“Fascism rebelled against modernity inasmuch as modernity was identified with the rationalism, optimism, and humanism of the eighteenth century, but it was not a reactionary or an anti-revolutionary movement in the Maurrassian sense of the term. Fascism presented itself as a revolution of another kind, a revolution that sought to destroy the existing political order and to uproot its theoretical and moral foundations but that at the same time wished to preserve all the achievements of modern technology.”
Source: The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, 1994, p. 7
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Zeev Sternhell12
Israeli historian 1935Related quotes
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer
Source: The Age of Revolution (1962), Chapter 12, Ideology: Religion
Zeev Sternhell (1935) Israeli historian
Source: The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, 1994, p.7
Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant
Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 9
“Fascism was a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place.”
Ignazio Silone (1900–1978) Italian author and politician
The School for Dictators http://books.google.com/books?id=9scdAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Fascism+was+a+counter-revolution+against+a+revolution+that+never+took+place%22&pg=PA42#v=onepage (1938)
Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba
Words to Intellectuals (1961)
Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art
Foreword (1956), to The Rebel (1951) by Albert Camus
Other Quotes
Context: All revolutions in modern times, Camus points out, have led to a reinforcement of the power of the State.
"The strange and terrifying growth of the modern State can be considered as the logical conclusion of inordinate technical and philosophical ambitions, foreign to the true spirit of rebellion, but which nevertheless gave birth to the revolutionary spirit of our time. The prophetic dream of Marx and the over-inspired predictions of Hegel or of Nietzsche ended by conjuring up, after the city of God had been razed to the ground, a rational or irrational State, which in both cases, however, was founded on terror." The counterrevolutions of fascism only serve to reinforce the general argument.
Camus shows the real quality of his thought in his final pages. It would have been easy, on the facts marshaled in this book, to have retreated into despair or inaction. Camus substitutes the idea of "limits." "We now know, at the end of this long inquiry into rebellion and nihilism, that rebellion with no other limits but historical expediency signifies unlimited slavery. To escape this fate, the revolutionary mind, if it wants to remain alive, must therefore, return again to the sources of rebellion and draw its inspiration from the only system of thought which is faithful to its origins: thought that recognizes limits." To illustrate his meaning Camus refers to syndicalism, that movement in politics which is based on the organic unity of the cell, and which is the negation of abstract and bureaucratic centralism. He quotes Tolain: "Les etres humains ne s'emancipent qu'au sein des groupes naturels" — human beings emancipate themselves only on the basis of natural groups. "The commune against the State... deliberate freedom against rational tyranny, finally altruistic individualism against the colonization of the masses, are, then, the contradictions that express once again the endless opposition of moderation to excess which has animated the history of the Occident since the time of the ancient world." This tradition of "mesure" belongs to the Mediterranean world, and has been destroyed by the excesses of German ideology and of Christian otherworldliness — by the denial of nature.
Restraint is not the contrary of revolt. Revolt carries with it the very idea of restraint, and "moderation, born of rebellion, can only live by rebellion. It is a perpetual conflict, continually created and mastered by the intelligence.... Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.
A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist
Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 184
Ludwig von Mises book Socialism
Part V : The Economics of a Socialist Community, § V : Destructionism, Ch. 33 : The Motive Powers of Destructionism, p. 440 http://www.econlib.org/library/Mises/msS12.html#V.34.35,Ch.33 <br class="br">Socialism (1922)
Jaron Lanier (1960) American computer scientist, musician, and author
"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)