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Fascists
Fascists presents a new theory of fascism based on intensive
analysis of the men and
women who became fascists. It covers the six European
countries in which fascism
became most dominant: Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary,
Romania, and Spain. It
is the most comprehensive analysis of who fascists actually
were, what beliefs they
held, and what actions they committed. Through this evidence
we see that fascism
is merely the most extreme form of “nation-statism,” which was
the dominant
political ideology of the twentieth century. Fascists argued that
an “organic nation”
and a strong state that was prepared to use violence to “knock
heads together” could
transcend the conflicts, especially the class conflicts, rending
modern society. We also
see the fascist core constituencies: social locations that were at
the heart of the nation
or closely connected to the state, and people who were
accustomed to use violence
as a means of solving social conflicts and who came from those
sections of all social

classes that were working outside the front lines of class
conflict. The book suggests
that fascism was essentially a product of post–World War I
conditions in Europe and
is unlikely to reappear in its classic garb in the future.
Nonetheless, elements of its
ideology remain relevant to modern conditions and are now
reappearing, though
mainly in different parts of the world.
Michael Mann is Professor of Sociology at the University of
California, Los Angeles,
and Visiting Research Professor at Queens University, Belfast.
i
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Fascists
MICHAEL MANN
University of California, Los Angeles
iii
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
First published in print format
ISBN-13 978-0-521-83131-4
ISBN-13 978-0-521-53855-8
ISBN-13 978-0-511-21651-0
© Cambridge University Press 2004
2004
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521831314
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provision of
relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any
part may take place
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
ISBN-10 0-511-21651-3
ISBN-10 0-521-83131-8
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Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the
persistence or accuracy of URLs
for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this
publication, and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge
University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
hardback
paperback
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eBook (NetLibrary)
eBook (NetLibrary)
hardback
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Contents
Preface page vii
1 A Sociology of Fascist Movements 1
2 Explaining the Rise of Interwar Authoritarianism and Fascism
31
3 Italy: Pristine Fascists 93
4 Nazis 139
5 German Sympathizers 177

6 Austro-Fascists, Austrian Nazis 207
7 The Hungarian Family of Authoritarians 237
8 The Romanian Family of Authoritarians 261
9 The Spanish Family of Authoritarians 297
10 Conclusion: Fascists, Dead and Alive 353
Appendix 377
Notes 389
Bibliography 395
Index 417
v
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Preface
I originally designed this study of fascism as a single chapter in
a general
book about the twentieth century, the third volume of my The
Sources of
Social Power. But my third volume still remains to be written,
since fascism
grew and grew to absorb my entire attention span over seven
years. My

“fascist chapter” was to be written first, since I was at that time
spending
a year in a Madrid institute with a fine library collection on the
interwar
struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. But then my
research
on fascism grew to the size of a whole book. I realized with a
sinking
heart (since this is not a pleasant subject on which to work for
years) that
it had to grow yet further. Since the deeds of fascists and their
fellow-
travelers culminated in mass murder, I had to engage with a
second large
body of literature, on the events centering on “The Final
Solution
” or
“Holocaust.” I soon realized that these two bodies of literature –
on fascists
and their genocides – had little in common. Fascism and the
mass murders
committed during World War II have been mostly kept in
separate scholarly
and popular compartments inhabited by different theories,
different data,
different methods. These compartments have mostly kept them
segregated

from other rather similar phenomena of murderous cleansing
that have been
regularly recurring across the modern period – from
seventeenth-century
America to the mid-twentieth-century Soviet Union, to Rwanda-
Burundi
and Yugoslavia at the very end of the twentieth century.
All these three main forms of deeply depressing human behavior
– fascism,
“the Holocaust,” and ethnic and political cleansing more
generally – share
a family resemblance. This resemblance has been given by three
main in-
gredients most openly revealed in fascism: organic nationalism,
radical statism,
and paramilitarism. Ideally, the entire family should be
discussed together.
But being of an empiricist bent, I felt I had to discuss them in
some detail.
vii

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viii Preface
This would have generated a book of near 1,000 pages, which
perhaps few
would read – and which no publisher would publish.
So I have broken my overall study into two. This volume
concerns fascists,
centering on their rise to power in interwar Europe. My
forthcoming vol-
ume, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic
Cleansing, concerns the
whole swath of modern ethnic and political cleansing, from
colonial times
through Armenia and Nazi genocides to the present day. The
weakness of
this particular division between the two volumes is that the
“careers” of
the worst types of fascists, especially Nazis, but also their
collaborators, are
broken up between two volumes. Their rise is traced in this

volume, their
final deeds in my other volume. The advantage of this division
is that the
final deeds of these fascists appear alongside others with whom
they share a
genuine family resemblance – colonial militias, the Turkish
Special Forces of
1915, the Cambodian Angka, the Red Guards, Hutu
Interahamwe, Arkan’s
Tigers, and so on. Indeed, popular speech, especially among
their enemies
and victims, recognizes this kinship by denouncing them all as
“Fascists!” –
a rather imprecise but nonetheless justifiable term of abuse. For
these are
brutal men and women using murderous paramilitary means to
attain, albeit
rather crudely voiced, goals of organic nationalism and/or
radical statism
(all qualities of fascism proper). Scholars tend to reject this
broad label of
“Fascist!” – preferring to reserve the term (without exclamation
mark) for
those adhering to a rather more tightly structured doctrine.
Since I also

have pretensions to scholarship, I suppose I must ultimately
share this pref-
erence for conceptual precision. But deeds can share
commonality as well
as doctrine. This volume concerns fascists as scholars
understand the term;
my other volume concerns perpetrators and “Fascists!” in the
more popular,
looser sense of the word.
I have greatly benefited from the advice and criticism of
colleagues in
writing this book. I wish to especially thank Ivan Berend,
Ronald Fraser,
Bernt Hagtvet, John Hall, Ian Kershaw, Stanley Payne, and
Dylan Riley.
I thank the Instituto Juan March in Madrid for its hospitality
during the
first year of research for this book, and the Sociology
Department of the
University of California at Los Angeles for providing a very
congenial home
throughout.

