Revolution from the Right: Fascism - School of Arts and Humanities ...

Within the conceptual framework that we constructed at the outset, fascism has revealed itself
to be a radical form of ‘revolution from the right’ with a highly specific ideological dynamic. Not
only did the two inter-war regimes based on it self-consciously attempt to create an alternative
modernity which harnessed the power of a supercharged nationalism, but they deliberately
operated with a ritual style of politics aimed at providing a new sense of collective belonging and
meaning for populations disoriented by a profound social crisis. They aimed to produce a new
type of human being, a new type of state, a new era.
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This interpretation of fascism may conflict with conventional wisdom on the subject, but
it is fully consistent with the conclusions which G. L. Mosse, one of the world’s foremost
specialists on Nazism, has drawn after more than four decades of studying the dynamics of
fascism. When, in 1997, he reviewed the progress which scholars have made in understanding
fascism since the war he commented that the idea of:
fascism as a revolution has been one of the most difficult of all the so-called
revisionist theses to accept, for fascism has usually been characterized as
reactionary and backward looking. Whether we accept or deny its origins in the
French Revolution, fascism wanted to create new men. This was intended as a
cultural and social, but not an economic revolution. 25
Mosse went on to ascribe this blind spot to the ‘amazing’ extent to which models of revolution
based on Marxism and on the liberalism of the French Revolution still dominate academic
thinking. Once such prejudices are overcome, it becomes obvious that, though the following