Fascism, Umberto Eco argued in his often-quoted essay “Ur-Fascism,” does not have a political philosophy, only a rhetoric. Its features cannot be organised into a system, because fascism appeals to unreason, not to reason.¹ There is a long tradition of scholarship that supports the view that fascism has no political ideology, or even no ideology proper. These positions could be perhaps summarised, to borrow Barbara Spackman’s words, as arguing that “there were no ideas, and hence no appeal to rational faculties in fascism, there was only rhetoric and behind that rhetoric, violence first illegal and then of the state.” Reason, rational argument, or reasonable belief had, according to this account, “no part in fascism.”²

In The Authoritarian Personality, a widely-read study published in 1950, the team of researchers—Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford—developed and popularised the F scale (“F” for fascist). Created to gauge the psychological predisposition for fascism among the democratic citizenry, the F scale charted the devolution of the individuated and autonomous liberal subject into an irrational, frenzied mob. Equipped with a set of criteria by which to identify fascist features, the decades that followed individuated and pathologised fascist violence, depoliticising it. The current resurgence of fascism under figures such as Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, or Donald Trump has been narrated along these lines, as a descent into lunacy or outburst of unfocused anger, spilling into the public sphere, running rampant over middle-class civility.

Published in 1950, the same year as The Authoritarian Personality, Aimé Césaire’s essay “Discourse on Colonialism” argued that what in Europe is called “fascism” is just colonial violence finding its way back home. Yet Césaire’s warnings went unheeded.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, as Mahmood Mamdani details in Neither Settler nor Native, the Allies reconceptualised Nazism as “an accumulation of individual crimes rather than a political project.” By focusing on atrocities, the victors could identify Nazism “with the crimes of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of individuals,” and call for justice for its victims. Denazification became, thus, a “punitive effort rather than a politically transformative one.”³ While The Authoritarian Personality was canonised, “Discourse on Colonialism” was marginalised, ignored, and ultimately forgotten. As a result the relation between settler colonialism and fascism remained under-theorised and poorly understood, whilst the Cold War’s reduction of the political to an epic battle between the forces of freedom and unfreedom allowed the West to elide the colonial question and the struggles of the third world, ultimately conflating fascism and communism under the blanket designation of “despotism” or “totalitarianism.” By the late 50s, fascism had become another generic term denoting an undifferentiated evil, leaving the postwar consensus to settle on the notion that fascism was a negation or distortion of modernity, not one of its constitutive features.

But colonialism, as Nikhil Pal Singh sustains, is not something that happened in our past, it is an expansionary process that keeps moving forward and outward, structuring formal and informal rules and presiding over the differential distribution of benefits and burdens. Though the US believes that fascism is not native to its political culture, many of the elements that define fascism, as Singh notes, inhere in the conflicts attendant upon frontier expansion, slavery, and the removal of indigenous peoples, and keep recurring in a disaggregated form well into the contemporary period. In the US today, the logic of white supremacy still presides over the differential distribution of benefits and burdens, structuring forms of formal and informal rule. This is the reason why, according to Singh, “liberal democracy in the United States has always been a very strained and constrained institution, governed by a series of exceptions derived from the legacies of settler colonialism, slavery, and Jim Crow laws.”⁴ In Europe as well, rather than the absolute opposite of totalitarianism, democracy can accommodate a totalitarian dimension. The so-called “golden decades ”of social democracy in the West were coterminous with racial oppression at home and colonial violence abroad. And we can often find the elements that define fascism, like state and state-sanctioned terror, insulation from liability or processes of racial ascription, in our present-day societies, differentiating between those who the law protects but does not bind and those who the law binds but does not protect.

The current conceptualisation of fascism and an anomalous or deviant ideology is, one could argue, a post-war distortion manufactured to shield the victors from scrutiny by obscuring the continuities between their own colonial genocides and fascism. The logic that presided over the Nuremberg trials is key here: The denazification process, to paraphrase Mamdani, treated Nazi atrocities as forms of criminal rather than political violence,⁵ thereby delinking National Socialism from other modalities of nationalism, and their own legacies of extrajudicial killings, deportations, differential allocation of resources, racialised citizenship, or activation of murderous mobs.

