(Doi 10.1093 - Oxfordhb - 9780199594788.013.0002)

The Ideological Origins of Fascism before 1914
Oxford Handbooks Online

Kevin Passmore
The Oxford Handbook of Fascism
Edited by R. J. B. Bosworth
Print Publication Date: Oct 2010 Subject: History, Modern History (1701 to 1945)
Online Publication Date: Sep 2012 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199594788.013.0002
Abstract and Keywords
Benito Mussolini saw fascism as a novel phenomenon, constructed from existing

materials that were transformed in the process, as were the men and women who made
the new movement. It emerged from the specific context of world war and social and
political upheaval. Nonetheless, Mussolini exaggerates. This article explores different
political ideologies that consider fascism as a ‘political religion’; reason and unreason;
nationalism; the socialist origins of fascism; and liberalism.
Keywords: Benito Mussolini, fascism, world war, political upheaval, political religion, liberalism
That a new doctrine should use the still vital elements of other doctrines is
perfectly logical. No doctrine is born quite new, shining, never before seen. No
doctrine can boast of an ‘absolute originality’. It is bound, even if only historically,
to other doctrines that have been, and to develop into other doctrines that will be.
… [B]ut the activity of man reacts upon the doctrine, transforms it, adapts it to
new necessities or transcends it.
MUSSOLINI rightly saw fascism as a novel phenomenon, constructed from existing

materials that were transformed in the process, as were the men and women who made
the new movement.1 Fascism emerged from the specific context of world war and social
and political upheaval. Nonetheless, Mussolini exaggerates. The political landscape did
not change completely in 1914–18: some earlier ideologies possessed priorities similar to
those of fascism, and they had fitted into the political landscape in similar ways. Populist,
ultranationalist ideologies, opposed to Marxism and liberalism, and less systematically to
the right, already existed in 1914. Although the (p. 12) cults of violence and
paramilitarism were less common in these movements than they would subsequently
become, there were significant intellectual prefigurations of fascism.
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The only way to identify continuities across geographical and chronological boundaries is
to use an ahistorical concept of fascism, for no pre-1914 ideology couldhaveexactly
anticipatedfascism.2 Yet we must be aware of the drawbacks of using hindsight. Our
model is useful only for our specific purpose. It necessarily obscures the ways in which
protagonists made sense of the world. Before 1919, nobody saw her- or himself as ‘proto-
fascist’. Furthermore, identification of ideologies as pre-fascist does not ‘explain’ them.
We have only illuminated them from our own vantage point. The ideologies and thinkers
considered in this chapter were many other things besides harbingers of fascism.
I. Fascism as a ‘Political Religion’

The fashionable ‘political religions’ approach to fascism exaggerates the explanatory
power of its concepts. According to Emilio Gentile, a ‘political religion’ emerges when an
earthly movement or regime claims sacred status. A secular movement, endowed with the
trappings of a religion, endeavours to shape the individual and the masses through an
‘anthropological revolution’. Since it sees the world in terms of good and evil, it brooks no
opposition.3 The concept of political religion develops the notion, which originated with
theorists of totalitarianism, that fascism had its roots in a messianic, all-encompassing
ideology, which was dedicated to the creation of a perfect society.4 The major strength of
political religions theory is that it focuses attention upon what fascists thought.
In spite of its claim to understand fascism from the inside, political religions theory uses
extra-historical standards to extract the ‘core’ meaning of fascism from the plethora of
motivations, ideas, and programmes of actually existing fascism. Consequently, it
obscures the diversity of pathways by which people came to fascism. Gentile makes the
political religion the centre of fascism by attaching it (p. 13) to laws of historical change
and collective psychology.5 Thus, political religions supposedly emerge when old patterns
of thought have decayed under the impact of modernization, without undermining the
masses’ allegedly innate need for simple explanations of their place in the world. Fascism
functions as a secular replacement for revealed religion and thus resolves the anomie of
modern life. In discussing the relationship between fascism and its precursors, these
assumptions lead Gentile to hesitate between two views. On the one hand, he assumes
that since the political religion derives from a functional need, the materials from which it
is constructed are merely incidental—the circumstances of its origin give meaning to the
ideology. In some of his work, Gentile shows little interest in the origins of the political
religion. This approach comes up against a well-known refutation of essentialism and
determinism. Since the existence of the political religion depends upon both the need for
the religion and the materials from which the religion is constructed, then both are
essential to the existence of the phenomenon in question, and one cannot say which is the
more important. This point implies that the nature of the religion depends as much upon
the circumstances in which it was produced as upon the materials from which it was
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made, and that in turn makes impossible the notion of an ‘essential’ similarity between
any two objects of study. Similarities certainly exist, but only from one point of view and
not another.
On the other hand, in some of his work, Gentile shows greater interest in the origins of
the political religion. He distinguishes between full-blown political religions and ‘secular
religions’ which leave some space for individual liberty. Secular religions included, for
instance, the republicanism of Mazzini. Notwithstanding this distinction, Gentile tends
also to make any pre-1914 secular religion into a forerunner of fascism, while other
sources of fascism become ‘secondary’, or ‘circumstantial’.6 He regards the search for a
civil religion as a feature of Italian political culture since the Risorgimento, especially
evident in organic nationalism and its spiritual cousin, socialism. Furthermore, like Zeev
Sternhell, Gentile takes Mussolini's own account of fascism as a synthesis of spiritual
socialism and radical nationalism, both of which he sees as precursors of the political
religion, quite seriously. Fascism is a reworking of leftist ideas.7 Giventhatthere
wasnoequivalent in Nazism of Mussolini's reworking of socialism, Gentile's account of
fascist origins cannot be applied directly to Germany. Michael Burleigh is therefore
somewhat ambiguous on the question of the origins of Nazism. He argues that Hitler's
ideology emerged from a brew of medieval myths of kingship, conventional religion, the
writings of Nietzsche and Richard Wagner, and nihilistic art. Nevertheless, he too places
special (p. 14) emphasis on the left-wing origins of political religions, traceable back to
the French Revolution, via romantic nationalism.8
Fascism, or rather the people who saw themselves as fascists amongst other things,
should not be reduced to one of its dimensions. The attempt to do so by relating fascism
to a ‘fundamental’ process of modernization obscures the plethora of historical trends in
post-Enlightenment Europe. Fascism was one of several possible developments that
emerged from shared roots, leading in multiple directions as contexts changed. Secondly,
people's ‘need’ to explain the world is unproven. When they do seek to explain it, their
accounts are shifting, contradictory, and contested. While the sacralization of politics is
undoubtedly an important element of fascism, fascists did not always act within its logic
and they brought many other agendas to fascism. Insofar as they attempted to create a
political religion, they understood it in diverse ways and constructed their utopia from
sundry materials.9 It is also worth noting that the proponents of political religions theory
do not see themselves as requiring simple explanations. They therefore endorse implicitly
a dichotomous view of the subjective mass and the rational elite, and borrow some of the
categories of the collective psychology that was one of the ingredients of fascism.10
Fascism is not easily summed up in simple dichotomies such as ‘tradition/modernity’,

