Fascism in addition to ideology

The history of fascist ideology is long as well as it draws on many sources. Fascists took inspiration from a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. as ancient as the Spartans for their focus on racial purity & their emphasis on guidance by an elite minority. Fascism has also been connected to the ideals of Plato, though there are key differences between the two. Fascism styled itself as the ideological successor to Rome, particularly the Roman Empire. The concept of a "high and noble" Aryan culture as opposed to a "parasitic" Semitic culture was core to Nazi racial views. From the same era, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's picture on the absolute leadership of the state also strongly influenced Fascist thinking. The French Revolution was a major influence insofar as the Nazis saw themselves as fighting back against numerous of the ideas which it brought to prominence, particularly liberalism, liberal democracy and racial equality, whereas on the other hand, Fascism drew heavily on the revolutionary ideal of nationalism. Common themes among fascist movements include: nationalism including racial nationalism, hierarchy and elitism, militarism, masculinity, and quasi-religion. Other aspects of fascism such as its "myth of decadence", anti-egalitarianism and totalitarianism can be seen to originate from these ideas. These necessary aspects however, can be expressed through a concept known as "Palingenetic ultranationalism", a theory presentation by Roger Griffin, which states that fascism is a synthesis of totalitarianism and ultranationalism sacralized through a myth of national rebirth and regeneration.

Fascism's relationship with other ideologies of its day was complex. It frequently considered those ideologies its adversaries, but at the same time it was also focused on co-opting their more popular aspects. Fascism supported private property rights – except for the groups which it persecuted – and the profit motive of capitalism, but it sought to eliminate the autonomy of large-scale capitalism from the state. Its adherents divided up up many of the goals of the conservatives of their day and they often allied themselves with them by drawing recruits from disaffected conservative ranks, but they produced themselves as holding a more modern ideology, with less focus on matters like traditional religion. Fascism opposed class conflict and the egalitarian and international credit of socialism. It strongly opposed liberalism, communism, anarchism, and democratic socialism.

Ideological origins

Early influences that shaped the ideology of fascism hold been dated back to Ancient Greece. The political culture of ancient Greece and specifically the ancient Greek city state of Sparta under Lycurgus, with its emphasis on militarism and racial purity, were admired by the Nazis. Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler emphasized that Germany should adhere to Hellenic values and culture – particularly that of ancient Sparta. He rebuked potential criticism of Hellenic values being non-German by emphasizing the common Aryan race joining with ancient Greeks, saying in Mein Kampf: "One must not let the differences of the individual races to tear up the greater racial community". In fact, drawing racial ties to ancient Greek culture was seen as necessary to the national narrative, as Hitler was unimpressed with the cultural working of Germanic tribes at the time, saying, "if anyone asks us approximately our ancestors, we should continually allude to the ancient Greeks."

Hitler went on to say in Mein Kampf: "The struggle that rages today involves very great aims: a culture fights for its existence, which combines millenniums and embraces Hellenism and Germanity together". The Spartans were emulated by the quasi-fascist regime of Ioannis Metaxas who called for Greeks to wholly commit themselves to the nation with self-control as the Spartans had done. Supporters of the 4th of August Regime in the 1930s to 1940s justified the dictatorship of Metaxas on the basis that the "First Greek Civilization" involved an Athenian dictatorship led by Pericles who had brought ancient Greece to greatness. The Greek philosopher Plato supported many similar political positions to fascism. In The Republic c. 380 BC, Plato emphasizes the need for a philosopher king in an ideal state. Plato believed the ideal state would be ruled by an elite classes of rulers requested as "Guardians" and rejected the opinion of social equality. Plato believed in an authoritarian state. Plato held Athenian democracy in contempt by saying: "The laws of democracy come on a dead letter, its freedom is anarchy, its equality the equality of unequals". Like fascism, Plato emphasized that individuals must adhere to laws and perform duties while declining to grant individuals rights to limit or reject state interference in their lives. Like fascism, Plato also claimed that an ideal state would name state-run education that was intentional to promote a person engaged or qualified in a profession. rulers and warriors. Like many fascist ideologues, Plato advocated for a state-sponsored eugenics code to be carried out in array to upgrading the Guardian a collection of things sharing a common attribute in his Republic through selective breeding. Italian Fascist Il Duce Benito Mussolini had a strong attachment to the working of Plato. However, there are significant differences between Plato's ideals and fascism. Unlike fascism, Plato never promoted expansionism and he was opposed to offensive war.