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1
A Sociology of Fascist Movements
taking fascists seriously
This book seeks to explain fascism by understanding fascists –
who they
were, where they came from, what their motivations were, how
they rose
to power. I focus here on the rise of fascist movements rather
than on es-
tablished fascist regimes. I investigate fascists at their flood
tide, in their
major redoubts in interwar Europe, that is, in Austria, Germany,
Hungary,
Italy, Romania, and Spain. To understand fascists will require
understanding
fascist movements. We can understand little of individual
fascists and their

deeds unless we appreciate that they were joined together into
distinctive
power organizations. We must also understand them amid their
broader
twentieth-century context, in relation to general aspirations for
more effec-
tive states and greater national solidarity. For fascism is neither
an oddity nor
merely of historical interest. Fascism has been an essential if
predominantly
undesirable part of modernity. At the beginning of the twenty-
first century
there are seven reasons still to take fascists very seriously.
(1) Fascism was not a mere sideshow in the development of
modern
society. Fascism spread through much of the European heartland
of moder-
nity. Alongside environmentalism, it was the major political
doctrine of
world-historical significance created during the twentieth
century. There is
a chance that something quite like it, though almost certainly
under another
name, will play an important role in the twenty-first century.

Fascists have
been at the heart of modernity.
(2) Fascism was not a movement set quite apart from other
modern move-
ments. Fascists only embraced more fervently than anyone else
the central
political icon of our time, the nation-state, together with its
ideologies
and pathologies. We are thankful that today much of the world
lives un-
der rather mild nation-states, with modest, useful powers,
embodying only
1
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2 Fascists
a fairly harmless nationalism. National government

bureaucracies annoy us
but they do not terrorize us – indeed, they predominantly serve
our needs.
Nationalism usually also appears in comforting domesticated
forms. Though
French people often proclaim themselves as culturally superior,
Americans
assert they are the freest people on Earth, and the Japanese
claim a unique
racial homogeneity, these highly suspect beliefs comfort
themselves, amuse
foreigners, and rarely harm anyone else.
Fascism represents a kind of second-level escalation beyond
such “mild
nation-statism.” The first escalation came in two parallel forms,
one con-
cerning the nation, the other the state. Regarding the nation,
aspirations for
democracy became entwined with the notion of the “integral” or
“organic”
nation. “The people” must rule, but this people was considered
as one and
indivisible and so might violently exclude from itself minority
ethnic

groups and political “enemies” (see my forthcoming volume,
The Dark-
side of Democracy, chap. 1, for more analysis of this).
Regarding the state, the
early twentieth century saw the rise of a more powerful state,
seen as “the
bearer of a moral project,” capable of achieving economic,
social, and moral
development.1 In certain contexts this involved the rise of more
authori-
tarian states. The combination of modern nationalism and
statism was to
turn democratic aspirations on their head, into authoritarian
regimes seek-
ing to “cleanse” minorities and opponents from the nation.
Fascism, the
second-level escalation, added to this combination mainly a
distinctively
“bottom-up” and “radical” paramilitary movement. This would
overcome
all opposition to the organic nation-state with violence from
below, at what-
ever the cost. Such glorification of actual violence had emerged
as a conse-
quence of the modern “democratization” of war into one

between “citizen
armies.” Fascism thus presented a distinctively paramilitary
extreme ver-
sion of nation-statism (my actual definition of fascism is given
below in this
chapter). It was only the most extreme version of the dominant
political
ideology of our era.
(3) Fascist ideology must be taken seriously, in its own terms. It
must
not be dismissed as crazy, contradictory, or vague. Nowadays,
this is quite
widely accepted. Zeev Sternhell (1986: x) has remarked that
fascism had
“a body of doctrine no less solid or logically indefensible than
that of any
other political movement.” Consequently, said George Mosse
(1999: x),
“only . . . when we have grasped fascism from the inside out,
can we truly
judge its appeal and its power.” Since fascists did offer
plausible solutions to
modern social problems, they got mass electoral support and
intense emo-

tional commitment from militants. Of course, like most political
activists,
fascists were diverse and opportunistic. The importance of
leadership and
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A Sociology of Fascist Movements 3
power in fascism enhanced opportunism. Fascist leaders were
empowered
to do almost anything to seize power, and this could subvert
other fascist
values. Yet most fascists, leaders or led, believed in certain
things. They
were not people of peculiar character, sadists or psychopaths, or
people
with a “rag-bag” of half-understood dogmas and slogans flitting
through
their heads (or no more so than the rest of us). Fascism was a
movement of

high ideals, able to persuade a substantial part of two
generations of young
people (especially the highly educated) that it could bring about
a more
harmonious social order. To understand fascism, I adopt a
methodology of
taking fascists’values seriously. Thus each of my case-study
chapters begins
by explaining local fascist doctrine, followed, if possible, by an
account of
what ordinary fascists seem to have believed.
(4) We must take seriously the social constituency of fascist
movements
and ask what sorts of people were drawn to them. Few fascists
were marginals
or misfits. Nor were they confined to classes or other interest
groups who
found in fascism a “cover” for their narrow material interests.
Yet there were
“core fascist constituencies” among which fascist values most
resonated. This
is perhaps the most original part of this book, yielding a new
view of fascism,
and it derives from a methodology of taking fascist values