The word “genocide” was coined by the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin who used the neologism to pursue a convention outlawing it. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), or Genocide Convention was the first human rights treaty ratified by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948. African-Americans and left political activists, as Anson Rabinbach details, “saw the Genocide Convention as an opportunity to address the issue of lynching in the American South,” publishing a petition titled We Charge Genocide; The Crime of Government against the Negro People. This petition was presented to the United Nations in December 1951, only to be immediately derided as Soviet propaganda by the US State Department, which went on, under Eisenhower, to derail civil rights efforts and abort the discussion by deeming it “anti-American.” Even Lemkin, Rabinbach argues, “viewed the looming controversy over race as a potentially destructive force, dooming support for his Convention”⁶ and went on to recommend severing any ties between the framing of genocide and the struggle for civil rights. The result was to minimise the broader question of white supremacy, which, as Charles W. Mills argues, remained unseen as a “political system,” and is still portrayed as just the cultural backdrop against which “other systems, which we are to see as political,” like social democracy or fascism, play out.⁷

To this day the discussion in Germany is predicated on a differential logic, which contrasts Nazi crimes, deemed irrational by virtue of their uneconomical nature, and colonial crimes, deemed rational because driven by economic interests. This logic flies in the face of material evidence but, most importantly, reiterates the fallacy that fascism is an anomalous political formation, alien or antithetical to modernity.

Fascism is however not a mental pathology, and it is not anomalous either. Fascism is a structural aspect of modernity.

The modern nation state was born, as Mamdani argues, born in 1492, when the Castilian monarchy sought to establish a Christian polity by expelling Moors and Jews. Nationalism, he sustains,

did not precede colonialism, nor was colonialism the highest or the final stage in the making of a nation. The two were co-constituted. The birth of the modern state amid ethnic cleansing and overseas domination teaches us a different lesson about what political modernity is: less an engine of tolerance than of conquest.⁸

This is a political question as well as an epistemological one. Opposing the tribal and primitive, resistant to progress and to those who embrace it, the modern era is usually defined by the belief that the future would be different from the past. But this articulation of difference hinges on, and intersects with, another articulation of difference: racial difference.

From the Renaissance onwards, culture, traditionally seen as static or blighted, became increasingly coded temporally: a unilinear panorama within which different cultures could be measured against one another according to a single metric of civilizational “progress,” and whose status could be accumulated as evolutionary capital.⁹ The preoccupation with forward-moving processes turned temporality into a biopolitical and, by extension, necropolitical instrument. Aligned in a classificatory schema that moves from most primitive to most civilised, different populations came to acquire a different chronological ranking, separating ostensibly “advanced” societies from “underdeveloped” ones: The nineteenth-century English biologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer spoke of a primal state in which humans lived as undifferentiated hordes, and equated the development of civilization with the rise of class hierarchy;¹⁰ around the same time, the American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan drew a neat stack starting with a state of savagery (lower, middle, and upper savagery), moving on to barbarism (lower, middle, and upper barbarism), ultimately reaching the upper echelon of the  civilised condition;¹¹ and perhaps most importantly, the Enlightenment economist Adam Smith distorted the historical relation between labor and capital, through the use of what philosopher Dugald Stewart termed “conjectural history,”¹² describing the four stages of the economy as a succession of progressive civilizational steps, ranging from the lowest (animal-like) condition of the hunter and gatherer, to the barely-human stage of the nomadic herder, to the intermediate level of agricultural production, until finally reaching the highest possible form of social organisation and exchange: capitalism. One could add here a great many other unilinear schemas developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but their specificities are less noteworthy than their striking congruity.

All the markers of modernity—progress, development, modernisation, industrialisation, urbanisation—suggest a comparative chronology. Primitiveness and backwardness define the non-Western subject, in contradistinction to the concept of “modern civilization,” under whose terms the nature of time came to be defined. This “denial of coevalness,” anthropologist Johannes Fabian argues,¹³ ultimately consigns colonised subjects to the waiting room of history, and the disempowered to the past. And because the non-European is hopelessly “behind the times” successive waves of colonial and neo-colonial depredation are, to this day, justified by the necessity to assimilate to modernity, to develop, or to “catch up.” Theft, or that which is taken—via enslavement, land-grabs, depredation or plunder—can be thus codified as a gift, as the dispensation of contemporaneity. From this perspective, geopolitics is a form of chronopolitics. Temporality is, here, thoroughly politicised; it becomes a biopolitical and, by extension, necropolitical instrument: the distribution of time becomes the distribution of territory, and hence the distribution of life.

