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AfterthoughtsMARTIN BLINKHORN

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508 TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENTS AND POLITICAL RELIGIONS

In his own introductory article, Professor Griffin twice refers to myscholarly credentials for this task. Perhaps, therefore, I ought to beginwith some kind of response. I am, he states,

a professional historian who has written extensively on aspects of generic fascism and expressed considerable scepticism about thevalue of protracted navel searching over its definition a histo-rian of inter-war European fascism not known for being particu-larly enamoured of taxonomic soul-searching. 1

If this is indeed how colleagues see me, then so be it: I have prob-ably asked for it. Certainly I have expressed some impatience withwhat I once called the grail quest for a generally acceptable definitionof generic fascism, and scepticism regarding the claimed newconsensus of scholarly knights-errant who, presumably, believe theyhave found it. 2

Even so, I should be sad to be categorised, or worse stilldismissed, as a mere grumpy empiricist. Ever since sitting rapt inGeorge Mosses lectures at Stanford in 196364, and during thesame year exploring the rich and varied menu of the French right

with that wisest and most humane of French historians, Gordon Wright, I have reflected upon the nature of fascism, the position of fascism within the wider European Right, and the relationship of right-wing authoritarianism and totalitarianism. My early researchcareer involved dissecting the subtle and shifting internal relation-ships of the pre-civil war Spanish Right, 3 while I began universityteaching with attempts to interpret Friedrich and Brzezinski, 4 Arendt 5

and Nolte 6 for Lancaster undergraduates. Almost from the start,drawing particular inspiration from Stanley Paynes Falange 7 andEugen Webers Varieties of Fascism ,8 I accepted that inter-war Euro-pean fascism and National Socialism stood apart from other strandsof the extreme right by aiming to be, in their way, truly revolution-ary. As far as it goes that remains my view, and to that extent, atleast, Roger Griffin might be justified in seeking to enrol me as oneof the oldest of his new consensuals. Nevertheless from an almostequally early point I also became, as I also remain, convinced thatdefining and depicting fascism in primarily ideological, stylistic and

generally intentionalist terms distorts and however rigorouslydone actually over-simplifies what is actually a far more complex,and ultimately far more interesting and important, story. 9

D o w nl o ad edb y[F a cP si c ol o gi a/Bibli ot e c a] at02 :4007J ul y2012

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ROUTE MAPS AND LANDSCAPES 509

Only the most ungracious and indeed ungrateful student of fascismwould deny that many attempts at defining or ideal typing it, fromthe concise and suggestive (Griffin, Eatwell) to the steamrollinglydetailed (Linz, Payne, Gentile) are both intellectually stimulating andheuristically valuable. Even (perhaps especially) if we disagree some-where along the way, they prevent us from taking things for grantedand, as often as not, force us to wield for ourselves the scalpel of J.H.Hexters splitter and the glue of his lumper. 10 Nevertheless, whilethey may provide us with a variety of starting points from which, androutes by which, an understanding of fascism may be approached, theydo not, cannot and should not claim to, truly tell us what fascismwas. A route map, however accurate and detailed, is neither the desti-nation that lies at journeys end nor the living landscape in which itlies.

While I shall return to this theme later, it would be an unpardon-able abuse of my appointed role, and an insult to the seven authorswho have done the real work, were I to hijack this special issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions in order to do no morethan peddle my personal perspective on fascism. Fortunately, as I havejust implied, there is really no irreconcilability here. Turning on its

head the argument of the previous paragraph, while I may find it hardwholeheartedly to embrace definitions, conceptualisations and theo-ries I find prone to misleading reification and limiting in their abilityto help us approach historical reality, I nevertheless have no difficultyin recognising, applauding and exploiting their heuristic utility as faras it goes. It is simply a matter of realising their limitations and of acknowledging the importance of what lies beyond their scope.

What follows is therefore intended as a genuinely open-mindedconsideration of the cluster of analytical concepts which constitutesthe core of this thought-provoking collection that is, totalitarian-ism, political religion and, of course, fascism. (The centrality of fascism to the discussion enables me to evade consideration of anyclustering of totalitarianism and political religion with, for example,communism.) The three-part cluster before us is squarely and exten-sively explored, and the issues agenda well and truly set, in the collec-tions first two contributions the extremely helpful introduction byour editor, Roger Griffin, and the weighty, forcefully argued article by

Emilio Gentile. For Gentile, indeed, totalitarianism and political reli-gion, while by no means the exclusive theoretical templates withinwhich fascism can and should be studied, certainly do reflect what he


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sees as its salient characteristics. Moreover, Griffin now acceptsGentiles position on both totalitarianism and political religion, whilethe latters definition of totalitarianism duly incorporates a crucialelement (that of palingenesis) from Griffins definition of fascism.Between them, these two accomplished scholars thus give this specialissue a powerful opening impulse.