seriously. For the
core fascist constituency enjoyed particularly close relations to
the sacred
icon of fascism, the nation-state. We must reconstruct that
nation-state–
loving constituency in order to see what kinds of people might
be tempted
toward fascism.
(5) We must also take seriously fascist movements. They were
hierarchical
yet comradely, embodying both the leadership principle and a
constraining
“social cage,” both of which heightened commitment, especially
by single
young men for whom the movement was almost a “total
institution.” We
must also appreciate its paramilitarism, since “popular
violence” was crucial
to its success. Fascist movements also changed as they were
tempted by two
different prospects. One was to use power in more and more
radical and
violent ways. The other was to enjoy the fruits of power by
compromising

under the table with powerful traditional elites. These led
toward either
a hardening of fascism (as in Germany) or a softening (as in
Italy, at least
until the late 1930s). Fascists also experienced “careers” in the
movement,
which might lead them down either path. We must observe
fascists in action:
committing violence, trimming, pursuing careers.
(6) We must take “hardened” fascists seriously in a far more
sinister sense,
as the eventual perpetrators of great evil. We must not excuse or
relativize
this but seek to understand it. The capacity for evil is an
essential human
attribute, and so is our capacity to commit evil for what we
believe to be
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4 Fascists
moral purposes. Fascists were especially self-deluded. We need
to know
more of the circumstances in which we humans do this. Though
we pre-
fer to write history and sociology as a happy, progressive, moral
tale, this
grotesquely distorts the reality of human experience. The
twentieth century
saw massive evil, not as an accident or as the resurgence of the
primitive
in us, but as willed, purposive, and essentially “modern”
behavior. To un-
derstand fascism is to understand how people of apparently high
modern-
izing ideals could then act to produce evil that was eventually
unmitigated.
However, I leave the very worst for my forthcoming book, The
Dark Side of
Democracy.
(7) We must take seriously the chance that fascists might return.
If we
understand the conditions that generated fascists, we can better

understand
whether they might return and how we might avoid this. Some
of the con-
ditions that generated fascism are still present. Organic
nationalism and the
adoption of paramilitary forms, committed to ethnic and
political cleans-
ing, at present moves many thousands of people across the
world to commit
supposedly “idealistic” yet in reality murderous acts against
neighbours and
political opponents whom they call “enemies.” This may horrify
us, but
it is not dismissible as a return to the “primitive” in us. Ethnic
and politi-
cal cleansing has been one of European civilization’s main
contributions to
modernity; while violent paramilitarism has been distinctively
twentieth-
century. We must comprehend these aspects of modernity. It is
rather for-
tunate nowadays that “statism” (the third main component of
fascism after
organic nationalism and paramilitarism) is greatly out of
fashion, since both

its historic carriers, fascism and communism, collapsed
disastrously. Current
cleansing regimes tend to be paramilitary and authoritarian, but
pretend they
are democratic; the words “fascist” and “communist” have
largely become
terms of imprecise abuse. Given time for a supposedly stateless
neoliberalism
to do similar damage to parts of the world, this rejection of the
powerful state
will probably fade. Then extreme statist values might be
harnessed again to
extreme paramilitary nationalism in movements resembling
fascism – unless
we can learn from the history I record here. I doubt new
movements will
call themselves fascist, since the word is now so abhorred. Yet
some of the
substance of fascism lives on.
There are two main schools of thought on fascism. A more
idealist “na-
tionalist school,” which I discuss first, has focused on fascists’
beliefs and
doctrines, while a more materialist “class school,” discussed

second, has fo-
cused on its class basis and its relationship to capitalism. The
debates between
them constitute yet another replay of the traditional polemic
between ide-
alism and materialism in the social sciences. But since the two
approaches
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often appear to be discussing different levels of phenomena –
beliefs versus
social base/functions – they frequently talk past each other.
Thus we lack
an acceptable general theory of fascism. Such a theory would
have to build
on top of both approaches, taking from each what is useful and
adding what
both neglect.

I have chosen not to here give the reader a heavy dose of
sociological
theory. But my own approach to fascism derives from a more
general model
of human societies that rejects the idealism-versus-materialism
dualism. My
earlier work identified four primary “sources of social power”
in human
societies: ideological, economic, military, and political.2 Class
theorists of
fascism have tended to elevate economic power relations in
their expla-
nations, while nationalist theorists have emphasized ideology.
Yet all four
sources of social power are needed to explain most important
social and
historical outcomes. To attain their goals, social movements
wield com-
binations of control over ultimate meaning systems
(ideological), control
over means of production and exchange (economic), control
over orga-
nized physical violence (military), and control over centralized
and terri-

torial institutions of regulation (political). All four are
necessary to explain
fascism. Mass fascism was a response to the post–World War I
ideological,
economic, military, and political crises. Fascists proposed
solutions to all
four. Fascist organization also combined substantial ideological
innovations
(generally called “propaganda”), mass political electoralism,
and paramilitary
violence. All became highly ritualized so as to intensify
emotional commit-
ment. In attempting to seize power, fascist leaders also sought
to neutralize
economic, military, political, and ideological (especially
church) elites. Thus
any explanation of fascism must rest on the entwining of all
four sources
of social power, as my empirical case-study chapters
demonstrate. My fi-
nal chapter presents the pay-off from this model: a general
explanation of
fascism.
toward a definition of fascism

