Zeev Sternhell, A New Civilization

Abstract Zeev Sternhell is an Israeli scholar who has written extensively on French and Italian fascism. He is particularly keen to demonstrate how fascism represented a synthesis of ultra-right and ultra-left aspirations towards a post-liberal society rooted in the late nineteenth-century revolt against positivism and liberalism, and going ‘beyond right and left’. One peculiarity of his approach is that he regards the biological racism of Nazism as too exceptional and extreme to qualify it as a form of fascism. FASCISM Of all the major ideologies of the twentieth century, fascism was the only one to come into being together with the century itself. It was a synthesis of organic nationalism and anti-Marxist socialism, a revolutionary movement based on a rejection of liberalism, democracy and Marxism. In its essential character, fascist ideology was a rejection of materialism-liberalism, democracy and Marxism being regarded simply as different aspects of the same materialist evil. It was this revolt against materialism which, from the beginning of the century, allowed a convergence of anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois nationalism and a variety of socialism which, while rejecting Marxism, remained revolutionary.