While not all of the other contributors seize their theoretical andconceptual opportunities quite as fully as Roger Griffin surelyintended, all have interesting and relevant things to say. My task isthus to review what has been undertaken, reflecting in particular onthe value that the concepts under exploration may possess for histori-ans of fascism, whether generic, comparative or in its specific forms.

After some thought, I decided to do this in the manner of a scholarlyconclusion: that is, with relatively little in the way of additional mate-rial and restricting myself to the necessary minimum of referencing.

Where in practice I have deviated slightly from this plan, it has beenwhere, occasionally, I have felt able to offer something from my posi-tion as a historian of Iberia. For that, at least, I hope I may be forgiven.My modus operandi will be to examine the three concepts in turn, withfascism coming last.

Totalitarianism: From Structure to Intention

As several of the contributors to this special issue have noted, theconcept of totalitarianism has made a significant comeback in recentyears, having been rescued from the scrap heap of theory on whichit was dumped during the 1960s. The first scholarly vogue for total-itarianism peaked during the 1950s. If most profoundly andeloquently articulated by Hannah Arendt, 11 its most exemplary andinfluential formulation was probably in Totalitarian Dictatorship and

Autocracy , the principal work of the political scientists CarlFriedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski. 12 The books main focus though as Roger Griffin reminds us this was actually less exclusivethan its reputation has sometimes suggested was on politicalregimes of allegedly totalitarian character: dead fascist/nationalsocialist ones (especially the Third Reich) and still very much livecommunist ones. In a Cold War climate, the clear message was that

the structural/functional characteristics of totalitarian regimes madethem far more alike than their official ideologies might havesuggested; indeed, these ideologies were understood primarily as


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devices in the retaining and wielding of power, rather than as mean-ingful in themselves. Above all, what brought all totalitarian regimestogether was their suppression of the liberal freedoms supposedlyexemplified by the wartime (anti-fascist) Western Allies and thepost-war (anti-communist) Western alliance. The structural andindeed experiential spectrum which Friedrich and Brzezinski offeredtheir readers thus showed totalitarianism in all its alleged forms atone end and liberal democracy at the other.

The solidity and utility of what is now regarded as traditionaltotalitarianism theory were undermined by a confluence of scholarlyand geopolitical developments from the early 1960s onward. Theseincluded the explosion of empirical research into the history of Nazism, Italian Fascism and the whole European inter-war right; thereceding of the Second World War and the onset of (temporary)dtente ; and (sometimes forgotten) the collapse of right-wing author-itarian regimes in the southern Europe of the mid-1970s. For what,looking back now, was a relatively brief period, communism appearedin the West to be simultaneously less threatening than it had earlierdone and far more enduring than dictatorships of the right, whetherof the totalitarian or merely the authoritarian variety.

The onset of the Second Cold War in the 1980s, followed by theimplosion and collapse of the Soviet and East European communistregimes and by the fleeting supposed end of history, gave rise to ascholarly rehabilitation of the concept of totalitarianism. This timearound, however, it is probably fair to say that it held as much attrac-tion for some kinds of historian as for political scientists. During thelast quarter of the twentieth century, fascism, both in its innumerablespecific manifestations and as a generic phenomenon, had become athriving field of academic study: a development that had not evenbegun when totalitarianism theory was first fashionable. And from1989 onwards, the Soviet and East European communist regimesquickly became historical phenomena themselves, exposed to empiri-cal research and susceptible to renewed, but now historicallyinformed, comparison with those of Fascism, Nazism and (not least insome East European cases) Francoism. The angle of vision employedby historians even those well versed in and influenced by social andpolitical science theory was and is very different from that of the

political scientists of the 1950s. In Italy and in relation to ItalianFascism it is our colleague in this special issue, Emilio Gentile, who,building on the work of his mentor Renzo De Felice, best represents


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the new outlook. For Gentile, totalitarianism, especially in the Italiancontext, is to be seen not simply, or even chiefly, as characterising atype of regime, but rather as a dynamic and determining feature of Fascism in all its stages: from its ideological origins, through its move-ment phase, to and through its life as a political regime. Totalitarian-ism not merely describes the kind of regime Italian Fascism erected,but was also inseparable from the revolution political, social, culturaland anthropological that Gentile argues was Fascisms verypurpose. Let us remind ourselves of how Gentile represents totalitari-anism earlier in this issue. It is, he suggests on pages 327328,

an experiment in political domination undertaken by a revolu-

tionary movement, with an integralist conception of politics, thataspires toward a monopoly of power and that, after havingsecured power, whether by legal or illegal means, destroys ortransforms the previous regime and constructs a new state basedon a single-party regime, with the chief objective of conqueringsociety; that is, it seeks the subordination, integration andhomogenisation of the governed on the basis of the integralpoliticisation of existence, whether collective or individual,interpreted according to the categories, the myths and the valuesof a palingenetic ideology, institutionalised in the form of a polit-ical religion, that aims to shape the individual and the massesthrough an anthropological revolution in order to regenerate thehuman being and create the new man, who is dedicated in bodyand soul to the realisation of the revolutionary and imperialisticpolicies of the totalitarian party, whose ultimate goal is to createa new civilisation beyond the Nation-State.