Obviously, we must define our terms, though this is no easy
matter. Some
scholars have refused to define fascism at all in any “generic”
sense, believing
that “true” fascism was found only in Italy, its original home.
Along with
many others, I disagree. However, I do not initially seek a
generic definition
that might apply across many times and places. I merely seek
one offering
heuristic utility across the interwar period in Europe – until my
last chapter,
when I raise the issue of whether fascist movements have
existed in more
recent times and in other places.
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6 Fascists

Let us first get a general sense of fascism through the views of
its promi-
nent intellectuals, with the commentaries of Sternhell (1976,
1986, 1994)
and Mosse (1999), plus Griffin’s compilation of fascist texts
(1995), as my
main guides. Most of them were initially nonmaterialist leftists
who then
embraced organic nationalism. In 1898 the Frenchman Barrès
called his fu-
sion “Socialist Nationalism,” though it was the Italian
Corradini’s inversion
of these words, as “National Socialism,” which caught on,
though by so-
cialism he really meant syndicalism: “Syndicalism and
nationalism together,
these are the doctrines that represent solidarity,” he
emphasized. Class and
sectoral conflict could be harmonized with the help of
syndicalist (labor
union) organizations coordinated by a “corporate state.” So
national so-
cialism would be confined within national boundaries, with
class struggle
transformed into struggle between nations. “Bourgeois nations”

(such as
Britain and France) exploited “proletarian nations” (such as
Italy). To resist,
the proletarian nation must fight, with economic weapons and
through “the
sacred mission of imperialism.” Except for the last phrase, this
resembles the
“third world socialism” of recent years. These were not
uncommon ideas
in the twentieth century.
As leftists but not materialists, these men also lauded
“resistance,”
“will,” “movement,” “collective action,” “the masses,” and the
dialectic of
“progress” through “struggle,” “force,” and “violence.” These
Nietzschean
values made fascism “radical.” Fascists were determined to
overcome all
opposition ruthlessly, by will, force, whatever was necessary,
without com-
promise or scruples. This meant in practice forming
paramilitaries as well
as parties. As collectivists they despised the “amoral
individualism” of free

market liberalism and “bourgeois democracy,” which neglected
the inter-
ests of “living communities” and of “the nation as an organic
whole.” The
nation was essentially one and indivisible, a living and
breathing entity, de-
fined as either “integral” or “organic.” To be German, Italian,
or French,
fascists asserted, meant much more than just living in a
geographical space; it
meant something outsiders could not experience, involving a
basic identity
and emotion, beyond reason. As Mosse emphasizes, the
Germanic version
of the nation differed from the Southern European, being racial
as well
as cultural. It drew more on social Darwinism, anti-Semitism,
and other
nineteenth-century racialist strands of theory to generate a
Volk, a singu-
lar ethnic-cultural unity transcending all possible conflicts
within it, but
erecting higher boundaries against other peoples.
Nonetheless, the nation had both a moral and a rational

structure. Build-
ing on Rousseau and Durkheim, the theorists said that
competitive in-
stitutions such as markets, parties, elections, or classes could
not generate
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morality. This must come from the community, the nation. The
Frenchman
Berth railed against liberalism: “Society is brought to the point
where it is
only a market made up of free-trading atoms, in contact with
which every-
thing dissolves. . . . dustlike particles of individuals, shut up
within the nar-
row confines of their consciousness and their money boxes.”
Panunzio and
Bottai followed Durkheim in praising the virtues of “civil

society,” believing
that voluntary communal associations were the foundations of
liberty. Yet
they must be integrated into an overall corporate state that
would then rep-
resent the interests of the nation as a whole. Without this
linkage between
state and communal associations, they said, the state would be
“empty,”
with “a deficiency of sociological content,” as was the case in
the liberal
state (Riley 2002: chap. 1). In contrast, the fascist state would
be “corpo-
rate” and “sociological,” based on strong bonds of association.
Again, this
sounds quite modern. Berth and Panunzio might have been
targeting the
neo-liberalism dominant a hundred years later.
Fascist intellectuals also attacked a left trapped within passive
“bourgeois
materialism.” Its revolutionary pretensions had been exposed,
they argued,
by the superior mobilizing power of modern warfare between
entire na-

tions. Nations, not classes, were the true masses of modernity.
Class conflict
between capitalists and workers was not the core of the
problem, they in-
sisted. Instead, the real struggle was between “workers of all
classes,” “the
productive classes,” ranged against “unproductive” enemies,
usually iden-
tified as finance or foreign or Jewish capitalists. They would
defend the
productive workers of all classes. The Frenchman Valois wrote
that “na-
tionalism + socialism = fascism,” and the Englishman Oswald
Mosley said,
“If you love our country, you are national, and if you love our
people you
are socialist.” These were attractive ideas in the early twentieth
century, the
“age of the masses,” since fascists promised to “transcend” a
class struggle
then seemingly tearing apart the social fabric. Indeed, milder
versions of
such claims to transcendence have been adopted by most of the
successful
political movements of the twentieth century.

