Fascism and the primacy of the political
Dick Pels
Politics vs. Economics
One of the core convictions informing radical right-wing thought has been that politics should take precedence over economics and that the power question was more fundamental than the property question.[1] With the purpose of resolving the economic and cultural crisis, fascists and national socialists typically demanded a restoration of the primacy of the political and a repoliticization of economic life, which both liberal and Marxist theory had promoted to the status of an ontological "last instance." Speaking in March 1933, at the height of the political Gleichschaltung following the January coup, Hitler was characteristically straightforward about his intentions: "We want to restore the primacy of the political." In Mein Kampf (1924) he had already pleaded a reversal of the relation between economics and the state, advising that "industry and commerce recede from their unhealthy leading position and adjust themselves to the general framework of a national economy of balanced supply and demand." Capital was to remain "the handmaiden of the state" and not fancy itself "the mistress of the nation." A strong state was needed to act as "intelligence" and "organizer" of national production; economics was only one among its instruments and could never be its cause or aim.[2]
In their famous 1932 encyclopedia article "The Doctrine of Fascism," Mussolini and Gentile likewise asserted that "everything is in the state and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the state." In a broadside against both liberalism and historical materialism, they added that it was absurd to maintain that "economic improvements" sufficed to explain human history to the exclusion of all other factors. It was the totalitarian State, embodying the conscience and ethical will of all citizens, which was called upon to organize the Nation and thus logically also "claimed for itself the field of economics."[3] Gentile's neo-idealism, while advocating a reversal of Marx back toward Hegel, delineated the all-powerful state as both the highest embodiment of the citizens' ethical consciousness and economic activity as essentially subordinate to this ethical force. While liberals and Marxists had accepted economic principles as abstract, universally applicable laws, only fascist corporate economists had recognized that they should be controlled and regulated from a higher ethical-political viewpoint.[4]
This self-image has to some extent been ratified by outside observers, both neutral and inimical. The postwar political sociology of totalitarian regimes characteristically has operated from the assumption, in Talmon's words, that totalitarianism "recognizes ultimately only one plane of existence, the political," and tends to widen the scope of politics to embrace the whole of human existence.[5] Neo-Marxist theories of fascism,[6] in relaxing the rigid hold of the reductionary "iron guard of capital" interpretation, have likewise acknowledged the primacy of the political in fascist regimes, although under the sign of an expanded concept of economic determination in the "last" instance. In an early (1941) analysis of the national socialist regime as a form of state capitalism, Friedrich Pollock argued that the Third Reich was presently constructing a new economic order "in which market was replaced by command." Poulantzas' subsequent elaboration of the Marxian model of "Bonapartism" similarly emphasized the enhanced autonomy of the political vis-a-vis the economic sphere.[7] In an equally influential work, Mason explained the political disenfranchisement of the propertied classes and the ensuing "primacy of politics" in National Socialist Germany as necessarily ensuing from the inability of"capital" to bring about the recovery of the economy and the reproduction of civil society, which required a strong government to forge a new social and economic compromise.[8]
To take fascism and National Socialism seriously as intellectual systems, however, let alone to take fascist professions of continuity with specific varieties of socialism seriously, remains a hotly contested "revisionist" view which many students of the radical Right consider dangerously close to euphemizing a politics of irrationalism and radical evil. Traditionally, fascist ideologues could not be taken "at their word," since even the smallest suspicion of their alleged "rationality" engendered revulsion and unease; that fascist movements were anti-spiritual, that their sparse ideas were only negative and that, on balance, ideology did not carry much weight, long remained common conviction to both laymen and expert historians.[9] In the present context, this long-standing conviction easily translates into the claim that the "primacy of the political" did not constitute an intellectual conviction worthy of substantive analysis but constituted no more than the specious signature of an irrational and inexhaustible scramble for power.
Since the early 1960s, however, "revisionist" political historians such as Stem, Nolte, Gregor and Sternhell have begun to recognize that fascism did indeed feature a complex, systematic and coherent ideological doctrine, which reflected a respectable historical ancestry and was decisive for practical politics. Accordingly, fascist ideology was not nihilistic but founded on authentic forms of intellectual idealism. Neither was it conservative, at least not in the traditional sense; it represented an authentic revolutionary impulse.[10] Intellectual historians are also increasingly acknowledging that fascism provided reasonably coherent answers to evident weaknesses, gaps and paradoxes in rival ideologies such as liberalism and socialism --especially in its Marxist and anarchist variants. Perhaps this critical relation has been especially close with Marxism, which fascist and national socialist thinkers consistently targeted as their most formidable competitor. Apart from elaborating an extended critique of Marxist scientific rationalism, fascist ideologues also cornered defects in its theory about the role of political elites and cultural leadership, and criticized the silences and biases in its concepts of social class (specifically concerning the position of the alienated middle classes and the peasantry) in its theory about national sentiment and in its concepts of political power and the state. So far, however, fascism has hardly been given a serious hearing as a theoretical competitor of Marxism, or as an ideology which was pitched at an intellectual level comparable to its rival. It is still rare, in this context, to acknowledge the intellectual failures of socialism and Marxism themselves, and the concomitant attractions which were exercised by the counter-ideology of fascism.
