Karl Loewenstein,Max Lerner,and militant democracy: an appeal to ‘strong democracy’

ABSTRACT

In the 1930s Loewenstein responded to the ease with which the Nazi Party rose to power within parliamentary democracy. In America Lerner echoed Loewenstein’s call for a ‘militant democracy’, but identified a different ‘enemy within’ – rogue capitalist interests. Loewenstein’s response to populism was an ‘authoritarian democracy’, whereas Lerner wished to embrace the people in a public engagement. This paper seeks a middle path towards a conception of democracy that avoids the vicissitudes of transient majorities without yielding the ground to either transient or entrenched minorities. In its modern guise of ‘neoliberalism’, corporate capitalism has made inroads into the sensibilities of democrats, and needs to be confronted by a notion of ‘strong democracy’ expressed through the engagement of whole populations.     

Blurred images: Indro Montanelli’s anti-politics

Through a close reading of Indro Montanelli’s 1944/1945 novel Here They Do Not Rest, this article argues that the famous and popular Italian journalist Montanelli contributed significantly to a particular Italian form of ‘anti-politics’ after the fall of fascism. It argues that anti-politics in Italy provides the foundation for the county’s right-wing populism and that it makes a significant contribution to political and historiographical revisionism of the fascist past. Indro Montanelli is read as an important architect of this revisionism and as such read against his popular image.     

SVEN OLOV LINDHOLM AND THE LITERARY INSPIRATIONS OF SWEDISH FASCISM

Very little research has been done into the leader of the most prominent Swedish fascist party of the interwar period, the leader of the Nationalsocialistiska Arbetarepartiet, Sven Olov Lindholm, in spite of extensive source material in his personal archive. This article explores the literary influences on his politics, which Lindholm cited in his private documents and interviews, both contemporary and post-war. The immediate impact of notable Swedish writers, poets especially, such as Verner von Heidenstam, Viktor Rydberg, Esaias Tegnér, and Bertel Gripenberg, is demonstrated. These authors, largely of the Swedish Romantic tradition, are shown to be parts of one major Scandinavian cultural current in particular, namely Gothicism (göticism), manifested through a centuries-long interest in the Old Nordic heritage. In Sweden, the influence of new far-Right ideas that made their way into the country in the 1920s intersected with Gothicism in unique ways, which gave Swedish fascists a peculiar relationship to both fascism and their national heritage. Ultimately, these literary Gothicist influences allowed a particular naturalizing codification of Swedish fascism in the 1930s. Under the influence of, above all, contemporary Finno-Swedish health specialist Are Waerland, Lindholm is shown to have actively shaped Swedish fascism in line with his literary exemplars.     

Two new books on Fascism. A review,the authors’ responses and the reviewer's comments

This section contains a review by the Italian historian Emilio Gentile of Paul Corner's new book on the Fascist Party and public opinion, and of Christopher Duggan's intimate history of Mussolini's Italy. The review is followed by responses from Corner and Duggan, and the section concludes with comments by Gentile.     

The Development of Comparative Judicial Politics

Abstract

Much of the scholarly debate over the Heidegger controversy has endeavored to either connect or free his philosophy from fascism. Against both these tendencies, I argue that the central concepts of Heidegger's philosophy are politically underdetermined. Throughout both his late and early periods, Heidegger's primary ambition remained the illumination of the question of being, a project that I argue made his ontological framework inherently relativistic.     

Max Weber,charisma and nationalist leadership1

ABSTRACT. One of Max Weber's most well‐known achievements was the formulation of three concepts of legitimate authority: traditional, legal‐rational and charismatic. However, there are particular problems with the last of these, which is not historically grounded in the manner of the other two concepts. The charisma concept originated with Weber's sociology of religion, was pressed into service in pre‐war writing on the sociology of domination, shifted focus in his wartime political writings and changed meaning again in his post‐war writing on basic sociological concepts. To use the concept in historical‐political analysis, I argue, one must distinguish between a pre‐modern and modern form of charismatic domination. I argue that doing this enables us to understand features of the leadership of colonial nationalist and fascist movements.     

Punctuated Equilibrium and the Information Disadvantage of Authoritarianism: Evidence from the People's Republic of China

According to the punctuated equilibrium thesis, government attention allocation alternates between long periods of stasis and dramatic spurts of disequilibrium because democratic institutions enable minority groups to obstruct change. This article presents a critical discrepancy in contemporary China, where punctuated instability is significantly more intense despite a lack of democratic institutions to empower minority obstructionism. Our empirical analysis further reveals that punctuated intensity goes even higher for Chinese regions facing fewer signs of social discontent. We attribute the intensification of punctuated dynamics to an information disadvantage arising from the lack of diverse, independent sources of information under authoritarianism. Our finding contributes to punctuated equilibrium theory by underlining the function of opposition groups not only as obstructionists but also as challengers to policy priorities. By marginalizing these challengers, authoritarian institutions confine attention to known problems, leading to serious delays in the discovery of and adjustment to emerging issues.     

