Tony Judt on fascist thinking

Fascists have attitudes, not concepts

The English historian Tony Judt grew up in a working class Jewish family in London before becoming an academic star at Cambridge, eventually becoming a professor of history at New York University in 1988. He was described in his Guardian obituary as “a fearless critic of narrow orthodoxies and bullying cliques, from communist apologists to the Israel lobby, from ‘liberal hawks’ to progressive educationists.” Though a social democrat in politics, he had “a lifelong suspicion of all forms of ideology and identity politics. He despised political expediency, but abhorred misplaced idealism and zealotry.” This is taken from the book-length interview, conducted by the historian Timothy Snyder, while Judt was dying of motor neuron disease, Thinking the Twentieth Century.

If there was a common quality to fascist sympathy in England in the last decade before World War II, it derived, I believe, from the modernist face that fascism presented foreign observers. In Italy, above all, fascism was not so much a doctrine as a symptomatic political style. It was youthful — thrusting, energetic, on the side of change and action and innovation. For a surprising number of its admirers, fascism in short was everything that they missed in the tired, nostalgic, gray world of Little England. . . .

Fascism was not at all the opposite of communism, as was popularly supposed on left and right alike in those years. It was, above all else, its contrast with bourgeois democracy which accounts for its appeal. . . .

The fascists don’t really have concepts. They have attitudes. They have distinctive responses to war, depression and backwardness. But they don’t start out with a set of ideas that they then apply to the world. . . .

In contrast to the postwar generation of dominant left-wing intellectuals— the Sartre generation, which is the immediately succeeding generation of dominant intellectuals—the fascist intellectuals of the 1930s, tended to be less prone to asserting views about everything.

They’re not all-purpose intellectuals; they tend to focus on certain areas and be known for that. They tend to be quite proud of being cultural critics, or foreign policy experts, or whatever it might be, and don’t wander aimlessly across the whole range of public policy. . . .

This specialization made, I think, fascist intellectuals much better placed to defend themselves against the charge of being mere wordsmiths.

Finally, in the case of someone like Brasillach, there was a sort of cultivated individualism which, of course, goes well on the right and tends to be uncomfortable on the left. . . . Most rightwing intellectuals — Junger, Cioran, Brasillach — were not party men. All of these are a strength in the intellectual world. . . .

The Bolshevik Revolution let fascist movements present themselves as “a guarantee of traditional order.” At the same time,

For the fascists, those aspects of Leninism which most troubled conventional Marxists — the emphasis on voluntarism and Lenin’s hubristic willingness to accelerate history — were what they found most pleasing. The Soviet state was violent, decisive and firmly led from above: in those early years it was everything that future fascists longed for and found lacking in the political culture of their own societies. It confirmed for them that a party can make a revolution, seize a state, and govern by force if necessary. . . .

It is terribly easy to make the mistake of talking about some abstraction called “fascist intellectual positions.” Fascism varied from country to country, and from person to person. . . . They [fascist intellectuals] are like fascism itself: much clearer in style than in content.

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