God’s Counterfeiters? Investigating the triad of fascism, totalitarianism, and (political) religion.

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

to a special issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions (Vol. 5, No. 3, Winter 2004) on ‘fascism as a totalitarian movement’

ROGER GRIFFIN, OXFORD BROOKES UNIVERSITY

Abstract

This article sets out to provide a context for the six specialist essays and afterthoughts to follow that cumulatively throw light on the value of applying the conceptual  ‘triad’ formed by fascism, totalitarianism, and political religion to certain forms of right-wing extremism. It underscores the tangled semantic debate surrounding all three terms, while also highlighting the way they can each be directly associated with the project of creating a new order. The practical implications of the tendency not to see them as interrelated, convergent components of a conceptual cluster is illustrated by the acute lack of consensus among major historians about their relevance to Nazism. A brief outline of the topics covered in the individual contributions is followed by an appeal for political scientists and historians to bring to the study of political extremism a greater sense of synergy and shared humanistic purpose.

God’s Counterfeiters? Investigating the triad of fascism, totalitarianism, and (political) religion.

Even when he turns for religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.[…] We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race, are akin to those of the Inquisition or the Reformation.

Emile Cioran, ‘Genealogy of Fanaticism’, A Short History of Decay (1949)

Ideological storm-fronts

When the first issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions appeared in the summer of 2000 it was not building on an existing specialism so much as identifying the site where the edifice of a new one might arise at the conjuncture between several specialisms. It was an act of the social scientific and historical imagination, or perhaps of the archetypal human faculty that Ernst Bloch calls the ‘not-yet-conscious’. ‘Totalitarianism’ and ‘political religion’ have their own convoluted histories as analytical terms, both so contested and value-laden that the proliferating connotations they have acquired seriously compromise their heuristic value for investigating concrete historical realities. A journal whose title linked them, conjoining ‘totalitarian’ with ‘movement’ rather than ‘regime’, opened up new cognitive spaces. It provided a forum for academics keen to explore the nexus between two seemingly unrelated class of phenomena: ideologically motivated onslaughts against the civic institutions and plural forms of social existence fostered by liberal humanism, and the capacity of politics in the age of the accelerating ‘disenchantment of the world’ to reassert the primacy of a religious tradition or to turn the secular world itself into a new source of faith and the re-enchantment of reality.

Within a year the attacks on the World Trade Center had placed the need to understand the relationship between political violence, religion, and sacralized modes of secular politics at the top of the agenda of the international social science community. It involved a reordering of research priorities comparable to the rapid promotion of ‘nationalism’ to pole position once the unexpectedly sudden collapse of the Soviet Empire had not only created new nation-states, but unleashed a spate of hitherto repressed xenophobias and ethnic conflicts. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979 had so unexpectedly established a theocracy in Iran, Middle-East watchers in the Pentagon were said by one political satirist to be ‘speed-reading the Koran’ for clues to what had happened. Events since 9/11 have made it clear that mapping the rapidly shifting contours of the emerging ideological world-order in a process more reminiscent of what Walter Benjamin called the ‘storm of progress’ than the gradualistic scenario of an ever advancing warm front of neo-liberalism implied by George Bush Senior or Francis Fukuyama. It is a turn of events that makes particular demands on contemporary historians and social scientists in the West, requiring them not only to be receptive to the experiences and constructions of reality born of other cultures, but also to be prepared to re-read some recent chapters in our own history more slowly.

This painstaking, sometimes painful process of revision and professional soul-searching is one that, among other things, means reopening the investigation into episodes of right-wing extremism in modern political history that may until recently have seemed dead and buried as academic issues, but with hindsight can be seen to offer important case-studies in the complex relationship between political violence, ideological fanaticism, religious politics, and totalitarianism. In particular, it means revisiting the two fascist regimes of inter-war Europe, for decades routinely treated as the products of capitalism in crisis, idiosyncratic national histories, dysfunctional political cultures, or personal megalomania. It is now becoming increasingly apparent that they are also to be interpreted as fruits of an inherently unstable and destabilizing Western modernity (a term embracing capitalism) which after the First World War gave rise to various types of authoritarian regime and totalitarian movement bent on overthrowing parliamentary democracy in the name either of restoring stability or of creating a new order.

The group of essays that follow have been specially ‘commissioned’ (in the non-mercenary sense that still (against all odds) prevails among academics) to contribute to the emergence of greater conceptual lucidity and methodological sensitivity in the way the nexus of generic concepts bound up with fascism is approached by historians and political scientists. The original intention was admittedly more utopian. A number of leading specialists on different manifestations of fascism would be asked to analyse ‘their’ variant of it as a ‘totalitarian movement’, paying particular attention to its relationship to religion, both traditional and ‘political’. They would be encouraged to carry out their analysis within a common conceptual framework informed by two articles previously published in TMPR, namely Emilio Gentile’s ‘The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism’,ⁱ and Michel Burleigh’s ‘National Socialism as a Political Religion’,ⁱⁱ as well as an article on ‘the new consensus’ in fascist studies (of which more later) which first appeared in The Journal of Contemporary History.ⁱⁱⁱ I thus approached the task of editing the project with the naivety of a student teacher who plans a seminar on the assumption that all students will turn up having immersed themselves in the prescribed preparatory reading, and proceed to engage in a passionate discussion of the topic without what Germans call ‘talking past each other’. The synergy thus generated would unearth subterranean linkages between the apparently disparate phenomena of totalitarianism and political religion on the basis of specialist empirical knowledge of particular specimens of fascism, both past and contemporary. Naturally, the special issue of TMPR that resulted would have profound implications for both political scientists and modern historians studying the various assaults of the ‘extreme right’ against liberal democracy, Enlightenment humanism, or socialist concepts of progress.

Inevitably the shadow between idea and reality, the conception and the creation about which T. S. Eliot wrote about so memorably in The Hollow Men fell on this enterprise too. Perhaps inevitably, there remain significant differences between the contributions in the degree of conceptualization that their authors brought to their case-study and in how far they addressed the notion of ‘totalitarian movement’ and its relationship to ‘political religion’ using a common vocabulary. As a result many feel these essays do more to document current academic confusions and conflicts over key definitional questions in this field of enquiry than to elucidate them. Nevertheless, at the very least they should help establish the pitfalls and merits of the multiple-perspective that results when ‘clusters’ of key terms are applied to conceptualizing modern forms of the extreme right in a comparative context instead of the single-point perspective imposed when only one key concept is applied.^iv After the six specialist analyses Martin Blinkhorn offers a provisional evaluation of the success of this exercise in fulfilling this more modest and realistic ambition. He does so in his capacity as a professional historian who has written extensively on aspects of generic fascism and expressed considerable scepticism about the value of protracted navel searching over its definition.^v

Much light, deep shadows^vi

To place this exercise in applying a ‘multiple-point perspective’ to the study of the modern extreme right in context it may be helpful to be reminded of some of the tangle of definitional and taxonomic confusions that have grown up around each of the three key terms of the ‘cluster’ within the human sciences.

