Fascism: A Readers Guide- Walter Laqueur (1976)
The book is a series of articles talking about various aspects of fascism. The most interesting for me was Zeev Sternhell’s article on Fascist ideology, which included a section on the intellectual climate that led to fascist ideas. This is where I felt like the book filled in some gaps in my own understanding.
Fascism was a response to what were perceived as the failures of the liberal system. Marxism provided one response, but many of the socialist thinkers were moving away from the Marxist analysis and shifting where they thought society ought to focus its efforts.
So much of the charge of “fascist” today is centered on the idea of “authoritarian”, so that if someone is perceived as authoritarian, that is enough to label them fascist. But monarchs are authoritarian, communist dictators are authoritarian, theocratic states can be authoritarian… all without being fascist. The cheaper charge of fascist being another name for meany racists is again, so imprecise as to be useless. Fascist in those instances is just an epithet hurled at an opponent.
What this book taught me was that the ideas that brought about fascism were more important for defining fascism as such, than the structures that arose afterward. Given the political upheaval, and the fight for power, the two prime movements we classify as fascism, those of Italy and Germany, were practically aligned with societal elements they hated, and that they would have liked to have altered had they had more time. But a big problem was that their ideas were unworkable and probably would have collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions and mis-framing of the problems, even had they NOT been bent on war and conquest as a policy.
Which makes me seriously question the charge of fascism leveled today. I have seen some movements define themselves in what look to me like fascist. But I’m not sure if they have the intellectual underpinnings of the fascist worldview. Structural similarities aren’t going to be enough to label something fascist.
One of the particular things the book helped me to get my head around: The fascist belief that the nation is a living entity. Perhaps more than any other belief, this notion is the fountain from which almost all of the other beliefs are a consequence.
For the fascists, the liberal notion of humans- that they are formed prior to society, then group together to form societies- is fundamentally wrong. Fascism says humans are FORMED by pre-existing social realities. Language, habits, values, instincts, and loyalties all precede choice.
The individual then is a later abstraction, not a natural unit. Society isn’t a contract then, or an aggregation of wills. It is a body, an organism with a living, historical reality. Fascists believed the nation was what shaped individuals whether they choose it or not. The nation was embodied in language and customs, transmitted through education and memory, expressed in myths, symbols, and rituals. And every people has a national spirit, a particular, historical, and non-universal culture.
The nation then has a shared historical trajectory, that trajectory produces characteristic values and instincts, those values are what expresses what “flourishes” for that people, and therefore, the nation has interests independent of individual opinions. The nation then has direction, tendency, and telos. It exists in action, and the State gives that will consciousness.
From this, individuals are understood to be analogous to cells. Cells don’t vote on the body’s direction, and cells that act independently of the body are cancerous. From this, the fascists conclude that individual rights are conditional, dissent threatens coherence, and pluralism is pathology not diversity…. which is why repression follows so directly.
The liberal promise of individuals being born with inalienable rights, being allowed the freedom to determine their own direction as long as it doesn’t impinge on others, is absolutely anathema to the fascist. While democracy follows from liberalism, it directly contradicts fascism.
Furthermore, liberalism fosters debate between equals, which fascism is ideologically opposed to. Fascism doesn’t accept the equality of men. It says there are most definitely distinctions in abilities, and the social Darwinism in vogue at the time took the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ to mean ‘we might as well eliminate or subordinate the weak’, which was good and right. They saw an objective difference in men and said that obviously the best men should lead the lesser men, that is only natural.
Of course, some of the problems fascism saw with liberalism were straw men. The fascists said individualism meant greed, isolation or ‘alienation’ in the Marxist terminology, and the loss of virility. Individualism in the classically liberal sense meant that each individual was to be respected as a full moral agent, and had the right to determine his own path, as long as it didn’t infringe the rights of others. This turned self-interest, a natural instinct that in fact drives the Darwinism they were so enamored of, into pure greed.
Collectivism, which pushes itself as caring about others more than oneself, is actually a denial of every individual’s agency. It turns the individuals that make up society into nothing more than disposable pieces to be used for some greater good, while the individualism that protected the people from the tendency of the State to steamroll them, was turned into an evil of “greed” because some of those individuals would refuse to do what they were ordered.
Of course collectivism isn’t a fascist concept, the fascists got the idea from their socialist beginnings, but modified the collective spirit from Marx’s original idea of class consciousness, to the more inclusive idea of national consciousness…. and in the Nazi case- racial consciousness.
Another note: The explicit racism of the National Socialist (Nazi) party in Germany was not the same as the Italian Fascism. Fascism had no implicit racial element. The nation was what was important, although the nation was considered to have been a historical people, so there certainly would have been a natural exclusion of foreign elements.
The centrality of the nation as the historical particular culture for fascism is perhaps a reason why fascism has never really grabbed hold in the Americas. In the Americas, we are all immigrant nations, lacking in the kind of historical ties to the ancestral land that fascism sees as necessary. Fascist movements in the Americas tend to be imitative of either the German or Italian varieties, and attempt to hearken back to some imagined period of national purity and unity that just never existed. In fact, it didn’t exist in Europe either, but it’s even harder to try and push that here in the States.
But anyway, I had not really understood their reasoning on the nation, nor their problems with liberalism, until I had read this book, and for that, I am really glad I got this.
Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life- Len Fisher (2008)
I have been wanting to study game theory for a while now. But every time I’d try to look something up on it, it included diagrams and math. Me and math haven’t been on speaking terms since fifth grade and long division, so I would just give up. But I kept hearing about the uses of game theory in economics and when I read Thomas Sowell’s book Basic Economics, and alongside the Anthropology books I’ve been reading too, I thought the calculations people make in following certain deliberative paths might be illuminated by understanding game theory. So I looked for a book that would explain things in prose rather than math, and this one was it. I still don’t have a great understanding of it, but this was a good start.