| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Robert O. Paxton. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Pp. xii, 321. $26.00.
In this book, Robert O. Paxton, who earned his spurs in his pioneering research on Vichy France, pointedly sets out to teach established authorities on comparative fascist studies a trick or two by publishing a fully elaborated version of the theory of fascism's "five stages" that he presented in a more rudimentary form in an article for the Journal of Contemporary History in 2000. These are the creation of a movement; the rooting of it in the political system; the seizure of power; the exercise of power; the eventual radicalization or entropy of fascism as a regime. Five chapters devoted to how various interwar fascist phenomena illustrate each of these stages are followed by a comprehensive survey of putative fascisms outside interwar Europe, and a final chapter offers a definition of fascism. This is supplemented by an extended biographical essay that will be of particular value to newcomers to this prolific branch of comparative historical study.	1
The merit of this book hinges on the validity of Paxton's claim to deliver a comprehensive anatomical lesson on the topic based on living history rather than the autopsy of an inert abstraction. However, Paxton's analysis turns out to be much more of an X-ray than a vivisection, since it leaves invisible so much of the connective tissue between the archaic anthropological, psychological, and ritual dynamics of his subject as a "political religion" and its technological, bureaucratic, scientific, and scientistic aspects as a modern political ideology. Moreover, closer scrutiny of what it does provide leaves the strong impression that the "ground-breaking" journey promised by the book's dustjacket is actually a march down well-trodden paths.	2
For one thing, Paxton is jousting at windmills in his assumption that he has avoided the trap of "essentialism" that he claims to have encountered in earlier works on the subject. None of the most important scholars who have offered an account of the "fascist minimum," whether discursive (e.g. Eugen Weber, Juan Linz, Zeev Sternhell, George L. Mosse, Emilio Gentile) or as quotable "one-liners" (e.g. Ernst Nolte, Roger Griffin, Stanley Payne, Roger Eatwell) has committed the naïve fallacy of reifying fascism's core traits of which Paxton accuses them. In every case their definition is presented in an exploratory, heuristic spirit, and in several cases it is explicitly proposed as a Weberian "ideal type," thus specifically precluding the notion of an "essence" to the phenomenon under investigation. Second, none of these scholars has implied that it is somehow sufficient to define the fascist minimum to "understand fascism," only to insist that fascism cannot be understood or even investigated as a historical entity or family of entities without a conscious or unconscious conceptual framework and working definition (a position to which Paxton has only recently become converted). All have spent at least as much time as he exploring concrete historical realities related to the term. Indeed, Weber, Sternhell, Mosse, and Payne approach generic fascism as experts in the history of the extreme right in particular countries.	3
Third, Paxton shows a shaky grasp of the relationship between the nomothetic (generalizing, pattern-seeking) aspect of the social sciences and the idiographic concern of historians with uniqueness. All definitions of generic terms are "static" (p. 21) by definition because they are shorn of the surface texture provided by concrete historical case studies, but their purpose is to facilitate comparison and reveal patterns of causality existing between unique phenomena. Moreover, each of the stages that Paxton has identified are, in Weberian terms, "ideal types" inferred from the "real" history of events through a process of idealizing abstraction. Obviously, to develop a heuristically useful ideal type of a generic concept requires a number of comparable phenomena from which to abstract it. However, the chapters of this book expounding stages three to five in the evolution of fascism are based entirely on the fates of Italian fascism and Nazism, an inadequate basis for generalizing about "the fascist regime" per se. What passes for the identification of the generic traits of fascist regimes is actually the attempt to identify common denominators in what happened under Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, a project hardly new to academia, as Alexander de Grand will testify.	. . .

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