Totalitarianism

‘Totalitarianism’, a term apparently making a comeback after for a time being left out in the cold, now carries with it such cumbersome semantic baggage that several books and books and doctorates have appeared which might be classified ‘tertiary literature’, devoted mainly to taking stock of the conflicting connotations it has acquired within secondary literature.^vii A recent doctorate treats the superabundance of secondary literature surrounding the topic under four main headings, utopianism, modernity, political religion, and post-modernism, each of which subsumes a plethora of conflicting conceptual approaches and definitional border-disputes.^viii What emerges from such surveys are deep historical conflicts and intellectual divisions over how far totalitarianism should be seen ‘functionally’, and hence also phenomenologically, focusing on the type of radically authoritarian state it produces and the marks of coercion it inscribes on the minds and flesh of those it attempts to bend or subjugate to its purpose, or ‘intentionally’ in terms of the goals that an autocratic regime sets out to achieve through its efforts to exercise of total authority over the state and civic society. In the second case deeply divergent interpretations result from assuming that the intention is reducible to the destructive and ultimately nihilistic one of gaining power as an end in itself, as opposed to the utopian one of using the power accumulated to realize an ideal new order.

How treacherous this terrain can be conceptually is illustrated by considering the way one academic, Leonard Schapiro, summarizes a crucial passage in a canonical text in the (Anglophone) history of the concept, Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, first published in 1956. This book is famous for defining totalitarianism in terms of a ‘five-point’ syndrome, (increased to six in the 1965 edition), the first of which Schapiro summarizes as ‘an official ideology, to which everyone is supposed to adhere, focussed on a “perfect final state of mankind”’.^ix The purely coercive connotations of this criterion for Schapiro are reinforced in his conclusion which presents totalitarianism as being characterized ‘by the predominance of the Leader of the victorious movement, who, with the aid of his subordinated elite and manipulated ideology, aims at total control over state, society, and the individual’, an approach firmly rooted in the ‘functionalist’ mindset.^x

Yet in the original this ideology is explicitly described in intentionalist terms as being ‘characteristically focused and projected towards a perfect final state of mankind ─ that is to say, it contains a chiliastic claim, based upon a radical rejection of the existing society with conquest of the world for the new one [sic].’^xi Earlier Brzezinski and Friedrich have cited with approval another expert’s judgement that totalitarian dictatorship is a ‘novel type of autocracy’ established ‘for realizing totalist intentions under modern political and technical conditions’, the primary goal of which is the creation of a ‘new man’.^xii That the authors do not see this ‘functionally’ as a pseudo-revolutionary façade designed simply to indoctrinate and manipulate the masses is clear from their own exposition of ‘point one’ a few pages later. This not only states that ‘totalitarian ideology involves a high degree of convictional certainty’, but that the ‘Utopian, chiliastic outlook of totalitarian ideologies gives them a pseudo-religious quality’ which elicits ‘in their less critical followers a depth of conviction and a fervour of devotion usually found only among persons inspired by a transcendent faith’. In a phrase that has a direct bearing on the raison d’être of the present group of essays they add ‘whether these aspects of totalitarian ideologies bear some sort of relationship to the religions they seek to replace is arguable’. They then express their own sympathy for seeing totalitarian ideologies in terms of Ersatz religion, highlighting the way they pervert conventional political programmes by substituting ‘faith for reason, magic exhortation for knowledge and criticism’, so that Marx’s phrase ‘the opium of the people’ applies to them just as much as it does to organized religion.^xiii

Given the book’s influence on generations of students and scholars, the history of the term ‘totalitarianism’ would probably have taken a different course altogether had Friedrich and Brzezinski devoted an entire section of their work to elaborating on the relationship, only alluded to in its pages here, between totalitarian ideology, transcendent faith, pseudo-religion, and the creation of a ‘new man’. Indeed, if they had then applied their embryonic ‘cluster-analysis’ to an extensive comparison of the ‘chiliastic’ projects of Stalinism and Nazism with the manifestations of totalitarianism that subliminally form the central focus of their analysis, this special issue of TMPR might have been redundant. As it is the impact of the Cold War on the mood of the times ensured that the main theme of the book as far as its ‘reception’ within the human sciences is concerned was the nexus between a regime’s totalizing ideology, its monopoly of state, cultural, and military power, and the resulting destruction of liberty, a perspective which implicitly endorsed the claims of the ‘Free World’ to represent good in the Manichean struggle against the evils of state communism.

Another major authority in this area who might have helped save later generations of scholars much agonizing over taxonomic categories is Juan Linz. However, his seminal essay on authoritarianism and totalitarianism written three decades ago, while stressing that the radicalism of the latter stems from a vision of revolutionary transformation that cannot be countenanced by conservatives, still refers to ‘fascist-mobilizational authoritarian regimes’.^xiv To compound the confusion his equally important essay on comparative fascism of the same period talks about fascism’s ‘totalitarian goals’, which are directly linked in the text to ‘new organizational conceptions of mobilization and participation’ and a ‘new synthesis’ of political and social components.^xv Not only is there slippage between ‘totalitarian’ and ‘authoritarian’ in Linz’s taxonomic scheme, but he does not develop the fleeting reference in his synthetic definition to fascism as ‘anti-clerical, or at least non-clerical’, so that the embryonic nexus of generic concepts remains no more than implicit.

Clearly Linz recognizes how germane the issue of religion is to the understanding of totalitarian regimes and fascism, and his essay contains a section entitled ‘secularization, religion and fascism’ on the structural role played by Catholicism in limiting the political space for fascism’s success.^xvi His more recent work on ‘fascism, authoritarianism and totalitarianism’ includes only a short passage on the transition ‘from ideology to political religion’. It contains the tantalizing assertion that by the twentieth century secularization had created a spiritual void within the intelligentsia and educated classes that could be filled by ‘total ideological dedication’. He continues: ‘Once simplified and reduced to slogans by a political movement, such ideas became the powerful basis for a pseudo-religious political cause that justified totalitarianism and made it possible’.^xvii Such passages provide the reader with no more than glimpses of a sophisticated conceptual framework that would identify the nexus between conservative authoritarianism, (anti-conservative) totalitarian movements and regimes, revolutionary nationalism, traditional and political (pseudo-) religion, and modernity that with his encyclopediac knowledge of the twentieth extreme right Linz has been ideally placed to construct, but clearly not felt drawn to as a central focus of his research.

A scholar of the younger generation who has made a concerted effort at ‘tidying up’ the definitional mess that has grown up around totalitarianism is Simon Tormey. One of his key contributions is to distinguish between the ‘strong’ theory of totalitarianism that assumes that a regime’s systematic use of social engineering can be largely successful in its bid to destroy the inner freedom of its citizens, in contrast to the ‘weak’ theory which sees the external conformism thus imposed as largely perfunctory, destined to evaporate the moment the outer constraints are removed. This would enable the term to be applied even to regimes accommodating considerable pockets of personal freedom and cultural pluralism, such as Fascist Italy, which signally failed (and was genuinely reluctant) to impose the high level of regimentation and uniformity consistent with the Friedrich and Brzezinski model.

More important in the present context is Tormey’s recognition that ‘most theorists of totalitarianism agree that what distinguishes totalitarian rule from other forms of dictatorship is the commitment of a ruling elite to fashioning an entirely new form of society’. Thus ‘totalitarianism is born above all of radicalism, a discontent with the present that is translated into a longing for the new’,^xviii which leads a regime to seek to implement a ‘vision whose realisation would consist in a complete transformation of the very character of human existence’.^xix Yet the limitations of the single-point perspective are once again exemplified in Tormey’s approach when he compares the applicability of his own model to Nazism and Stalinism. He has clearly not engaged with the works of G. L. Mosse or Stanley Payne, both of whom stress the centrality to fascism in general and Nazism in particular of the myth of new elites and the new man.^xx Thus he repeats the error committed by many in an earlier generation of academics that, in contrast to Marxism-Leninism, Nazism is at bottom a ‘hotchpotch of prejudices and partialities’, and that, whereas Marx’s The German Ideology offered ‘a vision of phoenix-like rebirth of humanity from the drudgeries of everyday life’, Mein Kampf presents only a bleak picture of ‘competition and struggle between races’.^xxi The possibility of integrating totalitarianism into a nexus of generic concepts is precluded by this tunnel vision of one of the most important case-studies in the phenomenon.