‘forward-/backward-looking’, or ‘reason/unreason’. Fascists certainly used oppositions
such as these. However, rather than take them at face value (or deduce their meaning
from the movement of history), we must explore what they signified to protagonists. We
must also take account of conflict among fascists over the meaning of their ideology.
Indeed, fascism was characterized by the dynamic interrelationship of people with
different agendas, who nevertheless agreed to work together and oppose, in different
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ways, rival ideologies. Like all ideologies, fascism defined itself against rivals but also
possessed affinities with them. Competing ideologies drew upon and transformed the
same intellectual currents. Robert Nye's comments on the history of biomedical thought
are relevant to the origins of fascism: no longer can we write a history ‘with villains and
noble seekers after truth and its narrative tropes of tragedy and ultimate redemption; few
unambiguous heroes emerge [from this history]’.11
I shall approach the question of origins by examining some of the ideological

(p. 15)
materials from which fascists constructed their ideologies, remembering that fascists
drew selectively on the ideas they used, and that dichotomous formulae such as ‘the
revolt against reason’ are not very useful. I shall then explore the ways activists began, in
the last years of peace, to transform these materials into political ideologies dedicated to
the renovation and perhaps conquest of the state.
II. Reasonand Unreason

Where do we begin? if we regard the religious component of fascismasfunda-mental, then
we might see its earliest precursor in medieval millenarianism. To do so would require
indifference to historical actors’ self-understanding, to their categories of thought, and to
the contexts in which they operated. However, this danger is only an extreme example of
a problem inherent in the search for origins. A more important objection is that Aquinas's
scholasticism, which deployed reason in the service of faith, anticipated fascist religiosity
just as much as millenarianism did. There was more than one religious tradition in
Europe.
The late eighteenth century is a more meaningful starting point, since modern political
alignments first took shape then. Fascists generally disparaged the Enlightenment
tradition, which they saw as the fount of materialist individualism. Yet their stance was
complex. On the one hand, fascists believed, like Enlightenment thinkers, that man could
create a better world, if only for some. Fascists also agreed that universal laws regulated
human societies, even if the laws in question did not lead to universal emancipation. As
Gentile and many others before have argued, Fascism owed something also to Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, who held that it might be necessary to createa ‘civic religion’
andtoforce people to recognizethe ‘general will’. Yet fascists also had something in
common with Rousseau's critic, Gottfried von Herder, for whom national diversity was
more valuable than uniformity. However, Herder did not posit the existence of a racial
hierarchy.
Notwithstanding, Herder's thought prefigured Romanticism and thus linked with an

ideological current that flowed directly into the pool from which fascism emerged.
Romanticism rejected rational, classicist, precepts of rationality and balance in favour of
individualism and subjectiveness. Like fascism, Romanticism idealized the creative spirit
who overturned formal rules. Romantics saw imagination as a gateway to the spiritual
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truths of national and folk identities. Romanticism also developed the organicist strand
evident in anti-Enlightenment thought. This organicism simultaneously provided a bridge
to rationalist liberalism, for biological science was attractive to liberal rationalists well
before Darwin. Moreover, if the (p. 16) nineteenth-century bourgeoisie abandoned
organized religion, it rarely rejected spiritualism. It was prone to regard the
contemplation of artistic genius as a means to cultivate the self. Liberals could recognize
themselves in the romantic idea of self-realization through struggle against nature and
routine.
Romanticism had not entirely disappeared by 1900, when a new wave of artists and
writers announced the latest of the many deaths of reason. They had in mind the ultra-
materialist positivism typified by Jeremy Bentham, which contended that scientific
principles could resolve moral issues. Anti-positivists also attacked the specialist
university disciplines as they were then emerging. They saw the sociology of the
Durkheimians and the history of the Rankeans as representing the mindless collection of
dry facts. Among the critics of the professional academic were figures commonly seen as
precursors of fascism. The German Paul Lagarde, the Frenchmen Gustave Le Bon and
Georges Sorel, and the Italians Giuseppe Prezzolini and Giovanni Papini all railed against
professional academe. In fact, the relationship between university and amateur learning
was complex. Those characterized as mere accumulators of facts were just as likely to
regard society as an organism, with intrinsic properties, as were their amateur critics.
Emile Durkheim respectfully cited Le Bon. As for the rebels, they did not reject science
per se. They redefined it.
The rebels rejected positivism for different reasons. Friedrich Nietzsche (1884–1900) is
interesting from our perspective because both Mussolini and Hitler wrote positively of
him. One can see why fascists should have admired a thinker who idealized fearless
individuals, possessed of a will to power, and who rejected universal values for placing
intolerable constraints upon individual creativity. Nietzsche envisaged the leadership of
an elite, ready to sacrifice untold numbers in the interests of an ideal. Yet his writings are
too contradictory to be appropriated by a single ideology. He urged his contemporaries to
face the death of god with the creation of new values, and yet he was scathing of any
attempt to create new standards. He rejected German nationalism and yet celebrated the
national past. He regurgitated crass anti-Semitic stereotypes while abhorring anti-
Semites, including, after an initial fascination, Wagner. Furthermore, Nietzsche was a
critic of the rational utopia imagined by totalitarians and, in the 1960s, he became an
icon for the anarchistic postmodernist Michel Foucault.12
Nietzsche's fame extended beyond Germany. French and Italian thinkers read him as a
counter to Wagnerian decadentism—Mussolini was among those who did so. Under
Nietzsche's influence, Gabriele D'Annunzio's literature moved away from explorations of
decadence to the celebration of action, violence, misogyny, and the myth of the superior
man. Another Italian follower was Giovanni Gentile, whose idealist philosophy denied the
existence of individual minds and of any distinction between theory and practice or
subject and object. According to the future Fascist Minister of Education, all such
Page 5 of 22