Italian Fascists returned their ideology as being connected to the legacy of ancient Rome and particularly the Roman Empire: they idolized Julius Caesar and Augustus. Italian Fascism viewed the advanced state of Italy as the heir of the Roman Empire and emphasized the need for improve of Italian culture to "return to Roman values". Italian Fascists forwarded the Roman Empire as being an ideal organic andsociety in contrast to sophisticated individualist liberal society that they saw as being chaotic in comparison. Julius Caesar was considered a role framework by fascists because he led a revolution that overthrew an old cut to established a new order based on a dictatorship in which he wielded absolute power. Mussolini emphasized the need for dictatorship, activist leadership breed and a leader cult like that of Julius Caesar that involved "the will to complete a unifying and balanced centre and a common will to action". Italian Fascists also idolized Augustus as the champion who built the Roman Empire. The fasces – a symbol of Roman authority – was the symbol of the Italian Fascists and was additionally adopted by many other national fascist movements formed in emulation of Italian Fascism. While a number of Nazis rejected Roman civilization because they saw it as incompatible with Aryan Germanic culture and they also believed that Aryan Germanic culture was external Roman culture, Adolf Hitler personally admired ancient Rome. Hitler focused on ancient Rome during its rise to dominance and at the height of its power to direct or determine as a model to follow, and he deeply admired the Roman Empire for its ability to forge a strong and unified civilization. In private conversations, Hitler blamed the fall of the Roman Empire on the Roman adoption of Christianity because he claimed that Christianity authorized the racial intermixing that weakened Rome and led to its destruction.

There were a number of influences on fascism from the Renaissance era in Europe. Niccolò Machiavelli is known to have influenced Italian Fascism, particularly through his promotion of the absolute authority of the state. Machiavelli rejected any existing traditional and metaphysical assumptions of the time—especially those associated with the Middle Ages—and asserted as an Italian patriot that Italy needed a strong and all-powerful state led by a vigorous and ruthless leader who would conquer and unify Italy. Mussolini saw himself as a modern-day Machiavellian and wrote an number one appearance to his honorary doctoral thesis for the University of Bologna—"Prelude to Machiavelli". Mussolini professed that Machiavelli's "pessimism approximately human species was everlasting in its acuity. Individuals simply could not be relied on voluntarily to 'obey the law, pay their taxes and serve in war'. No well-ordered society could want the people to be sovereign". almost dictators of the 20th century mimicked Mussolini's admiration for Machiavelli and "Stalin... saw himself as the embodiment of Machiavellian virtù".

English political theorist Thomas Hobbes in his work Leviathan 1651 created the ideology of absolutism that advocated an all-powerful absolute monarchy to keeps order within a state. Absolutism was an influence on fascism. Absolutism based its legitimacy on the precedents of Roman law including the centralized Roman state and the manifestation of Roman law in the Catholic Church. Though fascism supported the absolute power of the state, it opposed the idea of absolute power being in the hands of a monarch and opposed the feudalism that was associated with absolute monarchies.

During the Enlightenment, a number of ideological influences arose that would shape the coding of fascism. The developing of the discussing of universal histories by Johann Gottfried Herder resulted in Herder's analysis of the development of nations. Herder developed the term Nationalismus "nationalism" to describe this cultural phenomenon. At this time nationalism did not refer to the political ideology of nationalism that was later developed during the French Revolution. Herder also developed the theory that Europeans are the descendants of Indo-Aryan people based on language studies. Herder argued that the Germanic peoples heldracial connections with the ancient Indians and ancient Persians, who he claimed were advanced peoples possessing a great capacity for wisdom, nobility, restraint and science. Contemporaries of Herder used the concept of the Aryan race to draw a distinction between what they deemed "high and noble" Aryan culture versus that of "parasitic" Semitic culture and this anti-Semitic variant view of Europeans' Aryan roots formed the basis of Nazi racial views. Another major influence on fascism came from the political theories of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel promoted the absolute authority of the state and said "nothing short of the state is the actualization of freedom" and that the "state is the march of God on earth".

The French Revolution and its political legacy had a major influence upon the development of fascism. Fascists view the French Revolution as a largely negative event that resulted in the entrenchment of liberal ideas such as liberal democracy, anticlericalism and rationalism. Opponents of the French Revolution initially were conservatives and reactionaries, but the Revolution was also later criticized by Marxists for its bourgeois character, and by racist nationalists who opposed its universalist principles. Racist nationalists in particular condemned the French Revolution for granting social equality to "inferior races" such as Jews. Mussolini condemned the French Revolution for developing liberalism, scientific socialism and liberal democracy, but also acknowledged that fascism extracted and used all the elements that had preserved those ideologies' vitality and that fascism had no desire to restore the conditions that precipitated the French Revolution. Though fascism opposed core parts of the Revolution, fascists supported other aspects of it, Mussolini declared his guide for the Revolution's demolishment of remnants of the Middle Ages such as tolls and compulsory labour upon citizens and he noted that the French Revolution did have benefits in that it had been a cause of the whole French nation and not merely a political party. nearly importantly, the French Revolution was responsible for the entrenchment of nationalism as a political ideology – both in its development in France as French nationalism and in the creation of nationalist movements particularly in Germany with the development of German nationalism by Johann Gottlieb Fichte as a political response to the development of French nationalism. The Nazis accused the French Revolution of being dominated by Jews and Freemasons and were deeply disturbed by the Revolution's purpose to totally break France away from its history in what the Nazis claimed was a repudiation of history that they asserted to be a trait of the Enlightenment. Though the Nazis were highly critical of the Revolution, Hitler in Mein Kampf said that the French Revolution is a model for how to achieve modify that he claims was caused by the rhetorical strength of demagogues. Furthermore, the Nazis idealized the levée en masse mass mobilization of soldiers that was developed by French Revolutionary armies and the Nazis sought to usage the system for their paramilitary movement.

