My translation of Armin
Mohler’s “Zeev Sternhell, nouvel historiographe du fascisme,” from Généalogie du fascisme français (Geneva:
Idhuna, 1986). Mohler gives an excellent review to Sternhell’s study of the birth
of fascism out of French socialism and nationalism. Mohler finds in Sternhell a
kindred spirit. Of particular interest is the “conceptual rhyme” between Sorel’s
account of myth and Sternhell’s account (per Mohler) of historical realities.
French original:
PDF of this translation:
A book published in Paris
in 1983 has completely overturned the historiography of fascism. This book bears
the title Ni droite ni gauche:
L’idéologie du fascisme en France. The best part of 412 pages, it’s
published by Les éditions du Seuil, a firm known, however, for its leftward
tendencies. The author, Zeev Sternhell, professor of politics at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, was born in Poland in 1935. He’s currently the
director of the Centre for European Studies; and, a little before the
publication of Ni droite ni gauche,
he founded the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of French Civilisation.
His book is very dense.
It also abounds with repetitions; because what matters for Sternhell, a man of
fiery temperament, is to inculcate the reader with unfamiliar judgments. But it would be erroneous to
reproach him for using “vague concepts.” Quite unlike the hitherto celebrated
specialist in the study of fascism, Ernst Nolte, Sternhell has received no
philosophical training. He’s an authentic historian who preoccupies himself by
taking stock of the past. For him, every historical reality is “irreducible”;
one cannot trace it back to a single concept; one must consider it from many
angles. From this, contrarily to Nolte, Sternhell doesn’t derive an abstract
schema of fascism, in which one can insert concrete concepts. He would rather
refer these phenomena to a whole variety of concepts that he draws,
nonetheless, from the traditional political vocabulary, in order to discern
them and locate them.
If we propose to
summarise here so complex a work, our exposition cannot however replace a
reading of this book. It’s rather an introduction.
1. Who Is Zeev Sternhell?
1. Without a doubt, he’s an authentic man of the left. The journal Le Monde (14 January 1983) declares on
this subject:
Sternhell entered Israeli political life in May 1977, after the electoral victory of Begin and the fall of the Labour Party. He created the 77 Club, an assembly of intellectuals on the extreme left of the Labour Party. The Club engaged in a politics of moderation towards the Arab world, and militated for the evacuation of the West Bank; on the matter of internal politics, it sought to further as “socialist” a politics as possible—that is, according to the maximum of equality. Sternhell was part of a minority within the Labour Party, while being a member of the Executive Committee.
2. Sternhell is a “Gramscian.” In the fashion of all the proclaiming
and protesting left of his generation, he liberated himself from Marxist
orthodoxy. He expressly rejects the materialist conception of history (pp.
18–9). Following Gramsci (and a fortiori Georges
Sorel, the inspirer of this Italian communist), Sternhell adopts the
historiographico-philosophical conception that would not have ideas be the
reflections of realities, but the inverse.
3. Sternhell’s point of departure: revisionism. The fact that
Sternhell has dedicated himself to the study of fascism is explained without a
doubt by his interest in the biography of revisionists, those who have tried to
change and reform orthodox Marxism. From Ni
droite ni gauche it emerges that “right” revisionism (p. 35), or “liberal”
revisionism (p. 81), which leads to alliances and compromises with bourgeois
liberalism, and which births an Eduard Bernstein (in France, Jaurès),
fascinates Sternhell less than “left” revisionism (p. 290), the movement
initiated by Sorel and the revolutionary syndicalists, who repudiated the
“softening” of socialism, and passed on, in due course, to fascism. Sternhell
is particularly interested in a new socialism current of the period which,
surpassing the Sorel–Bernstein opposition, came to light in the aftermath of
the Great War: the “planist (planiste)”
or “technocratic” revisionism (p. 36) of the Belgian socialist Henri de Man,
and of the French neo-socialist Marcel Déat. This revisionism led directly to
fascism.
4. Sternhell contra salon
fascism. The “socialist” orientation that underpins Sternhell’s study of
the question of fascism is expressed in his marked lack of interest in
philosophical or literary forms of fascism. A characteristic trait: Sternhell
never mentions the two most important writers belonging to fascism, Céline and
Rebatet. And Sternhell neglects still other aspects of salon fascism, of the
fascism of thinkers “who end their lives as Academicians (en habit vert)” (p. 22). In view of the multiple facets of French
(and European) fascism (p. 21), Sternhell grants himself the right to offer a pars pro toto analysis: he claims to
dedicate himself first of all to the study of hitherto neglected sectors (p.
