Warfare in Europe 1650-1792 Book

By the mid-1970s, scholars in both history and political science had begun to seriously grapple with the question(s) of fascism. After decades of dismissing it as a political movement without ideology or meaning, or of seeing it simply as an advanced stage of capitalist degeneracy, they had finally started to look at the actual words and actions of those who identified as fascists for their answers. This book came after groundbreaking work by the likes of Ernst Nolte, George Mosse, Stanley Payne, and Roger Eatwell, and dove into the debate with daring and perception. That isn't to say that Cassels got it "right" necessarily, and more recent work has largely abandoned his thesis, but he certainly shook things up at a time when new perspectives were welcome. It's important to note that it this time, scholars were still searching for the elusive "fascist minimum:" the set of characteristics common to all fascist movements and governments, which set fascism apart from other ideologies, and that many were simply giving long lists of elements of fascism, rather than neat definitions.

Cassels returns to the idea that Fascism may be a kind of "stage in development," but he splits it into two trends: one "progressive" and the other "regressive." For him, fascism as it appeared in Italy was a forward-thinking movement, one which used authoritarian methods to rapidly industrialize and modernize the technology, and used pageantry and military formations to speed up Italy's sluggish process of nationalization from disparate city-states. On the other hand, fascism as it manifested in Germany was essentially backward-facing, seeking to re-attain a mythic past based in German purity and deny the modern world. He credits this difference to the fact that Italy was in need of modernization when the fascists came along, while Germany was already modernized, but craving for escape from the ennui of the modern world.

This is a pretty interesting thesis, and a number of inquiries were made on the basis of it or similar ideas. However, in the end, it doesn't really hold up. The Nazis may have had their attachments to peasantry and "Blood and Soil" but they didn't reestablish the monarchy, and they managed to appeal to technocrats like Todt and Speer as well as dreamers like Darre or fantasists like Himmler. In the end, even the regressive elements of Party ideology had to give way to the necessities of modern warfare, no serious action was made to create a primitive German utopia. On the other hand, Fascist Italy had its mythic ties to the Roman Empire and to the glory of a pagan past as well, while the technocrats an artistic futurists of the regime fared comparably poorly.

Cassels devotes a few pages each to several fascist movements in other countries, trying to test his hypothesis, and concludes that fascism in Spain and Portugal and in Eastern Europe follows the Italian "progressive" model, while Northern and Western European fascists were, like the Nazis, mostly "regressive." There's so little specific information or original research here that it's hard to take this conclusion seriously, but it's an interesting attempt. In the case of Spain, he concludes, somewhat dubiously, that syndicalism was the most important feature of Spanish fascism, the one thing Franco encouraged even after the war, and that this was an example of the regime's necessarily "progressive" stance, but Franco never used syndicaism to advance the economy or the infrastructure of the nation, and really gave syndicalist ideas little more than lip-service.

In all, this book has of course been superseded in the four decades that have followed its publication, but it is one of the better exemplars of its period in the historiography of fascist studies.