy and that of Italian fascism. Writing in 1930, G. K. Chesterton reached a remarkably similar conclusion, though from a position far less hostile to Mussolini:

Mussolini does openly what enlightened, liberal and democratic governments do secretly. This is not the same as saying Mussolini  necessarily does right. Far from it; quite otherwise; heaven forbid. What enlightened, liberal, and democratic governments do is generally wrong. What Mussolini does is, in my opinion, sometimes wrong . . . But the point to grasp is that he does and defends what they do and do not defend. They conceal; they  effect  same thing, because they think it is convenient; but they do not defend it, because they think its indefensible. He is acting with his own principles of Fascism; they are acting against their principles of Freedom [6].

In all but designation, this, too is an account of ‘crypto fascism,’ a concept which could be usefully juxtaposed with the liberal tradition of esoteric politics, discussed in Chapter 6, from Bagehot to the Straussians of this day and age, and which aims to lead king Demos by the nose, while feigning to do his wishes. It is thus appropriate that careful secrecy and covert deals played a vital role in the politics of the British elite when dealing with the fascist regimes, a fact amply documented in the pages of such rare, truly critical historians, who dare to probe beneath the surface of probity [7].

The point is not tat negotiations were confidentially conducted which is justifiable as a part of an effort to reach diplomatic agreements. For what was kept hidden was not this or that detail, or even initiative, but rather the very substance of the deals themselves, the very goals that the politicians pursued, and for good reason, since these very often enough formed the opposite of what was openly proclaimed in order to soothe the public. Thus, exoterically, Chamberlain was reprimanding Germany, in the knowledge that the public was fed up with Hitler’s expansionism, while esoterically sending the Fuhrer assurances not to take such public utterances seriously (Leibovitz and Finkel 1998 150-1). The ultimate example of such doublespeak was the very notion of appeasement, the lofty façade of the effort to maintain the European peace, under whose cover the British politicians were briskly facilitating the next war between Germany and the USSR (and of course ultimately the war which Britain itself would be compelled to fight, though this was against their intentions. ‘War’, as famously proclaimed in 1984, ’is peace’. Yet Orwell’s critical gaze, it appears, did not have to stray far from home to discover the abuses of ‘totalitarianism.’

And there were other contemporaries who were alarmed by the patent analogies between the modus operandi of the British government and that of the European dictators. Among those dismayed by Chamberlain’s cynical strategies of spreading mass panic was the celebrated historian R.G. Collingwood, who wrote in 1938:

To me, therefore, the betrayal of Czechoslovakia was only a third case of the same policy by which the “National”  government had betrayed Abyssinia and Spain; and I was less interested in the fact itself than in the methods by which it was accomplished, the carefully engendered war scare in the country at large, officially launched by simultaneous issue of gas-masks and the prime minister’s emotional broadcast, two days before his flight to Munich, and the carefully staged hysterical scene in Parliament on the following night. These things were in the established traditions of Fascist dictatorial methods: excerpt that whereas the  Italian and German dictators sway the mobs by appeal to the thirst for glory and national aggrandizement, the  English prime minister did it by playing on sheer stark terror ( L & F, 1998: 157).

Michael Oakeshott, the ingenious English conservative- in fact pre-neo- liberal, inasmuch as he opposed the welfare state and espoused small government, individual initiative and unrestrained market forces- provides a good case in point. For example, writing in 1955, he disagreed with Walter Lippmann’s  pessimistic analysis of the crisis in liberal democracy, which the then famous American journalist understood in terms of the irrational, ‘Jacobine’ tendency of the modern masses to exaggerate democratic demands at he expense of mandatory liberal limitations, notably the right of property. This, in Lippmann’s view, was the key factor that has led to the collapse of liberal-democratic regimes and to the rise of authoritarian ones. Oakeshott, however, sensed here a ‘misplaced gloom.’ His confidence in the prospect of liberal-democracy was much greater; yet he completely partook in Lippmann’s unflattering diagnosis of the masses. It was as only that he feared them much less than his American counterpart.  Implicitly falling back on the English political tradition, which he on many other occasions explicitly extolled, Oakeshott was confident that elites in liberal countries will continue to be intelligent and responsible enough not to incite the mases. For, quite like a la Mosca and Pareto, he dismissed the notion that political initiatives ever come from below; not really, that is. What the masses clamor for in the final account is nothing other tan what their leaders have instructed them to want:

It is safe to say that we, ‘the people,’ never ask for what we have not been prompted to desire; we corrupt policy, not by our own shortsighted demands, but by our responsiveness to what is suggested and promised to us. Our voice is loud, but our utterance is the repetition of simple lessons well learned. [8]

Given that the masses as an independent actor, indeed the people, are completely ruled out, both literally and metaphorically, construed as mere clay in the hands of the potter, it is only a question of what the leaders will do, for good or bad. Oakeshott thus supported the rule of the people under the assumption that such a rule is an impossibility; that what we actually have under political liberalism is not democracy, but – to use the neologism suggested by Robert Dahl – a polyarchy, an interplay of ruling elites.[9] A keen appreciation of the advantages of such a polyarchic, stolid, ’English’ model, it would seem, underlines Michael Mann’s position. He therefore expresses wonderment at the failure of fascists to notice, and subsequently copy and employ, the same tested, liberal and ‘democratic’ methods of the northwest:

But a question still arises. Why should upper and middle classes increase the level of repression, abolish parliaments and civil liberties, and mobilize mass arties –still less call in dangerous fascists – if tried and tested milder forms were available at lower cost and risk? In fact the best solution to class struggle was visible in the northwest,. Its unions, socialist parties, and strikes were large than in most of the center, east and south but were implicated in class compromise, posing little threat to capitalist property relations .  .  . the center, east and south’s neglect of all this experience appears puzzling [10].


Mann provides the sanguine definition of the liberal model, underlining the ‘class compromise’ it entails; but one can grasp the same phenomena in a less positive light; precisely as a sophisticated way to defuse democratic potential, to dilute the people’s sovereignty and, in extremis, to avail oneself of crypto-fascism, with all the dangerous pitfalls on this path. Nor is it altogether just to reproach the center, east and south for ‘neglecting’ to consider the pluses of this model. AS we have seen, many fascists in both Germany and Italy envied the western-liberal ability to create a democracy ‘in appearance’, as Mosca put it, a democracy where the proverbial, terrifying, many-headed hydra of the people is gratifyingly transformed, to paraphrase Oakeshott, into a well-trained, if gargantuan, parrot.

We have seen how it was not uncommon for continental, ‘open’ fascists and their fellow travelers- such as Moeller, Jung, or Rocco – to expressly ground their politics  on the inability to develop a democratic model of the English or French type. In  Italy, it was notably the resonant failure of this ‘best solution,’ according to Mann, embodied in Giolitti. Fascists in general had to face a democracy declining in nominal status and threatening to become real and substantial. And indeed, what happens if the masses are not so sensible (or insensible(as to ‘compromise’ their interests? What if –pace Oakeshott-they refuse to repeat their simple lessons? And what if –pace Mann – they are determined to use democracy not to underpin but to question ‘capitalist property relations’?  Is fascism, then, an understandable, viable and legitimate option? Reading Mann, it is at times difficult to avoid the impression that this , indeed, is his opinion. As when he states that ‘If we place ourselves in the shoes of the Spanish latifundistas, threatened by anarcho-syndicalist and socialist land occupations, bombings, and ostensibly ‘revolutionary’ uprisings, we might also reach for the gun.’

 

For all Mann’s negation of the class analysis of fascism, we irreducibly back at the liberal cul-de-sac, which sees the bourgeoisie confronted with the masses, the economic domain against the political, capital vs democracy. We are back at the doorstep of the Lockes, the Burkes, the Donosos, the Mills, the Paretos, and the Spenglers, defending the sanctity of private property against the encroachment of ‘the mob’.