9).
2. France, Model of Fascism?
1. Why France? Sternhell’s book tries to develop a definition of
“fascism” based on the French example. This example may surprise. France, in
fact—if one except the interlude of the German occupation—has never known a
regime classable as “fascist.” Italy, Germany, even Spain, would be better
examples in this regard. But Sternhell, we will see, deploys very serious
arguments to justify his choice.
2. Sternhell’s previous studies. These arguments, for us, can be
deduced from Sternhell’s previous studies, which all concern France. He turned
his attention to fascism from the start, even if, one may suppose, a change of
perspective might have occurred and made him choose another region of research.
Sternhell discovered very early on that he’s found, in these sectors neglected
by research, the right track. Two similarly copious books preceded Ni gauche ni droite. The first was
called Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme
français (1972). The second, La
droite révolutionnaire 1885–1914: Les origines françaises du fascisme
(1978), treats of the same historical epoch; but Sternhell’s great theme,
fascism, appears for the first time in the subtitle. The literature immediately
classed these two works as classics. The subjects of these two books were at
once more specific and general than the theme of the third, on which we comment
here. In Ni gauche ne droite,
Sternhell seeks to forge a comprehensive and detailed classification of the
fascist phenomenon, which he intends to master conceptually.
3. France invented fascism. The first of Sternhell’s arguments for
situating the field of his research in France is that the country saw the birth
of fascism twenty years before the others, notably around 1885 (p. 41).
Sternhell only occasionally employs the term “pre-fascism” to designate the
events of 1885–1914 (p. 21). Such a figure as Maurice Barrès already carried
the seeds of all later fascism. And when I proclaimed the same hypothesis in
1958, I ran into a surprising incomprehension on the part of French experts…
4. France as counter-model. The second argument Sternhell advances
is more complex. It avoids two pitfalls. Among the great countries of Europe,
it’s in France that the dominant position of the ideology and praxis of
liberalism has been the least endangered—at least until the military defeat of
1940 (p. 41). Sternhell underlines (p. 42) the fact that the most important and
most exemplary liberal revolution in history unfolded in this country, and
draws our attention to the phenomena of “republican consensus” (p. 43) and
“centrist consensus” (p. 52), which are the keystones of contemporary French
history. It’s precisely because of these immovable consensuses that Sternhell
opts for France as his field of investigation. Because fascism, in France, has
never come to power (p. 293); and, writes Sternhell,
fascism here has never passed the stage of theory, and has never suffered the inevitable compromises that always distort, in one way of another, the official ideology of a regime. Thus we perceive its deep meaning; and, grasping the fascist ideology at its roots, in its process of incubation, we arrive at a more faithful perception of mentalities and comportments. And we better understand, it seems, the complexity of situations and the ambiguities of attitudes that made up the tissue of the ’30s.
This is quite clearly a
heuristic principle, derived from a radical position, which proposes the
primacy of ideas and refutes that of factual constraints.
3. Problems of Periodisation
1. The impossibility of proposing precise dates. As every veritable
historian must be, Sternhell slightly varies his dates. Setting punctual events
to one side, it isn’t easy to furnish precise dates, well delimited in time, to
designate the emergence or the disappearance of a current in political ideas.
This is why Sternhell examines the “fascist” phenomenon in the space of half a
century.
2. Continuity between 1885 and 1940. An essential fact for
Sternhell: this period is “in the history of Europe a truly revolutionary
epoch.” And he continues: “In less than a half-century, social realities, way
of life, level of technological development and, in many respects, the vision
men had of themselves, changed more profoundly than in any other moment of
modern history” (p. 45). Therefore, this period formed a unity—if one always
puts in parentheses the four years of the Great War (pp. 19 and 290). And
Sternhell writes expressly: “In the course of this half-century, the problems
had scarcely changed” (p. 60).
3. Three generations. Although he’s aware of this continuity,
Sternhell still proceeds to subdivisions in time; thus, for example, when he
speaks of the “fascists of 1913” as fascists of a particular type. He
distinguished three generations of fascists (cf. pp. 30, 52 and 60): first the
Boulangists and anti-Dreyfusards of the end of the ’80s; then, before 1914,
those of the “second generation,” that of the “Jaune” movement in the world of
work, and of Maurras’ Action Française, which then attained its apogee;
finally, he evokes, as a third generation, “post-War fascism.”