Fascism

One reason why Tormey may have been put off the serious engagement with fascist studies that would have corroborated his thesis in respect of Nazi Germany as well as Fascist Italy is perhaps that for several decades ‘fascism’ was an even more contested term than totalitarianism. It was thus difficult for a guest from another discipline to hear the voices of resident scholars who stressed the revolutionary thrust of fascism’s ideology (e.g. Juan Linz, Eugen Weber, Zeev Sternhell, G. L. Mosse, and Stanley Payne) above the babble of those stressing its nihilism, reactionariness, pathology, or lack of a cohesive ideology, let alone of those who denied the very existence of a generic fascism. It was actually the same year in which Tormey published Making Sense of Totalitarianism that saw the appearance of the most authoritative work of comparative fascist studies to date, Stanley Payne’s A History of Fascism: 1914-1945,^xxii a mile-stone in the emergence of the partial consensus about the nature of fascism that forms part of the conceptual premise that underlies this special issue.

The suggestion that fascist studies has entered a period of fruitful convergence and synergy within fascist studies after years of fragmentation and polarization (code-named for the sake of brevity the ‘new consensus’ ─ an idea I first mooted in 1998^xxiii ─ has been sometimes been misunderstood as the claim that unanimity now exists between theorists of fascism, which is patently absurd. I should thus restate what is actually being claimed, namely that since the early 1990s there has been a significant degree of compatibility in the conceptual frameworks operated, consciously or not, in three types of contribution to comparative fascist studies: a) theories of generic fascism; b) comparative histories of fascism as an international phenomenon; c) monographic or comparative studies of specific political, social, or cultural phenomena associated with fascist or putative fascist movements or regimes. The core component of this conceptual framework can be summarized as the premise that fascism is an ideologically driven attempt by a movement or regime to create a new type of post-liberal national community which will be the vehicle for the comprehensive transformation of society and culture with the effect of creating an alternative modernity. Inevitably, since academia, though extensively influenced by cultural climates, social norms, and prevalent ‘schools of thought’ (fashions?), does not operate under the diktats and psychological constraints of a totalitarian regime, each expert gives a particular nuance to this broad characterization and highlights certain features of the definitional core or lays particular emphasis on some of the organizational forms and techniques of establishing political and ideological power that are involved in realizing the transformation. As those familiar with the debate are all too well aware, my approach highlights the central role played in generic fascism by ‘palingenetic ultra-nationalism’,^xxiv namely the myth that the organically conceived nation is to be cleansed of decadence and renewed.^xxv

I offered empirical evidence for the growth of consensus or convergence on this premise within Anglophone academia in an article published in 2001.^xxvi Since then there has been a steady trickle of publications which confirm the tendency, such as Sven Reichardt’s Faschistische Kampfbünde,^xxvii Philip Morgan’s Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945,^xxviii or Angelo Ventrone’s La seduzione totalitaria: guerra, modernità, violenza politica,^xxix all of which associate the aspect of fascism under discussion specifically with the myth of national regeneration and the forces of palingenesis, even when, as in the case of Enzo Traverso’s The Origins of Nazi Violence^xxx and Jay Gonen’s The Roots of Nazi Psychology,^xxxi the author seems oblivious of the wider debate over the definition of fascism. Another interesting symptom of the diffusion of the ‘new consensus’ are works by authors who specifically dissociate themselves from its claims, as if it were a club or sect, membership of which is the kiss of death to their intellectual autonomy, and may even go to the trouble of attacking the concept of palingenetic myth as a crucial component of fascism, yet proceed to offer characterizations of fascism that are entirely consistent with it. In the past this was true of Alexander de Grand,^xxxii A. J. Gregor,^xxxiii and Martin Blinkhorn.^xxxiv More recently the list of experts operating a curious form of doublethink in the way they distance themselves from the new consensus but apply theories patently consistent with, and even indebted to, it must be extended to include Kevin Passmore’s Fascism: A Very Short Introduction,^xxxv Marco Tarchi’s Fascismo. Teorie, interpretazioni e modelli,^xxxvi Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism,^xxxvii and Michael Mann’s Fascists.^xxxviii

I should stress that the publication of ever more academic articles and books that assume that the concrete socio-political or cultural manifestations of a particular form of fascism are at least partly conditioned by a core utopia or mythic project of national rebirth does not mean that their authors have all become members of some Masonic fraternity. Significant differences of emphasis and interpretation remain in the books I have referred to here, and they are also of sharply contrasting originality, quality, and value to fellow specialists in terms of both scholarship and insight. Nevertheless, taken collectively they suggest that, in marked contrast to the state of affairs until the early 1990s, it is increasingly part of academic ‘common sense’ to assume that fascism’s dynamics should be understood in terms of the ‘positive’ goal of a total national revolution, and not in terms of its negations, and hence as a product of modernity and not its rejection.

It is when totalitarianism and political religion are applied to fascism conceived in a way broadly consistent with this approach that the possibility of a powerful conceptual cluster emerges. At least that is what this group of essays were intended to establish, and hopefully succeed in doing so ─ even if not everyone involved chose to do the homework I had set, and the diversity of approaches of those who did counteracts any attempt on my part to ‘impose’ total harmony on the conceptual framework applied (in any case a perverse impulse in an academic context!).

Political Religion

Of the three concepts whose relationship is being explored in this special issue, it is ‘political religion’ that poses the most intractable problems of definition and semantic demarcation from adjacent terms, and demands the most attention in the present context. Anyone accultured to the (post-)Christian West tends to instinctively refer to ‘God’ in the context of political extremism as a rhetorical device to evokes the absolutist claims they make on an individual’s faith and capacity for self-sacrifice, producing such titles as The God that Failed^xxxix and The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler.^xl It is thus not surprising if the fanatical convictions and liturgical rites generated by some modern regimes have often reminded outsiders of organized religions. In 1928 the American social scientist Herbert Schneider, having witnessed Mussolini’s fledgling regime at first hand, referred to Fascism as ‘a new religion’. However, he immediately qualified this observation by stressing that he did not mean that Fascism had developed ‘its own theology’, but that ‘it has given to thousands of Italian youths an ideal for which they are ready to sacrifice all’.^xli On returning from his visit to Russia only three years after the Revolution, Bertrand Russell described Bolshevism as satisfying the generalized longing for a ‘new religion’ created by the mood of despair generated by the First World War, and as providing ‘the only force capable of giving men the energy to live vigorously’.^xlii Bolshevism was subsequently described metaphorically as a religion in a very different context by one of the foremost representatives of an ideology determined to wipe it out from the face of the earth. In his lecture on ‘The Nature and Tasks of the SS and Police’ given in 1937 Himmler stated unequivocally:

Bolshevism is an organization of sub-humans, it is the absolute foundation of Jewish rule, it is the exact opposite of all that the Aryan people loves, cherishes and values. It is a diabolic outlook, because it appeals to the lowest and meanest instincts of humanity and turns those instincts into a religion. One should not be deluded: Bolshevism with its Lenin buried in the Kremlin will need only several more decades to plant its diabolic religion of destruction in Asia, this religion that is aimed at the destruction of the whole world. ^xliii

It is when attempts are made to turn such vivid impressions into the basis of a useful social scientific term that problems arise. First there are problems of terminology, with political religion, secular religion, and religious politics all vying for the same semantic space, and sometimes jostling for position with other closely related terms such as millenarianism (apocalypticism, chiliasm), or civil (civic) religion. Secondly, the concept of a political religion has had far longer to acquire conflicting historical connotations than either ‘fascism’ or ‘totalitarianism’, and a dense thicket of secondary literature has grown up around it.^xliv Once it embraces aspects of ‘civil religion’ its history can at least be given a precise origin in the theory that was to have such a profound impact on the ideologues of the French Revolution, namely section eight in book four of Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract. After considering the various relationships between traditional religions and the State demonstrated by history, all of which are found wanting as the basis of a tolerant and enlightened society, he postulates the need for a ‘civil religion’ whose dogmas should be:

few, simple, and exactly worded, without explanation or commentary. The existence of a mighty, intelligent and beneficent Divinity, possessed of foresight and providence, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws: these are its positive dogmas. Its negative dogmas I confine to one, intolerance, which is a part of the cults we have rejected.^xlv

Yet Rousseau’s theory of a civic creed has its own venerable history and can be seen as an Enlightenment version of Plato’s idea of a ‘royal lie’ or ‘needful falsehood’ which, once accepted unquestioningly by the citizens of the Republic, guarantees that they will ‘care more for the city and for one another’ and be prepared to sacrifice themselves for the community. There is a remarkable adumbration of both ‘bourgeois capitalist’ and Nazi uses of ideology when Plato’s Socrates explains that the myth to be believed by both rulers and subjects is that God has created three different castes of citizen, corresponding to gold, silver, and an alloy of brass and iron, and that ‘there is nothing which they should so anxiously guard, or of which they are to be such good guardians, as the purity of the race’.^xlvi

The main problem posed by the idea of ‘political religion’ is not its antiquity, however, but rather distinguishing between its metaphorical power and its heuristic value as a conceptual tool and explanatory device. A comparison of Russell’s observation on Bolshevism with the theory of Rousseau brings out two of several contrasting ways that the term religion can be approached in a secular ideological context. Russell implies that the Bolsheviks’ passionately held political beliefs in a revolutionary new order constitute a new religion, which may be the substitute for a ‘true’ (revealed/ scriptural/ metaphysical/ traditional religion), but is based on genuine faith and deep-seated psychological need.^xlvii Rousseau contemplates the necessity of the state to contrive a form of supra-denominational, non-scriptural deistic religion which the state is somehow meant to inculcate in its citizens as the orthodoxy despite its obvious points of conflict with the Church, an attitude that comes close to Plato’s idea of persuading citizens to believe in an outlandish mythic cosmology designed to promote civic virtues. The first approach leads to an emphasis on the ‘phenomenology’ of the ‘subject’s’ experience of a political faith which has the normative, motivating, and existentially ‘grounding’ force of belonging to a religious community and thus can be seen to all intents and purposes as a ‘genuine’ religion even if it is clearly a travesty of traditional Christianity. The second stresses the instrumental aspect of an ‘evangelistic’ political ideology from the regime’s point of view as a means of social control, and hence the way it acts as a modern equivalent for organized religion’s legitimizing role in traditional societies, and is hence functionally speaking an ‘authentic’ religion, even if it a manufactured one. It is a shift of perspective related to the distinction drawn by Hannah Arendt between ‘the historical approach’ and the ‘social sciences’ approach.^xlviii But such dichotomies are clearly simplistic simplistic, and a major expert in the field, Jean-Pierre Sironneau, identifies not two, but four approaches, the typological, the genetic and historical, the functional, and the comparative.^xlix

The historical versus the archetypal view of political religion

Even with such fine distinctions the stubborn fact is that few major theories in the debate fit neatly into any category. Arendt herself has reservations about the historical as well as social science approaches she identifies. Moreover, her own theory combines elements of both, for though she investigates in depth the almost literally soul-destroying function of totalitarianism in practice, she also argues that it can be seen ‘as a new — and perverted — religion, a substitute for the lost creed of traditional beliefs’ and the product of the human ‘need for a religion’.^l These statements were made in her rebuttal of the theory of Eric Voegelin’s internationally famous but deeply idiosyncratic meta-theory of political religion, which identifies residues of what he (unhistorically) terms ‘gnosticism’ in all secular political ideologies. By this he refers to a travestied, ‘immanentist’, and heretical version of ‘true’ Christianity which is transcendental and metaphysically real, and whose tell-tale sign is the location of a suprahistorical paradise within a historically conceived, this-worldly future state of society, humanity, or the nation. The elaborate philosophy of history Voegelin erects on this fragile premise leads to the thesis that nearly all modern ideologies, including positivism and liberalism — and not just the creeds of totalitarianism — are not substitute religions, but modernized, historicized versions of the ‘immanentist’ travesties of genuine religion found in medieval an movements. They are thus not just one but two stages removed from ‘the real thing’.^li

No matter how abstruse such taxonomic and explanatory disputes may seem, their relevance to the interpretation of concrete historical phenomena is underlined by Barbara Spackman’s criticism of what she takes to be Emilio Gentile’s concept of political religion. She insists that when Giovanni Gentile declared in the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals that Fascism was a religion he was employing a metaphor, ‘just as “Achilles is a lion” is a metaphor’, so that Emilio Gentile displays considerable methodological naivety in not recognizing that the tope ‘religion’ used in the context of Fascism is a rhetorical strategy known as ‘catachresis’.^lii What makes Spackman’s remedial lesson in rhetoric superfluous is that Emilio Gentile has never claimed that Fascism is a religion, but that it can be seen as a ‘political religion’. As such it was distinct from an established theology, in this case institutionalized Christianity, while making total claims on an individual’s capacity for faith and need for a ‘higher’ reality in a way which led to a philosophical idealist such as Giovanni Gentile to deliberately call Fascism a religion, meaning a total ethical system. It is perfectly reasonable to argue that human beings have an archetypal propensity to sacralize secular realities without making them the object of transcendental religions based on a suprahistorical notion of the divine. Thus Emilio Gentile was being no more lexicographically challenged when he explored the sacralization of Italian politics under Fascism than G. L. Mosse was when he traced the history of the sacralization of the nation in nineteenth century Germany.^liii

Whether the term ‘religion’ should be used for this-worldy political phenomena, shorn of their exclusive connotations of traditional religion, and suitably qualified by some such term as ‘civic’, ‘political’, or ‘secular’, is ultimately a matter of academic judgement in the creation of a heuristically useful conceptual framework. But anyone who maintains that the application of the term ‘sacred’ should be limited exclusively to the sphere of transcendental, otherworldly realities revealed by Christian scripture, ecclesiastical teaching, and mystic texts could do with a crash course in comparative religion and cultural anthropology. This would highlight the existence of numerous ‘monistic’ or ‘immanentist’ belief-systems such as Buddhism, Shinto and animistic ‘nature religions’ which reject the metaphysical dualism of Christianity and make the drawing of clear distinctions between secular and religious deeply problematic. Even in the history of Judaism and Christianity the relationship between heaven and history, the sacred and the profane, religion and politics is far from clear-cut. One implication of this global ‘anthropological’ perspective is to be wary of any impulse to trace modern utopias of a new era or new order to Renaissance millenarianism in general or to Joachim de Fiore in particular. The works of Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell on comparative mythology and cosmology suggest that the myth of rebirth (palingenetic myth) is an archetype of human mythopoeia which can express itself in both secular and religious forms without being ‘derived’ from any particular source or tradition (an approach congruent with the theory of the ‘not-yet-conscious’ postulated by Hermann Broch in The Principle of Hope).

