Fascism: Its Left-Wing Origin and Neutral Utility
James Allen once said that "circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself." No statement could be more accurate in regards to Fascism. A tired buzzword in this day and age, Fascism is rarely defined. The first step is taken from Machiavelli, who proclaims that a "mixed principality" will always conflict, and the only way to alleviate this is to assume total control over one's subjects. The second step focuses on Hobbes's belief that the sovereign authority cannot be wronged, cannot be ridiculed, and must strive to assert its authority wherever possible. The third step is to inject a collective approach towards economic policy, where the State controls the economy of its citizens and may grant or remove rights as they see fit. Finally, there must be laws on record that allow for the persecution of one's citizens, should they break away from the State's dogma. While the French Revolutionaries, led by Maximillian Robespierre, already had control over the economy and the Government in 1792, it would not be until the following year that Fascism would begin. Fascism began on 17 September 1793, when the French Revolutionary leader Robespierre's Law of Suspects passed during the French National Convention; this zero-tolerance doctrine on the State's supposed enemies affected classical liberalism by influencing every authoritarian political movement brought forth after its declaration to adopt a similar law.
Throughout the centuries, the strong made it their mission to control the weak. In the Italian peninsula, city-states warred with one another, and the Pope himself warred against his papal states; this was a peculiar fight, considering that the Pope had the power of Ediction, the right to remove one's baptismal rights and damn the subjects of an entire State to Hell.1 The city- states of Italy had to deal with this tumultuous time for centuries, but no one quite had the power or the influence necessary to bring the peninsula into a group understanding. That is until Lorenzo de Medici of Florence employed the philosopher who gave him the handbook to do it.2 Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince stripped away all morals and ethics of rule and focused solely on the task at hand: how to obtain power and keep it. Machiavelli proclaims that the purpose of the State is stability for he who rules over it and that new Princes must disarm rebels and arm the previous regime's enemies to maintain his strength.3 Machiavelli further proclaimed that "Mixed Principalities"4 disrupt the State's sovereignty and ultimately lead to the ruin of the Prince.5 In a time where the Pope and the Catholic church were revered in nearly every text available, Machiavelli only mentions Pope Julius II as a tyrannical dictator and mentions God once, in a blasphemous way for the time, stating:
This will not be difficult if you will recall to yourself the actions and lives of the men I have named and although they were great and wonderful men, yet they were men, and each one of them had no more opportunity than the present offers, for their enterprises were neither more just nor easier than this, nor was God more their friend than He was yours…God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.6
In this passage, Machiavelli casts doubt on Predestination, proclaiming that God is on the side of no one, and that the choice of being a conquering hero or a failure is ours to make. Ultimately, Machiavelli argues that the State's will should be secondary to the will of the Prince, and only when another dethrones him can his power be taken away.
After one hundred and thirty-eight years had passed, and the Civil War raged in England, Thomas Hobbes expanded upon the thought of "Mixed Principalities" leading to the death of a nation when he penned Leviathan in 1651 during the conflict. Hobbes's book explores the components that erect the political landscape and suggested that a political ideology created around a Summum Bonum (greatest good) will ultimately lead to a civil war.7 Hobbes goes further than Machiavelli when he rejects the separation of powers, advocating for Sovereign's rights to censor the press and restrict free speech rights should they be considered desirable by the Sovereign to promote order. Also, Hobbes proclaims that the Sovereign should have the power to be incapable of being put to death, be the judge in all cases, reward or punish in any way they deem fit and that the Sovereign is the voice of the political system.8 Hobbes believed that, without power like this being held in the Government, there would be Bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all), a never-ending war that would result in the country's disintegration. This work was written during the Civil War, but the author would argue that it was the teachings of Machiavelli that inspired this notion of governance more than anything else. Consider where Machiavelli states that mankind is “ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, (and) covetous.”9 In Hobbes’s writing, he declared that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes virtually quotes Machiavelli when he speaks of the Sovereign of the State, when he maintains that:
“The greatest of human powers is that which is compounded of the powers of most men, united by consent, in one person, natural or civil, that has the use of all their powers depending on his will; such as is the power of a Commonwealth: or depending on the wills of each particular; such as is the power of a faction, or of diverse. factions leagued.
