Review of Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism

Robert O. Paxton is one of the most distinguished and respected historians of the twentieth century. The author of the groundbreaking study Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, in May he published the culmination of years of teaching and thinking about fascism in the form of The Anatomy of Fascism. This book is intended to be Paxton’s final say on the issue of fascism.

Paxton sees the study of fascism as beset by a number of problems, not least among them the problem of discerning a definition that is wide enough to encompass the myriad of varieties fascism took, and also specific enough to be coherent and usable. Paxton writes: 

Though many … interpretations and definitions were to be proposed over the years … none of them has obtained universal assent as a completely satisfactory account of a phenomenon that seemed to come from nowhere, took on multiple and varied forms, exalted hated and violence in the name of national prowess, and yet managed to appeal to prestigious and well-educated statesmen, entrepreneurs, professionals, artists, and intellectuals.

My main problem with Paxton’s methodology is that he is more interested in the way fascism was brought into practice, rather than the ideas behind it. He is clear from the start that this is the route he is going to take. He says in the introduction that “this book takes the position that what fascists did tells us at least as much as what they said.”  

Paxton seems to have doubts about the efficacy of looking at the ideology of fascism. He writes about how fascism is unlike other political theories given that it came about much later. In Juan Linz’s term, fascism is a latecomer, and this explains why much of its ideology is defined in terms of negatives – anti-communist, anti-liberal, counter-revolutionary etc. Paxton sees fascism’s latecomer status as a great hindrance when it comes to examining its ideas, as it lacks a definitive early exposition. He writes that: 

The other “isms” [conservatism, liberalism, socialism] were created in an era when politics was a gentleman’s business, conducted through protracted and learned parliamentary debate among educated men who appealed to each other’s reasons as well as their sentiments. The classical “isms” rested upon coherent philosophical systems laid out in the works of systematic thinkers. It seems only natural to explain them by examining their programs and the philosophy that underpinned them. Fascism, by contrast, was
a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics…. Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system…. It has not been given intellectual underpinnings by any system builder, like Marx, or by any major critical intelligence, like Mill, Burke or
Tocqueville.

Paxton goes on to identify three ways techniques that scholars have employed when it comes to looking at fascism. He says that, Faced with the great variety of fascisms and the elusiveness of the “fascist minimum,” there have been three sorts of response.

Some scholars, exasperated with the sloppiness of the term fascism in common usage, deny that it has any useful meaning at all…. If we followed their advice, we would call Hitler’s regime Nazism, Mussolini’s regime Fascism, and each of the other kindred movements by its own name. We would treat each one as a discrete phenomenon. This book rejects such nominalism. The term fascism needs to be rescued from sloppy usage, not thrown out because of it. 

The work of Gilbert Allardyce, whose influential essay “What Fascism is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept”, is the most obvious example of this.

A second response has been to accept fascism’s variety and compile an encyclopaedic survey of its many forms. Encyclopaedic description provides enlightening and fascinating detail but leaves us with something resembling a medieval bestiary. 

This was the approach taken in much of the 70s and the 80s, when country- or movement-specific surveys were more popular than theoretical studies.

A third approach finesses variety by constructing an “ideal type” that fits no case exactly, but lets us posit a kind of composite “essence”.

The work of Roger Griffin and a new generation of scholars in the past twenty years is representative of the return to a analysis of fascism in its generic or theoretical form.

Despite what he says, Paxton seems to fall somewhere between the first and the second type of response. He largely limits his discussion to German Nazism and Italian Fascism, while giving some of the bestiary in brief discussions of what he obviously considers periphery forms of fascism. The form his book takes is examine the life of a fascist regime through what he identifies as the Five Stages of fascism. 

1. the creation of movements; -- the closest he comes to the philosophical underpinnings of the ideas 


2. their rooting in the political system; discussion of various fascist movements, e.g. Colonel la Rocque’s Croix de Feu, Leon Degrelle’s Rexism, and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascist 


3. their seizure of power; about how fascists manoeuvre themselves into power 


4. the exercise of power; about the methods of repression and violence that the fascist leaders employ 


5. and, finally, the long duration, during which the fascist regime chooses either
   radicalisation or entropy.
   

By the nature of looking at fascism in this way, he limits his discussion of non-German or Italian fascism to the first two categories. As Paxton repeatedly emphasises, his interest is in what fascists do, rather than what they think. In the last two pages, Paxton finally gives his definition of fascism. He writes, 

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

This definition almost sounds like the description of a mental illness rather than an ideology. In fact, as Paxton himself emphasises, he is more interested in the actions of the fascists rather than their thought, and this necessarily leads him to a definition that draws more upon the actual political activities of the few fascist regimes to have taken power, and less on the more pure ideas and thought behind them.

I think it is interesting to take note that he defines fascism as a “behaviour” and not as an ideology, and that much of his definition is about methods of rule or styles of action. Paxton’s method and conclusions do not go into any great detail on the theory of generic fascism. He spends little time addressing the work done in the last decade, and does not mention Roger Griffin’s attempts to reach a consensus definition on generic fascism, except as an example of finesse in the search for an ideal type.

The main usefulness of Paxton’s book comes in the form of his long and extremely comprehensive bibliographic essay, which, along with the copious footnotes, makes up almost half of the book’s length. Although Paxton does not add much to the theoretical debate on generic fascism, his book is a thorough synthesis of the work on how fascist regimes come to power, or fail to do so. In that sense, Paxton’s book is a welcome addition to the literature on fascism.