The Fascist Equation
Writing in 1933, both as a former syndicalist Marxist and as the most prestigious political scientist of the Mussolini regime, Robert Michels outlined the relation between Marxism and fascism as follows: "Fascism cannot be comprehensively understood without an understanding of Marxism. This is true not only because contemporary phenomena cannot be adequately understood without a knowledge of the facts that preceded them in time (and with which they are linked dialectically), but also because of the points of contact which, in spite of everything, remain. That which, to its advantage, distinguishes Italian Fascism from German National Socialism, is its painful passage through the purgatory of the socialist system, with its impressive heritage of scientific and philosophical thought from Saint-Simon through Marx and Sorel."[11]
Leading thinkers of the "Conservative Revolution" in Weimar Germany chose to picture their indebtedness to Marxist thought in more agonistic terms. Moeller van den Bruck, author of the prophetic Das dritte Reich (1923), claimed to counter internationalist, democratic and proletarian socialism by a truly "German" socialism, which was to be nationalist, elitist and authoritarian in inspiration; it would hence "begin where Marxism ended" in order to eliminate all traces of liberalism in the spiritual history of mankind.[12] Hans Freyer, a well-known sociologist and author of the influential pamphlet Revolution von Rechts, suggested that the very demise of the revolution of the Left was presently creating room for a revolution from the Right; this volkische revolution, directed by the State as its conscious and organizational vanguard, would finally emancipate the State from its century-long entwinement in societal interests.[13] In the preface to his synoptic pro-Nazi work, Deutscher Sozialismus, Werner Sorebart, while recommending an intimate knowledge of Marxism as an "ineluctable demand" for any participant in politics, considered it his duty "to direct the apparently strong forces that work for a completion of the national socialist idea in its socialist aspect."[14]
In Weimar Germany, as in France and Italy before WWI, revolutionary conservatism thus partly developed through a critical confrontation with and digestion of Marxist socialism, which one way or the other counted among the most significant cultural roots of fascist ideology. Under this aspect, fascism can be truthfully described as socialism's "dark side." Anticipated by Burnham and Hayek,[15] this thesis about the peculiar relation between Marxism and fascism is encountered in contemporary historical disputes with different shades of emphasis. For Nolte, fascism represents a radical counter-ideology, which in its "hostile proximity" remains deeply indebted to its polar opposite. In his familiar definition, fascism is "anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always however, within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy."[16] For Gregor, fascism represents not so much a reversal of Marxism as a radical heresy emerging from crisis-ridden classical Marxism, which "was sufficiently vague and porous to accommodate all the theoretical elements later put together by Mussolini and the first Fascists to fashion their revolutionary ideology." Along with many others in his political environment, the young Mussolini was a Marxist intellectual heretic who should be taken seriously in that capacity. Indeed, fascism itself should be taken seriously as "a variant of classical Marxism" rather than as its metaphysical opposite.[17]
Sternhell has carved out a position that mediates between the opposite exaggerations of Nolte and Gregor. According to him, fascism neither constitutes the "long shadow" or mirror image of Marxism, nor can it be simply seen as one of its heretical branches. The "fascist equation," instead, emerges from the synthesis of a specific anti-rationalist and anti-materialist revision of Marxism (the anarcho-syndicalist school of Sorel, Lagardelle, Michels, Berth and others) and of a newly developed "integral" and revolutionary nationalism, elaborated in France by Barres, Maurras and Valois and in Italy by former syndicalists such as Labriola, Panunzio, Corradini, Michels and Mussolini. In this respect, a revision of Marxism in a revolutionary syndicalist direction (or a "revolutionary revisionism," as Michels termed it) formed at least one of the two crucial tributaries to ideological fascism.[18] This "revolutionary revisionism" considered itself anti-bourgeois, anti-parliamentarian and anti-party, glorifying a revolutionary spirit of combat without privileging the proletariat as world-historical actor. It embraced socialism less as an outcome of objectively determined economic coordination than as a matter of ethical choice; and it squarely acknowledged the "authoritarian" fact of leadership by political intellectuals, grounding its utopian expectations on a novel union between this radical managerial intelligentsia and the broad ranks of the "people" or "nation."
Fascist ideology thus emerged, at least in part, from a novel confluence of Marxism and anarchism, or more precisely: from an anarcho-syndicalist revision of Marxist orthodoxy which increasingly distanced itself from the latter's economistic, deterministic and egalitarian premises. French revolutionary syndicalism always placed more emphasis on the role of ethical sentiment and political will, on myth and intuition, and on the autonomy of intellectual and political elites; its Italian counterpart, drifting away even further from classical anarchist principles, gradually accentuated authoritarian notions about revolutionary organization, discipline and vanguard leadership, while simultaneously exchanging traditional internationalist views for a closer recognition of the irrepressible fact of nationality. In the first decade of the present century, syndicalists such as Panunzio, Olivetti and Michels, invoking Engels' familiar remarks on the necessity of authority for all types of social organization, came to describe revolutionary syndicalism as essentially "authoritarian" in character and the syndicalist elite as a "new aristocracy" charged with the historic mission of educating the passive working masses toward a new moral and political consciousness. By 1909, Michels advanced the notion of an "iron law of elites," arising from the necessity of organizing for group and class conflicts, especially of a revolutionary nature.[19] In the same vein, Mussolini called Pareto's theory of elites "perhaps the most ingenuous sociological conception of modem times," and went on to describe himself as an "authoritarian" and "aristocratic" socialist.[20]
In a further development, dominated by the experiences of war and economic crisis in an industrially backward nation such as Italy, the syndicalist emphasis on the role of revolutionary elites substituting for an absent or immature proletariat was blended with a growing emphasis on the priority of developing the forces of production within the national framework. This emphasis, if stamped with the revolutionary urgency constitutive of syndicalist ideology, logically led to a reinforced "nationalization" and "statization" of its framework of analysis, which finally overturned what still remained of anarchist anti-authoritarian principles. Italy, to the syndicalists, was a "proletarian nation" which had first to traverse the stage of industrial development and throw off the tutelage of the more advanced capitalist nations before it was able to complete something like a Marxian revolution. What was needed was a strong "developmental" state that would harmonize the classes and organize a productivist revolution from above.[21] Pioneered in Italy by Corradini, Panunzio and Michels, this "proletarian nationalism" or "state syndicalism," by proclaiming an end to the disruptive class war and seeking the "total mobilization" of all productive forces in the nation under the guidance of a dynamic, innovatory and entrepreneurial state, subsequently re-emerged both in "conservative revolutionary" and "national Bolshevik" thought in Weimar Germany and in that of Belgian and French neosocialisme. In claiming the sovereignty of state politics over economic production, "national socialism," in this specific "developmental" version, simultaneously affirmed the primacy of the political and conceded the essentially secondary nature of the property question; property rights were henceforth defined as socially functional and contingent upon the demands of state-directed economic development. Not surprisingly, fascism's comparative "leniency" toward private property was precisely the master criterion which its Marxist adversaries required in order to "prove" its essentially reactionary nature as a handmaiden of capitalism.[22] Anarchism, of course, had been dismissed as a "petty-bourgeois luxury" on precisely the same ground.
"German Socialism" as Power Theory
It is a curious coincidence that one of the most detailed and influential polemics written against state socialist views by the founders of historical materialism can be plausibly read as an anticipatory critique of the fascist and national socialist affirmation of the primacy of the political. This polemic was directed against the "German socialism" of Eugen-Karl Duhring and written by Engels in 1877-78 in order to combat the growing influence of the former's ideas in the socialist movement of his day. A Berlin philosopher and economist, Duhring combined a defence of free competition with the notion of creating a strong national state expressive of the general will of the German Volk, which would establish an autarkic political economy and supervise a nationalized culture built on class harmony. This "German socialism"[23] was strongly contrasted with the "Jewish" socialism of Marx and his associates.
