The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism by Emilio Gentile (original) (raw)

related to it. Hence by treating all new extreme right parties as neo-fascist, they misunderstand the nature of some of the new extreme right parties and they overstretch, as Giovanni Sartori would say, the concept of Fascism. Moreover, by doing so, they reduce its usefulness from an analytical point of view. This leads to the third, and possibly most serious, problem of the book. There is no clear definition (and consistent use thereof) of what Fascism is and is not. In the introduction to the book, the editors of the volume identify the essence of Fascism, which is common to all Fascisms old and new, both with the rejection of ''the emancipatory promise of the Enlightment tradition'' (p. 10) and with the fiction of race which ''lies at the heart of virtually all fascisms and neo-fascisms'' (p. 12). Yet, later on in the book Fascism is defined as ''a form of fuzzy totalitarianism'' (p. 58). This Babel of definitions is problematic not only per se, but more importantly because none of these definitions provides the tools with which to distinguish Fascism from other political phenomena. For example, Fascism was, in most, but not all, of its manifestations (p. 69), racist, and the new extreme right is also generally racist. But the fact that Fascism and extreme right are racist does not justify equating either of them to racism tout court as there are forms of racism that, however unpleasant, are not Fascist and do not have anything to do with the extreme right. The discrimination against the Chinese minority in Malaysia can, and probably should, be seen as the product of racial politics but not of Fascism. Moreover, the fact that both Fascism and the new extreme right are racist does not allow one to equate the new extreme right to classic Fascism. The argument would run along the following lines: all Fascists are racist, all extreme right people are racist, hence all extreme right people are Fascist. This argument is however fallacious and it has in fact been known for centuries, as the fallacy of undistributed middle. This means that, in spite of its rhetorical value, this argument is not logically valid and, in the case of this book, does not support the claim that the new extreme right is inherently neo-fascist or that it has links to classic Fascism. In any event, by failing to define what is Fascism and to clarify the factors that make Fascism different from other fuzzy authoritarian regimes or from other fuzzy non-democratic ideologies, this collection of essays fails to provide the basis for comparing the contemporary extreme right to classic Fascism and to assess whether these two phenomena are linked-which is what the book originally planned to demonstrate. This is why, in spite of the high quality of many of the chapters, the overall result seems to be less than the sum of its parts.