 

 [1] 1996 A History of Fascism, 1914-45; 304

[2] quoted in Patey 2001, The Life of Evelyn Waugh, 147

[3]  Cole, Margaret, ed. 1956. Beatrice Webb’s Diaries. 1924-1932

[4] Salvemini, Gaetano and George Bernard Shaw. 1997 Polemica sul fascismo, Rome: Ideazione Editrice

[5] Salvemini, 1973 The Origins of Fascism in Italy 57

[6] 1990 “The Resurrection of Rome”, in G. K. Chesterton Collected Works Vol XXI 429

[7] Leibovitz and Finkel (1998) In Our Time. The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion. Monthly Review Press. Quigley, Carrol (1981) The Anglo-American Establishment. From Rhodes to Cliveden;  GSGH & Associates. Schuman, Frederick (1942) Europe on the Eve: The Crisis of Diplomacy 1933-1939; Knopf.

[8] Oakeshott, Michael. 1993 Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, Yale University Press.

[9] Dahl, Robert A. 2003. How Democratic is the American Constitution? Yale University Press

[10] Mann, Michael. 2004 Fascists Cambridge Univ. Press

Reading

My mother read us kids books. I don't remember the early ones, except the ' Madeline in Paris' and 'Curious George'. Later, a few of the last ones: "Swallows and Amazons'; 'Wind in the Willows' 'Sword in the Stone'.* Time came when it was up to me to read on my own and there was a lot of pressure to do it. When? It was still ' to bed early, lights out!'
First, I remember reading 'Moby Dick" under the covers with a flash light. I set myself to read at least one chapter a night, kind of forced myself to do it: 'I'll show them'. I got absorbed into it, I must of been disappointed when I finished, not having Moby Dick to read every night. Back then it was was a 'great adventure', in was only decades later that I came to understand the breadth and depths of it.
I suppose after that I go into the sea adventures of C.S. Forester, the Hornblower series, every one. but this wasn't the 'adult reading' I was seemingly supposed to doing though by that time think my patent's stopped paying attention to what I read, as long as there was a book around in my bedroom, if they happened to drop by.
I can't remember when it was I started browsing seriously in my parent's library. Certain parts of it had the aura of being 'out-of-bounds' like in my Dad's study. The first book I remember 'sneaking' was Kerouac's 'The Subterraneans', I had probably heard something about 'Beatniks' on TV. I didn't get all that much of it but for some reason becoming a Beat seemed a good aspiration, by comparison to growing up, being normal and getting a job. I felt a lot affliction in my life- from many directions, as 14 and 15 year olds sometimes do, so my 'pretend life' was 'out of the world'. What to make of Jesus Christ, what to make of the "Kinsey Report' which I saw on one of my Dad's bookshelves ( I heard about that in the news too)?Not much in it for a kid really though much later when I had kids of my own I read all about it.
The book that really got a gripe on me was 'The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud", translated by Brill, Modern Library Edition, 1938; probably something my Dad got when he was studying for his degree in clinical psychology,. I still got it, his signature is on the first page after the cover: Judson T. Shaplin. May be my mother read it too when she did that study of witchcraft, maybe hoping to get into a course at Harvard. Not a mark in it though, and she marked all her books to beat hell.
Later in life I did get some 'counseling' on several occasions, even had a real psychiatrist. They always said they weren't Freudians. Really? I never said anything about it though. It's just something they didn't want to see in the themselves. Something they thought they could get by without, hoping for some "Easy Street' or 'Royal Road', cleared of the confusing, ambiguous and painful obstructions in the 'pursuit of happiness.'



*I recall King Arthur now. "Brier Rabbit" and "Little Black Sambo' and the "Jungle Books', 'Tom Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', Huck's Dad was kind of scary.