Duhring, of course, is one among the select army of thinkers who seems solely remembered today because Marx and Engels at one time considered it worth their while to consign to the scrapheap of intellectual history.[24] While major figures such as Stirner and Proudhon have meanwhile successfully shaken off this Marxian shadow, Duhring is still almost exclusively known through the abbreviated title of Engels' exhaustively and consistently malevolent Anti-Duhring. His views are only briefly outlined here because his vision of a nationalist and state-directed "German" socialism largely anticipated the revolutionary-conservative thinking as it emerged from the ordeal of the Great War and the intellectual ferment of Weimar in the 1920s and early 1930s. In the wartime and postwar writings of Plenge, Sombart, Spengler, Junger, Freyer and Schmitt, much of the debate with Marxism was once again condensed in the analytical dilemma about the subordination of the political vis-a-vis the economic. A considerable part of Engels' polemic against Duhring was likewise devoted to a critical dissection of the latter's "theory of force," seeking to reverse his conviction that the constitution of political relations was historically fundamental and that economic dependencies were only an effect or a special case and hence invariably constituted "facts of secondary importance." Some of the newer socialist systems, Duhring stated, had totally reversed the order of priority by deriving political phenomena from economic conditions. Although such secondary, retroactive effects were indeed present, the primitive fact had to be located in immediate political force and not in indirect economic power. The original "fall from grace," when Robinson Crusoe enslaved Friday, from which all subsequent history took its departure, was an act of force; and all property was therefore Gewalteigentum, since it rested upon this original act of political subjection.[25]
Duhring's own example, Engels riposted, clearly demonstrated that force was only the means, while economic advantage (the surplus labor extracted from Friday) constituted the end; which made the economic aspect of the relation historically more fundamental than the political one. In order to enslave Friday, Robinson Crusoe had to dispose of the tools and material objects of labor as well as the means for the slave's own subsistence, which presupposed a certain level of productivity and distributive inequality. In this fashion, Duhring stood the entire relation on its head. Everywhere private property emerged from changes in relations of production and exchange in which the role of force did not enter. The entire necessary movement toward monopolization of the means of production and subsistence in the hands of a restricted class and the attendant demotion of the vast majority to the status of propertyless proletarians could be explained from purely economic causes without having to invoke phenomena such as theft, force, state action or any other kind of political involvement. Force remained universally dependent upon Money, which could only be generated by economic production; it was the economic situation which ultimately furnished Force with the equipment it required.[26]
If Duhring, as Michels later reported,[27] was temporarily "buried alive" by Engels' massive polemic, it would not be long before ideas closely resembling his volkische socialism caught the imagination of an entire generation of German "anti-intellectual" and anti-Marxist intellectuals. From around 1910, but especially spurred by the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, authors such as Sombart, Plenge, Spengler, Junger, Van den Bruck, Freyer and Schmitt were to crystallize similar ideas into what became known as the "German socialism" of the "Conservative Revolution."[28] Roughly a decade after the incubation period of Italian national syndicalism, the "conservative revolutionaries" reinvented and deepened in all important respects its conceptual merger of intransigent nationalism and radical anticapitalism. The "primacy of the political over the economic" stood out as one major common theme. Thus, in Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (1911), Sombart, already renowned as a left-wing sociologist and historian of capitalism, expounder the view that the primacy of the economy over all other spheres of social life had been the special contribution of the "Jewish spirit."[29] The capitalist domination of money and abstraction was Jewish in its essence; Jews represented everything that was universal, rootless, international and abstract in contrast to all that was local, rooted, nationalist and concrete. Two souls, in fact, lived in the breast of the capitalist entrepreneur: the "German" one of dynamic risk-taking and rational planning of production and the "Jewish" one of calculating for financial gain. While the "German" entrepreneur was an inventor, organizer and leader, "a hero of production," the "Jewish" merchant was exclusively interested in commercial profit and remained indifferent to the product itself.
Sombart's wartime pamphlet Handler und Helden (1915) extrapolated this opposition between the spirit of commercialism and the spirit of organization -- and between the exemplary types of economic and political man -- to the national contest between Germany, a nation of social order and political hierarchy, and England, the historical guardian of the merchant capitalist spirit. English commercial civilization had to be countered by the "German idea of the state," as pioneered by Fichte, Lassalle and Rodbertus, which requested subordination of individual interests to the higher interests of the popular community.[30] The outbreak of the war had triggered a broad stream of patriotic polemics revolving around what Johann Plenge, a neo-Hegelian sociologist, had influentially styled the "Ideas of 1914." 1789 and 1914 symbolized the two grand principles in the history of political thought battling for pre-eminence: the ideal of individual freedom, which was the essence of liberal capitalism, and the ideal of social organization, which constituted the essence of socialism. Whereas the 19th century had been an atomized, critical and disorganized century, the 20th century was to be dominated by the idea of "German organization," which was commissioned to establish the popular community of a national socialism. In Der Krieg und die Volkswirtschaft (1915) Plenge, like Sombart, extrapolated the opposition between capitalism and socialism toward the war of the West against Germany; first realized as a war economy, German socialism would consolidate a state-regulated Volkswirtschaft after the inspirational example of Fichte's "closed commercial state." It was high time to recognize that "socialism must be power policy, because it is to be organization. Socialism has to win power, never blindly destroy it."[31]
Spengler's Preussentum und Sozialismus (1919) was perhaps the most stirring conservative-revolutionary call to arms issuing from this wartime intellectual ferment. Like Sombart and Plenge, he divined an implacable opposition between the "English" liberal spirit of society, profit and competition and the "Prussian" instinct of order, community, hierarchy, duty and labor. This opposition had unfolded into a heroic life-or-death clash between two dominating "world ideas": the dictatorship of money and that of organization, which defined the world alternatively "as booty or as state, wealth or authority, success or profession." Would in the future, Spengler rhetorically asked, "commerce govern the state or the state govern commerce?"[32] To decide this issue, German socialism had to be liberated from Marx, who had merely invented a kind of "inverted capitalism," and install an authoritarian socialism -- a socialism of the civil servant and the organizer, which was prepared to use to the full the economic authority of the state. The essence of socialism did not reside in the opposition between rich and poor, but in the fact that rank, performance and competence would rule life. In Spengler's projected state corporatism, property would not be seen as private booty but as a procuration of the whole community; not as an expression and means of personal power but as a trust or fief for which the proprietor owed accountability to the state. In this respect, socialization was not so much a matter of nominal possession but of technique of administration. Socialism, in brief, meant "power, power and yet again power. Plans and thoughts are nothing without power."[33]
Freyer, Junger, Sombart
Three other texts are worthy of attention here, since together they consolidated the intellectual framework of German socialism as a theory of power rather than one of property: Freyer's Die Bewertung der Wirtschaft im philosophischen Denken des 19. Jahrhunderts (1921), Junger's Der Arbeiter (1932) and Sombart's Deutscher Sozialismus (1934). Freyer's Habilitations-schrift fleshed out ideas about the commercial and "marketing" spirit of the 19th century, adopted from his teachers Plenge and Sombart, in a broadly conceived intellectual history of the "naturalization" or autonomization of the "economic" frame of mind. Liberal political economy and the socialist tradition shared the same basic concept of the abstract law-like autonomy and the primordial value of economic life, which Marx had even elevated into an ontologically grounded essence -- a "cause of causes" in the interplay of cultural moments.[34] With the avowed purpose of reframing this economic rationalism in a new communitarian ethics and politics of the people state, Freyer invoked the Romantic tradition of national economy, especially Adam Muller's Elemente der Staatskunst, whose idea of a corporatist Volkswirtschafi, in which each function partook of "the spiritual whole of the politicized economy," had received further elaboration at the hands of authors such as List, Rodbertus, Hildebrand and Schaffle. "Economic life," Freyer summed up, "is not necessarily the commercial contest of atomized interests, which it is at present. It is a spiritual concern of the state community."[35] Recently this tradition of historical, ethical (and truly political) economy had tended more strongly in a state socialist direction. Extrapolating this trend, Freyer harmonized this tradition's shared neo-Hegelian concept of the ethical state with that of volkische political nationalism by identifying it as "the acme, in which the people become historical," both anticipating his subsequent laudation of the state as the ultimate perfection of spiritual development in Der Staat (1926) and his ringing expression about the state as "the politicized people" in Revolution von Rechts (1931).[36]
