Europe: Early Modern and Modern
rupt, lecherous priest, was done in. His murder was far
too late to save tsarist Russia, and the treaty of
Brest-Litovsk, taking Russia out of the war, was signed
in March 1918, not December 1917 as the author says.
Some readers may nevertheless find Weitsman's
approach to be interesting: it raises old questions
about international relations and examines them in
new ways.
MICHAEL JABARA CARLEY
University of Akron
MICHAEL MANN. Fascists. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pp. x, 429. Cloth $65.00, paper
$23.99.
This is by far the best comparative study in recent
years of interwar fascisms, an analytical tour de force
in which Michael Mann, a sociologist, insists on sufficiently empirical answers to such questions as who
were the fascists? What motivated them? Were "class"
or material motivations stronger than other motivations? What did fascists believe? How and why did
fascists in some countries differ from those in others?
Why did fascism succeed in some European countries
during the interwar period and not in others?
On the last, Mann concludes that the great divide
was between Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe
on the one hand (where fascisms flourished) and
Northwestern Europe and Britain on the other (where
liberal democracies were more entrenched). After a
masterful examination of various interpretations of
fascism, Mann provides his own data-rich explanations
(including some of the best data from other scholars)
of Italian, German, and Austrian fascisms-with additional chapters on Hungarian, Romanian, and Spanish
"families of authoritarians" (Mann regards fascist
movements in all six countries as "extensions" of
previous right-wing authoritarianisms).
Specialists will welcome his synthesizing of so much
contemporary scholarship, and general readers may be
surprised by some of Mann's conclusions. According to
Mann, Nazism's vision of a better society should be
taken seriously, since to many Germans in 1932 it
seemed both "plausible," and in politics, "minimal but
resonant plausibility-never some higher standard of
truth-rules" (p. 259). All fascist movements during
the interwar period appealed disproportionately to the
well-educated, "to students in high schools and universities and to the most highly educated middle-class
strata" (p. 79). In Germany, most Nazis were not
downwardly mobile "marginal" men (many women
were also Nazis) but men who felt empowered by
previous social success.
Mann writes that only a handful of Nazi leaders were
originally attracted to the movement by antisemitism.
Most Germans disliked Jews, but antisemitism was not
a priority for them and Nazi leaders downplayed
antisemitism at election time. Germany's media barons
played a major role in stirring up a populist nationalism that boosted their audience and moved politics to
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549
the right. Alfred Hugenberg, a conservative politician
who controlled Germany's largest media empire,
"made the world-historical mistake of giving favorable
news coverage to the Nazis" (p. 197).
Mann finds no overall correlation between class and
Nazism. All classes were well-represented in Nazism.
Many non-industrial workers supported Nazism (by
1930 some seventy percent of the SA were workers). In
Italy, two-thirds of the labor force in 1922 remained
non-union, and many previously socialist workers were
tired of party rhetoric that brought few results. For
them "guaranteed work was more important than risky
protest" (p. 117). Few German capitalists supported
the Nazis before 1933, although "even fewer hindered
them" and "many finally welcomed their accession to
power" (p. 197). German capitalists wanted "order"
and were unhappy with Weimar's social and labor
reforms, which raised taxes and reduced profits, but
before 1933 they distrusted Nazism's "socialist" side,
disliked its violence, and "greatly preferred" the older
conservative parties of the day. Austrian fascism, by
contrast, was more "class-based," and Austrian conservatives "reached for their guns too early" (p. 234), as
did conservatives in Spain. In Italy rural landowners
and the "nation-statist" bourgeoisie were overrepresented in fascism and the business bourgeoisie, large
and small, was underrepresented. As for fascist violence in Italy, by 1926 Benito Mussolini's regime was
so popular that there was little need for further
violence.
According to Mann, overrepresented in fascist
movements were not the class foes of communist
historiography, capitalists and petty bourgeois, but
rather the highly nationalistic and "macho" young
from all classes, people living in border regions where
communists or foreigners had earlier threatened, war
veterans and younger men with paramilitary values,
and, in largely agrarian countries, big and small landowners.
Mann states that a far better predictor of public
support for Nazism than class was religion. Of all
registered voters in Germany in July 1932, some
thirty-eight percent of Protestants voted for the Nazis,
only sixteen percent of Catholics, "a big difference."
"The greater the percentage of Protestants in an area,
the greater its Nazi vote" (p. 186). In Italy, the
Catholic Church at first "looked askance" at fascists,
but came to regard them favorably after they agreed to
protect its institutional interests. "The Vatican preferred them to democracy if it included socialists" (p.
126), and Pope Pius XI thanked Mussolini for implementing the "Social Catholicism" of the church. Mann
observes that in Austria from the mid-1920s, Christian
Social governments encroached on constitutional
rights, purged socialists from the army and administration, engaged in selective repression, and cooperated with the fascist Heimwehr, which itself "had
intimate relations with the clergy" (p. 229). In Hungary, fascism came wrapped in both Catholicism and
antisemitism. Its leader, Ferenc Szalasi, considered
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Reviews of Books and Films
himself a good Catholic and claimed that the Old
Testament showed "how God despised the Jews" (p.