Unmaking the fascist man: masculinity,film and the transition from dictatorship

This essay examines the recasting and renegotiation of Italian masculinity during the war and during the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Film is my privileged source for understanding the complexities of male experience during this period of dramatic change, but I also rely on war crimes charges, diaries and memoirs. While not explicitly comparative in nature, the essay considers whether we can speak of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ in postwar Italy akin to that diagnosed by historians of postwar Germany and France. Within this broad frame, the essay focuses the experiences and representations of one category of men who evoked particular anxieties about the legacies of defeat and the redemption of Italian men for democratic models of fatherhood and citizenship: veterans, in particular returned prisoners of war. The 1946 film Il bandito (The Bandit, Alberto Lattuada), which I analyze in the last section of the essay, dramatizes the situation of these returned prisoners and the problem of a generation of men raised according to fascist norms that linked masculinity to the performance of aggressive acts.     

1. CARL SCHMITT BETWEEN HISTORY AND MYTH

Carl Schmitt's work defines the history and theory of political myth. But analyzing it represents a challenge to historians and theorists alike. For many historians, Schmitt should be analyzed in his own context, whereas theorists study his writings without enough consideration of the specific context in which he conceived his texts. In this essay, I argue that Schmitt not only contributed to the fascist glorification of the mythical and its novel enactment as the driving force of fascism, but he also represents one of the most intriguing and influential interpreters of the political theory of myth, challenging in turn theories of democracy and the role of reason and secularism in historiography.     

Atavistic Novelty: Questioning Hannah Arendt’s Understanding of Totalitarianism

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critique of Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of totalitarianism as formulated in her magnum opus—The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). It argues that, to comprehend totalitarianism, Arendt forged a heterodox method of historical analysis. Employing that method, she conceived totalitarianism as a form of transcendence of historical context. In doing so, however, she ignored crucial historical contexts that were in fact related to the history of totalitarianism. Subverting her interpretation of totalitarianism as transcendence, these elided contexts erupted inadvertently and repeatedly into her analysis—revealing that totalitarianism was solidly embedded in them. The Origins of Totalitarianism thus exhibits a conceptual contradiction that confuses its attempt to understand totalitarianism.     

New idols: Catholicism in the face of Fascist totalitarianism

Abstract

This article explores the attitudes of the Vatican and Catholic culture towards Fascism and Fascism's political religion during the pontificate of Pius XI, in the context of the Catholic church's rejection of modernity as a new epoch of paganism that took the form of political mysticism. It shows that despite the Concordat of 1929, the papacy reacted with growing alarm to the Fascist regime's ‘sacralization of politics’ that threatened to make Catholic religion a handmaid of the totalitarian state.     

Byron to D'Annunzio: from liberalism to fascism in national poetry, 1815–1920

ABSTRACT. From Byron's death at Missolonghi in 1824 to D'Annunzio's capture of Fiume for Italy in 1919, the nationalism of universal liberalism and independence struggles changed, in literature as in politics, to cruel dictatorial fascism. Byron was followed by a series of idealistic fighter‐poets and poet‐martyrs for national freedom, but international tensions culminating in World War I exposed fully the intolerant, brutal side of nationalism. D'Annunzio, like Byron, both a major poet and charismatic war leader, was a key figure in transforming nineteenth‐century democratic nationalism into twentieth‐century dictatorial fascism. The poet's ‘lyrical dictatorship’ at Fiume (1919–20) inspired Mussolini's seizure of power in 1922, with far‐reaching political consequences. The poet became the dangerous example of a Nietzschean Übermensch, above common morality, predatory and morally irresponsible. This article shows how the meaning of nationalism was partly determined and transformed by poets, illustrating their role as ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’.     

‘Fare di ogni famiglia italiana un fortilizio’: The League of Nations' economic sanctions and everyday life in Venice 1

Abstract

The imposition of punitive sanctions against Italy by the League of Nations in November 1935 in response to the invasion of Ethiopia, a fellow league member, provided the fascist regime with an opportunity to mobilize the civilian population into ‘resistance’ against the ‘economic siege’ and to promote its ideals of nationalism, imperialist expansion and autarchy. This article examines the way in which the fascist authorities in Venice, aided by a supportive local press, sought to use the sanctions and ‘sanctions resistance’ to engage Venetians – especially women – in the fascist project and explores the effect of the anti-sanctions resistance measures on Venetians' daily lives. Placing importance both upon the regime's intentions as well as Venetians' reception of the anti-sanctions rhetoric, and drawing upon Michel de Certeau's observations on The Practice of Everyday Life, the article argues that Venetians' reception of such propaganda was characterized above all by confusion and by a multiplicity of personal choices and reactions, spanning a range of possible responses from unequivocal support through passive acceptance or indifference to outright rejection or subversion of the sanctions resistance measures that sought to elicit consent for the fascist project.