Following Spengler and Sombart, at the beginning of the 1930s Junger developed a spectacular metaphysic of war, discipline and total mobilization which has accurately been described as a "conservative anarchism."[37] His portentous essay "Die totale Mobilmachung" (1930) and his book Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt (1932) -- which carried a memorable dedication to Spengler -- became foundational for National Bolshevik tendencies as formulated by his friend Niekisch, for younger conservative revolutionaries around the journal Die Tat and for the "left-wing" national socialist tendency represented by the young Goebbels and the Strasser brothers within the NSDAP. Developing earlier suggestions by Plenge and Moeller van den Brock, these circles saw the insurrection of "young," "proletarian" nations such as Soviet Russia and Germany against the "old" capitalist powers as requiring a national and autarkic "war socialism" geared toward a total mobilization of all of the nation's human and material resources. Germany's military defeat, Moeller van den Brock had argued after Versailles, should be exploited as an "educational" challenge. Since, like the proletariat, Germany now possessed little more than its chains, it should not fear the coming world revolution, but could spearhead the war of liberation of the expropriated nations against the world bourgeoisie. Junger, Niekisch, Edgar Jung, the Tatkreis intellectuals[38] and the Strasserites within (and soon to be drummed out of) the NSDAP all echoed this alarming conversion of the Marxist idea of the economic alienation of the proletariat into that of the spiritual-political contamination of the nation.
Reversing Rathenau's dictum that, in the modem world, not politics but economics had acquired the force of fate, Junger outlined a universal trend toward state-directed mobilization and planned organization of economic life, which forced everyone and everything into the harsh mold of an all-enveloping logic of power.[39] It was instructive to notice, for instance, that in the Soviet planning experiment the economic mode of thinking had superseded itself and evolved into an outright deployment of power. The world war had essentially been a gigantic labor process, fusing the Warrior and the Worker into a single form, which sharply contrasted with that of the bourgeois, the typical representative of liberal disorganization.[40] Editors of Die Tat such as Fried and Wirsing likewise emphasized this inevitable drive toward state organization of economic life in terms of an autarkic planned economy, which was prefigured in the war economy but remained imperative in order to shield Germany from the havoc of a collapsing world economy. By pressing the economy into its service, the state would simultaneously "grow together" with the working masses and, in fusing state and people, it would realize the perfection of democracy. In this new frame of things, the place of economic science would once again be taken by the political sciences.[41]
Junger's Der Arbeiter (1932) further detailed the worker-soldier as the archetypal "political man" and torchbearer of a totalitarian industrial dictatorship, over against the liberal and Marxist conception of the worker as "product of industry" and a merely "economic quality."[42] The emancipation of the laborer from the economic world implied his subordination to a higher law of struggle. It meant that the pivotal point of the worker's insurrection was neither economic freedom nor economic power, but power as such. In contrast with the security-minded bourgeois, the worker enjoyed "a new relation with the elementary, with freedom and power;" the will to power was the truest representation of his form.[43] Property and labor power stood under state protection and hence were essentially limited in their freedom of movement. Indeed, "in terms of an investigation of the worker" the question of private property was much less interesting than current ideology presumed. Different from the world of liberal economy, it did matter much less in the world of labor whether property was considered moral or immoral; what counted was whether it could be included into a general labor plan. More important was the manner in which the state instituted and circumscribed property as a subordinate fact; its value would rather be assessed in terms of its contribution to the realization of total mobilization, or what Junger synonymically referred to as the mobilization of labor.[44]
Speaking around the same time at the Fascist Congress of Corporations at Ferrara, Sombart once again summed up what had become the central credo of the Conservative Revolution: that the previous century had been the century of economics, in which economic interests weighed heavier than all other factors of culture, but that the future was going to be a political epoch, in which politics would once again reign supreme.[45] Sombart's Deutscher Sozialismus, published a year after the Hitler coup, was similarly written as a comprehensive indictment of the primacy of the economic as the most essentially negative characteristic of the time. Repeating and systematizing all the major themes developed over the decade by himself and other writers of the radical Right, he insisted that economic rationalization had conjured up the triple disease of intellectualization, objectification and uniformity. Bourgeois class formation, the proletarian class struggle and hence also proletarian socialism were actually "true children of the economic age": Marx's metaphysics of history incorrectly generalized this particularity of the economic into a defining characteristic of human history. Meanwhile the "idea of the state" had gradually faded away and finally disappeared. German socialism was therefore nothing other than "the renunciation of the economic age in its totality." Because it targeted the general spirit of this age, it was far more radical than other movements. While proletarian socialism, more specifically, was only "capitalism with a negative sign," German socialism was truly anti-capitalist.[46]
After much preliminary footwork, Sorebart went on to identify socialism as a "social normativism" set over against the "social naturalism" of economizing thought, explaining that obligatory norms originated from the "general reason" rooted in the political community as represented by its state. Socialism was hence not confined to the economy, but had to be understood as "the total order of the German people," a total ordering of all sectors of culture born from a uniform spirit and issuing from a single center. Because this popular socialism realized itself within the national framework, the only powers which were able to carry it through were state powers. Invoking the heritage of Fichte, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Rodbertus and Lassalle, Sombart consequently insisted on the need for a strong state which would govern a corporate, organic and hierarchical social order which recognized the primacy of the political.[47] The planned economy of German socialism would be at once comprehensive, single-minded and differentiated. The private economy would not need to be liquidated, as long as it was incorporated in a larger meaningful whole directed by the popular will embodied in the state. The property question, Sombart stipulated, was indeed "not an independent issue" for German socialism. For it, the bitterly embattled alternative of private vs. communal property did not exist. Private property was not unlimited in scope, but remained socially committed after the model of feudal tenure.[48] The core issue was that property rights no longer determined the foundations of economic activity, but that the (political) foundations of economic activity henceforth determined the scope and character of property rights.[49]
Dialectics of the Political: Schmitt and Others
In their totalizing conceptualizations of power, the political and the state, ideologists of the radical Right tended to retain a cognitive pattern typical of the intellectual systems they sought to reverse: the dialectic of the "last instance." The subtle Marxist scenario of over-determined reciprocity remained in place, resulting in a dialectic of constitution which similarly articulated the social whole into relatively autonomous spheres, even if the status of ontological "category of origin" now fell on the political. Curiously, this reversed dialectic derived as much from a politicized recapitulation of the Hegelian notion of the ethical state, interpreted as the culmination of the entire idealist tradition, as nourished by a duly collectivized and nationalized version of Nietzsche's will to power. If the Conservative Revolution was virtually "unthinkable" without Nietzsche,[50] the work of Spengler, Freyer and Sombart -- and, in the Italian context, that of Gentile, Spirito, Panunzio, Olivetti and Michels -- was there to verify the enduring legacy and converging influence of the accredited father of the dialectic.
