20th Century was a new era in the world history and it was an era that differs in many aspects from other centuries by including two major wars (WW1 and WW2) and Great Depression. The modernization movement and industrialization which came with the Enlightenment Era in the 18th century stressed the concepts of human rights, freedoms, democracy and independence. However, also this modernity created a negative atmosphere with wars in the 20th century. The living conditions of individuals were developed by the new technologies, recognition of the right to vote for women, establishment of new democracies etc. On the other hand authoritarian leaders, repressive regimes, wars, economic declines, racist ideologies were affected the world order. This is a questionable phenomenon about the results of the modernity.
National Socialism is also a product of turbulent atmosphere of the 20th century. Sauer seems Nazism as a ‘’disease of modern society’’. Features of more emphasis on ethnicity, constructing the nation-state as a latecomer, conservativeness of the regime distinguish the concept of nationalism in National Socialism from nationalism in French Revolution. In addition to that, the characteristics of opportunist structure, desire to turn to natural life, antisemitic traits and the use of propaganda as a tool for political aims differentiate National Socialism from liberal democracies. Because of the different characteristics of the National Socialism, different approaches used in referring it: mainly Fascism and Totalitarianism. Some scholars classified National Socialism as totalitarianism (like Russia, Stalin) and the others classified as fascism (like Italy, Mussolini). The definitions of both regimes somehow share similar characteristics but they also have dissimilarities and they stress different sides of the regimes. ‘’The theories of fascism, Germanism, and totalitarianism coexisted to a degree from the outset.’’
In this context, this paper will analyze how National Socialism is addressed through fascism and totalitarianism by different scholars.
Scholars answer the question of ‘what is national socialism’ differently. Some thinks that National Socialism is a type of fascism, others think totalitarianism and some classify it as original to German society with respect to its intellectual historical background. Hannah Arendt (1953) takes National Socialism as a form of totalitarianism and she makes socio-political arguments and psychological explanations in her article. She mainly focused on the period after 1933. Instead of thinking national socialism as an unique product of German history like thinkers stand up for Germanism, she takes national socialism as a ‘’novel form of government’’ by analyzing its elements called ideology and terror which grants government an ability to form the individuals that they live in. She defines totalitarian government as ‘’the alternative between lawful and lawless government, between arbitrary and legitimate power.’’ Arendt (1953:306). ‘’If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination’’ Arendt (1953:310). This can be explained by the anarchical order of the Hitler Regime. SS had the opportunity to judge individuals. The anarchical order and chaos also create fear in the public.
‘’What totalitarian rule needs to guide the behavior of its subjects is a preparation to fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim. This two-sided preparation, the substitute for a principle of action, is the ideology.’’ Arendt (1953:315). In that manner, totalitarian state is different from any other repressive regimes with its tools. It is a control over individuals and so called ‘total domination’. Terror is in between lawfulness and lawlessness. By imposing a fear in society with terror and focusing on the totalitarian ideology to eradicate alternative ways of thinking in order to explain and understand the world, totalitarianism aims to create lonely and insecure individuals. This is not like a solitude. Solitude is good for production, it is mainly prefer to be alone to increase creativity and production. ‘’Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone where- as loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.’’ Loneliness is the result of destruction of the line between private and public, people became passive individuals that don’t think about the system, social order, governance etc. On the one hand, in terms of ideology Sauer (1967) talks about the insufficiency to use totalitarianism to understand Nazi regime even explaining their ideology. ‘’Even in the case of Nazi ideology, we know more about its roots and its propaganda system than about its structure and its functional role in the social system.’’ Merely totalitarianism is not enough to explain Nazi ideology and historical background according to Sauer.
Terror and ideology are essential elements of totalitarianism also used by Hitler to control the individuals and to turn back to the Law of Nature which is opposed to modernism. All these features that are used by totalitarianism create difference from tyranny, dictatorship. Also Arendt seems Russia as totalitarian regime. Sauer who classifies National Socialism as fascism criticizes this approach by analyzing the differences between fascism and Bolshevism. ‘’Neither V.I. Lenin nor Joseph Stalin wished to turn the clock back; they do not merely wished to move ahead, but they wished to jump ahead. The Bolshevik revolution had many elements of a development revolution not unlike those who under way in the underdeveloped countries.’. The willingness of turning back to the Law of Nature, idealizing the lives of farmers and traditional ones are peculiar to Hitler’s Germany. ‘’The social and political order of Bolshevism is relatively independent from leadership; it is so speak, more objective. Fascist regimes, by contrast, are almost identical with their leaders; no fascist regime has so far survived its leader.’’