The nation should be represented through a corporatist,
syndicalist state.
It could “transcend” the moral decay and class conflict of
bourgeois so-
ciety with a “total plan” offering a statist “third way” between
capitalism
and socialism. The Italian Gentile (a late convert to fascism)
claimed that
fascism resolved the “paradox of liberty and authority. The
authority of
the state is absolute.” Mussolini agreed: “[E]verything in the
State, nothing
against the State, nothing outside the State.” “Ours will be a
totalitarian
state in the service of the fatherland’s integrity,” proclaimed the
Spaniard
José Antonio Primo de Rivera. The Belgian Henri de Man
applauded
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8 Fascists
“authoritarian democracy.” The “fascist revolution” would
produce “the
total man in the total society, with no clashes, no prostration, no
anarchy.”
said the Frenchman Déat.
But this was the future. Right now, the nation must struggle
against its
enemies for self-realization. It would be led by a paramilitary
elite. The more
radical fascists endorsed “moral murder.” They claimed that
paramilitary
violence could “cleanse,” …
1
Introduction
In late-century Africa, things fell apart. By way of illustra-tion,
consider Figure 1.1, which lists civil wars in African

countries from 1970 to 1995, as judged by the World Bank.
As time passes, the list grows. Angola, Chad, Namibia,
Nigeria, and Sudan enter the 1970s war-torn; in the mid-1970s,
Sudan exits the list, but Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe join
it; by 1980, Zimbabwe departs from the ranks of the war-torn,
but is replaced by Mozambique, Nigeria, and Uganda. The
pattern – a few dropping off, a larger number entering in –
continues into the early 1990s. Only one country that was con-
flict ridden in 1990 becomes peaceful by 1992, while eleven
others crowd into the ranks of Africa’s failed states.
Humanitarians, policymakers, and scholars: Each de-
mands to know why political order gave way to political con-
flict in late-century Africa. Stunned by the images and realities

of political disorder, I join them in search of answers. In so
doing, I – a political scientist – turn to theories of the state and
3
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316423974.001
to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
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by the UC San Diego Library, on 07 Jan 2020 at 19:42:32,
subject
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https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://www.cambridge.org/core
year 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88
89 90 91 92 93 94 95
Burundi
Chad

Congo
Djibouti
Ethiopia
Kenya
Liberia
Mali
Mozambique
Namibia
Nigeria
Rwanda
Senegal
Sierra Leone
Somalia
Sudan

Uganda
Congo
Zimbabwe
Figure 1.1. Civil wars, Africa 1970–1995. Source: World Bank
(Sambanis 2002).
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https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316423974.001

Introduction
locate the sources of political disorder midst the factors that
lead states to break down.
I anchor this book in the work of Weber (1958) and view
coercion as the distinctive property of politics. As will become
clear in the next chapter, I depart from Weber – and his “struc-
turalist” descendants1 – by turning to the theory of games.
Driven by the realities of Africa, I view political order as
problematic: In light of the evidence Africa offers, political
order cannot be treated as a given. Rather, I argue, it results
when rulers – whom I characterize as “specialists in violence” –

choose to employ the means of coercion to protect the creation
of wealth rather than to prey upon it and when private citizens
choose to set weapons aside and to devote their time instead
to the production of wealth and to the enjoyment of leisure.2
When these choices constitute an equilibrium, then, I say,
political order forms a state.3
To address the collapse of political order in late-century
Africa, I therefore return to theory – the theory of the state –
and
to theorizing – the theory of games. I do so because proceeding
in this fashion points out the conditions under which political
order can persist – or fail. I devote Chapter 2 to an informal
1 Evans, P., T. Skocpol, and D. Rueschmeyer (1985), Bringing

the State Back
In, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press provides
perhaps the
best-known example.
2 I am drawing on Bates, R. H., A. Greif, et al. (2002),
“Organizing Violence,”
Journal of Conflict Resolution 46(5): 599–628.
3 The ambiguous phrasing is intended.
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Introduction
derivation of those conditions. In the remaining chapters, I
turn from deduction to empirics and explore the extent to
which these conditions were to be found, or were absent, in
late-century Africa. The evidence leads me to conclude that
in the 1980s and 1990s, each of three key variables departed
from the levels necessary to induce governments and citizens
to choose in ways that would yield political order.
The Literature
Following the outbreak of conflict in Serbia, Somalia, Rwanda,
and elsewhere, the study of political violence has once again
become central to the study of politics. Familiar to many, for
example, would be the attempts by Collier and Hoeffler (2004)

and Fearon and Laitin (2003) to comprehend the origins of civil
wars. Also familiar would be studies of the impact of ethnic-
ity (Fearon and Laitin 2003), democracy (Hegre, Gates et al.
2001; Hegre 2003), and natural-resource endowments (e.g.,
Ross 2004). In my attempts to comprehend why things fell
apart in late-century Africa, I draw upon these writings. But I
also take issue with them, for virtually all share common prop-
erties from which I seek to depart.
Consider, for example, the assumption that civil war can be
best treated as the outcome of an insurgency. When thinking
about the origins of political disorder in Africa, I can find no
way of analyzing the origins of insurrection without starting

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Introduction
with the behavior of governments. The conditions that led
to the breakdown of order in Africa include the authoritarian
nature of its states and their rulers’ penchant for predation. By
rendering their people insecure, they provoked insurgencies.
While both insurrectionaries and incumbents must necessar-

ily feature in the analysis of political disorder, in this instance
it
makes sense not to focus exclusively on the rebels but to stress
as well the behavior of those whom they seek to drive from
power.
Recent contributions exhibit a second common feature:
the methods that they employ. Utilizing cross-national data,
they apply statistical procedures to isolate and measure the
relationship of particular variables with the onset and duration
of civil wars. I, too, make use of cross-national data; but rather
than collecting data for all countries in the globe, I restrict my
efforts to Africa. I do so in part because Africa provides an
unsettling range of opportunities to explore state failure and

because political disorder is so important a determinant of the
welfare of the continent. I also do so because I find it necessary
to draw upon my intuition. To employ that intuition, I need
first to inform it, be it by immersing myself in the field or in
qualitative accounts set down by observers. I have therefore
made use of a selected set of cases – those from the continent
of Africa – and my knowledge of their politics.4
4 The use of a subset of countries also eases the search for
exogenous vari-
ables, and thus causal analysis. For example, given the small
size of Africa’s
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Introduction
Lastly, if only because they are based on the analysis of
cross-national data, contemporary studies exhibit a third
property: Their conclusions take the form of “findings.” These
findings are based upon relationships between a selection of
key variables and the outbreak or duration of civil wars. Collier
and Hoeffler (2004), for example, stress the importance of
“opportunities,” that is, chances to secure economic rewards