Appropriated by Moeller van den Bruck in his pioneering article "Nietzsche und der Sozialismus" (1919), the Nietzschean metaphysic of power also infiltrated Spengler's Preussentum und Sozialismus (1919) and its call for "hardness," for a class of "socialist supermen," and for "power, power and yet again power."[51] If Spengler could affirm, in the first part of The Decline of the West (1918), that "all of life is politics," the latter was again taken in the transcendental Nietzschean sense and closely identified with "life," "action," and "war;" while his concept of the "state" tendentially encompassed all human activity, the connecting tissue of its living whole, in the long tradition that connected Muller to Fichte and Hegel. For his part, Gentile was clear about adopting Mazzini's inclusive concept of the political "in that overall sense which is indistinguishable from morality, religion, or any other conception of life." As a totalitarian doctrine with its center of gravity in political matters, fascism was therefore not simply concerned with the political order but sought to encompass the nation's "will, thought and feelings." As supreme creator of rights and liberties, the power of the stato etico was coextensive with social order and constituted the individual's true moral reality; state and individual should accordingly be considered "inseparable terms of an essential synthesis."[52]
Freyer's Der Staat (1926) laid out this political dialectic in terms of a world-historical progression of three stages directed by the development of objective Spirit, which he described as belief, style and state. The final stage, in which spirit took a "political turn," represented the ultimate telos and perfection of cultural development. Here spirit realized its ultimate objectification in the state, which would henceforth politicize all elements of culture; it was truly "the spirit of the age."[53] The stage of style, although it had proliferated the manifold expressions of human creativity, had not been able to unify them; the essential quality of the state, by contrast, was its ability to forge living humanity with all its forces into a unity. The world could only be changed through power, which remained "one of the integrative and formative forces of the human world." Power created form out of the flux of life and molded the individual into "a necessary link in the exalted whole of the Reich."[54] Freyer's totalizing concepts of power and domination found a clear resonance in Junger's Der Arbeiter and many other writings of the radical Right.[55]
In subsequent work, such as the 1933 essay Herrschaft, Planung und Technik, Freyer not only repeated his criticism of the Marxist tendency to "shift the fact of domination toward the economic" and interpret it as a mere form of exploitation, but also explicitly drew on Max Weber's "realistic" account of the ubiquity of domination in all types of social organization.[56] In this essay he also specified that, unlike classical liberal (and presumably, Marxist) thought, structural differentiation and stratification could well originate from the state, which could even actively create new estates or classes with functions of domination, such as the noblesse de robe or a proprietory bourgeoisie. This emphasis was repeated in somewhat different form in "Das Politische als Problem der Philosophic" (1935), which lamented 19th-century philosophy's dogmatic "neutralization" of the political, pleading philosophical recognition of the fact that the political belonged to the essence and destiny of mankind, that it signified no less than mankind's "second creation." Virtually reversing the Marxist dialectics of economic constitution, Freyer intoned that the political was the true soil from which culture grew, adding in Hegelian fashion that the state constituted the "totality of the systems of the objective spirit," the sum of its own social articulations. These systems were "not just regulated or protected or historically represented by it, but constituted and brought into existence as its moments, even in their capacity as autonomous spheres."[57]
So far there has been hardly any mention of the major intellectual figure whose influential concept of the political[58] perhaps offered the most clear-cut example of this reversal of ontological terms.[59] Indeed, Schmitt's vivid defence of the autonomy of the political against liberal and Marxist "neutralizations" and "depoliticizations"[60] notoriously slipped into a far more offensive claim about the political as first and last constitutive instance, which acted as a totalizing force, even while the specificity of alternative instances was to some extent preserved. The political was essentially autonomous, not in the sense of marking out a new area laterally positioned vis-a-vis others (such as morality, culture, economics, or religion), but as a self-revealing essence not reducible to any one of them but that could operate in all. Because it was oriented toward the emergency or the state of exception, the specifically political distinction -- between friend and enemy -- marked the highest degree of intensity of a social association or dissociation. As a matter of tension rather than extension, it had no substance of its own; the specifically "political" might be reached from all areas as soon as indigenous conflicts were fueled into a high degree of polarity. The political logic was hence always foundational and the political entity always the decisive entity, sovereign in the sense of being determinant in the decisive instance. The state was therefore the determinant condition of a people, "its status as such," the societas perfecta of this nether world.[61] In a democratically organized community, state and society mutually penetrated and fused, inaugurating the "total state" of the "identity between state and society," in which politically neutral areas ceased to exist. Even if "state-free" societal spheres were reconstituted, they were conditionally demarcated by the totalizing and functionalizing state.[62] As Schmitt declared, not only should one acknowledge that "the political" was "the total," but also that the decision about whether something is unpolitical invariably entails a political decision.[63]
Such theoretical preferences lent a peculiar significance to Schmitt's apercu, in The Concept of the Political, with regard to the "19th century German tension of state and society, politics and economy." As backdrop to a rather specific critique of Oppenheimer's liberal sociology of the state, which emphatically reversed the Hegelian order of evaluation, this insight also appeared to have wider validity for interpreting similar reversals by anarchist, syndicalist and Marxist thinkers. While Hegel, as Schmitt explained, set the state as the realm of ethical perfection and objective reason high above society, Oppenheimer's radical liberalism instead privileged economic society as the sphere of peaceful justice and equal exchange, degrading the state as a region of violent immorality, "extraeconomic" force, thievery and conquest. While the roles were reversed, the apotheosis remained.[64] Despite such unusual perceptiveness about "knowledge-political" rivalries between foundational concepts and intellectual systems, Schmitt himself, however, did not reflexively withdraw from the grand polemic and the grand binary but manifestly reinforced them by once again celebrating a grand apotheosis of the political.
