Cambridge Festival Speaker Spotlight

Dr Martin Reuhl is a Senior Lecturer in German Intellectual History in the Faculty of History and a University Associate Professor in German History and Thought in the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics at the University of Cambridge.

Dr Ruehl specializes in the intellectual history of modern Germany. His research to date has focused on the ideas and ideologies that shaped German society and culture from Bismarck to Hitler, in particular the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and its reception since the 1890s.

His talk, What is Fascism?, will take a closer look at the core myths at the heart of fascist ideology, offering probing explanations for its emergence, resurgence and its continuing appeal.

How do the origins of fascism still shape politics in the West today?

The world we inhabit is still in many palpable ways a world made by fascism. The great fascist challenge to the Versailles settlement in the 1930s and 1940s forever changed the geopolitical trajectories of most Central and Eastern European countries. Memories of the enormous violence unleashed, and the horrific crimes committed in the name of fascism continue to haunt the political imagination and determine political decisions in Europe and beyond. Vladimir Putin has justified the invasion of Ukraine with reference to Soviet Russia’s historical role in the fight against fascism.

A quasi-religious will to atone for and a commitment at all costs to prevent the resurgence of fascism have been the lodestar of German foreign as well as domestic policy at least since the 1960s. The Berlin Republic’s ‘open door’ policy during the European refugee crisis of 2015, its unconditional support of Israel in the 2023-24 Gaza War and the readiness of its parties to maintain a ‘firewall’ around the far-right (and supposedly ‘neo-fascist’) Alternative für Deutschland in the 2025 national elections are all part of the country’s continued efforts to deal with its fascist past. ‘Never again!’ (meaning: ‘we must never let fascism claim power again’) has been the mantra and main mission of many left-wing movements in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, notably Antifa, whose very name suggests the belief in the redemptive nature of the anti-fascist struggle.

On the other side of the political spectrum, groups and parties of the extreme right (e.g. Combat 18 in Britain and Germany and Golden Dawn in Greece) as well as the populist right (e.g. Fidesz in Hungary) have taken up the ideas, aesthetics and tactics of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism.

The question whether the statements and actions of the current American president can be labelled fascist has been a major talking point since his first term in office. For the past 15 years, the most radically anti-humanist groups within the environmental movement have been described – and in some cases have self-identified – as ecofascist. It no longer seems alarmist, then, to say that fascism is back, though it would be more truthful to acknowledge that it never really went away.

Has the definition of fascism changed?

The first comprehensive – and for many years the most influential – definition of fascism was provided by its enemies on the Left. As early as the 1930s, Trotsky, Lukács and other Marxist theorists interpreted fascism, correctly, as a trans-European phenomenon born out of an acute crisis within the liberal, capitalist system. They were wrong, however, to reduce it to a counter-revolutionary instrument of the ruling class: a kind of stick for big business and finance capital to fend off the proletarian revolution.

This reading of fascism as a mere symptom of something greater or more fundamental and as inherently reactionary persisted well into the second half of the twentieth century. It explains why, despite its tremendous death toll, fascism is still often seen as no more than a temporary aberration, a prelude to the more serious Cold War confrontation between the communism and liberalism; and why its ideology is frequently belittled as eclectic, confused, vacuous.

The first to challenge this view were the German philosopher Ernst Nolte and the American cultural historian George Mosse. In their different ways, they took seriously fascism’s revolutionary promise to purify and regenerate the nation by overcoming the ‘decadent’ liberal bourgeois desires for security, comfort and peace. The most insightful recent definitions of fascism – by Zeev Sternhell, Stanley Payne, Roger Griffin and Robert O. Paxton – all build on this willingness ‘to see fascism how it saw itself’ and to reconstruct from its culture, that is, its symbols, rituals and pageantry, as well as its ideas (its programs, pronouncements and philosophies) a unifying vision and attitude. The new scholarly consensus depicts fascism as violent populist ultra-nationalism, driven by an obsession with victimisation and rejuvenation.

Thanks to Mosse and Nolte, the academic study of fascism is now largely free of the anti-fascist pieties that characterised the original Marxist and many subsequent left-liberal interpretations. Most scholars today have abandoned labels such as ‘reactionary’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ and stopped viewing fascism as a mere stooge of finance capital. For the past thirty-odd years, the focus in the field of fascism studies has been on fascism’s anti-liberal, anti-bourgeois political ‘style’, its total rejection of debate and compromise, its glorification of violence, death and sacrifice in the service of a mythically exalted idea of national renewal.