4. The weight of an epoch. It’s to be remarked that Sternhell
clearly accords more weight to the first decades of the epoch that he studies.
For him, on the qualitative plane, the years that preceded the Great War take
on more importance than the decades that follow them: for, pre-War, everything
that would be essential to the elaboration of doctrinal fascism had been said
and put to work.
4. Prolegomena to Fascism
1. The refusal to consider eccentric groupuscules. Sternhell is
interested in the “propagators of ideas.” He doesn’t feel any need to lose time
in studying that folkloric fascism of a few illuminati
playing at brigands—the cartoonish fascism with which the media have their
field-days. He has nothing but contempt for those who centre their researches
on this type of marginal phenomenon (p. 9):
Already at the time, when a group of Solidarité française were photographed during pistol-training, all the leftist press spoke of it for weeks: any parade by a few dozen “blue-shirts” aroused much more interest than the patient efforts to undermine of a Thierry Maulnier or a Bertrand de Jouvenel…
2. Fascism: an ideology like any other. Sternhell speaks of the
“banality of fascism” (p. 296): “In the ’30s, fascism represented a political
ideology like any other; a legitimate political choice; a fairly common cast of
spirit, well beyond the restricted circles that assume their fascist identity…”
According to Sternhell, fascism was “a phenomenon possessing a degree of
autonomy, of intellectual independence” (p. 16). He rouses himself against “the
basic refusal to see in fascism anything but an accident of European history”
(p. 18). For Sternhell, then, it’s an error to consider fascism “a simple
aberration, an accident, if not a bout of collective madness” (p. 18). Towards
the end of his work (p. 296), Sternhell puts us on guard against those who
propagate the opinion that the fascists were merely “marginal.” Many were the
“fascists” who were judged, by their contemporaries, to be “most brilliant
representatives of their generation” (Luchaire, Bergery, Marion, de Jouvenel).
3. Routes of transmission. “The fascist ideology constitutes, in
France, far more diffuse a phenomenon that the restricted and ultimately
unimportant structure of adherents to groupuscules that have given themselves
this title” (p. 310). To pages farther, and Sternhell explains how it was that
“the fascist idea” was able to propagate itself in a milieu so ready to receive
its message:
Pure fascists were always less numerous and their forces more dispersed. Their real influence was exercised through a continuous contribution to the crystallisation of a certain intellectual climate; by the work of secondary routes of transmission: of men, of movements, of revues, of study-circles…
4. The difficulty of situating fascism sociologically. Sternhell
insists on the fact that fascism “proliferates as well in the great industrial
centres of Western Europe as in the underdeveloped lands of Eastern Europe” (p.
17). And he makes to mock those who believe themselves able to arrange fascism
according to well-defined social categories. It’s significant that Sternhell
draws our attention to one constant of the history of fascisms: “the rightward
slide of advanced social elements nonetheless fundamentally opposed to liberal
democracy” (p. 29). If this remark turns out to be true, it will obstruct any
attempt to attach the fascist ideology to overly defined social groups.
5. Explaining fascism: neither economic crisis nor war. What so
struck me about Sternhell was his insistence that he show the relative
independence of fascism with respect to this conjuncture (pp. 18 and 290). He
doesn’t believe that the birth of fascism was due to the pressure of economic
crises, and, quite stunningly, judges that the First World War (or any other
conflict) had been of little influence on the phenomenon. In this sense,
Sternhell opposes the majority of experts in fascism (pp. 96 and 101). It’s in
exactly this thesis that Sternhell’s “Gramscian” persuasion clearly manifests
itself, notwithstanding the fact that the name of Gramsci never appears in the
work of the Israeli professor. Sternhell never finds “crises” serious, except
when they’re moral crises, crises of values, or a comprehensive crisis
affecting a civilisation in its entirety.