Whereas, for Oppenheimer as for radical Marxists, the state would wither away and everything would become "societal" or "economic" -- since both the liberal and the communist state coincided with the associated producers -- everything would turn political in Schmitt's homogeneous people's state. The sovereignty of the economy (and of political economy as master science) was once again exchanged for the sovereignty of the political (and of political philosophy). This structural affinity turned Oppenheimer, Marx and Schmitt into "last instance" theorists with comparable ambitions: spokesmen who permitted themselves to be carried by "their" instances and by the science which lent them a socio-ontological primacy. Indeed, ira specific instance is claimed to be "sovereign," "decisive," or "inescapable," this is metonymically valid for the theory and the theorist that cultivate it as such.
The Intellectuals' Socialism of the Right
If for many intellectuals on the radical Right "the political" operated as a dialectical category of origin, allowing a permanent slippage between a partial, domanial concept and more totalizing and foundational ones, it also opened vast possibilities for what can be called the "metonymic fallacy of the intellectuals."[65] As radical spokesmen for the higher interests of state sovereignty, national homogeneity and cultural identity, the political intellectuals of the Right consistently insinuated their partial concerns into their missionary definitions of the "general will" and the world-historical project of the nation. The identitarian dialectic of power reflected their aspiration to emerge as the "part" that would empower the "whole"; it enabled them to read their own desired fate (to be prime movers and final causes of social action) into the objective hierarchy and causality of the world. The logic of substitution, according to which the people was defined as coming to reflexive self-consciousness in its state, also reflected a politics of knowledge through which the intellectuals molded both people and state after their own missionary self-image. Their oscillatory, "emanative," systematically overflowing concept of sovereignty, domination and the state silently suggested that intellectual spokesmen were legitimately everywhere and could substitute for all other interests. The claim about the ontological primacy of the political performatively but obliquely supported the more subterranean claim about the political primacy of the intellectuals themselves.
As an initial illustration of this knowledge-political double play, we may call attention to the obverse side of the right-wing intellectuals' politicization of the intellect, which was consistently balanced with a distinctly spiritualist or intellectualist definitions of the state and the political themselves. Extrapolating the long lineage of idealist philosophy and Romantic historiography which culminated in the Hegelian idea of objective spirit, the state was preferably circumscribed as a "spiritual form," a rational state in which the people became a subject-for-itself, attaining reflexive self-consciousness about its moral will and historical mission. The Hegelian ethical state was not only the moralizing but simultaneously the reasoning or rational state, the "social brain" which would act as a dynamic unifier and mobilizer of all human and physical resources. Gentile's neo-idealist statism was as spiritualist as Freyer's, which eulogized the state early on as the "spiritually conceived subject of history"[66] and as "the spirit as a goal,"[67] carefully stipulating that only those who knew the true direction of Geist had a right to historical action. Adding to a theme which had already attained prolific dimensions on the radical Right, Freyer also portrayed political action as a creative act and the political leader as a creative artist, who gave form to his people as an artist lent form to his work of art.[68] The "political turn" of spirit was hence consistently accompanied by a "spiritual turn" in the definition of the political itself; the newly projected synthesis of reason and power, far from implying a linear reduction of the former to the latter, simultaneously represented a bid for a spiritualized politics and a bid for power on the part of the "spiritual men" themselves.
The core notion of a knowledgeable, moralizing and entrepreneurial state also included an ambition toward the spiritualization of economic life, once again to be taken in the triple sense of rationalization, moratization and politicization. This cluster of virtual synonyms focussed what became one of the most persistent thematics in the discourse of the intellectual Right: the contrast between the Germanic "spirit of organization," inherently partial to rational planning and socialism, and the un-German (English, Jewish or generically foreign) spirit of capitalist individualism and disorganization. While the Italian fascist idea of the state as supreme consciousness and universal will of the nation could in this respect build on the tradition of political syndicalism, the Hitlerian conception of the strong state as "intelligence" and "organizer" of national production extended and repeated what was already fully contained in the "ideas of 1914," which had dramatized the world-historical contest between the "idea of money" and the "idea of organization," and prophesied the coming rule of "the socialism of the civil servant and the organizer."[69] This Saint-Simonian form of the intellectual organizer also moved up front in the "developmental," mobilizing regimes as they were projected in the planning utopias of the Italian syndicalists or those of Junger, Freyer and the Tatkreis.[70] Total mobilization of labor, to Junger, was clearly suggestive of the novel power of organizational thinking.[71] His warrior-worker, moreover, was evidently metonymic for the political technician or the "organizing" intellectual (such as Junger himself), whose existential condition and missionary aspirations had also inspired the (equally self-referring) profile of the class-conscious proletarian fighter according to Marx. In a broader intellectual context, indeed, the national syndicalist and conservative-revolutionary concepts of a state-directed "organization of labor" were definitely reminiscent of and parasitic on leftwing socialist concepts, as formulated much earlier by, e.g., Proudhon and Blanc.
Predictably, this idea of the "organization of labor" also encircled a persistent theme in corporatist thought, both in its more etatist and its more democratic "societal" versions.[72] As Manoilescu phrased it in his influential Le siecle du corporatisme, the economically defined dominance of labor and capital was presently receding into the past, while political "organization" was emerging as a novel autonomous force, inaugurating a regime of order, unity and competence. In the new functionalist order, authority would dominate property, which was essentially a rent in the general interest, to be guarded by a dynamically innovating and coordinating state. Appealing to Saint-Simon as an inspiring precursor and emphasizing the radical differences separating the corporatist project from both liberalism and communism, Manoilescu prefigured the organizer as the true prototype of the coming corporatist state.[73] Similar concepts about a corporatist technocracy and a "new aristocracy" of technicians and political intellectuals were current in the writings of Italian syndicalists and nationalists such as Michels, Rocco, Spirito and Panunzio.[74] They also resonated in German-Romantic utopias about an organically articulated people's economy, in which all occupations would be defined as civic duties and in which a managerial elite of engineers, industrialists and volkische intellectuals would institute rational order within the framework of the national community.