247).
Mann emphasizes that fascists everywhere were
extreme nationalists who genuinely believed that "nation-statism"-i.e. a mass-mobilized, right-wing, authoritarian state-would not only cleanse their countries of aliens and traitors but end class conflict and
achieve class harmony.
There may be a problem with Mann's view that
France, like the rest of Northwestern Europe, was
largely immune to native fascism during the interwar
period. Colonel Francois de La Rocque's Croix de
Feu/ Parti Social Francais (CF/PSF) was from 1934 the
fastest growing and by 1938 the largest political movement on the French political Right. In the 1930s, the
CF/PSF had many fascist characteristics (including
some of its mass mobilization practices), and in 1941
La Rocque strongly supported the Vichy regime (although he criticized some of its officials for being too
"soft" on France's domestic "enemies") and defended
Philippe Petain's "continental collaboration" with
Nazi Germany. If the PSF was indeed fascist (some
scholars think not), then not all of Northwestern
Europe rebuffed fascist ideas as decisively as Mann
suggests. La Rocque's call in 1941 for "the elimination
of non-assimilatable or non-assimilated foreign elements" in France and his insistence that "the will of
the State must be imposed on everybody in view of the
common interest" ("Le Flambeau," March 16 and
April 30, 1941) were not the only beliefs that La
Rocque shared with fascists in Southern, Central, and
Eastern Europe.
ROBERT J. SOUCy
Oberlin College
RICHARD WOLlN. The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
2004. Pp. xxii, 375. $29.95.
This motley collection of essays of varying depth and
interest, published or presented as lectures over a
number of years, is presumably held together by
Richard Wolin's rejection of "counter-Enlightenment"
alias "postmodernism"-in his usage a conceptually
fuzzy, politically suspect phenomenon-and various
condemnations of variously real or virtual fascisms.
The many redundancies, overall lack of conceptual
coherence, uneven writing, and frequently opaque
argumentation speak of a hastily assembled book that
relies more on moral judgments, suspicions, and denunciations than on intellectual analysis. The intended
audience for most of the essays seems to be a "general" readership with a presumed tolerance for preacherly arguments against the same bad fascist and postmodernist company kept by all the intellectual
protagonists in the same way in all the essays. In the
current situation of rapid technological globalization,
Western desecularization, ideological multicultural-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
ism, and Islamic fundamentalism, a historically informed, well-argued book for a general audience on
the intellectual and political meanings of the European Enlightenment would make a lot of sense, but not
Wolin's inchoate collection.
The title of the introduction promises the "Answer
to the Question: What Is Counter-Enlightenment?" It
would be an answer expected to provide an explanation for the selection, and then connection, of these
essays, but its melange of shorthand references to
"unreason" from Herder via Nietzsche, Jung, Heidegger, Gadamer, Levi-Strauss, Blanchot, Bataille, Foucault, Derrida, de Man, Lyotard, Deleuze, etc, does
nothing but obfuscate. The answer is CounterEnlightenment = postmodernism = fascism.
Wolin's
partisan political use of the term "postmodernism"
isolates and limits the historical phenomenon beyond
recognition but, hunting down fascism, he is certain of
the correctness of his findings. This book, he instructs
the reader, is "an exercise in intellectual genealogy. It
seeks to shed light on the uncanny affinity between the
Counter-Enlightenment and postmodernism. As such,
it may also be read as an archeology of postmodern
theory" (p. 8). A rather large claim for an enterprise
that is so focused on the upper layer-Derrida et al. as
the loyal disciples of the fascist Heidegger as the loyal
disciple of "antidemocratic" Nietzsche (p. 21)-that it
excludes the first generation of German Romantics
around 1800 with their heady mix of poeticized philosophizing echoed, if less brilliantly, in postmodernist
discourse around 2000. Such connections are of no
interest to Wolin since their writings cannot be accused of affinities to fascism, as can, strangely,
Friedrich Schleiermacher's hermeneutics, if only via
Nazi-tainted Hans Georg Gadamer (p. 100). Wolin's
most serious problem is his lack of historical curiosity
and inability to think historically, precisely what enables him to hold on to Manichean scenarios that
defeat contextualization and differentiation. His severely limiting and polarizing post-Holocaust perspective on European cultural and intellectual history
prevents him from understanding the ongoing transformative interactions between Enlightenment and
neo-Romantic positions-one of the reasons for his
inability to differentiate positions on "the Right" as
well as on "the Left."
Wolin could have found a wealth of information
about the historical diversity of "right" political
thought and activities during the Weimar period in my
Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity
(1988). But his purpose was to house the existing
essays and lectures, not to explore critically the important questions raised by the different positions on the
right. The most disappointing aspect of this book,
published six decades after the end of World War II, is
that it stays so simplistically on the message of denouncing evil fascism, which for the author is reflected
in the "ethical relativism" of postmodernism embraced
by "antihumanist-inspired Western self-hatred." I
would be the first to agree with Wolin that much of
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