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25 oeuvres 235 utilisateurs 2 critiques

A propos de l'auteur

A. James Gregor is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and has served as H. L. Oppenheimer Professor at the Marine Corps University at Quantico, Virginia. For his work on the history of the peninsula, he was awarded a knighthood in the Order of Merit afficher plus of the Republic of Italy. He is the author of thirty books, most recently Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism (Stanford University Press, 2008). afficher moins

Œuvres de A. James Gregor

Interpretations of Fascism (1990) 17 exemplaires
Phoenix: Facism in Our Time (1999) 7 exemplaires

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This was a rather deep dive for me. I don't have any familiarity with almost any of the thinkers discussed here. But Gregor certainly seems to the know the territory very well and to give a reasonable and accurate picture. He gives us a history, mostly between the world wars. It's mostly about how the syndicalists moved from Marxist anti-nationalism to a nationalist position, as a result of world war one. What gives a nation its coherence? Some sort of similarity, of sameness. A major theme of Gregor's book is to argue that Fascism, the ideas of the intellectuals in Mussolini's circle, were really anti-racist, and not anti-Semitic. The racism and anti-Semitism that entered into Fascism and into the policies of Mussolini's regime did so because Italy became allied with Nazi Germany for practical reasons. Fascist racism was an accommodation with Nazi racism. Gregor didn't bring up Stalin's alliance with Hitler, not that I can remember. Anyway the Fascists were certainly anti-liberal, against England and France.

Gregor argues at the end of book... well, even at the beginning he argues that most of what people call neo-Fascism, that has nothing to do with Fascism. Yeah, there is racism around... but just because people are racist, that doesn't make them Fascist. Again, Fascism was not fundamentally racist, nothing like how German National Socialism was. This book was published in 2005. It'd be interesting to see what Gregor thinks now. Hmmm. What might a book like Trump's Intellectuals look like. Steve Bannon, maybe Ted Cruz. Are there any kind of intellectuals in the Christian Right? Rushdoony and Dominion Theology... Gregor does discuss at some length how Fascism and the Catholic Church were pretty well aligned... that was another shift from Marxist syndicalism to Fascism, along with nationalism.

Certainly a major component of today's right wing is its anti-intellectualism. Gregor does a good job of showing that Mussolini and Fascism were not anti-intellectual. Gregor mostly portrayed Italian Fascism as mainly growing from Italian roots, though he mentions Hegel repeatedly as an intellectual foundation, along with Marx and Rousseau. But we aren't really shown how the Fascists were responding to intellectual developments outside of Italy during the 1920s and 1930s.... well, there are responses to political developments... the Fascists could see how the Bolsheviks were evolving, and learn from their mistakes... and then the accommodations to Nazi ideas in the late 1930s... but these came not out of intellectual inspiration, but political necessity.

Gregor is quite clear, that this book is quite limited. What it touches on but doesn't investigate in depth - how are ideas and actions related? Today's right wing doesn't seem to have the intellectual coherence of the Italian fascists... Tucker Carlson is no Sergio Panunzio... and yet, in November 2022, it's more than merely possible that the right wing will take over and crush our liberal democracy - the ideal of fair elections may be crushed - how will we get it back? Once we have an authoritarian government.... how will Jordan Peterson and Gary North coordinate policy?

Gregor does a great job of showing the intellectual coherence of Fascist thought and distinguishing it from the incoherence of the racist mobs we face nowadays... but he doesn't give us any real help in understanding our present situation... I imagine he has been surprised by how the authoritarian movement has continued to expand... the soil that nurtures it is quite different than that of the 1920s and 1930s.
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
kukulaj | Feb 19, 2022 |
Like many academic texts, "Marxism, Fascism and Totalitarianism" can be slow, dense, repetitious and theoretical to a fault. Even so, readers interested in the intellectual history of the twentieth century may find this book both useful and interesting. Gregor makes a few assertions here that may challenge the way that many of us consider the development both fascism and Marxism. He asserts that the fact that after the death of Frederick Engels in 1895, the fact that the proletarian revolution predicted by Marx did not take place led Marxists to weigh what practical steps they should take to implement socialism in their societies. Gregor seems to discount entirely the idea that a "pure" Marxism ever really existed, tracing instead the various arguments and factional splits that engaged Marxists in the years leading up to the Russian revolution of 1917. Marxism's need to adopt viable political strategies, according to this argument, led it to adopt less "scientific" approaches to politics and to cross-breed with other currents of European thought, most notably Darwinism and nationalism. Gregor sees fascism as more than Marxism's competing totalitarianism: in his view, it was an evolved Marxist heresy that developed after Italian socialists became divested of their class-oriented one-worldism. Well, that's not all, of course. There's much more here, and Gregor, who shows extraordinary determination extracting meaning from obscure Marxist and fascists texts, provides ample textual citations and other evidence to support his views. Of course, these are the sort of social debates that can still, almost a hundred years on, be argued from virtually every angle: it's possible that a reader more familiar with this subject than I am would be able to offer a much more thorough critique of Mr. Gregor's book. Still, if you've got an interest in the development of extreme political philosophies, or in the turbulent middle years of the twentieth century, you might find that "Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism" is very much worth your time.… (plus d'informations)
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TheAmpersand | Sep 23, 2012 |

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Œuvres
25
Membres
235
Popularité
#96,241
Évaluation
½ 4.4
Critiques
2
ISBN
62

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