categories were merely mental constructs. Gentile (p. 17) saw idealist philosophy as a
means of filling the void left by positivism. However, he also believed that traditional
religion could participate in this regeneration.13
Meanwhile, the French philosopher Henri Bergson rejected Immanuel Kant's view that
the mind could know approximations of reality through their impact on the senses.
Through intuition, Bergson maintained, one could apprehend the profound life force
itself, a state of becoming that, he claimed, was more analogous to cinematic reality than
the fixed truth of the photograph. We might read Bergson's critique of positivism as
prefiguring the fascist celebration of feeling, but it proved just as suitable to the
justification of traditional religion.
Whatever the case, Bergson's thought was rather different from that of the Catholic
physicist Pierre Duhem and the mathematician Henri Poincaré, for whom science could
not penetrate reality but only produce hypothetical approximations to it (a view actually
closer to Kant's). Duhem and Poincaré elaborated an alternative to positivism in the form
of a ‘provisional’ epistemology. Some thinkers combined it with Jamesian pragmatism,
according to which knowledge should be judged by its usefulness, not its truth. During
the war, some would follow pragmatism to the (not necessarily logical) conclusion that
what was useful was true and, indeed, good.
Le Bon, who was cited approvingly by both Hitler and Mussolini, issued from these
intellectual currents. He too held that science could discover but not explain, and
endorsed pragmatism. However, he refused to draw the conclusion that it was as useful to
follow instinct as reason, since that would rehabilitate ‘outdated ideas’, including
religion. Rather, civilization (i.e. progress or modernization for us) meant overcoming
instinctual drives. Following Bergson, he argued that instinct and the unconscious could
be objects of scientific analysis. In fact, Le Bon made an implicit, but crucially important,
distinction between elite and mass. The former, possessed of a proper balance of reason
and sentiment, could study and guide the wholly instinctive mass.
Although his political perspectives were initially different, Georges Sorel inhabited
thesamephilosophical worldasLeBon.Sorel is best knownfor hisbelief that irrational
myths, such as the class war or nation, were capable of inspiring actions that would
transform the world. Bringing together his professional training as an engineer and his
knowledge of Bergson, he aspired to study these myths scientifically. He criticized
socialism because he saw it as deriving from a Rousseauesque superlogical utopia and
counterpoised to it the practical socialism of the syndicalists.14 He believed that medieval
artisans had reconciled the technical and the artistic. The builders of the Gothic
cathedrals had produced beauty without thought of material reward. At about the same
time, the German engineer Edward (p. 18) Mayer endeavoured to reconcile technology
with a national culture that was traditionally hostile to positivism. In his Die Technik als
Kulturmacht (1906) he claimed that technical advance stemmed from growing
spiritualization.15
Page 6 of 22

The rebels rejected the positivist doctrine that general laws explained the behaviour of
man, for they believed them to restrict human creativity and spirituality. Yet they often
assumed laws of their own. Sorel thought that there were ‘regularities’ in historical
development. He held that each class, later nation, had a unique spirit, which it was the
task of heroic leadership to realize. This conclusion connected his thought with theories
of national identity, often with a racial component. Racial theories were irrational in the
sense that they believed pre-conscious dispositions to determine human behaviour—at
least that of the masses. They were rational in that their existence had allegedly been
demonstrated scientifically by thinkers informed by Social Darwinism and theories of
degeneration. If these ideologies had a religious component, they owed as much to
scholasticism as to messianism, for Sorel and others believed that the elite, exempt from
the determinations that constrained mass behaviour, could understand and make use of
myths for political ends.
Common to most fin de siècle thinkers was the belief that only a male, educated elite
grasped the principles of social organization. The masses were passive, irrational,
implicitly feminine, perhaps foreign and even animal. The distinction has a long history
and, at the turn of the century, the discipline of collective psychology gave it a new form.
Collective psychology was founded by the Frenchmen Le Bon and Gabriel de Tarde, and
by the Italians Scipio Sighele and Pasquale Rossi. Collective psychology took from
organicism the notion that the crowd behaved as a primitive organism, and from
psychiatry the idea, developed well before Sigmund Freud, that it responded to
unconscious motivations and could be influenced by hypnotic suggestion. Collective
psychology did not establish a professional presence in the universities before 1914,
although it was popular with professionals, journalists, and politicians.16 In fact,
collective psychology was not wholly different from academic sociology. Durkheim, too,
rejected positivist inductivism and insisted that the social body was more than the sum of
its parts. He agreed that the masses internalized ideas through the repetition of simple
images and that unscrupulous elites might exploit this gullibility. Where Durkheim
differed from the more right-wing collective psychologists was in his belief that the mass
should or could be guided by a democratic elite that would inculcate an (oxymoronic
perhaps) ‘cult’ of reason into the mass through state schools. Collective psychologists
were further to the right, although not necessarily of the extreme right, and they were
more pessimistic. Le Bon believed that crowds returned to earlier stages of evolution.
From thereitwas ashort step to racialization of themass. D'Annunzio saw the (p. 19)
‘nobles’ and the ‘plebs’ as two different races. In Ilfuoco, he recounted the story of an
artist-creator who mesmerized, violated, and then discarded the plebeian masses, just as
he did women.17
Since the Enlightenment, thinkers had assumed that race was a scientific fact, confirmed,
notably, by phrenology. Indeed, cranial measurement was not entirely displaced by
genetic theories of race—French racial ‘experts’ used it during the war, for instance. The
Comte Arthur de Gobineau's Essai sur l'inégalité des races (1853–5) was the culmination
of the earlier approach. It contended that history was a struggle between races, in which
the dominance of the Aryan race depended on preserving its purity from contamination
Page 7 of 22

by the black and yellow races. From the 1860s, Gobineau's theories became influential in
Germany, where Wagner and Nietzsche were among their admirers. The latter, in On the
Genealogy of Morals (1887), depicted socialists and democrats as products of racial
regression, and contrasted them with the Aryan elite. By 1900, racial categories were an
integral part of intellectual life, and no single political tendency monopolized them.
British liberals used them to justify hegemony in Ireland, while reactionary German
conservatives invoked them to legitimize German power over Poles.
The novelty of late nineteenth-century racism lay less in the notion of race as a scientific
fact than in its marriage with Darwin's theory of natural selection, and in the
development of racial policies. The master shared the contemporary conflation of
sociology and biology, and ambiguities in his work helped ensure that Darwinism would
appeal across the political spectrum. Initially, liberals, socialists, and nationalists saw the
struggle of species as confirmation of the market, class, and national causes respectively.
As liberalism and nationalism shifted to the right and as conservatives overcame (in
practice, if not in principle) their religious objections to evolution, Social Darwinism also
developed a right-wing version.18 It was a contested ideology and those who espoused it
did so inconsistently. While most non-socialists applied Darwinian categories to the
international environment and believed in a hierarchy of nations and races, they less
consistently saw struggle as inevitable in the domestic sphere. Some believed that it
guaranteed progress. Others felt that success in the international struggle necessitated
domestic harmony. Cell theory, which assumed a tendency towards stability in the
organism, worked against Darwinism. Fascists would prove to be no clearer in their use
of Social Darwinism.
For some, the logic of Social Darwinism seemed to suggest that the ‘softness’ of modern
life, perhaps aggravated by well-meaning social reform, might ensure the survival of the
weak, and the degeneration of the race. Medical science underpinned degeneration
theory. In France, doctors drew on the Lamarckian alternative to (p. 20) Darwinism. They
feared that inherited alcoholism, venereal disease, and unhealthy housing would taint
whole populations and disarm the nation in the international struggle for life. Doctors
looked to the active element of the population, the elite, to counter the tendency towards
degeneration present in the mass. Interventionists regarded social reform as a means to
ensure the fitness of the race, not to improve individuals’ lives.19
Degeneration seemed to provide an explanation for the discontent of the working class,
while intervention seemed to offer a remedy for socialism. Thus, Italian criminologists
invented methods to identify and segregate southern misfits and expected thereby to cure
southern lawlessness and unite the Italian nation. In Britain, France, and Germany,
eugenicists focused more upon the dangerous urban poor and the working class. They
advocated a variety of measures ranging from improvements in the housing of the
proletariat, via methods designed to ensure that only the healthiest reproduced, to the
outright killing of the ‘unfit’. Darwin's cousin Francis Galton (1822–19n) invented the
term ‘eugenicist’ to designatesuch policies. He wished to encourage the middle classes to
have as many children as possible and to encourage the ‘unfit’ to emigrate to the land of
Page 8 of 22