6. “Auschwitz” is never used as a clincher. Sternhell evinces a
stunning objectivity, which is particularly rare in the study of fascism. But
such an attitude seems easier to adopt in Israel than in in New York or in
Zurich. Thus, Sternhell doesn’t hesitate to recognise in fascism “a certain
rebellious freshness, a certain savour of youth” (p. 80). He renounces all
moralising pedagogy. But he’s very aware of the “problem of memory,” memory
pent up and repressed; he notably equivocates on the matter of certain figures,
fascist or fascistic in the past, who, after 1945, have chosen to reintegrate
themselves and make themselves mouthpieces of liberalism: Bertrand de Jouvenel
(p. 11), Thierry Maulnier (p. 12), and above all the philosopher of
personalism, founder of the revue Esprit,
Emmanuel Mounier (pp. 299–310).
5. Sternhell’s Formula for Fascism
1. The shortcomings of liberalism and Marxism. After this
introduction, we’re now in a position to explicate the elixir of fascism
according to Sternhell. For this Israeli historian, fascism is explained in
terms of an historical preliminary, without which it would be incomprehensible:
the incapacity of bourgeois liberalism or Marxism to take on the tasks imposed
on the twentieth century. This incapacity constitutes a comprehensive shortcoming,
affecting our whole civilisation, notably all the institutions, all the
ideologies, all the convictions that it owes to the eighteenth—the century of
rationalism and of bourgeois mechanism. Liberalism and Marxism are for
Sternhell the two sides of one coin. Tirelessly, he emphasises that the crisis
of the liberal order preceded fascism; that this crisis created a void on which
fascism could coagulate. Might it have been necessary
that fascism arose? Sternhell doesn’t assert as much; but all his demonstration
suggests that this necessity was ineluctable.
2. Left revisionists and disappointed nationalists. Generally, in
order to explain the birth of fascism, we evoke the forerunning existence of a
particularly radical and exacerbated nationalism. Sternhell himself finds this
explanation absurd. From the explanatory model he suggests to us, the origin of
fascism is explained far better by the fact that at the extremities, both
leftward and rightward, of the political spectrum, elements have detached themselves
to move beyond this spectrum and form a third and novel element which is
neither any longer right nor left. In this genesis of fascism, Sternhell
perceived no appreciable contribution from the liberal centre. According to
him, fascism results from the collaboration of leftist radicals, who won’t
follow the compromise of the moderates of their political universe with the
soft liberal centre, with rightist radicals. Fascism is, therefore, an amalgam
of the disillusioned left and the disillusioned right, of left and right
“revisionists.” What seems significant to Sternhell’s eyes is that fascism
situates itself beyond the traditional left–centre–right formation. From the
perspective of the fascists, liberal capitalism and Marxist socialism challenge
one another in appearance only. In reality, they are two sides of the same
coin. The opposition between “right” and “left” must disappear, in order that
men of the left and men of the right will no longer be exploited as the
guard-dogs of bourgeois liberal interests (p. 33). This is why the end of the
nineteenth century saw the appearance of more and more apparently paradoxical
notions, which indicate a fusion of oppositions thitherto in force. The best
known example of that fusion is the interchangeable formula: social
nationalism–national socialism. Sternhell (p. 291) insists on the will to go
“beyond (au-delà)” as characteristic
of the fascist climate. The term “au-delà”
is found in the titles of numerous fascist or pre-fascist manifestoes: Au-delà du nationalisme (Thierry
Maulnier), Au-delà du marxisme (Henri
De Man), Au-delà du capitalisme et du
socialisme (Arturo Labriola), Au-delà
de la démocratie (Hubert Lagardelle). This last title reminds us that the
concept of “democracy” covered the concept of “liberalism” long into the
twentieth century. Likewise, according to Sternhell, the concept of “liberal
capitalism” alternated with “capitalist democracy.”
3. Anti-plutocracy. Sternhell, the man of the left, takes the
social-revolutionary manifestations in fascism more seriously than the greater
part of other analysts, historians and sociologists in his camp. If Sternhell
had undertaken a more advanced study of the philosophical and literary currents
of the end of the nineteenth century, he would have discovered that hatred
towards the “rule of money”—towards plutocracy—represented a vast current of
the epoch, a current that far outran the socialist camp. This repulsion at the encounter
with plutocracy was, without a doubt, a very active ferment in the gestation of
fascism. Numerous fascist groups perceived that anti-Semitism represented a
vulgarisation of this repugnance, apt to sway the masses. Anti-Semitism,
therefore, offered the possibility of fusing the double fascist front—directed
simultaneously against bourgeois liberalism and Marxist socialism—in a unique
representation of the enemy. In parallel, this hostility towards plutocracy
preordained, quite naturally, a conflict which would oppose fascists and
conservatives.
