A Lesson from Hobbes

...when assassinations become the norm, and judges and juries fear to convict the perpetrators...

...when the Left falls captive to ideology, blindly repeating phrases about intensifying social contradictions until a dictatorship of the alleged proletariat ensues—then the Right adopts a counterideology, isomorphic to the Leftist creed in every respect...

...Diggins takes the "pragmatic liberals" to task for not having seen early enough the portent of Fascism...

...It is fashionable today to lay much evil at the foot of "pragmatism," but perhaps no philosophical tenet has any such crucial political import...

...Finally, Diggins engages in polemics against those writers who saw similarities between Fascism and Communism, saying they did so to "propagandize the urgency of the cold war...

...Unfortunately, Diggins tends to lapse into the current cliches?political love affair," "flirtation with Fascism," "soft touch," "caught ideologically naked...

...and Bergsonians were leading Nazi collaborators in Vichy France...

...A quarter-century after Benito Mussolini's death, this country has forgotten how many of its most distinguished liberals once had a sympathetic interest in Italian Fascism...

...the impulse is more likely to be endemic in the New Left for, as Herbert W. Schneider wrote long ago, Fascist politics possessed "many of the characteristics of a student movement...

...As for the failure of American Jewish magazines to criticize Mussolini, Diggins explains that he felt he should avoid the subject since he was unable to read the Yiddish press...

...Writing from his death cell in 1926, Bartolomeo Vanzetti sadly noted that "it was most humiliating and painful" to recognize that the Fascist newspapers had shown "more earnestness and intensity of feeling" in helping him and Nicola Sacco than had the democratic press...

...If it fails to do so, they will accept Fascism in the same way that Hobbes, fearing civil war, longed for an absolutist regime...

...Mussolini, inci-dently, professed himself to be a disciple of Einstein's theory of relativity...

...The Italian-American Left could do little to prevent most of its countrymen from becoming at least "sentimental fellow-travelers" of the new regime in Rome...

...Even the U.S.'s foremost labor leader, Samuel Gompers, and the feminist movement were taken with Mussolini's charm...

...Sometimes he links it to the emotional insecurities of mass man, borrowing Talcott Parsons' notion that Fascism was a consequence of anomie arising with the rationalization of society and technology...

...When violence takes over politics, and parliamentary debate yields to fighting in the streets...

...Has he considered Alek-sandr Solzhenitsyn, who writes that Stalin's labor camps were a model for Hitler's concentration camps...

...Italy, however, was among the least industrialized of Western European countries, with presumably correspondingly less anomie in its Catholic and peasant base...

...Yet some salient facts deserve mention: As early as 1927 Guido Bedarida reported in an American Jewish journal that "the Italian Jews followed the birth and development of the Fascist movement with interest and sympathy, without nourishing the least apprehension for possible anti-Semitic developments...

...Diggins considers the movement an integral part of Western culture...

...More seriously, in viewing the events at Mylai, where a group of soldiers ran amuck, as equivalent to the calculated horrors on a mass scale of totalitarian governments, he makes an ideologically unbalanced judgment...

...In the end, it is Thomas Hobbes who has the most to teach us about the sources of Fascism...

...Nor is it illuminating to take the current New Leftist idiom, as Diggins does, and assert that the Fascist impulse is to be found "when the full depths of the bourgeois psyche" are plumbed...

...Among the few to resist were the philosopher John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, who kept up a powerful criticism of the emerging Italian dictatorship from the editorial pages of the New York World...

...Reviewed by Lewis S. Feuer Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto Fascism is surprisingly little understood as a social phenomenon, having been largely neglected by Marxian and nonideological sociologists alike...

...11 years later the venerated Angelica Balabanoff wrote that Jews had been prominent even among the "Fascists of the First Hour...

...as late as 1937 he said, "Mussolini copied Fascism from me...

...At one point he characterizes A Bell for Adano as a tract for "participatory democracy," though he acknowledges that Fascists share the same organic metaphors—and, I might add, elitist emphasis...

...If anything, the "metaphysical liberals" did much worse: Philosophers like William Hocking were sympathetic to both Hitler and Mussolini...

...The book is marred, too, by a few purely factual mistakes?for instance, the defense "trial" of Trotsky in Mexico did not take place in 1934, but 1937—as well as a number of misprints, among them the names of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Mala-testa...

...This is exactly the kind of political doctrine and practice that was responsible for the Fascist reaction...

...The appointment of a courageous anti-Fascist, Gaetano Salvemini, to a post at Harvard in 1930 aroused considerable opposition in the Harvard Corporation, a story Diggins may have omitted because it has already been told by the senior Schles-inger...

...Although Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America is remarkably comprehensive, a few significant items appear to have escaped Diggins' attention...

...During the Ethiopian War, the Soviets continued shipping coal to Italy...

...certainly it was not in the tradition of the Enlightenment...

...In citing Mississippi Senator Tom Heflin as "a leading critic of Mussolini," Diggins also fails to point out that the Southern lawmaker, known as "Tom-tom," was perhaps the leading racist among his colleagues...

...If he had stayed out of the War, Diggins observes, Mussolini might have become as esteemed as General Franco, and have been courted by both the U.S...

...the Italian-American community finally broke with him when he entered World War II as Hitler's ally...

...Thus John P. Diggins' briskly written, marvelously detailed account of the American people's response to // Duce's movement, from its beginnings in 1922 to its collapse in 1945, fills an important gapDuring its first decade, Diggins reminds us, Fascism was favorably received not only by businessmen like Thomas W, Lamont and Catholic organs ranging from Commonweal to America, but by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Henry L. Stimson, Charles A. Beard, the New Republic, and correspondents of the New York Times as well...

...Ironically, as Diggins notes, the Ku Klux Klan, obedient to its own na-tivism, opposed Fascism on the grounds that it was an immigrant political doctrine...

...the existentialist Martin Heidegger was a Nazi activist...

...But American opinion did not turn definitely against Mussolini until he attacked Ethiopia in 1935...

...For example, in the mid-'30s Theodore Dreiser told a Harvard audience that Mussolini was doing the same things as Stalin, only by slightly different methods, and the novelist applauded both men...

...Yet Diggins puzzles confusedly over "why Americans believed Germans so much more responsible, and hence deserving of punishment, than Italians...

...In 1943 an Italian Communist leader declared that his party would execute the novelist Ignazio Silone as soon as it ascended to power...

...Marcus Garvey, the founder of black nationalism and an admirer of the Italian dictator, claimed to have been a Fascist before // Duce became one...

...Many American writers?including Irving Babbitt, George Santayana, Wallace Stevens, and Henry Miller—were also attracted by its disciplined, idealistic spirit...

...The Marxists, of course, insist that Fascism was a defensive measure of monopoly capitalism against the advent of Socialism, but nations like Britain and Sweden reconstructed much of their economy on Socialist lines without eliciting any such reaction...

...Apart from the postwar conquests of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the essential point is that Stalin's internal terrorism had its external counterpart, and herein was the origin of the cold war...

...Most people believe the first purpose of government is to preserve its citizens' security...

...and the USSR...

...Despite its wealth of detail, the book does not develop a coherent theory of Fascism...

...On other occasions Diggins describes the phenomenon as total-war militarism, yet Francois Duvalier operated a Fascist state in Haiti and he was scarcely preparing for an external war...

...Significantly, public opinion polls in 1937-38 indicated that the majority of Americans, including the working class, was prepared, given no other alternatives, to choose Fascism over Communism, while still repudiating Hitler-ism...