Therefore, to have servants is power; to have friends is power: for they are strengths united.”10
It is here that Hobbes concurs with Machiavelli that the will of the ruler should and must be the will of the people. With this power in place, the final portion of society necessary for the Sovereign to control, according to Hobbes, is the religious authority. Hobbes goes back to his ultimate point: Authority on Earth is conveyed by people in their self-interest, not conferred via divine right. His anti-Catholic leanings show through as he condemns religious figures who claim the authority of the temporal world for themselves. Hobbes favored a Protestant state religion that was subservient to the Government.11 Hobbes ends his critique of the church by stating that the only benefactors of the church were the clergymen, and they needed to be controlled to maintain cultural order.12
With Machiavelli granting insight into a single sovereign, and Hobbes proclaiming that the Sovereign should never be held in contempt, Jean Jacques Rousseau penned his magnum opus, The Social Contract in 1762. In it, Rosseau argued against the divine empowerment of monarchs to legislate, asserting that the will of the people alone should be the Sovereign voice within a nation. The beginning sentence of the book sets the tone, stating “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.”13 Rousseau continues by dismissing the theory that there is any other natural authority in nature than that found of a father and child’s dynamic, and this dynamic is only erected to protect the child. Rosseau continues this line of thinking by agreeing with Hobbes in his idea that a ruler’s role is a paternal one; just as a son shows reverence and obedience to his father, so too must a subject show reverence to his ruler.14 However, Rousseau believed that an ideal society would be one that would be filled by those who would give themselves to no one person, but instead give themselves to a group ideology where no one person would have any more power over anyone else. As Rosseau himself described it:
Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.15
Rosseau further claims that, since Hobbes was incorrect about people being generally selfish and evil, and that the will of the people is always for their good, that dissenting opinions come only from those outside the will of the people, and that censorship and the death penalty was acceptable for those unfortunate few who did not agree with the Sovereign majority, the only morally right people who exist come from within the group.16 Of course, the form of mob rule which Rosseau is advocating would be similar to two wolves and a sheep asking what is for dinner. If one is in the minority, and the will of fellow citizens is to kill dissenters, then the will of the people is to have Sovereign rule by any means necessary.
Just twenty-nine years after Rosseau, an American icon would advocate for the Revolution. Thomas Payne finished his second most well-known work, The Rights of Man, in 1792. Written as a rebuttal to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Payne defended the rights of the people of any nation to revolt against their Government vehemently when their leaders do not protect and defend their rights. Payne corrects Burke by informing him that "It was not against Louis XVI but the despotic principles of the government, that the nation revolted,"17 and he continued to point out that Burke did not understand the relationship between the practice of despotism and the principles of autocracy carried out in France under Monarchial rule. The act of assisting the then Revolutionaries against the British was in direct conflict with advocating for one’s people first. The increase of taxation on French citizens to assist the American Revolutionaries further sparked dissent. Payne would use these examples to claim further that this despotism would be erased by eliminating aristocratic titles, because democracy is incompatible with dynastic hierarchy, which leads to the despotism of the family. He advocates for a national budget without military and war expenses so that the King could not force his will on his citizens. With lower taxes for the poor, subsidized education, and a progressive income tax weighted against wealthy estates to discourage the re-emergence of a hereditary aristocracy, Payne claims that the despotism would be erased from France and any society which would enact these changes.18 Principally, Rights of Man opposes the belief that dictatorial Government is necessary because of man's corrupt, essential nature. Paine further argues that Government is a contrivance of man, and it follows that hereditary succession and hereditary rights to govern cannot compose a Government because the wisdom to govern cannot be inherited.19 If The Social Contract of Rosseau was the barrel, and Robespierre was the bullet, The Rights of Man was the trigger. Fueled with the concept of Sovereignty from Machiavelli, the inability of the Sovereign to be wrong by Hobbes, the will of the majority being advocated for defining the Sovereign from Rosseau, Payne's advocation for the Revolution to continue only gave support to what would become the "Reign of Terror" only a year later.