If Stalin’s Russia is totalitarianism, Hitler’s Germany cannot be totalitarian regime because of the dependency of its authoritarian leader. Sauer (1967) puts Nazism into three categories with defining the borders of the categories by WW2 and Cold War. He mainly explains these periods by non-Marxist and fascist perspective. In the first phase, fascism was examined with a Marxist approach by scholars but this perspective changed. Fascism was seemed as a domination by major firms, companies etc. in terms of Marxist perspective. ‘’Fascism was the representative of the lower middle class.’’ On the other hand, Sauer thinks that it is a capitalist movement but not indigenous to lower-middle class. ‘’Fascism is a political practice appropriate to the mass politics of the twentieth century.’’
It is a mass movement with the great contribution of lower-middle class according to Sauer. ‘’ It may even be said that a distinct interest group was formed within the fascist mixture by what might be called the military desperadoes, veterans of the First World War and the postwar struggles, who had not been reintegrated into either the civilian society or the armed forces.’. Capitalists, aristocrats, workers and desperadoes are the supporters of the movement. Fascism came into scene as power unity of losers. After WW1, the military force, desperadoes turned back and they did not engage in society as they did before. Lower-middle class also needed desperadoes to use their power against government. They acted all together to dictate their political aims. Sauer also draw an explanation about National Socialism and defined it as fascism that peculiar to Germany.
The modernization and industrialization process of Germany is essential to understand the fascist movement in Germany. Sauer also tries to find an answer to the question that ‘Is fascism reactionary or revolutionary?’ According to him it is both reactionary and revolutionary. It is not merely based on elites, it is a movement of masses. That is why it can be seen as revolutionary. On the other hand, the desire to turn back to the Law of Nature like Arendt (1953) mentions is reactionary. It is a paradoxical situation. ‘’A revolutionary mass movement whose goals were antirevolutionary in the classical sense.’’ However, Griffin seems the movement ‘’as a revolutionary form of nationalism bent on mobilizing all ‘healthy’ social and political energies…’’.
Paxton (1998) refuses to classify National Socialism as totalitarianism and also he refuses to examine it with the wide fascist perspective. ‘’ Yet great difficulties arise as soon as one sets out to define fascism. Its boundaries are ambiguous in both space and time.’’ Mussolini’s Italy that was not as obsessed as Hitler’s Germany in terms of Jewish population cannot be classified in the same fascist category. It is hard to define fascism in terms of timing because Germany is latecomer into the world scene compared to other countries like France, England, Italy etc. Also in order to mobilize the masses and to be powerful, states might be create a fascist image. It doesn’t mean that they have fascist regimes. Fascisms are compatible with their nations. There was no ideological principles or doctrine for Fascism. All of them makes harder to interpret National Socialism in a wide understanding of fascism.
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He made a distinction between stages of fascism: “(1) the initial creation of fascist movements; (2) their rooting as parties political system; (3) the acquisition of power; (4) the exercise of power; and, finally, in the longer term,(5) radicalization or entropy.” As a result of the these stages, he distinguished the differences and similarities between fascist regimes and he founds that fascisms are similar in terms of their functionality. Paxton (1998) There is no separation in between reactionary or revolutionary specific to National Socialism in his work, but he draws a conclusion by emphasizing active feature of fascisms that is specific to essence of the regime. His explanation is not based on economic features or classes like Sauer (1967) explains non-Marxist fascism.
Griffin also explains National Socialism with fascism. But instead of defining it with the negative phrases like anti-communist, anti-democratic, anti-liberal etc., he defines fascism as ‘’it is the capacity of the new state to induce the regeneration of the nation’s political culture…’’. He defines it as cultural revolutionary movement compared to Sauer’s explanation based on socio-economic factors mainly derived from interest seeking behavior of lower- middle class and military desperadoes.
Paxton (1998) establishes the similarity between fascist regimes with respect to their functionality instead of their way of using propaganda, symbols etc. Griffin (2004) establishes the similarity with the term of ‘palingenesis’ that means new birth, rebirth or national rebirth.
According to him fascist regimes can be different because of the historical path they took but they have the core element called palingenesis. ‘’What informs fascism’s actions and provides a degree of coherence to its ideology in its various spheres of policy and various national permutations is the utopia of the ‘palingenesis’ (rebirth or new birth) of the national community brought about through the total transformation and regeneration of its political culture.’’ He also seems National Socialism as a unique form of fascism with its ultra-nationalist characteristics. Paxton (1998) also mentions about the ‘mimics of fascism’ in his article and he claims that states can be seem to be fascist in order to create a powerful image.
