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One criticism that might be made of the interwar Marxists is that they assumed that any revolution worthy of the name would be a social revolution, that is, it would need to see the replacement of an old ruling class, and its replacement either by a new ruling class recruited from former peasants and the urban poor, or indeed by the abolition of class altogether and the equalisation of social opportunity. But surely there have been many instances in the history of revolutions which followed a different and lesser path? As it happens, one of the most significant theorists of revolution in the last hundred years was a member of this generation of interwar Marxists, Antonio Gramsci. In his prison writings, Gramsci sought to develop an idea of how fascism ruled. He reached for an analogy in the processes which had led to the formation of Italy as a nation state 50 years before. At the heart of the Sonderweg theory of German and Italian fascism, as we have seen, was the idea that modern societies should, in any healthy case, have followed the model of the transition to capitalism in England, France or America, and reached their mature condition as a result of a political revolution. Gramsci’s approach, in common with Sonderweg theories, began from the failure of Italy to follow this model. If in Italy, Gramsci reasoned, there had been a revolution of sorts – the unification of the country in 1861 – this change had been one in which most of the people had been passive bystanders. Such a ‘passive revolution’ had made possible Italy’s delay in modernising, which meant she could take advantage of the economic changes which had already taken place elsewhere in Europe, and the willingness of Italy’s pre-1861 ruling class to compromise with the new post-unification rulers.

Gramsci’s arguments will be further explored in subsequent chapters. It is enough to note here that the word ‘revolution’ was now being pulled in at least two different directions. On one axis it was being stretched to include both circumstances where the large majority of people had intruded into history, manifesting themselves as agents of their own destiny (active revolutions) and circumstances where the popular contribution was more limited or short term, and a minority was able to impose its preferred outcomes over the previous intentions of the majority of the people (passive revolutions). Meanwhile, on another axis, revolution was being asked to take on both circumstances of economic change, where the rich and their companions were cast down, and mere political change, where a leading political party or a group of parties gave way to a new set of rulers, perhaps representing merely a different faction of the same governing class.

This chapter has already referred to Stanley Payne, who, like Ze’ev Sternhell, is a historian of west European fascism. Payne describes fascism as a series of ideas possessing three main strands: fascist negations, fascist goals and a distinctive fascist style. By ‘negations’ he means such standard fascist politics as anti-Communism and anti-liberalism. As for ‘ideology and goals’, Payne includes the creation of a nationalist dictatorship, the promotion of empire and ‘the specific espousal of an idealist, voluntarist creed’. To Payne, the fascist ‘style’ includes such traits as its emphasis on violence, its exaltation of men above women and its positive evaluation of the young against the old. Payne’s definition is worth quoting in full, since it constitutes a political science counterpart to Ian Kershaw’s historical definition of fascism in power that was cited earlier:

A. The Fascist Negations

• Anti-liberalism.

• Anti-Communism.

• Anti-conservatism (though with the understanding that fascist groups were more willing to undertake temporary alliances with groups from any other sector, most commonly the right).

B. Ideology and Goals

•Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state.

•Organisation of some new kind of regulated, multi-class, integrated national economic structure.

• The goal of empire.

•Specific espousal of an idealist, voluntarist creed.

C. Style and Organisation

•Emphasis on aesthetic structure ... stressing romantic and mystical aspects.

• Attempted mass mobilisation with militarisation of political relationships and style and the goal of a mass party militia.

• Positive evaluation and use of ... violence.

• Extreme stress on the masculine principle.

• Exaltation of youth.

• Specific tendency towards an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of command.⁹⁶

Payne insists that the fascists were revolutionaries, albeit with a different idea of revolution from their Marxist adversaries. In this model of fascism, the goal that Hitler and Mussolini’s regimes set themselves was the subordination of everything in society to an authoritarian state, based on romance, myth and mass mobilisation. In Roger Griffin’s conception, which shares with Payne an emphasis on fascism’s roots in ideas, fascism in its purest form was a variety of palingenetic nationalism. Griffin argues that under fascism the nation ‘is in crisis and needs to be saved from its present state of disintegration and decadence through the agency of a vanguard made up of those who are keenly aware of the current forces that threaten it and are prepared to fight them’.⁹⁷

These models are said to correspond not merely to how various political scientists in our own day have understood fascism but, more particularly, to what Hitler and Mussolini thought was the purpose of their regimes. ‘The premise of his approach’, writes Roger Griffin, ‘is to take fascist ideology at its face value and to recognise the central role played in it by the myth of national rebirth to be brought about by finding a “Third Way” between liberalism/capitalism and Communism/socialism.’ Griffin insists that this method is necessary: ‘One of the advantages of the new consensus is that it brings fascism in line with the way other major political “isms” are approached in the human sciences by defining it as an ideology inferable from the claims made by its own protagonists.’⁹⁸

But why should it be necessary to understand fascism through the fascists’ historical views of themselves? Surely, when writing about any political ideology, the historian is obliged to be critical. This is a minimal expectation, akin to the position of a voter in any ordinary election who learns the limits of taking political language as it comes. The formal pronouncements of any leader must be compared to those around them. If, during a British general election, a politician says they are in favour of universal healthcare, or if, in an American election, a politician tells you they support freedom, these are not programmes for government. Such phrases served no greater function than to echo contributions made by other candidates. They are the price a politician pays to enter the game. Any voter learns to discount certain terms because they are ubiquitous. In an election where every party is promising to increase spending it matters which party would increase spending the most. Or, in conditions of austerity, you need to know who will cut fastest.

The words of any leader must be weighed against their practice. There is a duty to analyse all ideologies from the outside, and this is especially true of fascism, a political tradition which from its inception set out to kill millions.

It is just about possible to imagine a society which, on some objective measurement, achieved the cultural revolution set out by Payne and Griffin. After all, under Hitler art was taken out of its previously limited role as a specialist terrain of artists and used in every imaginable sphere of life – in architecture, in art, in posters, in music, in the staging of mass rallies. Mussolini did annexe colonies for Italy in Africa. But to say that fascism succeeded in establishing an empire without noting that the empire was used to carry out the Holocaust, or to say that it achieved a dominance of visual spectacles over politics without asking how those spectacles contributed to the stabilisation of a murderous regime, is not to explain fascism. Rather, it is to choose a form of blindness in which historians are incapable of seeing fascism except from a single perspective. Those who adopt the New Consensus remain trapped forever looking at the past only through the eyes of the intellectuals who shilled for fascism. Their approach prevents them from ever seeing fascism through the eyes of its victims.