Note the salience here of experimenting, aiming and seeking;Gentile is describing a kind of movement and a kind of regime which

aim to achieve wildly ambitious (total) ends by totalitarian means means, however, that may prove difficult to mobilise. At a very basiclevel, it might be suggested that the opportunity to develop this essen-tially historical approach to totalitarianism had offered itself whenever(which was often) earlier scholars acknowledged that supposedlytotalitarian regimes fell short of achieving actual systemic totality.Paradoxically, perhaps the greatest (though not necessarily intended)

strength of the recent reconfiguring of totalitarianism theory isprecisely that by viewing totalitarianism not in structural but indynamic terms, as a process rather than as a system , it allows for the


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existence of such limitations. It also, however, requires us to reflectupon their meaning.

The structuralist emphasis of Friedrich and Brzezinski was fatallyundermined (especially in the case of Italy) by the empirical uncover-ing of weaknesses within the outwardly hard and glittering edificesthey seemed to be describing. However once totalitarianism wasreconceived as an idea, a driving force, a goal, even a myth, rather thanas a structural, lived reality explicable in terms of power as an end initself, the incompleteness of its accomplishment could be considered,if not as irrelevant, then at least as contingent and perhaps thereforetemporary. If, for example, the Italian Fascist regime was totalitarianin the sense understood by Gentile, this was and always remained anintention , an aim, the realisation of which, for Gentile, was seriouslypursued and substantially achieved; while by 1940 totalitarianism stillmay not have become a perfected, structural reality, this does notmean that it could never have happened.

There is clearly an important tension here. Where Gentile, like DeFelice, might find himself at odds with some other scholars is withregard to the sheer deliberateness of the totalitarian drive within Ital-ian Fascism, the coherence and unanimity within the Fascist lite for

its pursuit, the degree to which a totalitarian structure may be said tohave been accomplished by the time Italy entered the Second World War, and the unfulfilled potential for further progress in the totalis-ing process. For many scholars (like myself) who find Gentiles stresson the salience of the totalitarian dynamic within Fascism thought-provoking and at least partly persuasive, it is the last two points thatcontinue to nag. They do so not only because we continue to be struckmore by the limits of Mussolinis power than by its extent, but alsobecause there has to be a suspicion (to put it mildly) that the limitswere due more to factors intrinsic to, if not indeed representative of,Fascism than to extraneous ones which, given time, Fascism might yethave overcome. Rather than the De Felicean clinging to a supposedlyoptional and unnecessary war as an explanation for Fascisms ultimatefailure, many would see entry into war and the problems then revealedas embodying proof of chronic and intrinsic weaknesses.

As long as we can accept totalitarianism as an idea, and a goal thatwere in every sense essential to Fascism as the latter is understood by

those within the new consensus and, indeed, as one of the featuresthat arguably set it apart from other strands of the anti-liberal right we can certainly accept and exploit its restoration, in a very much


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revised form, to analytical and heuristic respectability. Following thestrong case made by Griffin and Gentile, the other articles in thiscollection, explicitly or implicitly, accommodate the fascism-totalitar-ianism link without apparent difficulty and in ways that demonstrateits value.

This should not surprise us, since (setting aside for a moment Steig-mann-Gall) to a greater or lesser extent the other examples before us the BUF, the Romanian Legion, and of course the two present-day

American organisations were formed or (in the Romanian case)matured with the Italian and German exemplars, and their self-conscious flaunting of totalitarianism, very much in mind. Thus theBUF, inspired first by the self-regardingly totalitarian Italian Fascistregime and, later, the Third Reich, devised a more explicitly detailed,and even in its way coherent, transformative programme than eitherof those regimes ever possessed. It was, as Thomas Linehan shows us,an amalgam of the rational-scientific and the mythic-vitalistic which,it would be hard to deny, could only be pursued and realised via total-itarian means. Radu Ioanid indicates that, mutatis mutandis , much thesame was true of the Legionary movement in Romania. Both of thesemovements did at least operate within something resembling the real

world, unlike the different manifestations of the present-day Americanfar right examined by Martin Durham and Chip Berlet. It is evidentthroughout that the visions of the future nursed by the National Alli-ance and the Aryan Nations require a totalising acceptance on thepart of their adepts, and would involve one or other form of totalitar-ian regime to realise and sustain them. The totalitarian character of their visions and internal cultures also serves to differentiate bothorganisations (it is hard to regard them as movements) from other,less extreme segments of the American right.