At this point, Griffin gives a distinction point for fascism and the other repressive regimes, para-fascisms. He thinks that cohesion of ultra-nationalism and palingenesis helps us to differentiate National Socialism from other types of fascism. ‘’Fascism’s definitional core (fascist minimum) is best seen in terms of revolution, rebirth and modernity has gradually emerged out of decades of intense controversy that often produced more heat than light, a period of confusion leading most historians to give the term a wide berth in studies of inter-war Europe and, in particular, of Nazism.’’ Griffin (2004:3). Michael Mann (2004) also accepts National Socialism as fascism. According to Mann (2004), there should be five important features to classify a regime as fascism: organic nationalism, statism, transcendence, cleansing and paramilitarism. Organic nationalism is based on homogeneity and interests of certain group like opponents, certain ethnic groups. Statism is mainly seeing the state above everything. Paramilitarism is essential for creating violence in order to pursue the group interests. Transcendence brings explanation in terms of classes in society.
This is an explanation unlike Sauer’s (1967) non-Marxist fascist explanation. Cleansing also affects the creation of violence. He defines fascism as a negative manner with its negative features. Unlike Griffin (2004), he defined fascism as anti-Catholic, antiliberal and anti-capitalist. Mann criticizes Griffin also in terms of his definition of fascism in terms of construction of power in the society and social relations. He defines fascism in terms of economy, politics, ideological background and military. “Fascism is the pursuit of a transcendent and cleansing nation-statism through paramilitarism”. As Hannah Arendt mentions in her article, terror is important to sake of Nature and History, violence is also important in Mann (2004) to attain the interests of the certain group. In that manner, paramilitarism and cleasing creates a fear in the society like Hannah Arendt’s terror creates insecure and lonely individuals. Mann explains the supporters of the fascist regime by class theory. Sauer (1967) don’t reduce the supporters of the National Socialist regime by just counting lower-middle class. Also Mann (2004) adds civil servants into the category of supporters of fascism.
Also he mentions about the disposition of the classic petite bourgeoise to support the National Socialist regime. ‘’ By the bottom-up organization of the fascist paramilitary powers, fascists gain both important power and popularity.’’ He seems National Socialism as a movement of the masses like other scholars that I mentioned above did. The conclusion that Mann (2004) draws does not explain the authoritarian, irrational, sociological and psychological characteristics of such movements. ‘’More recently, with the growing disappointment in the strictly Marxist explanation of history, psychology itself with its new Freudian concepts of super- ego, father-image, and oedipus complex, has invaded the social sciences and continues to provide them with their chief tools of ‘evaluation’ to such an extent that it has become difficult to tell the two sciences from each other.
Briefly, economic, class based Marxist explanations are not enough to explain irrationality of individuals. Compared the all scholars I mentioned above, Mann (2004) brings a wider explanation by looking at economic, political features of the regime and defining it with statism, paramilitarism, cleansing, transcendence, organic nationalism.
Understanding National Socialism is a debatable phenomenon with its- uniquenessto German society, in terms of the wider definition of the terms that use for an explanation of it, difficulty of limiting the time and space to understand its historical path and difficulty of differentiation from its imitations etc. Also some scholars take fascism in terms of an ideology and the others focus on the characteristic of the regime. All in all, scholars came with different perspectives like Fascism, Totalitarianism and Germanism. In this paper, I mainly focus on the differences between fascism and totalitarianism. Totalitarian approach explains National Socialism with two-terms; ideology and terror. Totalitarianism was popular in between 1933-1945.
On the other hand, scholars that use fascism to -explain-National Socialism did not restrict themselves in the period of 1933-1945. Fascist approaches bring different explanations even if they defend the same notion. Mann defined Fascism with the negative notions, Griffin mentioned its positive contribution to the culture. Sauer found fascism as both revolutionary and reactionary on the other hand Griffin emphasized its revolutionary features. Mann used rational perspective to understand National Socialism, Hannah Arendt who uses totalitarian perspective stressed the importance of psychology and sociology to understand the regime. But all scholars simply argue that National Socialism is a mass movement even if it uses different political tools to attain its goals. It is also a product of modernity. All claims are essential to analyze and understand this historical phenomenon.
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