‘Cantsayanywhere’. In a prize-winning essay, the German Wilhelm Schallmeyer (1857–

1919)urged that the weak should be prevented from reproducing. Ernst Haeckel (1834–
1919), Professor of Biology at the University of Jena, explicitly advocated killing the sick
in the interests of ‘humanity’. In France and Italy, few went so far. Catholic teaching on
the sanctity of human life was more influential there. Nevertheless, there, too, the health
of the race was the measure of the efficacy of social policy.
Fascists built their ideological edifice from diverse materials—the same stock from which
opposed ideologies also drew. Fascism did not originate simply in a revolt against reason
or in the drive to create a political religion. It was inherently contradictory. It would
emphasize both leadership and fulfilment through participation in a crowd. It attacked
Enlightenment rationalism as a constraint upon struggle and yet invented its own, ultra-
determinist, theories of race and nation, justified with all of the paraphernalia of science.
Contradictions such as these (present in any ideology) provided multiple pathways to
fascism, from right, left,and centre.Especiallywidelysharedbydifferent political tendencies
was the distinction between the supposedly rational elite and the irrational mass.
Negative views of the masses did not inevitably lead to fascism, or even to the rejection of
liberalism. Much depended upon how the elites were defined. This is an appropriate point
at which to explore the ideas described in the political context of pre-1914 Europe.
(p. 21) III. Nationalism

Until the 1860s, nationalism was largely cast as progressive. In the east and south, it
sought the reform or destruction of the reactionary tsarist, German, and Austrian
empires. In the west, democrats claimed to speak for the nation. Following Rousseau,
they believed that each individual was bound to the common good by his [sic] equal share
of rights and duties. Democrats condemned aristocracy, monarchy, and the Church for
denying the rights of the nation.
There was always an exclusionary potential in democratic nationalism. It derived first

from the link between democracy, the people, the indivisible nation, and thence ethnicity.
Nationalists took for granted Herder's idea that people and ethnicity coincided or,
perhaps more dangerously, that they ought to coincide. They were prone to regard their
own nationality as ethically superior to others. The ethnicization of democracy potentially
justified moulding the population to the higher good of the nation.20 As Emilio Gentile
argues, the organic conception of the nation often fed into a quasi-religious idealization of
the national community.
The dark side of nationalism developed in the inevitable gap between vision and reality.
The space was arguably greatest in France, where moderate Republicans seemed unable
to regenerate a nation that in 1870–1 had experienced defeat at the hands of Germany
and civil war in Paris. France did indeed produce its fair share of pre-fascist thinkers.
Page 9 of 22

Nevertheless, I shall concentrate on Italy and Germany because fascism actually came to
power there after the Great War.
Italy was united in 1861 to 1870 through diplomacy and war. Popular nationalism played
a subordinate role. After unification, the liberal elites set about ‘creating Italians’. The
regime promoted loyalty to king and country, notably through secularized schools,
idealization of the army, sport, parades, and monuments. For some nationalists this was
not enough. The obstacles were enormous, for in large parts of Italy, especially the south,
‘Italy’ meant little more than taxes and police interference in customary ways.
Notwithstanding, the followers of the democratic nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini
condemned the liberal regime for its unrepresentativeness. They saw the liberals as too
concerned with pointless quarrels to bring their policies to fruition and as too elitist to
mobilize the masses. Mazzinian nationalists demanded something like a civic religion. In
their orbit can be found the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who claimed that isolation of
hereditary criminals—hangovers from an earlier stage of evolution—from the rest of
society would benefit the Italian race. Yet Mazzinians also believed that democracy
entailed individual rights and the peaceful coexistence of nations. We cannot know how in
practice they would have reconciled individual liberty and dedication to the nation. At
most, we can say that Mazzinian nationalism was ambiguous and, later, that fascists drew
upon elements (p. 22) of it. Lombroso's positivist criminology, for instance, influenced the
Fascist criminal code of 1930.21
By 1914, Italian nationalism had developed a genuinely radical right component. It was
rightist in the sense that it was strongly anti-socialist or more particularly anti-Marxist; it
was radical in that it held that the creation of a truly united Italy, without the socialists,
depended upon the displacement of the old ruling class by a new one. The context for the
emergence of this new nationalism was the rise of socialism, anarchist terror, peasant
occupations of landed estates, and defeat of the Italian army at Adowa in 1896.
Among the most important of the new nationalist journals was Corradini's Il Regno,
founded in 1903. Unlike earlier nationalists, Corradini was of conservative background.
He incorporated Social Darwinism and pragmatism into a nationalist, anti-socialist, and
anti-democratic ideology. He held that Italy must overcome its weakness towards other
powers by harnessing the ‘iron laws of race’, expelling foreign influences, and engaging
in an aggressive imperialist policy. Nationalism would incorporate workers into the nation
and regenerate the bourgeoisie, forcing it to abandon ‘feminine humanitarianism’ and
degenerate liberalism. Corradini advocated a ‘religion of nature and heroes’, and a cult of
force. If the bourgeoisie did not understand the need to break strikes by force, then
socialists would triumph. After 1908, Corradini added syndicalist themes. He likened the
struggle of the ‘proletarian’ Italian nation against the Anglo-Saxons to that of the workers
against the bourgeoisie. He admired syndicalism for its violence and for its subordination
of the individual to the group. In 1910, Corradini founded the Italian Nationalist
Association.22
Page 10 of 22

In Germany, right-wing nationalism developed earlier, as liberals bowed to the genius of