The latest definitions concentrate not on the socio-economic policies of fascism or its strategic alliances with the old elites (the monarchy, the Churches, the military establishment) but on its more general attitudes: its Manichean conception of the nation and its enemies (‘us versus them’), its apocalyptic vision of the future (‘rejuvenation or collapse’), the will to bring forth a ‘new Man’ imbued with a heroic disdain for material comfort and a ruthless readiness to do whatever it takes for the health of the national community.

To this I would add fascism’s fundamental rejection of the residual Christian elements in modern politics, including the universalist belief in the innate worth and dignity of all human beings (i.e. human rights), the commitment to compassion for and care of the weak (i.e. social justice) as well as the ideals of ‘turning the other cheek’ (i.e. pacifism) and ‘the last shall be first’ (i.e. equality). It is not least this militant rejection of 2,000 years of Christian values that distinguishes fascism from the conservative and the authoritarian Right.

What are the persisting myths about fascism?

There is a noticeable disconnect between the very rich and rewarding scholarly debates on fascism and the abiding popular perceptions of it. Of all the modern political ideologies, fascism is doubtless the most commonly misunderstood and misinterpreted. I cannot think of a political concept employed so widely and yet so loosely in everyday discourse – to the extent that it has become almost meaningless. Around the late 1960s, ‘fascist’, in popular parlance, was degraded to a catch-all term of abuse attached to various types of authoritarian (and often just conservative) politicians and regressive views by their progressive, left-wing critics. The inflationary use of the word has taken a marked upswing in the past fifteen years, with the rise of the populist Right in Europe and the first presidency of Donald Trump.

There are good reasons to deflate the term again by dint of careful historical analysis and to debunk certain popular assumptions about the nature and purpose of fascism. Once we have established what fascism was, we are in a better position to say what it is – and when/how to apply the label today. This should make current political debates more informed and less hysterical. Crying ‘fascism’ at every opportunity also runs the risk of crying wolf: it undermines the still important use of the concept as a stern, perhaps existential warning in the sphere of real politics. Calling Trump a fascist, for instance, weakens the stigma of the label when applied to a more deserving candidate such as Putin. It is important, therefore, to clarify the meaning of fascism and to explode the various myths and misconceptions around it.

Perhaps the most persistent of these is the claim that fascism is fundamentally reactionary. While it displayed many socially and culturally conservative features, notably in its treatment of women, fascism’s goals of national renewal and the creation of a new Man were forward-looking, in their own way as utopian and transformative as those of Soviet communism. Marxist interpreters have found it difficult to accept, but it is nonetheless true that fascism, even though it largely left intact the private ownership of the means of production, had a decidedly anti-capitalist dimension. The ideals of corporatism in Fascist Italy and of the Volksgemeinschaft or national community in Nazi Germany, if never fully realised, speak to this dimension. In the comparatively short period (20 years in Italy, 12 in Germany) that it was in power, fascism put into practice many incisive, in some cases revolutionary social and political changes, including welfarism, mass mobilisation, and environmentalism.

Another myth about fascism is that it is inherently repressive and anti-democratic. This claim ignores the many populist and participatory aspects of fascism: its denunciation of the old social and political elites and its promise to ease class distinctions, provide full employment and increased social mobility, and involve all citizens, e.g. through youth and labour organisations as well as plebiscites. According to fascist ideologues such as Carl Schmitt, a dictatorship was not just compatible with democracy, but the clearest expression of the unified will of the people; it was only incompatible with parliamentary democracy, which Schmitt decried as a liberal-bourgeois abomination. Both Mussolini and Hitler claimed to speak on behalf of the people, to channel their general will. Social and cultural historians of the Nazi era and the Fascist ventennio have shown that fascism was experienced by many not just as an authoritarian ‘top-down’ affair, but also as a form of participatory politics.

Finally, it is important to correct the idea that racism was a defining feature of fascism. Both fascist regimes, to be sure, pursued policies that were aggressively, indeed murderously racist: Fascist Italy against Libyans and Ethiopians, Nazi Germany against Jews, Slavs and Roma. It was only National Socialism, however, that made race a cornerstone of its ideology. For most fascist movements and parties of the interwar period, racism was a symptom, rather than the cause of the stark friend-enemy distinctions at the heart of their worldviews. Regenerating the nation through the comprehensive destruction of its enemies took different forms, because the forces deemed to be weakening and corrupting the nation were many. In Italy, only a few of them were racially connoted. That we identify fascism with racism nowadays is mainly because we have come to view the Third Reich as a kind of fascist ‘ideal type’. But the Nazi tendency to conceive of the outsider and enemy in primarily racist terms was the exception not the rule in fascism.