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Article: THE FASCIST REVOLUTION: TOWARD A GENERAL THEORY OF FASCISM.(Review)
- Article from:
- First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life
- Article date:
- May 1, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Institute on Religion and Public Life. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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THE FASCIST REVOLUTION: TOWARD A GENERAL THEORY OF FASCISM. By GEORGE L. MOSSE. Howard Fertig. 230 pp. $35.
"EVERYTHING FOR THE STATE, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state." So Benito Mussolini trumpeted the ideal of fascism, the wild-eyed political movement that he rode to power in Italy in 1922 and that died with Adolf Hitler's defeat in 1945.
Mussolini's infamous quote captures the remarkable hubris of fascism, its frightening impulse to rule over every dimension of life (the word is from the Latin fasces, the bundle of rods sporting an axe-head that symbolized the unchallenged state authority of Rome). In varying degrees, that hubris ...