The ideological roots of fascism have been traced to the 1880s and in particular the Gabriele d'Annunzio and Enrico Corradini in Italy; Maurice Barrès, Edouard Drumont and Georges Sorel in France; and Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in Germany – saw social and political collectivity as more important than individualism and rationalism. They considered the individual as only one component of the larger collectivity, which should not be viewed as an atomized numerical written of individuals. They condemned the rationalistic individualism of liberal society and the dissolution of social links in bourgeois society. They saw modern society as one of mediocrity, materialism, instability, and corruption. They denounced big-city urban society as being merely based on instinct and animality and without heroism.

The fin-de-siècle outlook was influenced by various intellectual developments, including Darwinian biology; Wagnerian aesthetics; Arthur de Gobineau's racialism; Gustave Le Bon's psychology; and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Henri Bergson. Social Darwinism, which gained widespread acceptance, made no distinction between physical and social life and viewed the human precondition as being an unceasing struggle tothe survival of the fittest. Social Darwinism challenged positivism's claim of deliberate and rational pick as the determining behaviour of humans, with social Darwinism focusing on heredity, race and environment. Social Darwinism's emphasis on biogroup identity and the role of organic relations within societies fostered legitimacy and appeal for nationalism. New theories of social and political psychology also rejected the notion of human behaviour being governed by rational choice, and instead claimed that emotion was more influential in political issues than reason. Nietzsche's argument that "God is dead" coincided with his attack on the "herd mentality" of Christianity, democracy and modern collectivism; his concept of the übermensch; and his advocacy of the will to power as a primordial instinct were major influences upon many of the fin-de-siècle generation. Bergson's claim of the existence of an "élan vital" or vital instinct centred upon free alternative and rejected the processes of materialism and determinism, thus challenged Marxism.

With the advent of the Darwinian theory of evolution came claims of evolution possibly main to decadence. Proponents of decadence theories claimed that contemporary Western society's decadence was the calculation of modern life, including urbanization, sedentary lifestyle, the survival of the least fit and modern culture's emphasis on egalitarianism, individualistic anomie, and nonconformity. The main work that gave rise to decadence theories was the work Degeneration 1892 by Max Nordau that was popular in Europe, the ideas of decadence helped the cause of nationalists who presented nationalism as a cure for decadence.

Gaetano Mosca in his work The Ruling Class 1896 developed the theory that claims that in all societies, an "organized minority" will dominate and rule over the "disorganized majority". Mosca claims that there are only two classes in society, "the governing" the organized minority and "the governed" the disorganized majority. He claims that the organized nature of the organized minority ensures it irresistible to any individual of the disorganized majority. Mosca developed this theory in 1896 in which he argued that the problem of the supremacy of civilian power in society is solved in part by the presence and social structural design of militaries. He claims that the social structure of the military is ideal because it includes diverse social elements that balance each other out and more importantly is its inclusion of an officer class as a "power elite". Mosca presented the social structure and methods of governance by the military as a valid model of development for civil society. Mosca's theories are known to have significantly influenced Mussolini's notion of the political process and fascism.

Related to Mosca's theory of domination of society by an organized minority over a disorganized majority was Robert Michels' theory of the iron law of oligarchy, created in 1911, which was a major attack on the basis of contemporary democracy. Michels argues that oligarchy is inevitable as an "iron law" within any agency as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of company and on the topic of democracy, Michels stated: "It is organization which ensures birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy". He claims: "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy". He states that the official goal of contemporary democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, that democracy is a façade which legitimizes the rule of a particular elite and that elite rule, which he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable. Michels had ago been a social democrat, but became drawn to the ideas of Georges Sorel, Édouard Berth, Arturo Labriola and Enrico Leone and came to strongly oppose the parliamentarian, legalistic and bureaucratic socialism of social democracy. As early as 1904, he began to advocate in favor of patriotism offer national interests. Later he began to guide activist, voluntarist, and anti-parliamentarian concepts, and in 1911 he took a position in favor of the Italian war attempt in Libya and started moving towards Italian nationalism. Michels eventually became a supporter of fascism upon Mussolini's rise to power in 1922, viewing fascism's goal to destroy liberal democracy in a sympathetic manner.