Bismarck, the aristocratic, conservative, architect of German unity. Wagner's evolution
from left to right was symptomatic. The composer initially harnessed his art to the
evocation of a socialist and nationalist people's utopia, which he expected to follow from
the twilight of the gods—that is, Judeo-Christian religion. There was a messianic element
in the operas of a composer who saw himself as a Christlike mediator between the
spiritual and material realms. Wagner viewed art as a means to reconcile the individual
with the German community, with its past and future. He believed that the Germans were
descended from pre-Christian nature-gods and so uniquely placed to apprehend the pure
essence of being.23
Wagner was uncertain on the nature of the new Germany. He hesitated between
(p. 23)
the call for a new national movement free from the Jewish and foreign influences that had
allegedly caused the failure of 1848, and the conviction that regeneration would come
through art.24 His conception of his utopia increasingly resembled a comfortable
Germany cleansed of divisive elements. By the end of his life, Wagner preached the
mutual respect of bourgeois and lord, town and prince within the nation and claimed that
the German was essentially conservative. If Wagner's ideas contained religious drives,
they were not the only elements, and his putative ‘new man’ would not have been wholly
strange to any ‘old man’.25 Some saw Wagner not as the prophet of a new religion, but as
an admirer of Arthur Schopenhauer. The latter regarded suffering as the lot of humanity
and political action as absurd.26 Hitler's Wagnerian fantasies of decadence—he ordered
Albert Speer to design buildings that would impress as ruins—were an important
ingredient of Nazism. In his final testament, the Führer gave full vent to his conviction
that the Germans were not worthy of their historic mission.
Wagner's son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain also influenced Hitler. Chamberlain's

racism combined Darwinism with mystical idealism derived from Gestalt theory. Present-
day peoples originated in cross-breeding between different races, followed by careful
inbreeding over a long period. Whereas Darwin denied the existence of innate qualities,
Chamberlain believed that breeding would lead to thegradual emergenceofaperfectform
—theexpression of amystical lifeforce. The racial elite would commune with this essence
and express it in the arts and religion. The state must preserve the purity of the Volk.
Although these ideas influenced Hitler, for Chamberlain they legitimized the authority of
the Wilhelmine empire.27
By 1914, nationalism was so strongly anchored in the German right that its left-wing
origins were a distant memory. Nevertheless, the ideas of 1848 survived in the use of
categories such as the Volk. Conservatives exploited exclusionary potentials long present
within nationalism and made it a xenophobic, anti-socialist, authoritarian creed. Paul
Lagarde was one of the first to claim the label of radical conservative. As an enemy of
positivism, he attacked socialism and democracy for their view that the world was an
aggregate of material facts rather than an organic whole. He sought to save Germany by
giving it a new religion, inspired by the rituals, but not the dogma, of the Catholic and
Protestant Churches. This religion meant striving for a personal relationship with the
Page 11 of 22

ideal, through participation in the national community and emulation of an aristocracy of

the spirit. Lagarde (p. 24) rejected the idea of a return to the past, arguing that religion
and nation must adapt to changing times. Nevertheless, his definition of the elite was not
wholly new. He was a monarchist and opposed the bureaucratic state. He envisaged
something like a caste of country gentlemen, mediating between king and people. By the
end of his life, he was more favourable to the established churches and wanted to give
them control over secondary education. In the domestic sphere, he envisaged harmony
and was increasingly willing to allow existing churches a place in his utopia.
Internationally, he used Darwinist language, advocating the forceful conquest of lands in
the east and the assimilation or driving out of the indigenous populations. Lagarde's
racism was not biological but he did preach discrimination against Jews on the grounds
that it would encourage assimilation.28
IV. The Socialist Origins Of Fascism

For much of the nineteenth century, socialists were nationalists. They associated
democracy with the triumph of the people and assumed the people to be a nation. They
used the terms ‘worker’ and ‘people’ interchangeably, thereby enabling broad
recruitment, including the petty bourgeoisie and the inevitable bourgeois intellectuals.
Socialism had never been free from prejudice, notably towards women and foreign
labour. The rise of Marxist socialism, which was theoretically internationalist, secularist,
and dedicated to the interests of the industrial proletariat alone, sometimes brought out
the exclusionary potential of the older socialist tradition. The French Blanquistes provide
an excellent example of this evolution. They espoused a sort of working-class Jacobinism,
advocating seizure of power by a revolutionary party on the back of an urban uprising.
They were anti-parliamentarian, nationalist, xenophobic, and sometimes anti-Semitic. In
1889, Blanquistes backed the campaign of the political adventurer General Boulanger, in
the hope that it might permit them to seize power. This tactic led some of them to
accentuate the nationalist and anti-parliamentarian side of their programme. In
subsequent years, the Blanquistes split, with one wing launching wholeheartedly into
anti-Semitism and nationalism.29
Even after the triumph of Marxism in the labour movement, internationalism never
entirely replaced nationalism. Marxism, after all, insisted that the triumph (p. 25) of the
proletariat depended upon a preliminary bourgeois-democratic revolution within the
nation. Socialists were as concerned as anyone with the question of leadership and with
the creation of an elite, which they implicitly contrasted with the non-elite. Socialists saw
the workers both as a potential source of renewal and as lacking in ‘consciousness’, and
vulnerable to ‘hypnotization’ by rival elites. Some socialists hailed eugenicism as a means
to improve the quality of the proletariat and ensure that it proved equal to its destiny.
Socialists’ predilection for describing capitalists as ‘parasites’ must be counted among
the preconditions of mass murder in the twentieth century. Socialism was no more
Page 12 of 22

homogeneous than any other ideology and so there were potentially many affinities with
other movements. Some thought socialism less a means of securing political and
economic power for the proletariat than a source of idealism that would regenerate a
decadent world corrupted by bourgeois materialism.
Some socialists were disenchanted by the cautious practice of organized Marxism.