With regard to these examples of what can loosely be termedneo-fascism or neo-Nazism, it is vital to recognise that embracingsuch visions in a post-1945, post-Holocaust age demands a verydifferent kind of commitment (or perhaps pathology) from what-ever was demanded in becoming a fascist, or even a Nazi, in the1920s or 1930s. In acknowledging the value of applying the revisednotion of totalitarianism to all of these movements, and in express-ing our gratitude to Emilio Gentile for his part in executing that

revision, we also have to recognise that once we accept the revolu-tionary nature of fascist (and Fascist) intent, the role of totalitarian-ism, as both means and end, becomes inseparably bound up with it.


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This is, of course, what conceptual clustering is all about. If,however, we were to decide that the study of fascism requires morethan this, then the role of totalitarianism within our analysis wouldneed to change accordingly.

Political Religion and Religious Politics

Of the three concepts that make up the triform cluster under exami-nation in this special issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political

Religions, it is political religion that emerges as perhaps the mostawkward, at least if we are hoping to employ it with rigour and, espe-cially, consistency. As Roger Griffin reminds us in his illuminatingexploration of this and related concepts, ideas linking the religiousand the political, and more particularly injecting the former into thelatter, are nothing new. Neither, as he also shows us, is the absence of agreement as to how possible linkages should be applied. Here againwe find ourselves indebted to Emilio Gentile, who, building uponearlier work on the sacralisation of politics, 13 bravely offers us a defi-nition designed to invite that consistency. Political religion, Gentiledeclares in his contribution to this collection (p. 328), is

a type of religion which sacralises an ideology, a movement or apolitical regime through the deification of a secular entity trans-figured into myth, considering it the primary and indisputablesource of the meaning and the ultimate aim of human existenceon earth.

Any student of fascism, and in particular of Fascist Italy and/or theThird Reich, will recognise in this definition important, and perhapsfor some even defining, attributes of those regimes. Some, as I do, willperhaps feel that the opening and crucial phrase a form of religiontakes more for granted about the nature of religion than they cancomfortably swallow, but none can deny that in terms of (to borrowRoger Griffins phraseology) metaphorical power and heuristicvalue it demands to be taken seriously.

Unfortunately for our project, however, Gentiles offer has beenleft somewhat dangling in mid-air. As Roger Griffin (with a franknessunusual in the editor of a collective enterprise) openly laments, not all

of his contributors have followed the proffered brief of relating theirown ideas about political religion to Gentiles definition and hisnotion of sacralisation. Steigmann-Gall and Radu Ioanid, with little


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or no attempt to connect with Gentile, do nevertheless explore differ-ent avenues of association between the political and the religious, eachof them mind-opening in its way. In their discussions, Durham andBerlet on the contemporary American far right and Linehan on theBUF do make every effort to apply Gentiles ideas on the sacralisationof politics and political religion, while doing so in very different waysand with little consistency of outcome. As for Steigmann-Gall, whilehe disappointingly makes no attempt to analyse Nazisms claims to bea political religion as Gentile defines it, he actually does something noless interesting. By playing down Nazi paganisation (not reallycentral to Gentiles conception of political religion) and arguinginstead for a hitherto little acknowledged link between Nazism andelements within existing German Protestantism, he effectively chal-lenges the secularisation and psychological void clichs on whichideas of political religion at least partly hang. I shall return to this ques-tion shortly.

The overall picture which lies before us is thus a fascinating but notaltogether tidy one, with which it is unlikely that Emilio Gentile willfeel entirely satisfied. It demonstrates convincingly enough the valueof exploring (i) the attempts of Italian Fascists and Nazis to erect and

impose a wholly new ethical system embodying many of (thoughcertainly never all) the attributes of a religion, and (ii) the presence of similar strands in many other, happily less successful, far-rightprogrammes and organisations. Whilst in all this Gentiles definitionprovides a useful analytical starting point, the signs are present that asa more widely encompassing definition it tends to fray at the edges. Itis not the heuristic utility of Gentiles conception of political religionthat is in question, so much as its wider applicability and therefore itsconsensual potential.

That there existed within Italian Fascism, Nazism and such imita-tive movements as the BUF a desire to instil in their respective nationalcommunities a new value system of quasi-religious type, sustained byrituals, symbols and liturgies of pseudo-religious style, is in itself a lessthan mind-blowingly original observation, the importance of whichdepends largely upon the use we make of it. To classify this as a reli-gion, even of political type, is a different matter especially bearingin mind the continued vigour of so-called traditional religion in many

of the countries concerned. While Gentile insists that for him politicalreligion is more than a metaphor, he also denies that by religion hereally means the same thing as is meant by those who associate the


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word with notions of divinity, creation and the afterlife. It is difficultto see how this non-meeting of minds can be resolved.

As was hinted above, a theme that emerges powerfully in manydiscussions of political religion, not least in Griffins and Gentiles arti-cles, is that of an alleged atavistic or archetypal human need for a senseof the sacred. In an era of secularisation, it is suggested, with the weak-ening of established religion, this need has become associated with thesacralisation of non-divine entities (for example the nation, the state,the race) and the emergence of the kind of political religion underdiscussion here. Especially in conditions of stress, we are told, popu-lations severed from the sacred by declining churches and widercultural secularisation are susceptible to the appeal of political reli-gions, that is, new and all-embracing ethical systems, devised by simi-larly (but more consciously) deracinated intellectuals and purveyed viarituals, symbols and liturgies of a clearly religious kind.

