Out of the 43 volumes that I have collected and studied on fascism, Zeev Sternhell’s book easily makes it onto my top 10 list for being the best overall discussion on the development of Fascist ideology, from French and Italian syndicalism, to Mussolini and Fascism in power. But why the 3-4 star ratings? No rational arguments have been fourth coming by certified purchasers. This is a carefully argued and well documented treatment of Fascist ideology, rightfully distinguishing it from German National Socialism, and tracing its growth out of the radical political thought of the period. Chapter 4 and 5 by Mario Sznajder—which transitions from revolutionary syndicalism, to fascism, (with national syndicalism acting as the bridge), was an impressive and detailed read. Note: that Mario is a specialist on Italian syndicalism, and also a former student of Zeev Sternhell.
Sternhell’s contribution to the field of fascist studies was in helping to trace Fascist ideology to France in his previous book “Neither Left Nor Right,” which was highly praised by the late George L. Mosse and A. James Gregor. A great many scholars who began to take Fascist ideology seriously in the 1960s alluded to the complex set of influences that contributed to the making of the system of beliefs that brought Mussolini to power in 1922. Because Sternhell’s works were so impressive, objective and intelligently crafted, his judgments exercised significant impact on the academic community during part of the Golden Age of fascist studies in the 1970s-1990s.
There clearly were French elements in the ideology of Fascism, but there were also German and Austrian constituents as well (which Sternhell acknowledges). In its final form, the ideology of Fascism was unique, neither identical with nor replicated by any other political system. That is only to be expected—and it should be understood that neither Sternhell nor any other commentator or historian on Fascism meant anything more. Serious research has made several things reasonably clear: Marxism, in its original Germanic form, arrived in France considerably modified by English influence. One need only compare Marx's “The Holy Family” with his essays written after his long sojourn in England. Marxism, whatever the form in which it arrived in France, had very little immediate impact on revolutionary thought. Marx spent two decades after the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital trying to make Frenchmen into Marxists who believed that the entirety of the world's material and psychological conduct was governed exclusively by "natural laws" that operated independently of human will and resolve.
It took a great deal of time and effort to convince the French, however revolutionary, to lend credence to any of that. Many remained resolutely Proudhonists, followers of Pierre-Jean Proudhon, who, while he insisted that revolutions "spring out of the necessity of things," qualified that by maintaining that revolutions were "acts of sovereign justice in the order of moral facts.” On more than one occasion he spoke of the failure of revolution because of a "total lack of ideas." Even after his death, French revolutionaries conceived radical political change a function of moral conviction and the availability of engaging the sentiment of “masses.”
Even as Marxism became increasingly prominent, there were many Frenchmen who continued to see revolution in terms of moral conflict, heroic commitment, and personal sacrifice. Georges Sorel became their spokesman. He always thought of politics in terms of the virtues of antiquity, in terms of moral challenges, mortal risk, sacrificial dedication, and heroic gesture. Sorel imagined revolution as the marshaling of masses—employing sign and symbol in the fashion described in the work of Gustave Le Bon.
Sorel saw revolution as the business of inspired men and engaged masses—not the epiphenomena of economic affairs. The collection of revolutionaries most inspired by such anti-materialist ideas were syndicalists. They were iconoclasts, influenced by Sorel's dynamic sense of purpose. In the course of anticipating their evolution, they had come to appreciate the fact that orthodox Marxism had very little to offer. Classical Marxism spoke of an inevitable revolution that would engulf communities sinking under the weight of over-production—(communities whose economies could not profit by the clearing of inventory; communities condemned to catastrophic collapse).
Because of classical Marxism's peculiar over-production-ist/under-consumptionist economic theory, it argued that the social revolution was positively correlated with the increasing maturity of a community's productive base. Conversely, the less developed the economy of any given community, the less revolutionary potential. According to an ordinary interpretation of the theory, England would be ready for revolution before France. It was reasonably clear that there were significant numbers of French revolutionaries who balked at such a notion.
All these ideas found eager acceptance in Italy. As soon as Sorel’s writings were introduced into the peninsula, a collection of aggressive, capable, and assertive intellectuals were ready to identify themselves as "syndicalists.” Together with gifted social scientists like Sergio Panunzio, and talented economists of the stature of Arturo Labriola, they were prepared to consider all viable social and philosophical ideas. Their citations, among others, included references to Ludwig Gumplowicz, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Maffeo Pantaleoni. They were less concerned with orthodoxy than with solutions. As a consequence, by the time syndicalism had taken first root in Italy, it had assumed its own particular features.
