Introduction to Political Theory

fascism sees the community as somehow prior to the individual (an inversion of the

liberal abstraction), so it sees the nation as the embodiment of superiority and

domination.

Nationalism, on a fascist reading, necessarily takes an explicitly xenophobic

form, based on hatred. Hatred of foreigners, aliens, the weak, the vulnerable, the

disabled, the needy, the female and a characterisation of ‘lesser’ peoples and nations

in terms of these ‘despised’ categories. Mussolini challenged those who saw

Machiavelli as the founder of fascism, on the grounds that Machiavelli was

insufficiently contemptuous of the masses – the herd, as Mussolini liked to call them

• who gratefully accepted inequality and discipline (Vincent, 1995: 156).

Rationality

Liberalism and the Enlightenment see all individuals as rational, and thus capable

of governing themselves. Fascism regards ‘reason’ as inherently abstract, and extols

action as a force based upon instinct and feeling. You should ‘think with your blood’,

and de Rivera of the Spanish Falange (a fascist movement that Franco tolerated and

used) declared that the movement is not a way of thinking but ‘a way of being’

(Vincent, 1955: 155). It is the soul, not the mind, emotion and instinct, not reason

and logic that ultimately count. Again fascism challenges, in a spirit of negative

inversion, the abstractions of the Enlightenment. Reason is rejected – not made

historical and concrete. Fascism dismisses not merely the weaknesses of liberalism

(its chronic tendency to abstraction) but its conceptual strengths (its argument for

the individual, universality, reason and self-government).

Colin Jordan who founded the White Defence League in 1958 and the National

Socialist Movement in 1962 in the UK, declared himself in revolt against liberalism,

singling out for particular mention its ‘cash nexus’, ‘its excessive individualism’, ‘its

view of man as a folkless, interchangeable unit of world population’, its ‘sickly

humanitarianism’ and its ‘fraudulent contention’ that the wishes of the masses are

‘the all-important criteria’ (Griffin, 1995: 325–6).

Fascism, Stalinism and the state

Fascism identifies the individual and the community with the state. Fascism inverts

the classical liberal thesis that humans dwell in a stateless order of nature, by arguing

that humans derive their very nature and being from membership of the state.

Although the Nazis liked to speak of the community in racial terms, they too held

that the repressive hierarchies of the state are central to human identity.

Hence the explicit and dramatic statism of the fascist analysis. By arguing that

humans are statist in essence, fascists reject the idea that freedom and force stand

as mutually exclusive entities. On the contrary, force becomes something that

ennobles and distinguishes humans, and since the exercise of force implies the

existence of a repressive hierarchy, fascism rejects the notion of equality. The

individual is a person who stands out from the mass, so that the leadership principle

Chapter 13 Fascism 297