This is the paradox of modernity: whereas the modern revolutions claim they fought to eliminate distinctions of class, caste, rank, or status, modernity is also the epoch that instituted the concept of racial difference. This set of mutually inconsistent claims—all human beings are equal; some human beings can be “justly owned”—is usually brushed aside as the death throes of a pre-modern order, a residue or vestige of medieval savagery, that bled into modernity. This couldn’t be further from the historical truth. Race and racism, unlike xenophobia or sectarianism, are “distinctly modern ideas.”¹⁴ Race, as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant––who is credited with introducing the concept of race into the scientific jargon–– makes plain, indexes a preoccupation with history, progress, and forward-moving processes to differences of skin colour. Addressing J.G. Herder, Kant famously quipped that non-historical life is neither properly human or worth living:

Does the author really mean that, if the happy inhabitants of Tahiti, never visited by more civilized nations, were destined to live in their peaceful indolence for thousands of centuries, it would be possible to give a satisfactory answer to the question of why they should exist at all, and of whether it would not have been just as good if this island had been occupied by happy sheep and cattle as by happy human beings who merely enjoy themselves?¹⁵

Hegel, as Rei Terada argues in her article “Hegel’s Racism for Radicals” puts forth a similar argument. In Hegel’s Philosophy of History and Reason in History, the philosopher opines that: “What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the condition of mere nature.”¹⁶ To be human, for Hegel, is to negate the given, to free oneself from nature¹⁷ Nature is an alienation in which spirit does not find itself: Nature negates the idea. The spirit must negate this negation. The function of culture is to undo nature, in order to create a (man-made) second world: “Man appears on the scene as the antithesis of nature; he is the being who raises himself up.”¹⁸ The failure to free oneself from nature is thus conceptualised as a cultural failure, which Hegel attributes to conceptual inadequacy. From Hegel’s perspective race is an index of failure and inadequacy; “whiteness” is thus not a race, but the absence thereof. By playing race “against a falsely transparent humanity,” Hegel, makes the notion of openness “into the measure of authentic development,” which he then uses “to generate racist images of Africans” who are defined by its “lack.”¹⁹ From this perspective we can see that the neat division which the Enlightenment institutes between subject and object in fact conceals another, racial, division, so that the distinction between subject and object is in fact a distinction between subject and subject. As David Marriott notes, the African for Hegel is a:

figure whose difference does not pass beyond itself into work or history; the African not only has no consciousness of itself, no self-related in identity, but he also lacks the alienation from self that comes with the movement of Spirit away from Nature, the teleology that is alone capable of revealing Spirit.²⁰

From Hegel’s perspective, there are no concrete universals in Africa, no world-spirits on horsebacks. Only inassimilable particularity:²¹ If whiteness is, as Charles Mills argues, the unspoken prerequisite for full personhood, racism is not a deviation from universalist ideals, it is baked into universalism, and no subperson need apply: “The peculiarity of the African character is that it lacks the principle that naturally accompanies all our ideas—the category of universality. Africans worship the first thing that comes their way.” In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel theorises what he calls “fetishism” as that which lacks transcendence. In the fetish, power is of the form, not merely in the form. The fetish is not a sign of something else, of something beyond itself. Because, in Africa, the Spirit does not reside within matter, but is of matter, the black subject is insufficiently alienated, or rather alienated from alienation. Perched on the edge of history, she cannot cross the door sublimity leaves ajar because she carries the finitude of nature within her.

Because Hegelian dialectics, as Teshale Tibebu details, elevates Western values to the status of universal rationality, equating the West “with man as such.”—whereas non-western cultures are debased as the embodiment of tribal irrationality—it can thus proceed to celebrate “Western global victory as the victory of humanity itself.” Hegel’s “radical openness to history,” to return to Terada’s argument, becomes an “Enlightenment technology that “produces the particular it claims to be the opposite of,” while it “imputes racism elsewhere to demand colonial access.”²²

In a similar vein, Henri Bergson’s 1932 essay Les deux sources de la morale et la religion (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion) describes two fundamentally different types of societies, the open (dynamic) and the closed (static).²³ Bergson’s dichotomy between open and closed systems is a racial schema, which stigmatises non-Western traditions as nothing but the tribal backwardness the West freed itself from.

