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109 of 115 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Whose Reich Is It Anyway?, May 1, 2004
The Marquis de Morés, returning to 1890s Paris after his cattle ranching venture in North Dakota failed, recruited a gang of men from the Parisian cattle yards as muscle for his "national socialism" project -- a term Paxton credits Morés' contemporary Maurice Barres, a French nationalist author, with coining. Morés' project was potent and prophetic: his national socialism was a mixture of anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism. He clothed his men in what must have been the first fascist uniform in Europe -- ten-gallon hats and cowboy garb, frontier clothes he'd taken a shine to in the American West. (Author Paxton suggests the first ever fascist get-up was the KKKs white sheet and pointy hat). Morés killed a French Jewish officer in a duel during the Dreyfus affair and later was killed in the Sahara by his guides during his quest to unite France to Islam to Spain. Morés had earlier proclaimed: "Life is valuable only through action. So much the worse if the action is mortal." Here assembled together are all of the elements of what Paxton would classify as first stage fascism: "the creation of a movement." Most fascist movements stall in this first stage he notes -- think, for instance, of the skinheads, the American Nazi Party and Posse Comitatus. Paxton's other stages are 2) the rooting of the movement in the political system; 3) the seizure of power; 4) the exercise of power; and 5) the duration of power, during which the regime chooses either radicalization or entropy. He notes that although each stage "is a prerequisite for the next, nothing requires a fascist movement to complete all of them, or even to move in only one direction. The five stages permit plausible comparison between movements and regimes at equivalent degrees of development. It helps us see that fascism, far from static, was a succession of processes and choices: seeking a following, forming alliances, bidding for power, then exercising it. That is why the conceptual tools that illuminate one stage may not necessarily work equally well for others." pg. 23. Paxton also tentatively offers a definition of fascism, but only after tracing the rise of various movements from their beginnings in the 19th century through the present day. Other historians and philosophers, he suggests, have written brilliantly on fascism, but have failed to recognize that their analyses apply to only one stage or another. He also notes that often definitions of fascism are based on fascist writings; he maintains that fascist writings while valuable were often written as justification for the seizure of power, or the attempted seizure, and that what fascists actually did and do is more critical to understanding these movements. Indeed, the language of fascism has changed little since the days of the Marquis De Mores. He hesitates in offering both his definition and his analytical stages, saying that he knows by doing so he risks falling into the nominalism of the "bestiary." He demonstrates that this is a common failing of definitions of fascism which are often incomplete or muddled as they typically describe only one or two typically late stages. Other historians, for instance, split fascism into Nazism or Italian fascism, avoiding the problem of understanding their common elements by concentrating on their differences, insisting that they are incommensurable. Finally in the last pages, Paxton offers up this fairly comprehensive and useful definition: "Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
Paxton is particularly strong in showing how the circumstances in post WWI Germany and Italy -- the demobilized mobs of young soldiers, sent to war by elites who had no conception of the destruction and suffering they had unleashed upon the younger generation -- were ripe for fascism's appeals. For many, liberalism, conservatism and socialism all seemed equally complicit in the crack-up of Europe in the Great War. Fascism, rising from the ashes, employed the socialistic tools of mass marches, the military techniques of terror learned in the war, and as they gained power, the new tools of mass communication and propaganda developed in the US during WWI. Fascists also reacted astutely to public discomfort toward the mass migrations from southern and eastern Europe coming in the wake of political and economic distress in those regions, using that fear to increase their power through scapegoating and its attendant rhetoric of purity. Fascism is both charged and blurry word these days, used by both the left and the right to assail their critics and enemies. The Nazi remains the evildoer par excellence in popular and political culture, invoked for a thrill of fear or the disciplinary scare or emotional incitement. In this masterful synthesis of writings in politics, history, philosophy and sociology, Paxton untangles the vast literature fascism has generated, establishes some essential ground rules for coming to grips with its many expressions, stages, and manifestations, and clears a space for further, better focused research. Although academic in its orientation, it is well and clearly written. Finally, for the reader who is not familiar with modern European history, it is a very useful and informative text as it takes into its scope by necessity much of European and American history over the past one hundred years. Absolutely required reading.