It is beyond question that many early twentieth-century intellectu-als subscribed to such a conviction, and that as Gentile and otherssuggest it played an important part in shaping fascist ideas and culturalpolitics. Whether or not the supposition was soundly based, or at anyrate valid very far beyond the ranks of the intelligentsia itself, is

another matter entirely. The fact that between the world wars it wasembraced, as Roger Griffin tells us, by a wrongheaded and gullibleobserver of Italian Fascism such as Schneider and a patronising aristo-cratic atheist like Russell does little to sustain the notion of humanitysinnate religious needs and the therefore religious character of popu-lar adherence to fascism, bolshevism or any other sacralised entity.The joined-up history of fascism 14 confirms up to a point the heuristicvalue of treating some form of political religion as a common ingre-dient of individual fascisms; it confirms that some fascist activistsbelieved in the existence of a religious vacuum and that their causecould refill it. On the other hand it provides little to convince us thata secularisation-induced psychological need has much to do with theactual level of popular support achieved by individual fascist move-ments. Even in the two successful cases, Italian Fascism and GermanNational Socialism, hard evidence of the kind historians ought torespect is more difficult to come by than superficial impression andlazy assertion. Whatever some of the Nazi lite may have been seeking,

Steigmann-Gall is surely correct to insist that Nazisms wider appealrelied on its use of the familiar rather than the innovative, not least inthe religious sphere. What Steigmann-Gall does not do, admittedly, is


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explore as Michael Burleigh has done the case for viewing theestablished Nazi regime in political religion terms, or the part thatthis may have played in cementing loyalty once that regime existed.

On this last point but in the Italian case, while Gentiles work hasconvincingly indicated the seriousness of (some) Fascists in attemptingto institutionalise the new religion hailed by an earlier Gentile, he hasyet to demonstrate conclusively that its popular acceptance and massinternalisation went anything like as far as Fascist visionaries wished itto do, or therefore were truly central to the popular experience of Fascism. Nor has anyone demonstrated that many of those whoflocked to Fascism before 1922 did so for reasons of a para-religiouskind. For hard evidence either way, a return to some serious socialhistory research is needed.

Elsewhere in Europe the main effect of employing the notion of political religion is to affirm its marginality. In Iberia, where it wouldbe difficult to argue that secularisation was a major influence on theevolution of the early twentieth-century political Right, SpanishFalangism and Portuguese National-Syndicalism merely flirted withwhat might have been an ideological challenge to Catholicism, andwould have been unlikely to register greater success had they taken it

more seriously.15

More generally, in that study of bathetic failure whichis (or at least should be) so central to that of fascism, a similar conclu-sion presents itself: that while most of what, certainly, the new consen-sus would identify as fascist organisations postulated some form of new religion, in few instances did this strike a significant chord withsupposedly craving populations. Right-wing movements (whether ornot we consider them fascist) which exploited traditional religioussentiment and loyalties for example, the Spanish and Polish CatholicRight, Lapua in Finland, and the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia weregenerally more successful. As a component of Europe-wide fascism,therefore, the ingredient of political religion may have been as impor-tant in contributing to, or at any rate not preventing, failure as in assist-ing success. If what interest us most in fascism are the convictions of the convinced and the policies of two admittedly important regimes,then seeing fascism as a political religion may have much value. If,however, we believe there is far more to the history of fascism than this,some major questions open up. Foremost among them is the question

of why, in the context of fascisms relationship with political religion,Italy and Germany should have been so exceptional. Further aspectsof this question will be explored in the section that follows.


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Fascism and How to Study It

In this special issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religionswe are exploring a cluster of three concepts: totalitarianism, politicalreligion and fascism. Inevitably, the one I have chosen to confront last,fascism, has already been much discussed alongside the other two. Yetalthough a different order of play would have been perfectly possibleand intellectually valid, it makes particular sense to climax withfascism. Apart from anything else (not least my own credentials), muchof the context for this collection is formed by what has emerged overthe past decade as the dominant trend within fascist studies: anunfortunately ambiguous label for the academic study of generic andcomparative fascism. This trend owes more to Roger Griffin than toany one other scholar, and hinges upon his definition of fascism as:

a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its variouspermutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-national-ism.16

While this now highly influential definition (one of the strengths of which is its succinctness) may not explicitly mention either totalitari-

anism or political religion, it is clear from Griffins introductory articlethat he sees them as important ingredients in fascism as he understandsit, and likewise sees fascism (however understood) as providing ananalytical testing ground for them.