and to finance political organizations. Noting that the magni-
tude of primary product exports, the costs of recruiting, and
access to funding from diasporas relate to the likelihood of
civil war, they conclude that “economic viability appears to be
the predominant systematic explanation of rebellion” (p. 563).
Fearon and Laitin (2003), by contrast, conclude that “capa-
bilities” play the major role: “We agree that financing is one
determinant of the viability of insurgency,” they write (p. 76).
But they place major emphasis on “state administrative, mil-
itary, and police capabilities” (p. 76), measures of which bear
significant relationships to the outbreak of civil wars in their
global set of data.
In this work, I proceed in a different fashion. I start by

first capturing the logic that gives rise to political order. While
I, too, test hypotheses about the origins of disorder, I derive
economies, I can treat global economic shocks as exogenous –
something
that yields inferential leverage when seeking to measure the
impact of
economic forces on state failure.
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Introduction
these hypotheses from a theory. By adopting a more deductive
approach, I depart from the work of my predecessors.
Key Topics
Energized by such works as Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy”
(1994), students of Africa have focused on the relationship
between ethnic diversity and political conflict. At least since
the time that William Easterly and Ross Levine penned
“Africa’s
Growth Tragedy” (1997), empirically minded social scientists
have sought to capture the impact of ethnicity on the eco-
nomic performance of Africa’s states. Interestingly, however,
they have found it difficult to uncover systematic evidence of

the relationship between measures of ethnicity and the likeli-
hood of political disorder.5
In this study I, too, find little evidence of a systematic rela-
tionship. And yet, the qualitative accounts – be they of the
killing fields of Darfur or of the tenuous peace in Nigeria – con-
tinue to stress the central importance of ethnicity to political
life in Africa. In response, I argue that ethnic diversity does
not cause violence; rather, ethnicity and violence are joint
5 For a discussion, see Bates, R. H., and I. Yackolev (2002),
Ethnicity in Africa,
in The Role of Social Capital In Development, edited by C.
Grootaert and T.
van Bastelaer, New York: Cambridge University Press; and
Fearon, J., and
D. Laitin (2003), “Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War,”
American Political
Science Review 97(1): 75–90.

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Introduction
products of state failure. Their relationship is contingent: It
occurs when political order erodes and politicians forge polit-
ical organizations in the midst of political conflict.
The political significance of resource wealth has also

attracted much attention. Analyzing their data on civil wars,
Collier and Hoeffler (2004) report that “dependence upon pri-
mary commodity exports” constituted “a particularly power-
ful risk factor” for the outbreak of civil war (p. 593). Africa
is, of course, noted for its bounteous natural endowments of
petroleum, timber, metals, and gemstones. And scholars and
policymakers have documented the close ties between the dia-
mond industry and UNITA (National Union for the Total Inde-
pendence of Angola) in Angola (Fowler 2000), the smuggling
of gemstones and the financing of rebels in Sierra Leone (Reno
2000), and the mining of coltan and the sites of rebellion in
eastern Zaire (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo)
(Kakwenzire and Kamukama 2000).

And yet, using Collier and Hoeffler’s (2004) own data,
Fearon (2005) has demonstrated that their findings are frag-
ile, depending in part on decisions about how to measure
and classify cases. In this study, too, I fail to find a signifi-
cant relationship between the value of natural resources and
the likelihood of state failure.6 Once again, then, there arises
6 For both Fearon (2005) and myself (this work), only the value
of petroleum
deposts is related to political disorder. Even here the
relationship is fragile,
however.
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a disparity between the evidence from cross-national regres-
sions and that from qualitative accounts. I shall argue that the
disparity suggests that the exploitation of natural resources
for war finance is a correlate rather than a cause of political
disorder.
A third factor plays a major role in the literature: democ-
ratization. Qualitative accounts, such as those of Mansfield
and Snyder (Mansfield and Snyder 1995; Snyder 2000) sug-

gest that democratization produces political instability and
leads to the mobilization of what Zakaria (1997) calls “illib-
eral” political forces. Careful empirical researchers, such as
Hegre (Hegre, Gates et al. 2001; Hegre 2004), confirm that new
democracies and intermediate regimes – those lying some-
where between stable authoritarian and consolidated demo-
cratic governments7 – exhibit significantly higher rates of civil
war. As demonstrated by Geddes (2003), many of these inter-
mediate regimes are the product of the “third wave” of democ-
ratization (Huntington 1991) and the collapse of communist
regimes and are therefore themselves new and vulnerable to
disorder.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many of Africa’s governments
reformed. Regimes that once had banned the formation
of political parties now faced challenges at the polls from
7 Using Polity coding. Available online at:
http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/
polity/.
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Introduction

candidates backed by an organized political opposition. And
in the late 1980s and early 1990s, militias assembled, states
failed, and Africa faced rising levels of political disorder. The
experience of Africa thus appears to conform to what the liter-
ature has recorded: Electoral competition and state failure go
together.
In analyzing the impact of political reform, I employ two
measures: the movement from military to civilian rule and the
shift from no- or one- to multiparty systems. In discussions of
democracy, the followers of Schumpeter (1950) argue for the
sufficiency of party competition; those of Dahl (1971) contend
that party competition is necessary but not sufficient. Without

an accompanying bundle of political and civil rights, the latter
argue, contested elections are not of themselves evidence of
democratic politics. In debates over the relationship between
party systems and democracy, I concur with the followers of
Dahl. When addressing political reform, I pay no attention to
the number of political parties, their relative vote shares, or
the conditions under which the opposition is allowed to cam-
paign. I therefore address not the relationship between democ-
racy and political conflict but rather the relationship between
political reform and political disorder.
Lastly, there are those who emphasize the impact of pov-
erty. That poverty and conflict should go together is treated
as noncontroversial, as if disorder were simply an expected