Clearly, there was a significant fight-wing, "national-socialist" variant of the traditionally Left-identified, "Saint-Simonian" vision of the political calling of a new managing elite and the significance of fascist ideology cannot be fully grasped independently of this elitist claim. The history of this multifaceted, politically diversified "socialism of the intellectuals," even if it was promoted by self-styled "anti-intellectual intellectuals" critical of Enlightenment values, at least sensitizes to some peculiar aspects of the still widely tabooed intellectual proximity between radical Left and radical Right, whose shared technocratic ideals sometimes offered a bridgehead for mutual intellectual exchanges and even crossovers from one side to the other. The viability and ubiquity of this shared "technocratic dream" was nowhere more clear than in the fateful itinerary of "crossover" intellectuals such as Mussolini, Michels, Lagardelle and other Sorelians in early-century France and Italy, represented more rarely in Germany by thinkers such as Sombart and epitomized perhaps most dramatically by Marcel Deat in France and Hendrik de Man in Belgium in the mid- and late 1930s.
"Crown princes" both of their respective parties, the SFIO and the BWP and influential revisionists of the orthodox Marxism embraced by their patrons Blum and Vandervelde, during the 1930s Deat and De Man slowly drifted toward premises and political tactics approximating notions about the strong state, a "national socialism," a state-directed economy and the rule of an intellectual technocracy also current at the other end of the political spectrum. Opposing Blum's "economistic" and "fatalist" policies in the summer of 1933, Deat and his associates capped their defence of a radically activist neosocialisme with the ringing slogan "Order, Authority, Nation," pleading a shift from class to national policy and the necessity of first organizing the economy within the national framework. De Man's plan of labor, enthusiastically adopted by the BWP at its Christmas Congress in the same year, similarly propounded a novel doctrine of socialization, according to which national implementation (or "socialism in one country") was to take priority over the shady prospect of internationalism. In a far-reaching reversal, the essence of socialization was located less in the transfer of ownership than in that of authority, which implied that control now took precedence over possession.[75] Anticipating Burnham, Berle and other managerialists, both De Man and Deat theorized that property and power were in the process of separating in the modem shareholding economy, which transformed the problem of socialism into one of organization and management rather than ownership of the means of production. In Perspectives socialistes (1930), Deat explicitly overturned the Marxist scenario by proposing to tackle first the power of capitalism, subsequently to take over profit and finally to socialize capitalist property. To be sure: the idea that socialization was no longer a question of ownership but of "technique of administration," as a result of the developing fissure between ownership and management, could already be found in conservative revolutionaries from Spengler to Fried and can be traced even further back to French and Italian syndicalism.[76]
In the late 1930s, the embryonic concept of the strong state common to both neo-socialism and planism, which presumed at least some degree of autonomy of the political vis-a-vis the economic, gradually evolved into a fully-fledged doctrine of state primacy and "authoritarian democracy," according to which the political state was to carry through a socialist revolution "from above" against the powers of capitalist finance and institute a corporatist regime to be run by an elite of intellectual technicians. Distancing themselves ever further from liberal parliamentarian politics, both Deat and De Man came to distinguish between what the latter called a "true, social and proletarian democracy" and a "false, only parliamentary and formal bourgeois democracy."[77] After the Nazi victory in early 1940, they both stood convinced that the demise of capitalist democracy was final and that the war inaugurated a revolutionary period which offered new promises for socialism. In a notorious manifesto of June 1940, De Man advised his fellow socialists to join "the movement of national insurrection" in order to realize "the sovereignty of labor" under the guidance of a single party and a totalitarian state. Somewhat later, he acknowledged German National Socialism as "the German form of socialism" and pleaded cooperation with the Reich "within the framework of a unified Europe and a universal socialist revolution."[78] Like De Man, whose collaborationist adventure was comparatively brief, Deat in 1940 placed his considerable powers of intellect in the service of the National-Socialist revolution and entered the collaborationist regime of Vichy.[79]
Reinventing the Political
Half a century after the defeat of the fascist regimes, the intellectual horizon is in many respects dramatically altered. Precisely as a result of the indissoluble association between the heritage of the radical Right and the agonizing memories of the Holocaust, "fascism" has become a universal term of political abuse, eclipsing its ideological stature and pedigree and censuring its intellectual content as being unworthy of serious analysis. Given the persistence of this ideological void on the Right, radical assertions about a "primacy of the political" in the postwar period tended to originate from the Left and were often clad in the confusingly indirect Marxist vocabulary of the "primacy of the economic." However, some major new schools of Marxist theorizing that emerged in the early 1960s permitted a secular, if initially subterranean, conflation of the two vocabularies, following from an increasingly explicit "Gramscian" recognition of the specificity if not primordiality of political and cultural causation, which pressed against the limits of extension of the logic of "last instance" economic determination. While theorists such as Althusser and Poulantzas already stretched the Marxian logic of causality to its breaking point, post-Marxists such as Foucault, Deleuze, Lefort, the "new philosophers," and Laclau and Mouffe extrapolated this tendency even further, ending up by emphatically reinstating the political at the center of critical attention. Their efforts were parallelled by a massive "defection" of feminist theorists from a Marxist-inspired "political economy of sex" toward generalized notions about the "politics of the personal," "the politics of (gender) identity" and the "politics of discourse." Other intellectual currents, such as ecology or constructivist science and technology studies, similarly abandoned the apparent constrictions of economic repertoires in order to clear the field for a "politics of nature" and a "politics of things."
