Beginnings and Endings

When Is Intellectual History Most Useful?

Il n’est jamais mauvais de commencer par un mea culpa.

                                                            —Marc Bloch

Much of my desire to step back and rethink the explanatory role that intellectual history should play in the human sciences can be traced to one book I read earlier this year. Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism(2004) is not in itself an intellectual history, but it does offer some strong opinions about intellectual history’s limitations. I don’t think Paxton meant these arguments to be taken as general propositions about the utility of intellectual history in all contexts, but they are provocative and present a challenge that intellectual historians ought to be able to meet.

The first move in Paxton’s challenge is an assault on one of intellectual history’s fetishes: the idol of definition, which, like Marc Bloch’s term “the idol of origins,” has been a professional susceptibility that “has sometimes dominated our studies to the point of a hypnosis.” Paxton’s irritation with definitions comes from their “inherently limiting” nature, from their tendency to “frame a static picture of something that is better perceived in movement.” He identifies this disposition to freeze and limit with intellectuals and—we can assume—with intellectual historians:

[definitions] succumb all too often to the intellectual’s temptation to take programmatic statements as constitutive, and to identify fascism more with what it said than with what it did.

This distinction between words and actions is one that Paxton reiterates on the next page, expressing frustration that, “if asked what manner of beast fascism is, most people would answer, without hesitation, ‘fascism is an ideology.’” While conceding that fascist leaders promoted themselves as master ideologues, Paxton counters that any analysis that begins with an analysis of its programmatic ideological statements “rests on the unstated assumption that fascism was an ‘ism’ like the other great political systems of the modern world: conservatism, liberalism, socialism.” This unstated assumption, he maintains in defiance of Walter Sobchak, is quite dubious.

Paxton contrasts what we might call fascism’s ceremonial or pretextual use of ideology with the genuine “isms,” for which “coherent philosophical systems laid out in the works of systematic thinkers” were indispensable to their practical success. I find that distinction a bit overdrawn, but there is no reason to deny Paxton’s comparative statement that “Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with such theoretical justification.”

But if fascism was not an ideology, what was it? Here Paxton somewhat walks back his insistence that analyses of fascism which start with its manifestos or party platforms begin in error. Ideological analysis is, in fact, important, but its importance is transitory: as a scholar traces the development of fascism as a political movement, an understanding of its ideological premises or doctrines gradually becomes obsolete, or even counterproductive. In a sense, to properly understand fascism, we should try to grasp it as an ideology but then forget what we learned.

Here’s what Paxton says:

“The conditions that made it possible because it was conceivable” is a phrase that suggests that the intellectual’s role was positive and creative, but the rest of the paragraph instead suggests that the function of intellectuals (at least in the case of fascism) was primarily corrosive, eating away the attachments which bound previously contented elites to liberalism and the permanently discontented masses to socialism. “Creat[ing] a space for fascist movements” is not a truly creative act because it does not expand the social imaginary but instead hollows out, withers, putrefies the ideological spaces that already exist.

Once that job of intellectual corrosion was completed, or rather once events caught up to and then surpassed the fascist imaginary that intellectuals had provided to the men of action, Paxton argues that we must put away ideological analysis.

Mentioning ideology’s utility to understanding fascism’s “endings” returns us to the fundamentally destructive role Paxton allots to the intellectual.

What to make of all this? First, I think it is important to reiterate that Paxton’s argument about the limitations of intellectual history is meant as an argument about fascism, not about politics in general. Yet it is a rather arresting insight that intellectual historians tend to assume that their particular skills are called for not to analyze specific stages of the history of some phenomenon—whether that is a social movement or an artistic trend or a charitable institution—but to address, to summarize, to explain that phenomenon as a whole. Our practice orbits unstably around the ever-present danger of essentialism because our method often is to try to achieve a concise definition or even image of our subject. That is why quite frequently our books have titles like Age of Fracture—we seek a commanding metaphor that conjoins disparate phenomena, that reveals the underlying unity of an entire bloc of time. We are always battling against our dispositions to resort to explicative shortcuts like a Zeitgeist or a climate of opinion.

Fundamentally, we approach our subjects ontologically, and it is precisely the demand to find the ontology of fascism that Paxton chafes against. He saves his definition of fascism for the very end of the book, but that is not merely because he wants to proceed inductively rather than deductively; it is because a definition assumes that deviations, phenomena which contradict that definition in some way, need to be squared or justified. Rather than continuously revising our definitions or even maintaining an agnosticism about definitions, we tend to make excuses that allow us to preserve the ontological parameters we originally staked out. One of the most common of these excuses is Wittgenstein’s idea of “family resemblances,” a concept that allows us enormous latitude to aggregate unlike things within our scholarly ambit. There certainly are legitimate uses of this idea, but it has been so frequently invoked that it feels to me a bit threadbare.

That is enough for this installment, but I would like to hold on to Paxton’s insight that we ought to think more about when intellectual history’s tools are useful. Rather than think in terms of what kinds of subjects yield well to our methods and what kinds of subjects do not, it is better or at least more cheering to think that we may always have a role to play—as long as we know when.