Ernst Nolte, Resisting Transcendence

Abstract It is common to attribute to Three Faces of Fascism (1965) by the West German scholar Ernst Nolte the merit of reviving scholarly interest in generic fascism and establishing the need to take fascist ideology seriously. The work concentrates on underlying parallels between the Action Fra1tfaise (which most historians do not consider to have been a fascist movement), Fascism, and Nazism. In the concluding section he erects a highly abstract theory of generic fascism which centres on its anti-Marxism (though stressing its underlying kinship with Marxism), and its bid to ‘resist transcendence’. By this he seems to mean that fascism aimed to reverse or find a refage from the forces of secularization, democratization, and globalization-sometimes equated with ‘modernization’-which both in theory (that is, ideologically) and in practice (the type of society created) have led to the breakdown of the closed material and spiritual social system of tradition. In other words Nolte’s theory is a highly abstruse and convoluted version of the common theory of fascism as a bourgeois revolt against Enlightenment rationalism (Text 148) and modernization (Text 16o), a position which obscures the fact that fascism offers to believers both its own form of transcendence from the anomie of modern society (Text 157), and an alternative form of modernity (Text 161). Nor was its social basis only middle-class.