The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution [Paperback]

After searching for a objective view of the development of this ideology I stumbled upon this book and was gratified by Zeev Sternhell's indepth educational coverage. The typical persistant sophistic demonizing of the philosphers and political ideologs, along with pharisee like critisism of the principles, myths and ideals of Fascism are thankfully nonexistant throughout the book. Instead Mr. Sternhell takes you from the early fomations in late nineteenth century France to the final solidification in post Great War Italy with meticulous perspicacity.

Misconceptions are dispelled--and Mr Sternhell should be thanked for his willingness to not only clearly and concisely separate Fascist principle from Nazi ideology but to also relate the surprising Italian Jewish contribution and memberships from before Fascism's move to government in 1922.

Names of philosphers and political scientists normally left out of other books on Fascism are given healthy coverage and should also be studied to fully understand why this non reactionary movement swept into popularity.

Finally I'd like to say that Mr Sternhell will convince you that parallel to Socialism and Liberalism, Fascism offered a original direction and answer to the development of European society and the problems that that development caused. It is as much the failures of Socialism and Liberalism to address and cure the problems that nineteen and twentieth century modernity created that successfully enacted the Birth of Fascist Ideology.

I had to read this book for a class on European Nationalism, and it was amazing. It took a very long time to read, as it is a hard book and a complex one, and discusses in-depth unfamiliar ideas and especially unfamiliar people. This, however, is what makes it so good: it is completely original, to me at least and I have read a fair number of history books over my undergraduate career. It is definitely worth picking up if you have any interest in modern European history, or especially if you are teach European history, have a discussion on this one!

Sternhell, the Jewish denizen of the Zionist state of Israel, leaves all the other academics of the "fascism studies industry" in the dust. How beautifully ironic--the brave Jewish analyst opposing the trendy static "settled wisdom" of fascism as merely an embrace of mafia-type terroristic violence, to be the fair intellectual umpire, and acknowledge the completely coherent nature of Fascist ideology, and its essence as synthetic conceptual product of the most intelligent theoreticians of the extremist Left, and the extremist Right; and to elucidate calmly and reasonably, the core of fascist politics as (self-conceived) revolt against political materialism. Fascism's association with massacre Sternhell does not absolutize as an a priori manifestation of Fascist political philosophy; and I, like any morally sane human being, wholeheartedly condemn the atrocities of World War II, but the mass-hysteria of "politics-as-demonology" obscured the deep-set, European innovation of political thinking given form in the Fascist experience. And from theory to practice, massive injustice was committed, but do we thereby pretend Gentile, Spirito, Olivetti, etc. were all simple criminals or demoniacs?

Sternhell argues for the coherency and historically enrooted nature of Fascist theory, as a spontaneous historical philosophical movement organically generated in Europe, and whose self-publicized, fluid and synthetic ideology of "revolutionary, anti-materialist reaction" offered hardly more irrational or culturally abnormal content than its rival-ideologies, Western capitalism and Trotskyist-Leninist Marxism.

Thus, overall, the heroic-spirited brave, meritorious Israeli, in an irony of sorts, as a lonely academic fearless enough to engage in heavy waters intellectually, is the one to pop another taboo-bubble of modernity, viz., the supposed "demonic irrationalism" of Fascism.

In no way am I personally endorsing Fascist political theory, only giving credit due where credit is due. The hegemony of the all-encompassing leftist world-view, its monopolization of interpretive authority, Sternhell conquers in his scholastic investigation of the intellectual genealogy of the so-called "satanism" of Fascism. I repeat: in no way am I advocating for Fascism, but, as Sternhell, do wish to see the overturning of the unilateral pure domination of neo-Marxian, neo-Marcusian, neo-Gramscian-Kojevian thought-block of twisted Hegelianism, and this establishment academician one-dimensional exegesis challenged aggressively. The tunnel-vision of Gramscian-Hegelian dialectics reigning today in all realms of scholarship, education and intellectual culture--is this revised "post-Marxism" our new sacred, untouchable Royal Absolutism?

It takes particular intellectual fortitude, especially as a Jew, to honestly differentiate, as Sternhell correctly does, the *deep* difference between Germanic National Socialism, and the Italian Fascism of Mussolini. Mussolini never traded in neo-pagan root-race Ariosophic madness; the Mussolinian concept of "race" was neo-Idealist and neo-Platonic in nature; and the Italian Fascist racial concept was hardly intrinsically anti-Semitic even remotely--one only has to think of Olivetti the Jewish-Italian Fascist theoretician, and many other Jewish Fascists, to understand the...otherness...of Hitlerian neo-paganist ancestor-worship, and its virtually necromantic, neo-tribalist, "Aryo-Nordic" blood-mysticism. The Mussolinian "Homo Fascistus" was a different creature, to say the least, than the pure-blooded Aryo-Nordic Over-Man of Hitlerian millenarian gnosticism; and this difference exists in an authentic, morally significant way...

All praise to Sternhell, the rebel academic with backbone, the heretical Israeli cryptologist of ideology, who helped tear down the leftist orthodoxy of mere all-too-human power-politics hiding itself within academia, tearing down its usurping monopoly of "cultural diagnostic semiology" as if royally and divinely enthroned. Sir Sternhell subverted this hegemonic perceptual control, and his work stands as virile scholarship and genuinely provocative in the pallid consensus of ossified intellectuality of the present. (To heighten his iconoclasm, Sternhell should have highlighted the interrelations between early Italian Fascism and certain sections of rightist Zionism to really stir things up for the linear-minded. Modern people would lose their minds over these antinomies of paradoxical reality.)