Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler: The Sense of a New Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler [Hardcover]

Roger Griffin has been standing out as particularly sharp-witted theorist and interpreter of classical and neo-fascism. His 1991 monograph The Nature of Fascism has, perhaps, been the most influential book of its kind during the last twenty years. Since then, Griffin has published a number of collected volumes and scholarly papers that too have contributed to the renewed interest in the notion and permutations of international fascism in various disciplines including political psychology, the history of ideas or cultural studies.
With his 2007 second monograph and opus magnum Modernism and Fascism, Griffin adds another text to comparative fascist studies that is likely to become a classic, in the discipline. Griffin's 1991 monograph was an exercise in political taxonomy and historical explanation - a sometimes schematic and technical investigation into the relationship between social classification, terminology and theory. His many papers and various collected volumes contained conceptual elaborations and empirical illustrations of themes he had already touched upon in 1991.
With the present volume, Griffin enters new terrain, in terms of the style, purpose and contents of his writing. His older investigations were designed to help comparativists of the contemporary extreme right as well as area specialists to identify, classify and explain various proto-, para- and fully fascist tendencies in this or that country. His new book, in contrast, can be seen as an exercise in Verstehen (comprehending) why fascism was temporarily so strangely successful, on a number of levels. While Griffin's 1991 monograph is a, sometimes, difficult and dry read, his 2007 opus documents Griffin's literary talents and often reads like a novel. The book's key argument is that pre- and inter-war European fascism has not been anti-modern and by no means a reactionary phenomenon. Fascism, to be sure, did constitute a particularly sharp reaction to classical Modernity. Yet, the solution that fascism provided to the psychological distress caused by modernization's increasingly fundamental disruption of traditional society since the mid-19th century was not rejection or reversion of Modernism, but an alternative Modernity. The palingenetic project that fascism offered to society was, strictly speaking, not the reborn, but a newborn nation. Griffin illustrates this point here with reference to Italian Fascism and German Nazism, as the paradigmatic cases of comparative fascist studies. He does so with a heavy bent towards the cultural aspects of these two fascism's national revolutions.
Apart from providing a dense and comprehensive description of various West European intellectual trends, political schools as well as artistic and literary phenomena from the late 19th century to 1945, this book's primary value is that of offering a "story" of how fascism became so attractive to millions of people including legions of educated Europeans - among them many prominent politicians, literati, artists and academics. Hugh Trevor Roper once wrote that Nazism was nothing more than a "vast system of bestial Nordic nonsense." Analogous statements have been made about Italian Fascism. Griffin largely succeeds with this book in explaining why Nazism and Fascism had, nevertheless, the capacity provide a majority of Italians and Germans with a sense of purpose and existential comfort in particularly liminal situations following such deep social disruptions as World War I and the Great Depression.

Palingenesis has been used for the exact reproduction of ancestral features by inheritance. Roger Griffin understands the political ideology of Fascism as a palingenetic ideology, primarily as a result of the notion that Fascism itself is the rebirth of an empire in the image of that which came before it. The best examples of this can be found with both Fascist Italy and Germany - Italy looking to establish a palingenetic line between the 20th Century regime under Mussolini as being the second incarnation of the Roman Empire, while Hitler's 'Third Reich' was seen as being the second palingenetic incarnation - beginning first with the Holy Roman Empire (First Reich) then with Bismarck's Germany (Second Reich) and then resulting in Fascist Germany (Third Reich).

In other words it seeks, by directly mobilizing popular energies or working through an elite, to eventually conquer cultural hegemony for new values, to bring about the total rebirth of the nation from its present decadence, whether the nation is conceived as a historically formed nation-state or a racially determined 'ethnos'. Conceived in these terms, fascism is an ideology that has assumed a large number of specific national permutations and several distinct organizational forms.

Griffin's approach has already had an enduring impact on the comparative fascist literature of the last 15 years, and builds on the work of George Mosse, Stanley Payne, and Emilio Gentile in highlighting the revolutionary and totalizing politico-cultural nature of the fascist revolution (in marked contrast with Marxist approaches). Now, his latest book, Modernism and Fascism, locates the mainspring of the fascist drive for national rebirth in the modernist bid to achieve an alternative modernity, which is driven by a rejection of the decadence of 'actually existing modernity' under liberal democracy or tradition. The fascist attempt to institute a different civilization and a new temporality in the West found its most comprehensive expression in the 'modernist states' of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, which also revealed the destructive and self-destructive nature of all fascist political projects to 'regenerate' the nation or achieving cultural renewal.

In this context the reviewer was most impressed by page 351: "Inter-war fascist movements had no exit strategy. ... They were bound eventually to become bogged down in their dynamism, moribund in their vitalism. There could be no stabilization, no viable routinization of the charismatic legitimacy of the state (that means, no "Empire Artam"), no social or military peace, no institutional procedures for passing on power to a non-charismatic leader, or for reinvesting it in the party. Nor could power even on the paper be one day entrusted to the people itself in a gradual process of democratization ... . Had Mussolini and Hitler managed to cling on to power, ... then both regimes may have gone the way of Salazar's Portugal and Franco's Spain, charismatic power draining away to a point where the renewal of autocracy after their deaths was impossible, and rapid democratization ensued. However, such an atrophy of modernist energies would have been the ultimate betrayal of the fascist world-view."