Socialist parties urged their followers to await patiently the working out of the laws of
history. Dissidents sought to hasten the revolution. Most often, they turned to the ultra-
left but some did not. For certain intellectuals, the Dreyfus Affair was the turning point.
In France, Charles Péguy felt that the party had betrayed the idealism of the Dreyfusard
cause—claiming that ‘mystique had become politique’. Sorel endeavoured to redefine
Marxism as ‘social poetry’. The sequel of the Affair also disappointed the socialists
around the journal La voce in Italy. For their leader, Giuseppe Prezzolini, the Dreyfusards
had nullified socialism by mobilizing the proletariat against the Church. Typically of the
journal's contributors, Benito Mussolini wanted to regenerate Italy through the
propagation of new artistic, moral, and social values. La voce's combination of socialism
and nationalism prefigured one strand of fascism but the journal did not preach the
supremacy of nation or race over the individual.30
Syndicalism provided another ingredient in the fascist soup. Syndicalism and radical
nationalism shared hostility to liberal democracy. However, for syndicalists to become
fascists they had to abandon or modify other beliefs. For Italian syndicalists, the turning
point for some was the failure of the strike movement of 1910 and then the debacle
triggered by ‘Red Week’ in July 1914. Some syndicalists concluded that Italy was not yet
ripe for socialism and so the most pressing task was to create a modern capitalist state.
Some held that parliamentary government had delayed industrialization. The political
system, rather than capitalism, became the enemy. Syndicalists also grappled with the old
problem of leadership. Embracing a version of collective psychology, the proletariat, they
felt, was too immature to embrace the spirit of self-sacrifice that the revolution required
of it; the inculcation of such a spirit depended upon revitalization of the elite. The
syndicalist Paolo Mantica (p. 26) sought to create a proletarian elite by making trade
unions the basis of decentralized self-government. This notion would become an
important element of the left wing of Italian Fascism, opposed to Alfredo Rocco's statist
version.31
Syndicalists did not inevitably become fascists—far from it. For instance, Arturo Labriola
argued that alliance with progressive liberals made modernization possible. Nothing
better illustrates the dangers of reading intellectual trajectories from their outcome than
the case of Mussolini. Like Lenin, the future Duce felt that capitalism was unlikely to
collapse under the burden of its contradictions. Again like Lenin, he expected an elite to
awaken working-class consciousness. Before 1914, he never departed from his
revolutionary line. He added a dose of romanticism and a cult of action, reinforced by his
reading of Nietzsche and Sorel and by celebration of Marx as a ‘man of action’. Mussolini
was not the only romantic in European socialism and his ideas surprise us only if we
assume that socialist thought was wholly homogeneous and isolated from the general
Page 13 of 22

intellectual climate. Neither should Mussolini's admiration of Darwin astonish, nor his
view that the party should evict reformists as a living organism expels germs. Mussolini's
well-known confusion about nationalism was quite typical of socialists. Whatever the
case, Mussolini called for a general strike to halt the 1911–12 Libyan war, and in August
1914 he reaffirmed his conviction that war would profit only the bourgeoisie.32Mussolini's
conversion to fascism was not predestined. It resulted as much from choices in new
contexts as from pre-existing elements in his thought.
Page 14 of 22

V. Liberalism
Some have speculated that in 1904, while in Switzerland, Mussolini attended the lectures
of the world-famous political scientist Vilfredo Pareto. He probably did not, and yet the
possibility that he did so underlines the extent to which political ideas crossed national
and political boundaries. Coupled with the great diversity of fascism, this fact renders it
impossible to locate the origins of fascism in a single part of the political spectrum. It
makes nonsense, too, of the claim that fascism originated in a coming together of the
extremes of romantic socialism and radical nationalism against liberalism. Fascism drew
upon centrist ideologies, too.
In the last decades of peace, liberals believed that mass politics was eroding elite
leadership. For liberals, too, elites were the progressive element in history and their
potential decline would be a manifestation of decadence. Liberals often saw (p. 27) the
market as a Darwinian struggle, in which the elite rose to the top. They were (and are)
quietly prepared to sacrifice the humanity, if not the lives, of millions to the imperatives
of the ‘dismal science’ of classical economics. Many liberals felt that the over-democratic
parliamentary system excluded ‘the best’—those who had demonstrated their worth in
the competition of business, professional, or academic life—from public affairs.
Parliamentary politics allegedly attracted those who had failed in their professional life,
people who saw politics as a means to make a quick penny rather than as public service.
Professional politicians were a ‘counter-elite’, possessed only of a talent for manipulating
the impressionable masses. Liberals devised a host of means to ensure that the tide of
democracy did not drown the ‘best’. These ranged from proportional representation in
France through corporatist reform of parliament to strengthening of the executive. The
liberal critique of the parliamentary system was not necessarily anti-democratic but it
reinforced hostility to politicians.
In France, Hippolyte Taine argued that the inferiority of French elites had caused defeat
at the hands of Germany and that democratization threatened to aggravate
theproblem.InhishistoryoftheFrenchRevolution,hedrewuponpsychiatryto argue that the
crowd had been motivated by collective madness. He advocated restrictions on the
franchise as the solution to the problem of the elites. Taine influenced the Italian liberal
Gaetano Mosca, who held that the elite could not rely on force alone to sustain its power
but needed energy and will. If the ruling class conceded suffrage extension, it would
forfeit its moral superiority, excite base instincts in the masses, and encourage anarchy.
Progress would come from men of genius, who must play upon the quasi-religious
proclivities of the masses. Mosca is often bracketed with Pareto. As a Social Darwinist,
Pareto worried that socialist protection of the unfit would undermine elite leadership. The
elite should abandon humanitarian illusions and refuse to compromise with socialism, for
the socialist elites were much better equipped to use demagogic ‘illusions’ to stir up the
masses. Pareto saw nationalism as an alternative myth through which to mobilize the
mass. Neither should the elite be afraid to use force. Taine, Mosca, and Pareto may be
Page 15 of 22

seen as representing the response of liberal-conservatives to the advent of democracy.

Their preoccupations also help to explain why so many liberals joined the fascist
coalition.33
Mosca and Pareto both cited Le Bon's work on crowd theory as support for their views.
Although Mussolini regarded Le Bon as a proto-fascist, in his day he was close to the
secular, liberal-conservative and nationalist right. Like Taine, Le Bon held that legislation
could be effective only if it accorded with the instinctive constitution of the nation. The
elite's job was to understand this natural constitution and govern accordingly. Thus, Le
Bon opposed social reform on the grounds that it would inevitably be frustrated by the
laws of nature. Nevertheless, he maintained (p. 28) that faith, properly controlled by a
rational elite, could be a force for renewal. He doubtless had in mind the moderate
nationalism of President Raymond Poincaré. If, however, we regard his views ahistorically
—as in this essay we must—then they anticipate fascist nationalism in their racism,
pragmatism, contempt for the masses, and the ‘scholastic’ desire to study and channel
the irrational. We must also acknowledge that Le Bon did not show great interest inactual
techniques of mass manipulation.34
In Germany, too, liberalism contained anti-democratic tendencies. Liberals at first

embraced Social Darwinism to justify individual freedom and attack aristocratic
conservatism. Increasingly, they used it to legitimate social inequality. A key figure in this
transition was Haeckel, who urged that ‘Passion and selfishness, conscious or
unconscious, is everywhere the motive force for life.’ In 1878,he claimed that the struggle
for existence would not lead to socialism but to a sort of bourgeois aristocracy of talent.
With time, German conservatives, too, embraced Social Darwinism. In a book dedicated
to Haeckel, published in 1875, Friedrich von Hellwald argued that the struggle for
existence would lead to the triumph of the aristocracy. He endorsed militarism, class
domination, absolutism, slavery, despotism, and the spiritual yoke of the Church, as
‘inventions of men for the purposes of self preservation’. Von Hellwald opposed liberalism
as well as socialism, and yet retained a faith in progress, which he saw as the product of
violent conflict between individuals, races, and nations, leading to the annihilation of the
weak.35
In fact, pre-1914 German ultranationalism never lost its liberal component. Heinrich
Class's pamphlet ‘If I were Kaiser’ was transitional between authoritarian liberal-
conservatism and fascism in that it appealed to the Kaiser and yet presumed to speak for
the nation to him, calling for government by a strong man. Class's themes were similar to
those of Pareto. He urged summary justice against strikers, warning against ‘half-
measures’ and ‘sentimentality’. He encouraged the government to mobilize popular
nationalism, favoured discrimination against Poles and German Jews, and the expulsion
from Germany of foreign Jews along with French speakers. Class's ideal Germany was
authoritarian and nationalist and yet his ideas may also be situated in the liberal-
conservative tradition. He called for the introduction of a class-based voting system in the
empire and for ‘conversion to a parliamentary system that recognizes the personal
accomplishments of the educated and the propertied in the realm of political work’.36
Page 16 of 22