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38 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Thoughtful and Thorough Analysis, June 13, 2004
This very thoughtful book is aimed at understanding the basic features of fascism. Paxton is very concerned with rescuing the term from its present status as a convenient insult. As Paxton points out, though not until relatively late in the book, all modern democracies contain nascent fascist elements. Given the incredibly destructive consequences of successful or even partially successful fascist movements, we should have a good understanding of fascism so as to be able to recognize fascist threats. Paxton departs somewhat from prior literature in that he does not concentrate on fascist ideology. Paxton is careful also to look at a broad spectrum of facsist movements, both successful and unsuccessful, rather than falling into the trap of using Nazism as an archetype. Looking at other features of fascism than ideology makes considerable sense. Fascist movements had important differences in ideology and fascism in general, with its appeal to intense nationalism and exclusionary sense of identity, shouldn't be expected to have a uniform ideology. Italian fascism, at least in its original form, lacked the virulent anti-semitism of Nazism, while the fascist movement in Romania was aggessively Christian in ideological content. Paxton provides instead a structural analysis and definition of fascism by pursuing a careful examination of how fascist movements functioned. Some of Paxton's important points are Fascism appears in failed or highly stressed democracies, that fascism involves mass politics, that fascism emerges as a reaction to perceived threats from socialism, that fascism depends on charismatic leadership, and that fascism always contains a cult of violent action. A particularly important point is that the successful fascist movements, Italian Fascism and Nazism, were invited into power by traditional conservative elites seeking to coopt fascist mass mobilization in support of their own ends. In authoritarian societies where the conservative elites were more powerful or confident, such as Spain, Romania, or Hungary, fascist movements were consigned to the sidelines or actually suppressed. Paxton's analysis is thorough, largely convincing, and based on a remarkable knowledge of the huge literature on this topic. This is actually an extended essay, 220 pages of text, but the book contains also a superb annotated bibiography and outstanding footnotes which add considerably to the length of the book.
I disagree with Paxton on some points. He describes fascism as the major political innovation of the 20th century, assigning liberalism, socialism, and conservatism to the 19th century. Perhaps, but I suggest that the Leninist version of Marxism is sufficiently different from 19th century socialism to constitute a new phenomenon in political life. Paxton states that an essential feature of fascism in power is the existence of parallel governmental structures. When fascism came to power in Germany and Italy, it did do in presence of intact state structures and civil institutions. Fascist party organization became a parallel structure of government and way to impose control, often competing with "normative" government. This is true but not unique to fascism. Erection of parallel bureaucracies is a common response of leadership concerned about the reliability of their formal governmental structures. The considerable expansion of American Presidential power over the last century has been accompanied by expansion of the size and power of the White House staff and its allied structures. Similarly, when the Qing conquered Ming China, they governed in parallel through both the traditional scholar-bureaucrats and through a parallel system of officials owing direct loyalty to the Qing emperors. Paxton correctly states that violent action was a necessary component of fascism and that pursuit of war was integral to Nazism and Italian Fascism maintaining their essential momentum and solving internal problems. It is worth noting however, that this is not unique to fascist states. Authoritarian states have commonly used external aggression as a way of addressing internal problems. Think of the invasion of the Falklands by the military dictatorship in Argentina or the similarly reckless and self-defeating attempt by the Greek dictators to annex Cyprus. There is a particularly strong tradition of these types of actions in German history and this was probably one of the causes of the First World War. Paxton errs also, I think, in downplaying (though not disregarding) the convergent features of fascism in power with Marxist-Leninism in power. I think the concept of totalitarianism has more power than he is willing to concede.
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Victory Lap, September 5, 2005
Think of this admirable book as a victory lap by a distinguished scholar. Or, from the standpoint of the reader, as an aged brandy, subtle and nuanced with a smooth aftertaste. Robert O. Paxton has spent his career trying to make sense the dark hours in the middle of the 20rth Century. He's enjoyed-and earned-the privilege of working with challenging colleagues, and with bright, informed students. Now nearing the end of his career, he gets to deliver his informed judgment.
Paxton does a commendable job of treading a fine line here. One the one hand, he is alert to recognize that fascism doesn't lend itself to facile copybook definition: not every kind of evil is fascism, and not every evil state exhibits the same complex of pathologies. But fascism does not escape definition altogether. There is (argues Paxton) a set of characteristics that are noteworthy and distinctive. Caution, plot spoiler ahead:
"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with trditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraint goals of internal cleansing and external expansion." (Paxton, 218)
Paxton says that his own definition (if that is what it is) "encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person." Fair enough, But Paxton's own insistence on this point is just one more reason to take pleasure in this remarkable summa from an important scholar.
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