It follows from this line of reasoning that attempts to reconstruct the genealogy of a modern political ideology as a continuous lineage back to forms of traditional religion, whether genuine or heretical, are simplistic fictions.^liv A cogent case can be made instead for seeing the rebirth myths of modern political religions as an expression of something more universal than the Christian belief in resurrection and the rich symbolic world it generated in the West. Thus the millenarianism of such movements as the sixteenth-century Anabaptists is to be regarded as one expression of palingenetic myth which a deeply Christianized culture produced in the stressed social conditions of early modern Europe. Four hundred years later the no less stressed historical conditions of early twentieth century Europe produced another, genetically distinct, expression of it in a variety of political movements promising a new secular order, many of which readily expressed themselves in the language of religion, and in some cases (e.g. the Romanian Iron Guard) made themselves out to be the true defenders and revitalizers of religious orthodoxy.^lv It is a perspective that suggests that the sacralization of politics, far from being a ‘metaphorical’ process, the profane simulacrum of a ‘true’ religion (Spackman), a cynical ‘aestheticization of politics’ (Walter Benjamin), or the modern survival of medieval heresies concerning a kingdom on earth (Voegelin), is instead to be treated as the product of the archetypal human faculty for imbuing the home, the community, and hence the new home and the new community, with suprahuman, ritual significance, producing in the European context a symbology and liturgy certainly shaped by and articulated through the legacy of Christian discourse, but not descended from it ‘genealogically’.

The need for joined up thinking

Clearly the ongoing academic debates being spawned by each of the three key terms under examination in this issue preclude the possibility that an aesthetically satisfying sense of closure could ever be derived from setting out to extract a definitive way of conceptualizing them. Indeed the very notion of definition is problematic in a humanities pervaded by the spirit of post-structuralist discourse analysis and post-modern relativism. However, as indicated earlier, the strategy being applied here is another, namely to pose the question whether by consciously approaching the terms as components of a cluster that offer a multi-point perspective on a phenomenon they acquire enhanced heuristic value as part of a conceptual framework.

As the earlier quotation from Arendt makes clear, there is certainly nothing new in linking the term ‘totalitarian’ to regimes driven by a powerful sense of ideological mission. The first of Burleigh’s Cardinal Basil Hume Memorial Lectures ‘Religion and the Totalitarian Challenge’ documents how frequently contemporary observers of Nazism and Fascism associated its totalitarian destruction of freedom with a secular form of religion.^lvi Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, first published in 1945, though part of the literature popularizing the idea of totalitarianism as a ‘closed society’, also recognized that its fascist variants blended elements of biology with Hegelian metaphysics to produce a’ materialistic and at the same time mystical religion’.^lvii Three decades on J.-Lucien Radel distinguished between ‘ordinary’ (i.e. what Linz calls ‘authoritarian’) dictatorships that ‘lack the mass enthusiasm in support of a leader and are not identified with a programmatic ideology’, in stark contrast to totalitarian ones that are driven by ‘a charismatic ideology with a suitable leader strongly contaminating people’s emotions’.^lviii Placed in this context we should not be surprised if Burleigh finds that ‘theories of totalitarianism have rarely been incompatible with theories of political religions, and such leading exponents of the former as Raymond Aron,^lix Karl-Dietrich Bracher, Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski have employed these terms almost interchangeably.’^lx He rightly highlights the contribution of Jacob Talmon to this school of thought with his pioneering studies of the link between ‘totalitarian democracy’ and the messianic mentality of the revolutionaries who established it. The many articles and reviews that have appeared in the pages of this journal in its brief history underline how strong the nexus is in the political science imagination.

When it comes to fascism’s relationship to political religion, the link is far less well established. Emilio Gentile and George Mosse both treat the sacralization of politics as a major aspect of generic fascism. Stanley Payne, on the other hand, ignores the concept in his own interpretation,^lxi and does not even refer to it in his survey of approaches of fascism,^lxii though in his review of Gentile’s Le religioni politiche he extends a cautious welcome to seeing political religion as central to totalitarianism, a term which embraces fascism.^lxiii Walter Laqueur bases his prognosis of fascism’s vigorous future on his use of the ‘clerical fascism’ to include radical Islamic politics, an idiosyncratic usage that blurs the distinction between what Gentile calls ‘political religion’ (i.e. a sacralized form of politics) and ‘politicized religions’.^lxiv Roger Eatwell’s reflections on the subject emphasize the need to see fascism as a ‘political ideology’ rather than a ‘political religion’, insisting that the core of (the Christian) religion is a leap of faith in the Resurrection, something ‘inherently absurd’, whereas fascism’s ‘quest to forge a holistic nation and create a radical syncretic Third Way state’ has ‘nothing absurd’ about it.^lxv

Eatwell correctly points out that in The Nature of Fascism I had expressed considerable scepticism about the value of the term ‘political religion’ in the context of fascism, and have now become a ‘convert to the cause’.^lxvi However, conversions can come about through a gradual process of recognizing the errors and limitations of a previous prise de position, and not just through an epiphanic moment that at last turns a doubting Thomas into the member of a sect. The reason I originally took pains to dissociate myself from the term was that, like Eatwell in his article, I was keen to dissociate fascism from being treated as a modern, secularized form of millenarianism or Gnosticism. I was also keen to emphasize the gulf that at least in theological theory (though tragically not in practice) should have separated fascism from all forms of established Christianity. However, after my original somewhat dogmatic pronouncements correspondence with Emilio Gentile and Walter Adamson made me more sympathetic to the heuristic value of theories that distinguish clearly between established religion and political religion, using the latter to refer to the full gamut of rhetorical, organizational, and ritualistic techniques used by a totalitarian movement or regime to engineer a cult of the reborn state, race, or nation , while making the leader the focal point for charismatic socio-political energies. Since then, without becoming a zealot, I am one of its more active proponents, as this article shows. What Eatwell seems not to appreciate, like Spackman before him, is that in Gentile’s terminology a political religion is always a secular ideology and an Ersatz religion when contrasted with the world-view based on an established ecclesiastical or Scriptural tradition, because it seeks to mobilize the population to the point where the new political order is sacralized rather than any suprahistorical holy entity (even if this distinction is blurred in the minds of ‘clerical fascists’). This usage of the term fully applies to a movement aspiring to create (in Eatwell’s words) a ‘holistic nation and Third Way state’, no matter how much secular science, technology, and appeal to rational choice is subsumed in the fascist synthesis of ideological components. In short, there is considerable uncertainty among political scientists over fascism’s relationship to the term political religion, while the emergent consensus on fascism — whose stress on total national rebirth would bring it naturally into the orbit of both totalitarianism and political religion — remains contested.