Like Pareto, Class prefigured the incorporation of conservatives and conservative liberals
into fascism. Those liberals who adhered to fascism rarely did so unreservedly. Neither
did anyone else, for there was little agreement among fascists about the nature of
fascism.
(p. 29) VI. Conclusion

Fascism was not the product of specific national traditions. Wagner entertained Gobineau
at his Venice home; D'Annunzio discovered Nietzsche in French trans-lationinthe Revue
blanche. If fascism crystallized first in Italy, it did so because circumstances permitted,
not because it was ideologically predestined to do so: historical analysis is possible only if
we think in terms of conditions, not laws. There were proto-fascist tendencies in several
European countries in 1914.They were radicalized and brutalized by the war and
perpetuated afterwards in the language or reality of civil war. In no country was everyone
brutalized. The task of historians’ is to explain why the brutalized came to power in some
countries and not others.
The fact that fascism was not homogeneous complicates this task. Ultimately, only their
decision to belong to the same movement unified fascists. They defined themselves in
opposition to rival ideologies, while simultaneously possessing something in common with
all their opponents. Fascism was a synthesis, perhaps merely an agglomeration, of ideas
taken from many different sources. The history of fascism played out through the
practices of a disunited movement in varying contexts.
Political-religious impulses were evident in the ideologies we have discussed. They help to
explain the violence and exclusionary nature of fascism and its horrifying readiness to use
ends to justify means. Yet these impulses were inseparable from other agendas, from the
protection of cultural and economic capital in an age of democracy and socialism to the
discontent of an intellectual proletariat and workers’ resentment of foreign competition in
the labour market. Both masses and elites (a loaded distinction that should be
historicized) were motivated by a mixture of interests and ideals. Furthermore, a political
religion could be conceived in multiple ways. For Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, it involved
the celebration of speed and destruction; for Giovanni Gentile it meant the mental pursuit
of the ideal. Anyway, the precursors of fascism rarely abandoned themselves to religious
mysticism. They distanced themselves from the religious phenomena they believed to
motivate the mass. Even if they claimed an intuitive relationship with the people and that
their ultimate aim was to restore the spiritual, they believed themselves able to study and
mould the mass according to the scientific principles of race, nation, gender, and
collective psychology.
Ironically, political religions theory reproduces elements of its object of study. The
isolation of ‘modernization’ from the complexities of historical change is little more than
an act of faith, while the belief that modernization creates an ‘anomie’, and potentially
Page 17 of 22

the worship of false gods, is the stock-in-trade of modern religions. It is the organizing
insight of Michael Burleigh's account of the relationship between politics and religion in
the nineteenth century. He cites Durkheim rather (p. 30) than Le Bon as a precedent for
this view, perhaps underestimating the ambiguous relationship between Durkheim's
sociology of the conscience collective and fin de siècle collective psychology.37 Burleigh
might also have cited Ferdinand Tönnies, whose account of the allegedly alienating
effects of modernization is close to collective psychology theory. Potentially of relevance,
too, is Max Weber's notion of charismatic authority, so influential in fascism studies,
which emphasizes the magnetic bond between leaders and led, and which also owes
something to collective psychology theory. Neither should we forget that Freud developed
his theory of unconscious motivation in critical dialogue with Le Bon.38 Indeed, one might
say that political religions theory relies on a collective psychologists’ reading of the
founding fathers of academic sociology and political science. Thus, Burleigh maintains
that the masses are more reluctant than the elites to abandon ‘apocalyptic revolutionary
illusions’ and that the ‘uneducated’ are vulnerable to manipulation by counter-elites. In
other words, political religions theorists define their own rationality in opposition to the
unreason of the masses and assume that the masses really are susceptible to
manipulation. The argument that political religions work because they meet a need in the
masses barely disguises the debt to the notion of the manipulative elite and the
manipulable mass.
Moreover, Burleigh amalgamates liberalism and socialism in a manner that would have
been familiar to Le Bon. He judges intellectual positions on moral grounds and there is a
whiff of decadence in contemporary society as he describes it. Intriguingly, Burleigh
writes for ‘those who may think atomistic pluralism and multiculturalism have gone too
far’. He sees civil religions as more tolerant than political religions and yet fears that
pluralism means that anything goes, rather than simply toleration of anything that does
not harm others. Burleigh advocates a vaguely defined ‘civic religion’, which amounts to
little more than instrumentaliza-tion of the common Christian heritage.39
Of course, political religions theory is not proto-fascist. Like its parent, totalitarianism
theory, the concept has proved attractive to people of various political persuasions, and
theories have to be treated on their merits. To make the transition from any ideology to
fascism, one had to abandon convictions previously held dear. Once choice enters the
equation and once we remember that fascism shared elements with all other ideologies, it
is easier to understand the multiple origins of fascism. Political religions theory rightly
encourages socialists to reflect critically upon potential dangers in their beliefs. Nobody
is exempt from this obligation.
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Page 18 of 22

BURLEIGH, M., Earthly Powers: The Conflict between Religion and Politics from the
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Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Notes:
(1) B. Mussolini, ‘The Doctrine of Fascism’, in M. Oakeshott, The Social and Political
Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), 164–
79.
(2) K. Passmore, ‘The Essence of Fascism’, Erwägen Wissen Ethik, 15 (2004), 403–5.
(3) E. Gentile, ‘The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections

on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism’, Totalitarian Movements and
Political Religions, 1 (2000), 18–55; idem, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy,
trans. K. Botsford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
(4) C. J. Friedrich and Z. Brezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1956).
(5) Like Weberian ideal types, they are supposedly merely descriptive categories because
they are related to long-term historical processes.
Page 19 of 22

