The
Essence of Fascism
by
Karl Polanyi
II. ATHEIST AND
CHRISTIAN INDIVIDUALISM
But we are not
primarily concerned here with politics. We hope to have
succeeded in establishing the fact that anti-individualism
is, broadly
speaking, the cue of all Fascist schools of thought. But what
exactly is
the Individualism at which the Fascist attack is aimed, and
what is its
relationship to Socialism and Christianity?
The answer which
we will try to extricate from Spann's argument is of a
highly paradoxical character. It is, in short, that the Individualism
on
which Socialism fundamentally rests, and against which Spann's
attack must necessarily
be aimed, is an entirely different Individualism from the
one
against which his actual arguments are directed. Thus, as
a critical
contribution to Fascism, Spann's argumentation is a failure.
Yet
incidentally it reveals the true nature of the problem with
exceptional
clarity, i.e. that meaning of individualism which Socialism
and
Christianity have in common.
Spann's indictment
of Individualism is based on the double assertion that
its concepts both of the individual and of society are fictitious
and
self-contradictory. Individualism must conceive of human beings
as
self-contained entities spiritually "on their own,"
as it were. But such an
individuality cannot be real. Its spiritual autarchy is imaginary.
Its very
existence is no more than a fiction. The same would hold good
of a society
that is made up of individuals of this kind. It might or it
might not
exist-according to whether the individuals decided to "form
it" or not.
This, again, would depend upon the more or less fortuitous
circumstances of
their feeling more sympathy or antipathy towards each other,
whether they
took a rational or irrational view of their self-interest,
and so on. A
society thus conceived must lack essential reality.
Nobody can deny
the strength of these arguments. Indeed, they are
conclusive. And yet they prove exactly the opposite of what
they are
intended to prove.
Spann's criticism
of Individualism is vitiated by a fundamental ambiguity. What
he is aiming to disprove is the Individualism which is the
substance of Socialism. It is essentially Christian. His actual
arguments are directed against atheist Individualism. Both
these forms of Individualism are theological in origin. But
the reference to the Absolute is negative with the one and
positive with the other. In fact one is precisely the opposite
of the other. No valid conclusions can be reached if we confuse
them. The formula of atheist Individualism is that of Kiriloff
in Dostoevsky The Possessed: "If there is no God, then
I, Kiriloff, am God." For God is that which gives meaning
to human life and creates a difference between good and evil.
If there is no such god outside myself, then I myself am god,
for I do these things. The argument is irrefutable. In the
novel, Kiriloff resolves to make his godhead actual and real
by conquering the fear of death. He proposes to achieve this
by committing suicide. His dying proves a ghastly failure.
Dostoevsky's ruthless
analysis of Kiriloff leaves no doubt about the true nature
and limitations of the spiritually autonomous personality.
The Titanic Superman is the heir to the gods Nietzsche had
proclaimed dead. In the mythological figures of Raskolnikoff
Stavrogin, Ivan, from whom Smardjakoff also derives, but,
most forcibly of all, in Kiriloff, Dostoevsky provided us
with an almost mathematically exact refutation of this concept
of human personality. Spann's criticism of Individualism is
but a belated attack on Nietzsche, with whose position Dostoevsky
had dealt half a century earlier. [1] Historically,
both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky had been anticipated by the
lonely genius of Soren Kierkegaard, who, in a unique dialectic
effort, had a generation before them created and wiped out
again the Autonomous Individual.
But Othmar Spann
does not only force open doors, he also gets through them
into the wrong apartments. By his effective, though superfluous,
attack on atheist Individualism he refutes what in corporate
Capitalism he eventually intends to uphold: the Individualism
of Unequals, and upholds unwittingly what he started to refute:
the Individualism of Equals. For the latter is inseparably
bound up with Christian as the other is with atheist Individualism.
[2]
Christian Individualism
arises out of the precisely opposite relation to the Absolute.
"Personality is of infinite value, because there is God."
It is the doctrine of the Brotherhood of Man. That men have
souls is only another way of stating that they have infinite
value as individuals. To say that they are equals is only
restating that they have souls. The doctrine of Brotherhood
implies that personality is not real outside community. The
reality of community is the relationship of persons. It is
the Will of God that community shall be real.
The best proof
of the coherence of this series of truths lies in the fact
that Fascism, in order to rid itself of one of the links finds
itself
constrained to renounce them all. It tries to deny the equality
of Man, but
it cannot do this without denying that he has a soul. Like
different
properties of a geometrical figure these statements are really
one. The
discovery of the individual is the discovery of mankind. The
discovery of
the individual soul is the discovery of community. The discovery
of
equality is the discovery of society. Each is implied in the
other. The
discovery of the person is the discovery that society is the
relationship
of persons.
For the idea of
Man and the idea of Society cannot be dealt with
separately. What Fascism is contending with is the Christian
idea of man
and Society as a whole. Its central concept is that of the
person. It is
the individual in his religious aspect. The consistent refusal
of Fascism
to regard the individual in this aspect is the sign of its
recognition that
Christianity and Fascism are completely incompatible.
The Christian idea
of society is that it is a relationship of persons.
Everything else follows logically from this. The central proposition
of
Fascism is that society is not a relationship of persons.
This is the real
significance of its anti-individualism. The implied negation
is the
formative principle of Fascism as a philosophy. It is its
essence. It sets
to Fascist thought its definite task in history, science,
morals, politics,
economics, and religion. Thus Fascist philosophy is an effort
to produce a
vision of the world in which society is not a relationship
of persons. A
society, in fact, in which there are either no conscious human
beings or
their consciousness has no reference to the existence and
functioning of society. Anything less leads back to the Christian
truth
about society. But that is indivisible. It is the achievement
of Fascism to
have discovered its whole scope. It rightly asserts the correlatedness
of
the ideas of Individualism, Democracy and Socialism. It knows
that either
Christianity or Fascism must perish in the struggle.
At first sight
it seems almost inconceivable that Fascism should have undertaken
a task which to our conventional minds seems so utterly hopeless.
And yet it has. That its assertions and propositions are more
startling than anything which Radicals of the Left have ever
produced ought, however, not to surprise us. Revolutionary
Socialism is but a different formulation and a stricter interpretation
of truths generally accepted in Western Europe for almost
two thousand years. Fascism is their denial. This explains
the devious paths which it has been driven to explore.
NOTES
[1]
Partly, indeed, prior to the actual publication of Zarathustra
itself.
[2]
Titanic Individualism derives the value of personality from
the assertion that there is no God. It is not to be confused
with the Individualism of Luther or Calvin or Rousseau, the
Individualism prescribed under its different aspects in the
rise of Capitalism. It is the atheist Individualism of Kierkegaard
Seducer, of Stirner Only One, of Nietzsche Superman, the philosophy
of a short transition period in which Liberal Capitalism was
triumphant.
Go forward
to the next section: III.
THE SOLUTIONS
Go back to
the previous section: I.
FASCIST ANTI-INDIVIDUALISM