It is thus hardly surprising if several major historians, who are professionally concerned primarily with the ‘idiographic’ task of exploring the uniqueness of phenomena and not the way they fit into general patterns and generic concepts ‘nomothetically’, have yet to join up the thinking on the three terms in their interpretation of Nazism. This is only partially true of Michael Burleigh, whose recent publications show that he needs no convincing of the deep structural relationship between totalitarianism and political religion,^lxvii and that he finds the term ‘political religion’ a valuable heuristic device for exploring the messianic dimension of Nazism.^lxviii As a result he makes both terms the conceptual key to his history of the Third Reich,^lxix observing that since the early 1990s it has ‘once again become fashionable’ to apply them to Nazism individually.^lxx However, a political scientist would soon notice that at no point does he define them, spell out the connection between them, or make it clear how, once used in tandem, they provide potent heuristic devices for explaining Nazi policies for the transformation of Germany and what actually happened when they were implemented. More strikingly, given the abundant references to the centrality of the myth of rebirth and the new man to Bolshevism, Fascism and Nazism in his lectures and articles on political religion, and despite referring readers (in footnote 19) to G. L. Mosse ‘important essay’ ‘Towards a General Theory of Fascism’^lxxi, he makes no allusion to the new consensus on generic fascism. As a result he fails to establish the obvious connections between totalitarianism, political religion, and those theories of fascism (notably the one contained in the very essay by Mosse that he recommends), that precisely stress this ‘palingenetic’ aspect of fascism once it is combined with extreme nationalism to become a key definitional component.

Richard Evans’ latest work on Nazism is revealing in another way. The last chapter of The Coming of the Third Reich is entitled ‘Hitler’s Cultural Revolution’, announcing an interpretation of Hitler’s political mission fully consistent with the new consensus on fascism, even if the correlation remains unacknowledged in a text that makes not a single reference to generic fascism. The next volume of the forthcoming trilogy immediately takes up this theme of cultural revolution. It opens with the passage from a speech delivered by Goebbels on 15 November 1933 in which he declared that ‘The revolution we have carried out is a total one. It has taken over all spheres of public life and transformed them from bottom up. It has completely changed and remoulded the relationships that human beings have to each other, to the state, and to the questions of existence.’ Like all revolutions it was not just affecting politics but ‘economics and culture, science and art’. ‘On the 30^th January the age of individualism finally died.[…] The single individual is henceforth replaced by the community of the Volk.’ Yet despite the obvious relevance ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘fascism’ in the some of the usages encountered earlier to the interpretation of such a speech, they are both conspicuous by their absence from the conceptual framework which Evan’s deploys in the book. As for ‘political religion’, this is his response when I tried to make the case for its relevance to Nazism’s ‘mission’ to build a new Germany:

I don’t think the concept of a political religion is very helpful. It is after all merely descriptive, and Hitler was at great pains to insist that Nazism was not a religion at all, poured scorn on Himmler and Rosenberg’s paganism, banned the Thingspiel, and so on. Of course there were stylistic elements borrowed from religious ritual, just as there had been in the SPD culture, but religion by definition involves the primacy of the supernatural, and Hitler always insisted that Nazism was fundamentally about this world, not the next.^lxxii

Once again the qualifying, transformative force of the adjective ‘political’ when conjoined with ‘religion’ in the hands of most political scientists has been ignored.

Perhaps the most significant case of a historian deeply unconvinced of the insights into Nazism offered by the group of terms under consideration is Ian Kershaw. Certainly he is not reluctant to deploy generic concepts per se, since it is Max Weber’s concept of charisma that informs the organization of his magnificent two-volume biography of Hitler. He is also fully aware of the potential relevance of two of them, having devoted a chapter to comparing the heuristic value of both ‘fascism’ and ‘totalitarianism’ in The Nazi Dictatorship. Yet he applies neither of them himself in his voluminous writings on Nazism.

The recent article on ‘Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism’ has thrown some light on this anomaly. Here he states categorically that ‘as long as we are looking for common features, not identity’ he has ‘no difficulty in describing German National Socialism both as a specific form of fascism and as a particular expression of totalitarianism’.^lxxiii Moreover, when he identifies the key to the dynamism of Nazism and to its uniqueness in the ‘explosive mixture of the “charismatic” politics of national salvation and the apparatus of a highly modern state’, he makes a fleeting link between this dynamic and the ‘quest for national rebirth’ that he (now) acknowledges ‘lay, of course, at the heart of all fascist movements’. However, since his concern is with Nazism’s uniqueness and not its ‘common features’ he immediately qualifies this concession with his assertion that ‘only in Germany did the striving for national renewal adopt such strongly pseudo-religious tones’,^lxxiv (a remark suggesting unfamiliarity with the intense pseudo-religiosity that also characterized the Romanian Iron Guard). While Kershaw finds only qualified value in applying ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘fascism’ to Nazism, he is utterly dismissive of ‘political religion’, describing it as ‘a currently voguish revamping of an age-old notion, though no less [sic] convincing for being repeated so persistently.’^lxxv

The cases of Evans, and Kershaw imply that even some of the most important historians may continue to harbour an instinctive mistrust of generic terms, and of the arid taxonomic disputes they can generate among the more nomothetically inclined political scientists, to the point where their minds are closed even to exploring the potential value to their work of certain generic terms.

Differentiation and the transcendence of indifference

It is against this background of continuing conflict among political scientists over several key generic terms and an understandable wariness of using those terms on the part of many historians, all in principle engaged with studying aspects of the ‘same’ modern revolutionary right, that the following essays seek to leave their mark. Of course they can be consulted in isolation solely for the empirical information they offer about a particular movement, and in the case of the essays on phenomena relatively neglected in Anglophone research, namely the Iron Guard in Romania, and the National Alliance and ‘religious right’ in the US, that would certainly make sense. But their full value emerges when they are read as case studies in the application of the terms fascism, totalitarianism/totalitarian movement, and political religion/religion conceived not as alternative concepts, but as forming a cluster or constellation of overlapping and complementary heuristic devices.

The organizing principle that has determined the choice of subjects is that the first pair deal with the relationship to religion, political and traditional, of (what the new consensus considers the only) two fascist regimes, the second pair focuses on ‘abortive’ fascist movements from inter-war Europe with very different relationships to religion, and the last two discuss post-war extreme-right phenomena in the US which exemplify contrasting connotations that ‘political religion’ can acquire in the context of contemporary ‘totalitarian movements’ of the right. A provisional evaluation of the heuristic value of this group of essays to historians of twentieth century closes the parabola opened by this introduction.