There is a coldly ironic, disquieting aspect of deja-vu in this novel omnipresence of the political on the political Left, which to some extent exhibits an involuntary "return of the repressed," insofar as it actually recycles many of the critical arguments previously advanced against Marxist and liberal economism by intellectuals of the prewar political Right. Some theorizations come rather close to reinventing the "conservative revolutionary" reversal of priorities by substituting ontological concepts of the political for previous concepts of the economic that continue to resemble the transcendental mechanics of the "last instance." Three such examples may be briefly cited here as collectively exemplifying the latter-day paradox of a Right-inspired search for a new Left-oriented political paradigm. Many are also sufficiently impressed, especially by Schmitt's razor-sharp critique of traditional liberalism, to honor him with recalcitrant or inverse readings of his political theory. The journal Telos has long stood in the forefront of this critical acclaim.[80] Introducing a special issue on the French New Right, for instance, its editor, Paul Piccone, identifies the "bureaucratic centralism" of the former Soviet Union and Western "liberal technocracy" as variations of the same basic Enlightenment model which "by defining all conflicts in economic terms, has successfully occluded a more pervasive logic of domination beyond labor/capital conflicts and predicated on the political power and obtaining between the rulers and the ruled, the experts and the masses, the administrators and the administrated." The main implication of this theory about a newly emerging New Class of politicians, intellectuals and bureaucrats, for Piccone, is "the displacement of economic conflicts between labor and capital as the deus ex machina of social dynamics, in favor of political conflicts between those possessing a 'cultural capital' redeemable as social and political power and those with mere 'cultural liabilities.'" The inspiration for this political analysis of cultural class is quarried both from Left theoreticians such as Gouldner and Konrad and Szelenyi and from the critique of (leftwing) intellectuals by the New Right.[81]
Laclau and Mouffe's writings offer another singular illustration of the internal groundswell which has swept Gramscian Marxism toward a Schmittian invocation of the primordiality of the political. While some commentators already saw Laclau's early Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977) as drifting toward a "power conception of class,"[82] Laclau and Mouffe's "post-Marxist" work, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, more emphatically distanced itself from the orthodox reductionist and essentialist economic paradigm in order to affirm "the new articulatory and recomposing logic of hegemony" as an autonomous political logic which itself structured the space of the economic.[83] Crossing the Marxist threshold in an even more decisive manner, Mouffe's appropriately entitled The Return of the Political further extends their collaborative project by entering upon a close engagement with the legacy of Schmitt, with a view to articulating a radical project of "agonistic" pluralism which is set squarely against the "anti-political" rationalism of Rawlsian political philosophy. Adopting Schmitt's conviction that "the political cannot be restricted to a certain type of institution, or envisaged as constituting a specific sphere or level of society," she chooses to understand it "as a dimension that is inherent to every human society and that determines our very ontological condition." In doing so, she closely follows Lefort's call for a new political philosophy, as well as his expansive understanding of politics as "a specific mode of institution of the social," as the "disciplinary matrix" of social life.[84]
Perhaps it is Lefort's political theory of democracy which provides the closest and most comprehensive approximation to Schmittian concerns, even while it is likewise formulated in the strictest opposition to all totalitarian presumptions of identity.[85] The "great swerve" from sophisticated Marxist economism towards political philosophy repeats itself in the history of Castoriadis' and Lefort's Socialisme ou Barbaric group, which gradually emancipated itself from a Trotskyitc critique of "bureaucratic collectivism" toward a recognition of new politically based forms of exploitation and domination, carrying the questioning step by step "to the heart of Marxist certainty."[86] Socialist thought, Lefort estimated, had insufficiently liberated itself from the liberal problematic, which proclaimed that reality "was to be disclosed at the level of the economy" and thus repressed the question of the political. Marxism's rejection of the political, its "refusal to think in political terms," resulted not simply in a deficient theory of the state, but more profoundly, in a complete lack of a concept of political society, including the nature of totalitarian regimes instituted under the aegis of Marxism itself. Hence the need for a new political philosophy that was able to rehabilitate the political beyond its "positivist" delineation as sector or domain in the social structure toward a broader recognition of it as a generative, originary principle of society, after the model of the Platonic politeia.[87] "Politics," as specific domanial activity, should be differentiated from "the political," which defined the primal dimensionality of the social, configuring society's overall schema and governing the articulation of its various levels or dimensions. It was precisely the focus on narrower "politics," Lefort argued, that obscured the broader acting of "the political" as the formative impulsive primal giving-form of society, taken in the double sense of giving it meaning and location.[88] In democratic societies, this political configuration of the social crucially implied a disentangling of state and society, a separation of the autonomous spheres of power, law and knowledge. Henceforth, the locus of power no longer constituted a substance but an "empty space"; it could not be occupied or appropriated and no individual or group could be consubstantial with it. This strictly opposed the democratic political configuration to the identitarian logic of totalitarianism, which strove to recover power as a substantial reality with the purpose of reunifying society as a homogenous social body governed by a supreme, sovereign power.[89] In this fashion, a totalizing concept of the political closely resembling Schmitt's was paradoxically deflected against the Schmittian politics of homogeneity, subverting its totalitarian temptation by means of a "divisive" vision of democratic difference.
Fifty years after the fascist defeat, this left-wing reinvention of the political is also seconded by parallel reactivating efforts issuing from the New Right. The repressed has also returned under its own flag, aided by the natural obliviousness that belongs to a new generational experience. The fact remains that criticism directed at the universal "marketing" or "economization" of existence and the triumphant proclamation of the liberal "end of history" is no longer solely operated from the Left but is also nurtured by a new radicalism of the Right, which is increasingly implicated in a process of intellectual rationalization. This new intellectualization of the Right implies, among other things, an intense rereading of the neglected legacy of the Conservative Revolution, including its prominent theme of the "primacy of the political." Aschheim has observed that, while the resuscitation of Nietzsche into something like a "European vogue figure" required that he emigrate to France in order to "catch" the poststructuralist revolution of the 1970s, there are signs that he is presently emigrating back and is reappropriated by a new German intellectual Right.[90] In France, however, Benoist has from an early date incorporated Nietzsche's legacy, as well as that of Schmitt, Niekisch and other conservative revolutionaries, in his synthetic project of a New Right;[91] his "Aristotelian" and communitarian conceptions of democracy and citizenship run largely parallel to conservative-revolutionary vindications of the primordial nature of the political. Among the leftist ideas also appropriated in the mid-1970s was Gramsci's converging theory of cultural and political hegemony,[92] thus compounding the spectacle of a Right-inspired leftism with the reverse one of a Left-inspired paradigm of the Right.
In this fashion, the radical-conservative version of the "primacy of the political" may be celebrating an unexpected return. Intellectuals such as Junger, Heidegger, Freyer and Schmitt once again figure as house gods of right-wing intellectual journals such as the German Junge Freiheit or Etappe, or the Russian Elementy, which not only communicate with Benoist but also negotiate with the thought of Foucault and other representatives of French poststructuralism.[93] Significantly, the new conservatism has also joined forces with radical political ecology and its apocalyptic sense of a civilization in disarray, boosting its penchant for totalizing and authoritarian solutions. "Eco-fascism" (or what is sometimes referred to as Blut und Boden ecology) calls for a strong state in order to protect the ecological "commonwealth" and its "natural order" from destruction both through natural disasters and through overpopulation and contamination, which collectively threaten the identity and integrity of the people and its natural habitat. Calls for a "patriotic protection of the environment," as phrased in the 1990 program of the Republikaner Party, are not far from more radical proposals such as entertained by former Green ideologist Herbert Gruhl, who activates familiar Schmittian themes in emphasizing the ecological "state of exception," which is necessarily governed by "martial law," the imperative need for an authoritarian state to plot a strategy of survival and implement it with force, and the concomitant need for abolishing democratic procedure in favor of a dictatorship -- in the present context, of an elite of the ecologically enlightened.[94]
Notes:
[Telos; Winter98 Issue 110, p39, 32p]