(6) E. Gentile, ‘The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism’,

Modernism-Modernity, 1 (1994), 55–87.
(7) Gentile, ‘The Sacralisation of Politics’; idem, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist
Italy, 1–18. idem, ‘Fascism as a Political Religion’, Journal of Contemporary History, 25
(1990), 229–51.
(8) M. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004); M. Burleigh, ‘National Socialism as a Political
Religion’, Journal of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 1 (2000), 1–26.
(9) N. Gregor, ‘Nazism: A Political Religion?’, in idem, Nazism, War, and Genocide (Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 2005), 1–21.
(10) K. Passmore, ‘The Gendered Genealogy of Political Religions Theory’, Gender and
History, 20/3 (2008), 648–68.
(11) R. Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London: Pimlico, 1996), 3–16; H. Lehmann, ‘The
Germansasa Chosen People: Old Testament Themes in German Nationalism’, German
Studies Review, 14 (1991), 261–73; R. Nye, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Eugenics Empire:
Recent Perspectives on the Impact of Biomedical hought in Modern Society’, Historical
Journal, 36 (1993), 687–700.
(12) R. S. Wistrich, ‘Was Nietzsche a Fascist Thinker?’, Partisan Review, 68 (2001), 201–
17.
(13) W. L. Adamson, ‘Modernism and Fascism: The Politics of Culture in Italy, 1903–1922’,
American Historical Review, 95 (1990), 372.
(14) R. Nye, ‘Two Paths to a Psychology of Social Action: Gustave Le Bon and Georges
Sorel’, Journal of Modern History, 45 (1973), 411–38.
(15) J. Herf, ‘The Engineer as Ideologue: Reactionary Modernists in Weimar and Nazi
Germany’, Journal of Contemporary History, 19 (1984), 631–48.
(16) R. Nye, The Anti-Democratic Sources of Elite Theory: Pareto, Mosca, Michels
(London: Sage, 1977).
(17) Adamson, ‘Modernism and Fascism’, 370.
(18) R. Weikart, ‘The Origins of Social Darwinism in Germany’, Journal of the History of
Ideas, 54 (1993), 469–88.
(19) R. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 75–7; D. Pick, Faces of Degeneration. A
European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
(20) Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy.
Page 20 of 22

(21) Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, 7–13; Lehmann, ‘The Germans
as a Chosen People’; Pick, Faces of Degeneration.
(22) A. De Grand, The Italian Nationalist Association and the Rise of Fascism in Italy
(Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1978); R. Drake, ‘The Theory and Practice
of Italian Nationalism, 1900–1906’, Journal of Modern History, 53 (1981), 213–41.
(23) M. Brearley, ‘Hitler and Wagner: The Leader, the Master and the Jews’, Patterns of
Prejudice, 22 (1988), 3–22.
(24) Ibid.
(25) R. Wagner, What Is German? (Bayreuth: Bayreuther Blätter, 1878; written 1865).
(26) C. Forth, ‘Nietzsche, Decadence and Regeneration in France’, Journal of the History
of Ideas, 54 (1993), 99.
(27) M. Woodroffe, ‘Racial Theories of History and Politics: The Example of Houston
Stewart Chamberlain’, in P. Kennedy and A. Nicholls (eds), Nationalist and Racialist
Movements in Britain and Germany before 1914 (London: Macmillan, 1981), 1–22.
(28) F. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic
Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961); V. Viaene, ‘Paul
De Lagarde: A Nineteenth-Century “Radical” Conservative-and Precursor of National
Socialism?’, European History Quarterly, 26 (1996), 527–57.
(29) P. C. Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition: The Blanquistes in French
Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981).
(30) E. Gentile, ‘The Struggle for Modernity: Echoes of the Dreyfus Affair in Italian
Political History’, Journal of Contemporary History, 33 (1998), 497–511.
(31) D. D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1979).
(32) R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 56–99.
(33) Nye, The Anti-Democratic Sources of Elite Theory, 14–20.
(34) G. Le Bon, ‘Philosophie et religion’, L'Opinion, 11 April 1908, 23 May 1908; B.

Marpeau, Gustave Le Bon: parcours d'un intellectuel, 1841–1931 (Paris: CNRS, 2000).
(35) Weikart, ‘The Origins of Social Darwinism in Germany’, 483.
(36) H. Class, ‘If I Were Kaiser’ (1912).
(37) J. C. Filloux, ‘Démocratie et société socialiste chez Durkheim’, Revue européenne des
sciences sociales, 25 (1971), 29–48.
Page 21 of 22

(38) Nye, The Anti-Democratic Sources of Elite Theory, 36.
(39) Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 1–17.
Kevin Passmore
Kevin Passmore is Reader in History at Cardiff University. He is the author of

Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2006), and ‘The Gendered Genealogy of
Political Religions Theory’, Gender and History (2008). He is at present completing
The Right in the French Third Republic, for Oxford University Press.
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The Ideological Origins of Fascism before 1914

Oxford Handbooks Online

Abstract and Keywords

Benito Mussolini saw fascism as a novel phenomenon, constructed from existing

MUSSOLINI rightly saw fascism as a novel phenomenon, constructed from existing

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

I. Fascism as a ‘Political Religion’

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Fascism is not easily summed up in simple dichotomies such as ‘tradition/modernity’,

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I shall approach the question of origins by examining some of the ideological

II. Reasonand Unreason

Notwithstanding, Herder's thought prefigured Romanticism and thus linked with an

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

‘Cantsayanywhere’. In a prize-winning essay, the German Wilhelm Schallmeyer (1857–

(p. 21) III. Nationalism

There was always an exclusionary potential in democratic nationalism. It derived first

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

In Germany, right-wing nationalism developed earlier, as liberals bowed to the genius of

Wagner's son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain also influenced Hitler. Chamberlain's

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

ideal, through participation in the national community and emulation of an aristocracy of

IV. The Socialist Origins Of Fascism

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

Some socialists were disenchanted by the cautious practice of organized Marxism.

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

seen as representing the response of liberal-conservatives to the advent of democracy.

In Germany, too, liberalism contained anti-democratic tendencies. Liberals at first

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

(p. 29) VI. Conclusion

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

GENTILE, E., ‘The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections

——The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. K. Botsford (Cambridge, MA:

GRIFFIN, R., The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991).

KERSHAW, I., Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris (London: W. W. Norton, 1999).

PICK, D., Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918 (Cambridge:

(3) E. Gentile, ‘The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections

(4) C. J. Friedrich and Z. Brezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge:

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

(6) E. Gentile, ‘The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism’,

(17) Adamson, ‘Modernism and Fascism’, 370.

(20) Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy.

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

(32) R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 56–99.

(33) Nye, The Anti-Democratic Sources of Elite Theory, 14–20.

(34) G. Le Bon, ‘Philosophie et religion’, L'Opinion, 11 April 1908, 23 May 1908; B.

(35) Weikart, ‘The Origins of Social Darwinism in Germany’, 483.

(36) H. Class, ‘If I Were Kaiser’ (1912).

Subscriber: University of Groningen; date: 05 June 2018

(38) Nye, The Anti-Democratic Sources of Elite Theory, 36.