For such diverse essays to ‘hang together’ at all it is important for the reader to start with Gentile’s essay in which he has taken the opportunity to restate his theory of political religion and to address some of the criticisms and misunderstandings to which it has given rise. The first section of this essay proposes a ‘modular’ theory of political religion, totalitarianism, and generic fascism not only of rare precision and concision, but fully consistent with the sophisticated ‘clustering’ approach to conceptualization alluded to earlier that avoids the traps of essentialist, dualist, reductionist thinking and encourages an openness to the heuristic value of other approaches. The second exposes, with considerable polemical brio, the fallacies and false assumptions that have informed, or misinformed, some of the more hostile reactions to Gentile’s theory. In doing so it offers students still tempted to read academic articles uncritically as unimpeachable ‘truths’ a rare insight into the continuous process of formulation and contestation, of thesis and counter-thesis, of convergence and divergence, of verbal cut and thrust, that is the life-blood of the humanities, and conveys some sense of the subjective passions and unexplored prejudices that drive the search for objective truths. It thus brings alive Max Weber’s memorable assertion that:

The progress of cultural sciences occurs [through]…the perpetual reconstruction of those concepts through which we seek to comprehend reality. The history of the social sciences is and remains a continuous process passing from the attempt to order reality analytically through the construction of concepts – the dissolution of the analytical constructs so constructed through the expansion and shift of the scientific horizon – and the reformulation anew of concepts on the foundations thus transformed…The relationship between concept and reality in the cultural sciences involves the transitoriness of such syntheses.^lxxvi

However the main value of Gentile’s essay for this special issue is that the terms ‘political religion’ and ‘totalitarianism’ are presented specifically as constitutive elements of fascism, whether in the form of movement or regime, which, as a result, becomes overtly identified with other key phenomena, notably the sacralization of politics, palingenetic myth, anthropological revolution, and violence as a means to achieve the transformation of society. In this way connections that in the secondary literature surveyed above were at best only implicit become explicit, and none of the constituent terms can any longer be used in isolation. It then becomes impossible to confuse ‘political religion’ with a traditional ‘suprahistorical’ religion, see totalitarianism as the attempt to monopolize power for its own sake, or approach fascism as the externalization of national, class or personal pathologies.

The focus of Gentile article for the construction and contestation of his model of political religion is Fascist Italy. The next piece was intended at the planning stage to dove-tail neatly by demonstrating the value of applying it to the Third Reich and the value of seeing Nazism as a totalitarian movement/political religion. However, the task of contributing to this special issue was taken on by Richard Steigmann-Gall, author of a major work arguing that there is persuasive empirical evidence to show that the Nazis’ claim to represent a ‘positive Christianity’ was far less spurious than has been assumed by historians hitherto. In doing so he has unearthed a wealth of data that emphasizes just how permeable the membrane can be, both institutionally and ideologically, between organized religion and secular political movements. Far from corroborating or engaging with Gentile’s conceptual model or Burleigh’s interpretation in the pages of this journal of Nazism as a political religion, Steigmann-Gall chooses to side-step them. Instead, he offers his own sustained critique of the concept ‘political religion’ when applied to Nazism in a reductionist way that concentrates on its secular, anti-Christian, or neo-pagan strands to the exclusion of those which he believes constitute a genuine synthesis between Christianity and Nazism. This hybrid he sees not as marginal to Nazism but as its prevalent orthodoxy, to the point where he suggests that it is to be approached as a form of ‘religious politics’ (or what in Gentile’s taxonomy is termed a ‘politicized religion’) rather than a ‘political religion’. Were scholars to accept this interpretation^lxxvii it would represent a major correction to received views on the essential character of Nazism as a political movement and social force. At the very least the article underlines how far scholars are still divided about fundamental issues relating to the religious content of Nazism and how best to conceptualize it. (I might also suggest that it indirectly emphasizes the shortcoming of applying a single-point perspective to Nazism, in this case based on the concept ‘religion’, without taking into account other terms in the cluster, totalitarianism and fascism, and the adjacent concepts found in Gentile’s articles, such as revolution, palingenetic myth, and modernity.)

With Linehan’s study of the BUF as totalitarian movement and political religion the reader may be reassured finally to encounter an article that marshals considerable scholarship to fulfill the original brief of this special issue to the letter. In doing so he demonstrates the cogency of the concepts when applied in tandem to understanding its fascist dynamics (and at least Mosley did historians the favour of avoiding much future wrangling over taxonomy by specifically calling his movement ‘fascist’). What also emerges is how in this case there is little danger of confusing the spiritual dimension of the BUF’s ‘political religion’ with ‘genuine’ Christianity, though the presence of ‘clerical fascists’ within the BUF shows how far these categories could become confused and fused in the minds of some believers. This pocket of clarity seems to disappear immediately with the next article, for not only has Ioanid Radu chosen to discuss the Iron Guard without reference to the analyses of political religion carried out by Gentile or Burleigh in their TMPR articles, but in the Romanian case ideology is deeply enmeshed with traditional religion, in this case Orthodox Christianity. In fact the synergy of religion with fascism is so strong in the case of the Legion of the Archangel Michael that several scholars have suggested that it represents a hybrid of religion with politics, and thus is not a full member of the family of fascism (as long as this is conceived as secular revolutionary ideology) no matter how much it cloaks its racist utopia in the theological discourse of sacrifice, redemption, and resurrection.^lxxviii However, what does emerges clearly ─ thanks to Radu’s profound familiarity with the primary sources relating to the subject in their original Romanian ─ is that, to cite the abstract ‘Despite its pronounced orthodox character, legionary mysticism did not signify the total assimilation of orthodox theology by a fascist political movement, but on the contrary an attempt at subordinating and transforming that theology into a political instrument.’^lxxix In a stroke this brings Romanian fascism into line with the way Michael Burleigh and Iain Kershaw instinctively (but not Steigmann-Gall) approach the ‘theology’ of Nazism.

Once we cross the divide between inter-war and post war fascism and move to the other side of the Atlantic we enter what can be disorienting terrain for historians of the extreme right in inter-war Europe. Nevertheless, Martin Durham’s essay on the National Alliance soon restores a sense of familiarity with its account of how a fascist movement has adapted neo-Nazism to an American and postwar context that turns the discourse of German nationalism into a pan-Aryan creed. In the absence of the conditions to generate a mass base, the AN has had to radically overhaul the inter-war concept of a fascist movement, the armed party, and the charismatic leader. Durham also suggests that it has introduced a significant new element to the religious dimension of original Nazi by postulating the need to transcend the existing secular world order, a project that for Durham calls into question the adequacy of seeing political religion as ‘centred on the sacralization of the state’. However, this comment apparently fails to take into account the fact that, as both Gentile’s Le religioni della politica and his The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy,^lxxx make clear, the ‘sacralization of the state’ is to be understood as only one dimension of a more general and pervasive ‘sacralization of politics’, a process that (in Gramscian terms) does not even operate primarily in ‘political society’ (within the state is subsumed), but within ‘civil society’.

A more fundamental challenge to Gentile’s taxonomy is implied by Durham’s suggestion that both the Romanian Iron Guard and the National Alliance in different ways call into question the neatness of the line that Gentile draws between traditional religion and political religion as the ‘consecration of a secular entity’. However, Gentile has always stressed the extremely porous nature of the division between political and traditional religion, seeing the key to the distinction in the degree to which sacralized political phenomena are generated by a traditional religion that has assumed a political dimension or by a political movement attempting to confer a sacral, numinous quality on a secular object at the centre of its idealized vision of the future, such as the fatherland, the nation, the race, the proletariat, or humanity itself. Ioanid’s article demonstrates that in the last analysis the Iron Guard was using the symbology and discourse of Orthodoxy to allegorically transfigure and hence consecrate the Romanian race. Durham is right to argue that its main purpose was to resurrect the nation ‘rather than sacralizing the secular state’, but this actually corroborates rather than calls into questions Gentile’s theory of ‘political religion’.