4. The long struggle between conservatives and fascists. In view of
the definition of fascism Sternhell sketches, it’s hardly surprising that he
speaks of a “long struggle between the right and fascism” (p. 20) as a very
distinct characteristic—though little-known today—of the epoch and the
situations he describes. And he remarks:
It is indeed so all throughout Europe: the fascists never succeed in seriously shaking the foundations of the bourgeois order. In Paris as in Vichy, in Rome as in Vienna, in Bucharest, in London, in Oslo or in Madrid, the conservatives know very well what separates them from fascists; and they’re not duped by propaganda looking to assimilate them [p. 20].
Also, Sternhell clearly
opposes (p. 40) the conventional classification of the French right, worked out
by René Rémond, which divides in into three camps: the ultras, the
liberal-conservatives and the Bonapartists. There have, in fact, never been but
two camps within the right: the liberals and the conservatives, to which the
revolutionaries, dissidents and protesters are opposed.
5. At once revolutionaries and moderns. With these two terms, used
by Sternhell to describe fascism, the Israeli historian has shocked his fellow political
theorists. For him, fascism is indeed a truly revolutionary, and resolutely
modern, phenomenon. “An ideology conceived as the antithesis of liberalism and
of individualism is a revolutionary ideology.” Later (p. 35), Sternhell exposes
the idea, typically fascist by his account, according to which the
revolutionary factor which ultimately annihilates liberal democracy is not the
proletariat but the nation. And he adds: “It’s therefore that the nation
becomes the primary agent of revolution” (ibid.).
The passages evoking the modernism of fascism are just as surprising. Regarding
one of these passages (p. 294), one may remark that this attribution of
modernism concerns only Italian and French fascisms:
For fascism possesses a very developed modernist side, which helps to widen the divide with the old conservative world. A poem of Marinetti, a work of Le Corbusier are immediately adopted by the fascists because, better than a literary dissertation, they symbolise all that which distinguishes the revolutionary future from the bourgeois past.
Another passage clearly
addresses fascism in its entirety:
The history of fascism is then in many respects the history of a will to modernisation, of the rejuvenation and adaptation of political systems and theories of the preceding century to the necessities and imperatives of the modern world. By consequence of a general crisis of which the symptoms appear clearly from the end of the last century, fascism emerged across Europe. The fascists are all perfectly convinced of the universal character that guides them; and their confidence in the future is therefore unshakeable.
6. Particular Elements of Fascist Ideology
1. Anti-materialism. Since, for Zeev Sternhell, fascism is not
simply a product of a political mode, but a doctrine, he will attribute certain
intellectual contents to it. But as these intellectual contents are also found
outside of fascism, what concretely constitutes fascism is the concentration of
always very heterogeneous elements in an operative unity. Let’s cite the
principal elements of this synthesis. Sternhell primarily emphasises
anti-materialism (pp. 291 and 293):
This ideology constitutes above all a refusal of materialism—that is, of what is essential of the intellectual heritage on which Europe drew from the seventeenth century. It’s exactly this revolt against materialism that permits the convergence of anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois nationalism with that variant of socialism that, even while rejecting Marxism, remain revolutionary… Not all anti-materialism is fascism; but fascism represents a variety of anti-materialism, and channels all the essential currents of anti-materialism of the twentieth century…
Sternhell likewise cites
other elements of the heritage to which fascism is opposed: rationalism,
individualism, utilitarianism, positivism (p. 40). This opposition indicates
that this anti-materialism is directed against every hypothesis that would have
man be conditioned by economic data. It’s when Sternhell speaks of psychology
that one perceives this opposition more clearly. Thus he raises the fact (p.
294) that the “moralists” Sorel, Berth and Michels “reject historical
materialism, which they replace with an explanation of a psychological order.”
“Finally,” continues Sternhell, “they make for a socialism whose ties to the
proletariat cease to be essential.” And he insists: “Socialism thus begins, at
the beginning of the century, by expanding to become a socialism for all, a
socialism for the collective in its entirety” (p. 295). More explicit still is
a passage relative to the revisionism of Henri de Man, who himself sought the
primary cause of class struggle “less in oppositions of an economic order than
in oppositions of a psychological order.”