Some of the first articles of A. O. Olivetti in his “Pagine libere” spoke a language other than that of orthodox Marxism. As early as 1907, he affirmed that "no one any longer" believed in a revolution that was the inevitable result of some set of arcane "laws"—that operated independent of the will and passion of human beings. He was to talk of a "new Marxism” that was destined to move human beings to action—part of its inspiration arising out of an abiding sense of humiliation that afflicted Italians—the result of its protracted interaction with nations that were economically more advanced. Italy had failed to achieve the most basic industrialization and was reduced to beggary—forcing its citizens to emigrate in the effort to survive, and selling its heritage to tourists for a pittance. It was disadvantaged by the conditions governing international finance and international trade. In all of that there was an unmistakable sense of frustrated nationalism that
was to regulariy surface In Olivetti’s prose. At almost the same time, Roberto Michels, already a syndicalist, maintained that nationalism was a heartfelt sentiment that would have to be accommodated in the forthcoming “internationalist” revolution.
The fact is that years before the Great War, syndicalism was more than a Marxism—it had been substantially modified. It included an emphasis on will and conscious resolve. It included nationalism and an acknowledgment of economic backwardness. Nonetheless, in the essays by syndicalists, there remained ample room for anti-bourgeois, and anti-state sentiment, together with an insistence on violent class conflict. In its advocacy there were unmistakable elements of Sorelianism and Proudhonism. Still, there was something other than that. Syndicalism in Italy had become increasingly Italian. By the coming of the Great War, the anti-statism, and the emphasis on class warfare, had been modified—perhaps by the "New Nationalism" of the followers of Enrico Corradini (and Prezzolini and Papini). By 1913, the democratic nationalists had left the Nationalist Association, and it had attracted authoritarian nationalists like Alfredo Rocco into its ranks. He brought with him the ideas of Friedrich List—a principled opponent of Karl Marx and a proponent of rapid national economic development.
After all, Italy was still a pre-capitalist society, with none of the prerequisites that Marx and Engels required for true socialism. Rocco was an advocate of state intervention in the nation's economy—particularly that nation prepared to, or that had embarked upon, a drive to industrial maturity. He emphasized a view of a community's economy radically different from that of the founders of Marxism. Rocco was a productionist—rather than an over-productionist. He anticipated a union of the state with politically organized labor and enterprise in a program of economic modernization.
Engels had spoken of the “withering away of the state” at the conclusion of the anticipated social revolution—while Rocco, and the nationalists of Corradini, together with an increasing number of syndicalists, conceived the state as an active, and perhaps determinative, actor in a nation's rapid economic modernization and industrialization.
Thus, even before the Great War, Italian syndicalism distinguished itself from that of France. Whatever influence Maurras was to have on the evolution of Fascist thought, it was secondary to the confluence of ideas originating among Italian nationalists and syndicalists. While the Great War forced nationalist and developmental ideas on the revolutionary leadership of the Italian peninsula, the outlines of a national syndicalism were already apparent. Syndicalists began to moderate their objections to the state—and began to appeal to a set of common interests that united all members of the nation in a community of destiny. Thus, although originally inspired by French ideas, developmental nationalism was to substantively influence the thought of Italy's radical intellectuals before the coming of the Great War. In so doing, developmental nationalism made of syndicalism an essentially Italian product.
Whatever the case, it was clear by the time of the coming of the Great War, Italian syndicalism had forged a belief system that explicitly appealed to nationalism—a national syndicalism—unmatched in range of thought and implications—only later to share features with the syndicalism of other countries and cultures. Years later, in 1930, Olivetti wrote his account of Italian syndicalism's development from the initial impulse that originated with Sorel, until it came to provide something of the belief system of Fascism (Lineamenti del nuovo stato italiano). At that juncture, and in retrospect, Olivetti insisted that Italian syndicalism, that found its origins in Sorel, had soon formulated a set of original concepts that anticipated a new form of nationalism that would find material expression in an "ordered society of producers" under the auspices of a unitarian state that expressed the will of a people prepared to meet the existential challenges of the twentieth century. In his judgment, a singularly Italian syndicalism had provided some of the critical components of what had become Fascism.
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