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Fascism versus Totalitarianism: Ernst Nolte's Views Reexamined

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Carl J. Friedrich
Affiliation:
Harvard University

Extract

Ernst Nolte, Professor of History at Marburg University, challenged the attention of all students of recent European history as well as specialists on totalitarian dictatorship some years ago by a new and intersting interpretation in his Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (1963). In it he undertook to see the Action Française group of Charles Maurras and his friends, Fascism, and National Socialism as cut from the same cloth.It was a view based upon a strong emphasis on the ideological features of these movements, rather than their conduct of politics. Like all syntheses, it encountered sharp criticism by specialists in the three national histories and cultures, with their vested interests in their particular specialties. I myself considered it a very valuable contribution, having always stressed the kinship of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, in conduct as well as ideology—in opposition to Hannah Arendt, who inclined to an ideal-typical restriction of the notion of totalitarianism to Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia on the ground that “the essence of totalitarianism is total terror”; this has always seemed to me like restricting the concept of absolute monarchy to Louis XIV and Peter the Great.

Type
Review-Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1971

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References

1. Quotations are from the English edition, Three Faces of Fascism, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. More recently, a Mentor paperback edition has been published by the New American Library.

2. Gregor, A. James, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (1969).Google Scholar Or perhaps it would be more fair to put it the other way around; for Nolte preceded Gregor by six years, and it is strange how much he influenced him without being acknowledged (only one note in the text and that critical, on p. II). However, Gregor does not take up the Action Française at all, nor does he bother to deal with Nolte's challenging inclusion of these French ultranationalists and royalists.

3. For the issue of ideology cf. among others the discussion of “Ideology and Soviet Politics” in the Slavic Review, XXIV (Dec. 1965), 591–621, and the references there. The Annales de Philosophie Politique is publishing a volume with a searching critique of the “end of ideology” by Professor Scharf.

4. See Totalitarianism in Perspective: Three Views (1969), myself, Curtis, Michael, and Barber, Benjamin R., especially my study, “The Evolving Theory and Practice of Totalitarian Regimes,” pp. 123ff.Google Scholar

5. Epstein, Klaus in World Politics, XVI (1964), 302–21;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKrieger, Leonard in the Chicago Tribune, in 1966.Google Scholar

6. Roth, Jack J., World War I: A Turning Point in Modern History (1967), especially pp. 47ff., “The Rise in Totalitarian Dictatorship”; Elizabeth Wiskemann, Europe of the Dictators, 1919–1945 (1966); Aurel Kolnay, The War against the West (1938).Google Scholar

7. Transcendent Justice: The Religious Dimension of Constitutionalism (1964).

8. Totalitarianism in Perspective, p. II.

9. Urs Müller-Plantenberg in Das Argument (1964, 3), cited in Die Krise, p. 437.

10. Incidentally, in the English translation a printing error makes nonsense of the sentence preceding this one.

11. On Hobbes and Locke, cf. McPherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962). On Locke, cf. Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957), chs. 1 and 2; and M. Seliger, The Liberal Politics of John Locke (1968), especially ch. v.Google Scholar

12. See my Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (2nd ed., 1965), pp. 24ff., 31ff., and 376 (on the future).