From the perspective of this special issue, Griffins identificationof fascism as a revolutionary, populist form of ultra-nationalismconstructed around a palingenetic myth thus clusters neatly withGentiles redefinition of totalitarianism and political religion. Theresult is undeniably a cohesive, mutually supportive analytical pack-age that everyone interested in comparative fascism and the compara-tive study of the wider far right should find helpful. All thecontributions in this collection accept and/or are consistent withGriffins definition. All, moreover, vividly illustrate how totalitarian-ism, as reformulated by Gentile, can be regarded not merely as inte-gral to fascism thus defined, but actually as an identifying characteristic that may be held to set fascism apart from other strandsof the (authoritarian) right. When considering the ideas embraced

and propagated by those fascists who concerned themselves withsuch things, and which drove at least some of those who enjoyed theopportunity to pursue their goals from positions of leadership or


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even power, the relevance and heuristic usefulness of totalitarianismto the study of fascism is thus clear.

As we have seen, however, political religion has emerged in thiscollection as a more problematical concept, common acceptance andconsistent application of which continue to elude us. Indeed, there isevidence here to suggest that for a combination of theoretical andterminological reasons it may, like palingenesis for fascist idealists, liebeyond our collective grasp. Even so, it can scarcely be denied thatreligion provides us with vivid and valuable metaphors when weattempt to understand fascist myth-making, zealotry, bigotry,violence, iconography and liturgy. If we are prepared to be flexible,then Gentiles notion of political religion, together with its differ-ently named competitors, offer heuristic opportunities even if, as indi-vidual scholars, we hesitate wholeheartedly to adopt any one of them.Indeed, it may even be that here, as so often, civilised openness to adiversity of theoretical approaches will prove the best route to height-ened understanding. Perhaps what is therefore most needed is worktowards developing a typology of political religion/religious politics(and so on) in order to make this process more systematic.

So far, with some qualifications, so good. But however well

elements within an analytical cluster may support and illuminate eachother, historians of fascism still need to consider how all this affectstheir wider understanding of the phenomenon. We should note, forexample, without simply dismissing as somehow eccentric and evenreprehensible, the unwillingness of distinguished scholars of Nazismsuch as Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans to be more welcomingtowards the idea of political religion. Rather than implying that some-thing is lacking in them , we should perhaps be asking ourselves whatis lacking in a concept they feel they can do without, and whether theiroutstanding contributions to the history of Nazism and the ThirdReich could conceivably stand out even further had they chosen toapply it. The work of Kershaw and Evans, like that of RichardBosworth and others on Fascist Italy, reminds us that there is a lotmore to the study of fascism than fascist studies can currently claimto be offering us.

* * *

While not all toilers in the fascist studies vineyard necessarily goall the way with Roger Griffin, enough nowadays do and enough


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certainly share his view of fascism as in origin a revolutionary phenom-enon with a clearly discernible ideology to lend plausibility to hisclaims regarding the recent emergence and current prevalence of a newconsensus on fascisms nature and distinguishing features. Since thepublication in 2000 of my Fascism and the Right in Europe , the amicablescholarly jousts that Roger Griffin and I had been (literally) enjoyingfor around a decade have gained added spice from his attempts torecruit me to the new consensus and my insistence on keeping at leastone foot outside it. 17 Mutual respect, both intellectual and personal, hassurvived triumphantly between (if I may risk saying so) two scholarswho are convinced they have something to say while believing thathistorical truth is something to be eternally pursued, and never, in atotalitarian spirit, claimed as final and unchallengeable. I now propose,therefore, to explore some of the ways in which this special issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions relates to the allegednew consensus, touching in the process upon why I continue to resistthe temptation to place both feet inside its enchanted circle.

In the first place, it is clear that Gentiles highly suggestive revi-sion of the concept of totalitarianism strongly supports a conceptionof fascism, which, if far more than simply ideological, remains

primarily intentionalist. While the degree to which Fascist Italyattained a totalitarian reality remains much debated, for Gentile theindividual and collective internalisation and the organised pursuit of totalitarianism constituted a perhaps the central goal of Fascistideology and politics. To shift the emphasis only slightly, for thosefascists (and no one can deny that they existed) who, in Italy or else-where, embraced one or other permutation of Griffins ideologicalpackage, totalitarianism represented (as for the American far right itstill represents, according to Durham and Berlet) the only means bywhich it could (can) be realised. A similarly intentionalist emphasischaracterises explorations of Fascism/fascism as political religion,whether understood in the almost but not quite literal senseconveyed by Gentile, as a metaphor, or as something rather differentthat might (as suggested by Steigmann-Gall) better be termed reli-gious politics. Viewed this way, fascism thus was what committedfascists said it was, and/or what they wanted it to be, and other defi-nitions or descriptions, notably those emanating from the left,

become unacceptable. Of course, intention(alism) can also become atleast partial reality. For Gentile, Fascism in Italy was a serious andsustained attempt to turn transformative ideas into reality: a regime


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within which a conscious, convinced and committed Fascist litedeterminedly pursued totalitarian and palingenetic goals. In De Feli-cean terms, Fascism was the movement, which remained alive andkicking within a not always quite so fascist regime. In the ThirdReich, most would agree, any discrepancy between movement andregime was, if still not entirely absent, decidedly narrower. In theearly years of Francos Spain, if I may be allowed to suggest at leastthe value of considering this a fascist phase, it was always wider,though perhaps not as wide as some would suppose. 18 But in the fargreater number of less successful or totally unsuccessful examples of fascism, a largely ideological definition is more or less all we need.