When the Revolution began, many French citizens were unemployed, food prices began to rise due to short harvests, and the rising taxes pushed the French National Assembly to rethink the leadership of the country. In June of 1789, the Assembly's leaders passed radical measures to eliminate Feudalism, expel state control from the Catholic church, and allow all French citizens the right to vote. In 1791, the French National Assembly solidified their ideas by passing a new French Constitution, guaranteeing the right to vote and the eventual dissolvement of Feudalism.20 Such radical proposals led to the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792, which ended with establishing the First French Republic in August of the same year.21 King Louis XVI would be executed the following year in January, and Robespierre’s Law of Suspects would be enacted seven months later in August.22 An astute reader of Rosseau, Robespierre understood that dissenting opinions within the Revolution would only fragment support of the movement, and there was only one way to ensure that those voices would never be heard. By the time the “Reign of Terror” ended in July of 1794, an estimated 16,600 people were put to death by guillotine.23 Fixed prices, death for 'hoarders' or 'profiteers', and confiscation of grain stocks by groups of armed workers meant that Paris was suffering food shortages by early September. However, France's biggest challenge was servicing the vast public debt inherited from the former regime, which continued to expand due to the war. Initially, the debt was financed by sales of confiscated property, but this was hugely inefficient; since few would buy assets that might be repossessed, fiscal stability could only be achieved by continuing the war until French counter- revolutionaries had been defeated.24 Instead, on 28 July 1794, Robespierre would be found guilty of conspiracy and treason, and he would be sentenced to death by his law.25 The French Directory would take control of France in 1795, only to be taken over by Napoleon Bonaparte. This seizure of power would bring the end of the French Revolution, but not its teachings. Bonaparte continued to use his own Law of Suspects throughout his reign as Emperor,26 as would Kaiser Wilhelm, Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin.27
Historians have debated the meaning of the French Revolution for centuries.28 Interestingly enough, their debate mirrors the fundamental difference that sparked the Revolution in the first place and grants the modern distinction between "right-wing", meaning one is conservative, and "left-wing" meaning liberal: this was the seating arrangement in the Revolutionary Assembly. Whatever else it may have been, one thing is clear: the French Revolution was the first totalitarian Revolution, and served as the blueprint for others that followed. Begun initially as a nationalist-populist uprising for the rights of the people, it morphed into a mechanism whose sole goal was to force the enemies of the common good to bend to the general will of the Revolutionaries. It was no wonder that their leader, Maximillian Robespierre, believed he was righteous; his teacher, Jean-Jacques Rosseau, wrote that individuals who live per the general will are "free" and "virtuous", and state-sanctioned coercion is the act of "forcing men to be free." Fascism began on 17 September 1793, when the French Revolutionary leader Maximillian Robespierre's Law of Suspects passed during the French National Convention, erecting a doctrine of zero-tolerance on the State's supposed enemies. This ruling affected classical liberalism by influencing the political movements brought forth after its declaration to adopt a similar law. Such a shift in political motivation and control was not random but two hundred and eighty years in the making.
Sources:
1 Erica Benner, Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017), 23-38.
2 Benner, Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World, 315-318.
3 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Trans. Ninan Hill (New York: Fall River Press, 2016), 8-11. 4 This is the first known time this term is mentioned but is certainly not the last. During the Weimar Republic, Carl Schmitt wrote a book titled Political Theology. In it, Schmitt quotes this exact portion of The Prince to create another term, Pluralism. Schmitt uses this theory to proclaim that Pluralism weakens the Sovereign by dividing political power through stretching power among multiple players. He further proclaims that a political system with multiple heads promotes disunity, dividing society into multiple subgroups, and encourages tribalism. If there is one Sovereign, there is one political identity. Carl Schmitt was also a respected attorney who won a case for the Nazi party called Prussia v. Reich, which allowed Goring to be appointed Chancellor of East Prussia. He would later establish the Soldau concentration camp, which would be responsible for executing political enemies. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985), 5-9, 21, 24; Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2000), 226-246; Reinhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 349-358.
5 Machiavelli, The Prince, 39-41.
6 Ibid, 111-112.
7 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004), 43.
8 Hobbes, Leviathan, 298.
9 Machiavelli, The Prince, 69-72.
10 Hobbes, Leviathan, 50.
11 Ibid, 439-443
12 Ibid, 437-438.
13 Rousseau, The Social Contract, 181.
14 Ibid, 182-189.
15 Ibid, 191.
16 Ibid, 258-261, 293-294.
17 Thomas Payne, The Writings of Thomas Paine, including Age of Reason, Common Sense, Rights of Man (New York: Carlton House, 1978), 122.
18 Thomas Payne, The Rights of Man, 125-127.
19 Ibid, 134-136.
20 Constitution of 1791. Institute for World History. Miami Gardens: St. Thomas University. Last updated 17 August, 2015. https://wp.stu.ca/worldhistory/wpcontent/uploads/sites/4/2015/07/French-Constitution-of- 1791.pdf
21 Israel, Jonathan. Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 98-110.
22 "The Law of Suspects," Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution. Visille: Musée de la Révolutiôn Française (Museum of the French Revolution). Accessed 30
March, 2021. https://revolution.chnm.org/d/417.
23 Williams, Helen Maria. Letters Written in France. London: John Crosley, 1612. Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership, 2011. http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A04486.0001.001.
24 Hale, Matthew Rainbow. "On Their Tiptoes: Political Time and Newspapers during the Advent of the Radicalized French Revolution, circa 1792-1793." Journal of the Early Republic 29 (2009): 191–218.
25 Sternhell, Zeev and David Maisel, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 234-256.
26 Ibid, 257-258.
27 Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 21-62, 81-117, 253-267, 452-470.
28 Fallace, Thomas. "American Educators' Confrontation with Fascism." Educational Researcher 47, 1 (2018): 46–52.
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