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Introduction
corollary of the lack of economic development.8 But consider:
If, as many argue, lower per capita incomes imply lower wages
and therefore lower costs of rebellion, so too do they imply
fewer gains from predation; income thus cancels out the ratio

between the costs and benefits. From the theoretical point of
view, moreover, there is simply little that can be said about the
relationship between the average level of income – or, for that
matter, poverty – and incentives for violence. As I will argue
in Chapter 2, for our purposes, discussions of private income
can be set aside; for the logic of political order suggests that
the focus be placed not on private income but rather on public
revenues. Economic shocks will indeed play a major role in this
analysis, but the focus will be on their impact on the revenues
of states, not on the incomes of individuals.9 In this work, when
I measure the impact of income per capita, I treat it as a control
variable, rather than as a variable of theoretical interest.
In Chapter 2, I parse the logic of political order. I recount the

theory informally, portraying the interaction between govern-
ments and citizens and among citizens as well. Presented as a
8 Indeed, see Sambanis, N., and H. Hegre (2006), “Sensitivity
Analysis of
Empirical Results on Civil War Onset,” The Journal of Conflict
Resolution
50(4): 508–35. The authors point to per capita income as one of
the very
few variables that bears a robust relationship with civic
violence.
9 See the arguments in Hirshleifer, J. (1995), Theorizing About
Conflict, in
Handbook of Defense Economics, edited by K. Hartley and T.
Sandler, New
York: Elsevier.
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Introduction
fable, the argument is based upon rigorous foundations and
points to the conditions under which governments choose to
engage in predation and citizens choose to take up arms.10
Chapters 3 through 5 set out the conditions that prevailed
prior to the collapse of political order. They document the
social and political configurations that were in place at the
time of the impact of the economic and political shocks that

dismantled the state in Africa. In Chapter 6, states fracture
and political disorder engulfs nations in Africa. Chapter 7
concludes.
10 The informed reader will note the parallels between my
analysis and that
of Azam, J.-P., and A. Mesnard (2003), “Civil War and the
Social Contract,”
Public Choice 115(3–4): 455–75; Snyder, R., and R. Bhavani
(2005),
“Diamonds, Blood and Taxes: A Revenue-Centered Framework
for Ex-
plaining Political Order,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution
49(4): 563–
97; and Magaloni, B. (2006), Voting for Autocracy, New York:
Cambridge
University Press.
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2
From Fable to Fact
I devote this chapter to the exposition of a fable.1
Whilediminutive, it is incisive: It captures the incentives that
drive the choices that lead to the failure of states. It is also
suggestive, for it points to the conditions under which polit-
ical order should, or should not, prevail. After expositing this
fable, I determine whether it is also informative. It can be
so only insofar as the forces that animate its central char-

acters find their parallel in late-century Africa. I devote the
last portions of the chapter to arguing that they do and that
the story communicated by the fable can therefore bear the
weight of the tragedy that befell the continent. The fable can
be used – with help – to explore the foundations of political
disorder.
1 A rigorous presentation appeared as Bates, R. H., A. Greif, et
al. (2002),
“Organizing Violence,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution
46(5): 599–
628.
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Introduction
A Fable
Consider the following scenario: A community is peopled by a
“specialist in violence” and two groups of citizens. Headed by
powerful patrons, the groups can act in a unified manner.2 The
specialist in violence earns his living from the use of force; he
either seizes the wealth of others or pockets funds they pay for
their protection. Sheltered behind their patrons, the citizens
generate incomes by engaging in productive labor; but they

too can be mobilized either to seize the income of others – or
to defend their incomes from seizure. The three personages in
this drama repeatedly interact over time. The question is: Can
political order prevail in such a setting?
The answer is: Yes. Under certain circumstances, the spe-
cialist will chose to use his control of the means of violence to
protect rather than to despoil private property. And the groups
of citizens will chose to devote their time and energies to labor
and leisure and forswear the use of arms, while rewarding the
specialist in violence for protecting them against raids by oth-
ers. In addition, under certain well-specified conditions, these
choices will persist in equilibrium, rendering political order a
state.

The primary reason for this outcome is that the players
interact over time. The specialist in violence and political
2 That is, they have solved the collective action problem.
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From Fable to Fact
organizations can therefore condition their future choices on

present behavior; that is, they can make threats and inflict pun-
ishments and thus shape the behavior of others. Should one
group raid or withhold tax payments, the specialist can retal-
iate by changing from guardian to predator. And should the
specialist opportunistically seize the wealth of the member of a
group, his defection would trigger punishment by that citizen’s
confederates: They can withhold tax payments or mobilize for
fighting. If not sufficiently paid for the provision of security,
the specialist in violence can pay himself: he can turn from
guardian to warlord. And if preyed upon or left undefended,
then the citizens can furnish their own protection; they can
take up arms.
When both the specialist and the citizens turn to pun-

ishment, political order breaks down. People become inse-
cure. They also become poor; having to reallocate resources
to defense, they have fewer resources to devote to produc-
tive activity. The resultant loss of security and prosperity stays
the hand of a specialist in violence who might be tempted to
engage in predation or of a group that might be tempted to
forcefully seize the goods of another or withhold tax payments,
thus triggering political disorder.
To better grasp the incentives that animate this story, focus
on the choices open to the specialist in violence, as commu-
nicated in Figure 2.1. In this figure, the vertical axis repre-
sents monetary gains or losses. The further above zero, the