Implicit in the previous paragraph are two major issues raised bythe study of fascism, but which fascist studies all too rarely seems toconfront or at any rate to treat as equal in importance with ideolog-ical and theoretical cheese-paring. The first, which has been at leastimplicit in much of this discussion, is that while attempts at definitionor ideal typing based on fascist ideas and ideology may offer us astarting point or even a route map of the kind referred to much earlier,they are not or should not be our destination. They must not be theend in themselves that they are sometimes in danger of becoming, and

they do not necessarily lead us in the right direction. In particular, theydo little to help us cope effectively with the sheer diversity of fascistexperience: that is, with (i) the gulf between fascist cells in (say)Bulgaria and the historical immensity of the Third Reich; and espe-cially with (ii) the complex and shifting processes which occur whenideas inspire organisation, when (more rarely) organisations becomemovements, when (far more rarely) movements become regimes, andfinally when regimes either implode (Italy), are destroyed (Germany)or evolve (Spain). It was to try to deal with this problem that in

Fascism and the Right in Europe I eschewed definition in favour of atemplate designed to allow for these shifting processes.

The tendency within the new consensus is generally to continueto recognise as fascist those elements within expanding movementsand developing regimes which conform to the original definition, eventhough both the demands of achieving power and the realities of keep-ing it may actually give rise to rather different phenomena which stillhave every reason to be regarded as fascist. An important indeed a

defining feature of all early fascist movements is their inability to winpower other than by being flexible and reaching accommodations withusually conservative non-fascists. For some inter-war fascists, this was


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genuinely viewed as a temporary expedient; others were prepared tointernalise compromise and see their cause change character; and letus be honest others simply did not much care. In the process of compromise, yet others became fascists whose conception of Fascism/Nazism/Falangism was anything but Griffinesque. While, in relation toItaly, Gentile would passionately argue that Fascist intentionalism notonly dominated Fascist Italy but also, given time, might have taken theFascist revolution further, I remain on balance persuaded:

(i) that structural features arising out of unavoidable compromises always (behind the admittedly impressive faade constructed bythe PNF) inhibited Fascist maximalism; and

(ii) that because such compromises were unavoidable for a far fromirresistible revolutionary movement, these, the kind of regimethey helped create, and the socio-economic realities that contin-ued to support it, were part and parcel of what Fascism truly was.

It is all very well to suggest that, had it not unnecessarily been drawninto Hitlers war, Fascist Italy might have become (even) more Fascist.Quite apart from the dubiousness of detaching Fascism from its belli-cose obsessions and decision-making processes, this counterfactual

excursion still depends on a German victory in Europe. Otherwise,given the tensions still present within the Italy of 1940, it is every bitas valid to counterfactualise that in an Ally-dominated post-warEurope, a still officially Fascist Italy might have gone into reverse,evolving along broadly Spanish lines.

My second issue has already been hinted at. Fascist studies suffersfrom a tendency to treat comparative fascism as though Italy andGermany were typical rather than exceptional, and accordingly, whenlooking at the rest of Europe, to treat with sometimes disproportion-ate respect the marginal, the mimetic and the downright insignificant.It is important to recognise and to do so explicitly that the studyof comparative or generic fascism is for the most part the study of fail-ure, and in the great majority of its appearances abject failure. Moreconcretely, we can say that it involves the study of innumerable unsuc-cessful individuals, cliques, clubs, societies and political groupuscules ;a much smaller but still significant number of larger but still unsuccess-ful parties and movements; a handful of cases in which such move-

ments grabbed a share of power that was either brief and self-defeating(Hungary, Romania) or compromised and largely illusory (Spain); andjust two, Italy and Germany of course, in which a self-proclaimed


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Fascist/National Socialist regime actually enjoyed a significant periodof power. Even here, since significant does not equal long, and sinceboth regimes perished in a war brought about through their activepursuit of ultra-nationalist, palingenetic, totalitarian goals, this too canbe considered a fascist failure: that is, it was, in even more ways thanjust suggested, a failure due at least in part to the intrinsic character and (to use an unfashionable but still meaningful phrase) internalcontradictions of Fascism and even National Socialism. In Italycertainly, and eventually in Germany too, politics (as fascists under-stood the term), political religion (as Gentile invites us to understandit), and the (rising) level of totalitarianism simply were not capable of delivering the economic and military goods that the lasting satisfactionof Fascist and Nazi intentions demanded. To some extent this alsoreflected the failures of the cultural and anthropological revolutionsso dear to Fascist and Nazi intellectuals and policy makers and socentral to present-day fascist studies.