Underlying the geographical orders imposed by colonialism, as Alia Al-Saji notes, are temporal frameworks or economies of time that persist largely unquestioned.²⁴ And the chronopolitical expression of these economies of time is saturated by colonial formations. The Enlightenment, to quote John Jervis, “transforms civilizing into a project, one in which the state itself is involved in programs of social betterment. Rationalism, Enlightenment and the potential for Imperialism come together here. Enlightenment becomes a mission, intolerant of otherness.”²⁵ Universalism crowds out others.

To this day, the legacies of colonialism tend to find expression in a language contemporary audiences find familiar and compelling, and hence remains largely unquestioned. Saturated by colonial formations, principles like openness, universalism, humanism, freedom, and individualism function in lockstep with the development of a globally-integrated economy rooted in Western hegemony.

Without the will to confront the racial schemas that undergird Western epistemologies, appeals to universal values or principles, whose structural inconsistencies only allow for a partial or distorted critique of racial capitalism, will continue to open an equivocal space in which a great many quasi-political positions can be inflected in the direction of fascism.

This article expands on the topic of the conference and podcast series Whose Universal? conceptualized together with Kader Attia and Anselm Franke.

Footnotes

1. Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” The New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/, accessed November 23, 2021. ↑

2. Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy, Minneapolis–London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 115. ↑

3. Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native, London–Boston: Harvard University Press, 2020, p. 102. ↑

4. Nikhil Pal Singh discussing his essay “The Afterlife of Fascism” on the White West podcast: https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2021/the_white_west_iv/start.php ↑

5. Mamdani, 103-105 ↑

6. Anson Rabinbach ,“‘We Charge Genocide’: African Americans, Memory and the Genocide Convention”,

   https://einsteinforum.de/veranstaltungen/we-charge-genocide-african-americans-memory-and-the-genocide-convention/ ↑

7. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. ↑

8. Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native. ↑

9. The notion that different historical eras had fundamentally different schemas of thought is usually credited to Giambattista Vico’s treatise The New Science, published in 1725. ↑

10. See for instance Spencer’s First Principles (1962) Principles of Biology (1864, 1867; revised and enlarged: 1898), particularily vol. i, or Principles of Sociology (1874–85). ↑

11. See Morgan’s Ancient Society: Or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from. Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization, London: MacMillan & Co., 1877. ↑

12. Adam Smith, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith: III: Essays on Philosophical Subjects: With Dugald Stewart’s “Account of Adam Smith”, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 293. ↑

13. See J. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press 1983. ↑

14. Andrew Valls, “Introduction” in Andrew Valls (ed.), Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, New York: Cornell University Press, 2005, p. 1. ↑

15. Immanuel Kant, “Reviews of Herderʼs Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1785),” in H.S. Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ↑

16. G. W. F. Hegel, “Introduction, Reason in History,” Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, translated by H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 177. ↑

17. Teshale Tibebu, Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2011, p. 28. ↑

18. G. W. F. Hegel, “B: The Realisation of Spirit in History,” Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, p. 44. ↑

19. Rei Terada, “Hegel’s Racism for Radicals,” Radical Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 5 (Autumn 2019), https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/hegels-racism-for-radicals. ↑

20. David Marriott, “On Racial Fetishism,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 18, no. 2 (2010): pp. 215–48. ↑

21. Ibid., p. 230. ↑

22. Terada, “Hegel’s Racism for Radicals.” ↑

23. See Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977. ↑

24. Alia Al-Saji, “Decolonizing Bergson: The Temporal Schema of the Open and the Closed” in Pitts and Westmoreland (eds), Beyond Bergson: Examining Race and Colonialism Through the Writings of Henri Bergson, New York: Suny, 2019, p. 13. ↑

25. John Jervis, “The Modernity of the fin de siècle” in: Michael Saler (ed.) The Fin-de-Siècle World, New York: Routledge, 2015, p. 60. ↑