As for the National Alliance, Durham’s own article makes it clear that it is bent on creating a new religion tailored to its purpose, which is to mobilize ‘the most advanced elements of the race’ so as to restore its mythical purity and supremacy within, not beyond, historical time. The fact that, unlike Italian Fascism, it makes no attempt ‘to subordinate traditional religion to its political project’ (which as an extra-systemic movement it is in any case in no position to do) thus does nothing to disqualify the NA’s as a political religion. Instead it serves to underline the importance of Gentile’s observation that the relationship between the sacralization of politics and traditional religion can assume many permutations, being the function both of the intrinsic nature of the political movement in question and of the role played by traditional religion in the society in which it attempts to fulfil its ultimate objectives.^lxxxi For example, the different role played by Christianity and the Church in inter-war Britain, Germany, Italy and Romania has a crucial bearing on the form assumed by political religion in the context of the British Union of Fascists, Nazism, Fascism, and the Iron Guard. The symbiotic relationship between traditional and political religion in political cultures where traditional religion is still a determining factor also explains the markedly mimetic and syncretic aspect of their relationship that can emerge in particular historical conditions. In the case of the Iron Guard this led to a high degree of intermingling and promiscuity between the two, producing what appear to be extremely fuzzy boundaries in taxonomic terms until they are examined more closely.

The final essay by Chip Berlet on Christian Identity adds tantalizing new dimensions to the enquiry we have collectively undertaken. On the one hand, it largely endorses both Gentile’s original taxonomy and the clustering approach to conceptualization that lies at the heart of the multi-point perspective it generates for research into totalitarianism, political religion, and political extremism. On the other hand, its focus on the relationship between Gentile’s concept of political religion and one particular nodal point in the cluster to which it belongs, namely ‘apocalypticism’, in the context of the heterogeneous CI movement opens up several new conceptual ‘cans of worms’. First, Berlet offers a cogent critique of the assumption that political religions represent a ‘perversion’ of religion, something I myself have contended in past analyses, and suggests instead that long before the rise of secularization not just Christianity but other major religions already exhibited the capacity to generate ‘dualistic apocalypticism, coercion, and theocracy’ in ways that anticipate modern manifestations of secular totalitarianism. This rightly draws attention to the need for scholars to clarify both the distinction between orthodox and unorthodox variants of traditional religions, and the relationship between the significance they attach to the other-worldly and this-worldly realms of reality (a relationship whose extreme complexity is already apparent in Saint Augustine’s The City of God written in the 5^th century AD). Berlet then proceeds to pose a flurry of new questions:

What are the characteristics and interactions of palingenesis, apocalypticism, millennialism, and millenarianism? When we speak of totalitarianism, are we assuming it includes subsets of authoritarianism and coercion or do we need to make these elements more explicit? Do all forms of totalitarianism, including fascism, involve to varying degrees the processes of dualism, demonisation, scapegoating and conspiracism? What are the different ways a movement can package its ideology and construct persuasive frames using integralism, organicism, völkish nationalism, and populist demagoguery?

Certainly these are a douche écossaise for any readers who might have experienced any temporary sense of intellectual epiphany reading Gentile’s original theory. However, they only underline, rather than call into question, its value as a heuristic conceptual framework once we accept Max Weber’s vision of the open-ended process of humanistic inquiry into the world.

As for Martin Blinkhorn’s afterthoughts on the issue as a whole, by definition I cannot know what they are since this article too falls into his purview. I will be as intrigued as many readers to learn what a historian of interwar European fascism not known for being particularly enamoured of taxonomic soul-searching makes of it all. Certainly, the articles justify a healthy scepticism about quests for ‘nomothetic’ clarity by documenting the extraordinarily diverse nature of the phenomena subsumed under the terms ‘fascism’ and ‘extreme right’, as well as the conspicuous differences in basic approach and conceptual framework that can still exist even among academics prepared to contribute to the same journal issue. However, they may hopefully also convince a sceptic that Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions would do well to adopt the policy of pursuing ever more deliberately and self-consciously the goal implicit in the act of its creation. This was surely to establish a new inter-disciplinary specialism based on maximizing the synergy, not only between political science and history, but between the concepts totalitarianism and political religion, thereby reinforcing the ties of kinship and mutual support within the large extended family of terms, or conceptual constellations, to which they belong.

Whatever the practical outcome of this particular journey into collaborative scholarship and converging concepts, I would like to thank Robert Mallet (the series editor) and Glyn Lavers (the in-house editor at Taylor and Francis) for encouraging me as a reluctant captain to steer this special issue on such oceanic topics to a safe harbour, and express my appreciation to all the contributors for ensuring it did not arrive with its cargo bays empty. Whether it has reached its destination clarifying more than it obfuscates, and hence succeeds in moving the debate on rather than bogging it down even further in the terminological disputes that so alienate historians, I must leave it for readers to judge. Nevertheless, no matter how far short this particular special issue may fall short of its original (necessarily utopian) objectives in the minds of some readers, it is worth emphasizing that debating the nexus between religion, politics, and ideological assaults against civil society should never degenerate into the scholastic game or wrestling match of intellectual egos it may sometimes appear to outsiders. Nor is it simply a matter of satisfying the compulsive need of academic specialists to compare, contrast, discriminate and differentiate in their attempt to achieve some sort of conceptual grip on politics in the age of high modernity. An age in which Marx’s prophetic phrase ‘all that is solid melts into thin air’ increasingly applies not just to external reality but to the terminology we create to capture them.

The prophylactic recommended by Cioran for the innate human drive to idolatry and fanaticism, the need to venerate even graven images representing secular authority, was to nurture ‘the faculty of indifference’, to become ‘sceptics (or idlers or aesthetes) because they propose nothing, because they — humanity’s true benefactors — undermine fanaticism’s purposes, analysing its frenzy.’ He also warns that ‘in every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world’.^lxxxii Undaunted, I will close in the guise of preacher rather than teacher by suggesting that the serious study of the nexus between politics and religion opens up — to use a trope employed by fascists, Dark Greens, and first generation Blairites alike — a ‘Third Way’ of which Cioran is oblivious. It is one where academics engage with the historical fruits of fanaticism and analyse the political frenzies of modernity not with cold detachment but with a passionate humanist, or perhaps just human, commitment to establishing academically cogent interpretations, educating students, and, if the chance arises, informing public opinion and the media that shape it, and enlightening government advisers and politicians, lest civil religion crosses once more the thin-line that separates it from a religious one in times of crisis. We have a professional duty to take advantage of our privileged vantage-point in society to avoid allowing the dissection of concepts to become desiccation, and to proactively disseminate the tolerance that is born of a sense of complexity and inflected by compassion. We have an obligation to combat any tendency for ‘the goddess Reason’ to degenerate into a modern Moloch or a Juggernaut. We have a mission to scrutinize and challenge the dangerous simplifications of fundamentalisms^lxxxiii, whether religious or secular, and do what we can to keep the minds and doors of our society open. It is a task that perhaps requires a benevolent fanaticism of its own, an academic equivalent of the passionate commitment to this-worldly life evoked on Sting’s album Sacred Love: ‘There’s no religion but the joys of rhythm.[…], There’s no religion that’s right or winning, There’s no religion in the paths of hatred, Ain’t no prayer but the one I’m singing’.^lxxxiv

Roger Griffin is Professor in the History of Ideas at Oxford Brookes University, and the author of The Nature of Fascism (1991), and numerous articles and chapters on fascism, as well as three readers, Fascism (OUP, 1995), International Fascism. Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (Arnold, 1998), and Fascism in Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Social Science series (2003). His is currently working on a monograph on the relationship between fascism and modernism.

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