Fascismen som ett sluttande plan

Abstract

Fascism as a “downward path”. Reanalysing political biographies of Benito Mussolini and Osvald Mosley the author is testing the hypothesis that ideologies like fascism start with fairly innocent ideas and, given the right circumstances, develop in a quasi-logical way on a downward path towards their malignant maturity. With “quasi-logical” the author means something similar to Karl R. Popper´s concept “logic of the situation”, that is, the logic is neither formal nor strictly deterministic; it follows that actors are not exempt from moral responsibility, you can always choose to act against the logic of the situation. The author finds that an exalted “communitarianism” is an essential factor in the development of fascism. A part of the “logic” is that a demagogue elevating the value of the group, be it “nation”, “church”, “class”, or anything, on the expense of the individual needs the picture of an ugly and evil enemy in order to get the members to obliterate themselves and merge into the group. Accordingly, in a classification of political ideologies the first question to be asked is: “individualism or antiindividualism”. The author objects to Sheri Berman´s suggestion that communitarianism explains the success of the Swedish Social Democracy during the twentieth century and will instead of that explanation propose “reformism”, that is, a nonrevolutionary strategy for political transformation.