ashthomas//blog: May 2004

ashthomas//blog

Sunday, May 09, 2004

Eagleton shows Miller how to do it.
Terry Eagleton gives one of his typically Marxian reviews of Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism in the New Statesman in which he focuses on the economic aspect of fascism. Fascism is unusual in that it combined a respect for the free market with a disdain for "big business" capitalists. The capitalism that fascism respected was an older form of anarchic competition between small business owners and artisans, not the modern form where huge multinationals discourage innovation and competition (I'm looking at you, Microsoft) by manipulating the market. Although I don't agree with Eagleton's emphasis on the "capitalist" side of fascism (since the form of that capitalism is different from the common modern understanding of the word, and that many of the objections that the left have against capitalism are also addressed by the fascists), his review is a much better example of how to treat a specialist academic text in a popular magazine forum.