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Introduction
Payoffs
+
0
-
Time

Payoffs on the equilibrium path
Payoffs from defection and subsequent punishment
Figure 2.1. Payoffs from strategy choices.
greater the payoffs; the further below, the greater the losses.
The horizontal axis designates time, with the more immediate
payoffs occurring near the origin and the more distant ones
further to the right. The dotted line represents the flow of pay-
offs that result from tax payments; the flow is steady, mod-
erate, and positive in value. The dashed line represents the
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From Fable to Fact
flow of payoffs that result from predation. Predation yields an
immediate benefit: The dashed line leaps above the dotted
line, indicating that the income from predation significantly
exceeds that from tax payments. But that one period spike
then gives way to a stream of losses, as illustrated by the plunge
below the zero point that separates gains from losses. Insofar
as a decision maker is forward looking, the losses that accrue

in the punishment phase caste a shadow over the returns from
defection and so temper any wish to engage in predation.
If summed over time, each line – that representing the
returns to taxation and that the returns to predation – yields an
expected payoff. What would determine their magnitudes? In
particular, what would determine whether the value of the vari-
able path, generated by predation, will be more or less attrac-
tive than that of the steady path, generated from tax payments?
The factors that determine the relative magnitude of these pay-
offs determine whether the specialist in violence will adhere
to the path of play and continue to behave as guardian or veer
from that path, engage in predation, and trigger the re-arming
of the citizenry and subsequent disorder.

The Conditions of Political Order
One factor is the level of tax revenue. If too low, the benefits of
predation may be tempting despite the subsequent costs.3 A
3 But they may also be if too high. See the discussion in Bates,
R. H., A. Greif,
et al. (2002), “Organizing Violence.”
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Introduction
second is the magnitudes of the rewards that predation might
yield. If sufficiently bounteous, the specialist in violence might
choose to deviate despite the losses. A third is the special-
ist’s rate of discount. A specialist in violence who is impatient,
greedy, or insecure will discount the future payoffs that accrue
along the path of play; and she will also discount the penal-
ties that follow an opportunistic …
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11:19
Fascists

Fascists presents a new theory of fascism based on intensive
analysis of the men and
women who became fascists. It covers the six European
countries in which fascism
became most dominant: Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary,
Romania, and Spain. It
is the most comprehensive analysis of who fascists actually
were, what beliefs they
held, and what actions they committed. Through this evidence
we see that fascism
is merely the most extreme form of “nation-statism,” which was
the dominant
political ideology of the twentieth century. Fascists argued that
an “organic nation”
and a strong state that was prepared to use violence to “knock
heads together” could
transcend the conflicts, especially the class conflicts, rending
modern society. We also
see the fascist core constituencies: social locations that were at
the heart of the nation
or closely connected to the state, and people who were
accustomed to use violence
as a means of solving social conflicts and who came from those
sections of all social

classes that were working outside the front lines of class
conflict. The book suggests
that fascism was essentially a product of post–World War I
conditions in Europe and
is unlikely to reappear in its classic garb in the future.
Nonetheless, elements of its
ideology remain relevant to modern conditions and are now
reappearing, though
mainly in different parts of the world.
Michael Mann is Professor of Sociology at the University of
California, Los Angeles,
and Visiting Research Professor at Queens University, Belfast.
i
P1: IWV/KCY P2: KaD
11:19
Fascists
MICHAEL MANN

University of California, Los Angeles
iii
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, São Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
First published in print format
ISBN-13 978-0-521-83131-4
ISBN-13 978-0-521-53855-8
ISBN-13 978-0-511-21651-0
© Cambridge University Press 2004
2004

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521831314
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provision of
relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any
part may take place
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
ISBN-10 0-511-21651-3
ISBN-10 0-521-83131-8
ISBN-10 0-521-53855-6
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the
persistence or accuracy of URLs
for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this
publication, and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge
University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org
hardback
paperback
paperback
eBook (NetLibrary)
eBook (NetLibrary)
hardback
P1: IWV/KCY P2: KaD
11:19
Contents
Preface page vii
1 A Sociology of Fascist Movements 1
2 Explaining the Rise of Interwar Authoritarianism and Fascism

31
3 Italy: Pristine Fascists 93
4 Nazis 139
5 German Sympathizers 177
6 Austro-Fascists, Austrian Nazis 207
7 The Hungarian Family of Authoritarians 237
8 The Romanian Family of Authoritarians 261
9 The Spanish Family of Authoritarians 297
10 Conclusion: Fascists, Dead and Alive 353
Appendix 377
Notes 389
Bibliography 395
Index 417

v
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Preface
I originally designed this study of fascism as a single chapter in
a general
book about the twentieth century, the third volume of my The
Sources of
Social Power. But my third volume still remains to be written,
since fascism
grew and grew to absorb my entire attention span over seven
years. My
“fascist chapter” was to be written first, since I was at that time
spending
a year in a Madrid institute with a fine library collection on the
interwar
struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. But then my
research

on fascism grew to the size of a whole book. I realized with a
sinking
heart (since this is not a pleasant subject on which to work for
years) that
it had to grow yet further. Since the deeds of fascists and their
fellow-
travelers culminated in mass murder, I had to engage with a
second large
body of literature, on the events centering on “The Final

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