Fascism and Utopianism
Philip Coupland
Until relatively recently the utopianism essential to fascism has been almost completely hidden and denied. However, once the subjectivity of the content of utopia is accepted, then fascism is revealed as one of modernity’s most ambitious – if regrettable – utopian movements.
Most commentators – understanding ‘utopianism’ as a deviation from socialism; as an idealist’s vision of the good society too ‘perfect’ to be realised in the historical circumstances of the time – have baulked at associating fascism and utopia. Non-fascists, who are almost inevitably also anti-fascists, have more readily identified fascism with dystopia, as in, for example, Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937). ‘Utopia’ has achieved a certain place in the conceptual armoury of the humanities and social sciences but here too it has rarely been coupled with fascism. Karl Mannheim’s (1936) sociology of the historical development of knowledge posited a series of dialectical stages between whereby dominant ‘ideology’ was challenged by ‘utopia’. In this scheme fascism was judged to be variant of ‘bourgeois’ ideology, rather than a distinctive radical project. More recently utopian studies has seen significant conceptual development (see, for example, Levitas, 1990) but fascism, where it has been mentioned at all, has continued to be understood as intellectually void or as a pathological form of ultra-conservatism.
However, as with other forms of utopian thinking of the 1918-1945 period, fascism’s aim was not to preserve capitalism, individualism or the mores of bourgeois society. Whatever pragmatic compromises fascists might make with the ruling classes on the way to power, they invariably regarded these as effete and their society as decadent. Fascism claimed to be inaugurating a new time, a new era of history, to be creating a ‘new man’ and a dynamic and harmonious organic state-society. In reality, the boasts of fascist rhetoric were often undermined by the stubborn realities of self-interest, the old allegiances of class, and their unstable syncretism generally. Nonetheless, the scope of its ambitions, and the ruthlessness with which it pursued them, marks out fascism as one of the most utopian movements of the modern period.
Fascism in Germany engendered a rich vein of utopian prose fiction (see Hermand, 1992) and the utopian desire motivating many Nazis has been brought out by Peter Merkl (1975). Although the Third Reich only survived for twelve years of its new millennium, it made considerable progress towards its aim of transforming a class society into one stratified according to race. As prerequisite of this process, National Socialism sought the comprehensive grasp of state and society characteristic of modern utopianism. Its plans for racial engineering reached an advanced stage of fulfilment through the extermination of so-called ‘racial’ minorities and the killing and/or sterilisation of other unwanted people. At the same time, racially acceptable Germans were subject to a battery of measures to prepare them to play their part in the national folk community. The negative process of ‘clearing away’ is a prerequisite for almost all utopia building, and the German armies functioned to create space for ‘Aryan’ Germans to become the rulers of the helot masses of a new empire. The centrality of racism in its utopia distinguishes Nazism from Mussolini’s regime, but Italian ambitions to create a ‘new fascist man’, to solve the dysfunctions of liberal capitalism with a corporate state and to recover the spirit of ancient Rome in a new empire were similarly utopian. Even the supposedly ‘moderate’ British Union of Fascists had a detailed blueprint for a ‘Greater Britain’ which, it was hoped, would bring together the spirit of Tudor England with the modern potentialities of science, industry and state planning.
Although rare contemporary observers did recognise fascism’s utopianism (see, for example, Vidler, 1941), this linkage has only begun to be explored relatively recently by scholars. Roger Griffin (1991) has been particularly influential through his identification of generic fascism’s aim of national ‘rebirth’, nonetheless the study of fascist utopianism remain at a relatively early stage.
References and Further Reading
Berezin, Mabel. 1997. Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy. Ithica: Cornell University Press.
Coupland, Philip M. ‘The Blackshirted Utopians’, Journal of Contemporary History 33 2 (April 1998), 255-272.
Griffin, Roger. 1991. The Nature of Fascism. London; Routledge.
Hermand, Jost. 1992. Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkish Utopias and National Socialism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Herzenstein, Robert Edwin. 1982. When Nazi Dreams Come True. London: Sphere Books.
Levitas, Ruth. 1990. The Concept of Utopia. Hemel Hempstead: Philip Allen.
Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Merkl, Peter H. 1975. Political Violence under the Swastika. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Vidler, Alec R. 1940. God’s Judgement on Europe. London: Longmans.
This article originally appeared as: ‘Utopianism’ in Cyprian Blamires (ed.) A Historical Encyclopedia of World Fascism (New York: ABC-Clio, 2006).
The right of Philip M. Coupland to be identified as the author of this article has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
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