2. Determination. It would however be false to affirm that man, for
fascism, does not submit to some species of determination. For fascist
intellectuals, these determinations are simply not of a “mechanical” nature; by
this we mean “economic” nature. As Sternhell indicates, the fascist doesn’t
consider man as an isolated individual, but as a being submitted to constraints
of an historical, psychological and biological order. In this is the fascist
vision of the nation and of socialism. The nation on this account can only be
“a great mounting force, in all its assembled classes” (p. 32). As for
socialism, the fascist can only represent it as a “socialism for all,” an
“eternal socialism,” a “pedagogical socialism,” a “socialism for all time”—in short,
a socialism no longer tied to a determined social structure (cf. pp. 32 and
295).
3. Pessimism. Sternhell considers as very characteristic traits of
fascism
its vision of man as moved by unconscious forces, its pessimist vision of the immutability of human nature, factors which lead to a static vision of history: given that the psychological motivations remain the same, human conduct will never change.
To substantiate this
consideration, Sternhell cites Sorel’s definition of pessimism: “That doctrine
according to which nothing very great has been done in this world” (p. 93).
This definition recalls in what consists the veritable paradox of existence
according to the conservatives: the perception that man has of his own limits
doesn’t paralyse him, but incites him to action. Optimism, to the contrary, in
overestimating man’s potentialities, seems to let him sink unceasingly into
apathy.
4. Voluntarism and decadence. Sternhell, who is not a philosopher
but an historian, is never conscious of this “conservative paradox.” He simply
notices the presence, in fascisms, of a “taut energy” (p. 50), and repeatedly
signals this fascist will to dominate destiny (pp. 65 and 294). Sternhell
notices that the problem of decadence disquiets the fascist a good deal. It’s
for this reason that he wishes to create a “new man,” a man nurturing classical
anti-bourgeois virtues, heroic virtues: a man of energy, always on the alert,
who has a sense of honour and sacrifice. The concern for decadence urges the
acceptance of the primacy of the community over the individual. The supreme
quality, for a fascist, is to have faith in the force of will, of a will
capable of giving form to the world of matter, and of breaking its resistance.
Sternhell makes such observations up to the last line of his work; thus, on
page 312:
In a world in distress, fascism easily appeared as a heroic will once again to dominate matter; to take, by a deployment of energy, not only the forces of nature, but also those of the economy and of society.
5. The question of truth. On one hand, pessimism; on the other,
voluntarism. For logical thought, this can only be a paradox. But does fascism
pose itself the question of truth? Consider what Sternhell declares in this
regard on one of the “founding fathers” of fascism: “For a Barrès, for example,
it’s no longer a matter of knowing which doctrine is true, but of knowing what
force permits one to act and to vanquish” (p. 50). To prove the fact that
fascism doesn’t judge a doctrine according to its “truth,” but according to its
utility, Sternhell cites Sorel on the subject of “myths,” which, for the author
of the Réflexions sur la violence,
constituted the motor of all action: “myths are ‘systems of images’ which one
cannot decompose into their elements, that one must take entire as historical
forces… When one enters the terrain of myth, we are safe from all refutation”
(pp. 93–4).
In Summary…
We have only covered
Sternhell’s book in its basic elements. We’ve had to neglect a number of
important points, such as his allusion to the “new liturgy” as an integral part
of fascism (p. 51); to its anti-Americanism (even before 1914) (p. 290); we
haven’t delved into his remark suggesting that, for fascism, the struggle
against internal liberalism has always been more important than the struggle
waged against the same by certain dictators… (p. 34). As author, I permit
myself two remarks that will perhaps prove useful for the German reader. First,
Germany is hardly mentioned by Sternhell. In fact, the German bibliography
cites only the books of Nolte translated into French; one can suppose on this
account that he hasn’t mastered the language of Goethe. My second remark will
be to remind the reader of my attempt to restore some substance to the concept
of “fascism” by limiting it to a certain number of historical phenomena (cf.
“Der faschistische Stil” [1973]; Fr. transl. “Le ‘style’ fasciste,” Nouvelle école 42 [1985]). Sternhell, for his part, has given an enormous scope to
the term “fascism.” His effort is justifiable to the degree that this vast
definition of “fascism” corresponds, at base, to what I put under the heading
of “conservative revolution.” In brief, we can say of Sternhell’s book that he’s
sent the greater part of all the works hitherto devoted to the study of fascism
to the knackers’ yard…
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