I shall return briefly to the question of Germany in a moment, butfirst wish to stay with the theme of the failure of fascism. If fasciststudies is to avoid becoming stuck in the rut of over-heated introspec-tion towards which it seems to be careering, then this fundamental fact

needs always to be borne in mind. Only by understanding why fascism,however nasty it has always been and can still be at local level, has farmore often failed than succeeded in attracting popular support can webegin to understand why it succeeds when and where it does. This iswhy it is sad to see Roger Griffin so readily ditching the old-fashionednotion of national pathology. The terminology and connotationsmay no longer be acceptable, but questions as to why some countriesfell for and under fascism while the great majority saw through mere-tricious ideas and their unpleasant proponents still have to beanswered. Answers must come, moreover, from areas of social historywhich, vigorous up to a decade ago, have for the present been margin-alised by strands of cultural history that all too often depend upontheory and sheer assertion rather than hard-sought evidence.

Where, as in Italy and Germany and to a lesser degree in someother countries, fascist organisations sooner or later did attract widersupport, we need to consider what it was they then became: some-thing, inevitably, more complex, more subtle, perhaps more ambiva-

lent, than in their earlier stages. In particular, and especially in relationto this special issue, we need to look beyond ideological and culturalanalysis and comparison, to ask ourselves how the totalitarian aspect


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of fascist ideas and policy relates in practice to fascisms popularappeal, to the realities of power and political achievement once power,or a share of it, is won, and (again) to the reality of pursuing via thatmost regenerative of means, war, the regeneration for which fascistlites, at least, are supposed to yearn. And to some extent (and herethe dinosaur can be heard to roar) we need to employ socio-economicand, yes, structural analyses in order to work out what, in the joined-up understanding of fascism, was really going on.

Still there remains the question of Germany. For if, within thehistory of inter-war fascism, Italy and Germany were different fromeverywhere else, Germany also proved very different from Italy. Wereit not for the German case, it would be possible to dismiss, or at thevery least (with due respect to Gentile) be sceptical about, fascism as atruly revolutionary phenomenon, capable of translating the revolu-tionary ideas identified by Griffin and others into reality. For scepticalpost-post-structuralists such as myself, Germany offers a humblingreminder that fascist intentions, even if ultimately self-defeating, couldget very close to fulfilment.

And finally

It has been a privilege to undertake these afterthoughts and to haveread the seven contributions which have inspired them. My thanks areaccordingly due to the editors of Totalitarian Movements and Political

Religions; to (again) Roger Griffin for his invitation, his splendidintroduction to this collection, and his patience while I grappled withmy own task; to Emilio Gentile for years of making me reconsiderthings I had previously taken for granted; and to all the contributors

to this special issue. The many imperfections of this article are all myown.

NOTES

1. Here and elsewhere in these reflections, I shall refrain from otiose referencing to othercontributions within this issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions . It ismy assumption that anyone reading this contribution will by this time have read all theothers.

2. Martin Blinkhorn, Fascism and the Right in Europe 19191945 (London: Longman,

2000), pp.37. See also my reply to Tobias Abses review of this book, published inReviews in History, 24 September 2001.3. Martin Blinkhorn, Carlism and Crisis in Spain 19311939 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1975).


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4. See note 12.5. See note 11.6. Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Franaise, Italian Fascism, National Social-

ism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965; first published in Germany in 1963).7. Stanley G. Payne, Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism (London, Oxford and Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 1962).8. Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism (New York and London: Van Nostrand, 1964).9. This conviction inspired and underlies my edited collection, Fascists and Conservatives:

The Radical Right and the Establishment in Twentieth-Century Europe (London: UnwinHyman, 1990).

10. J.H. Hexter distinguished between lumpers and splitters in his essay, The HistoricalMethod of Christopher Hill, in On Historians: Reappraisals of Some of the Makers of

Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).11. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,

1951, 1958).12. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New

York: Praeger, 1956).13. For an introduction, see Emilio Gentile, The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Inter-pretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism,trans. Robert Mallett, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1/1 (2000),pp.1855.

14. See below.15. On the Spanish Right, see Payne, Falange (note 7); idem, Fascism in Spain (Madison,

WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000); Blinkhorn (note 3); and idem, Conservatism,traditionalism and fascism in Spain, 18981937, in Blinkhorn (note 9), pp.11837. OnPortugal, see especially A. Costa Pinto, The Blue Shirts : Portuguese Fascism in Interwar

Europe (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2000).16. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991) p. 26.17. See above, note 2. See also Roger Griffins feisty review of my Fascism and the Right in

Europe (entitled A sophisticated vulgarization), published in Patterns of Prejudice 37/2(June 2003), pp.21619.

18. The historiography of Spain in the 1940s is expanding rapidly, and mostly in a way thattends to confirm the fascism of the early Franco regime. Perhaps the best example isMichael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in FrancosSpain, 19361945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).


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