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Book description

Robert O. Paxton explains fascism as a political process rather than a timeless doctrine or a checklist of symbols. He follows movements from their creation through political rooting, entry into power, exercise of power, and either radicalization or decay. The book’s central analytical move is to study what fascists did, with whom they allied, and how institutions and ordinary citizens responded—not merely what fascist intellectuals said.

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Source and method

The supplied book PDF is the primary source for the chapter notes below. Page links refer to PDF viewer pages, not printed pagination. The shorter LonerBox-derived outline that previously occupied this note is preserved at the end as a clearly labeled secondary synthesis.

Whole-Book Thesis

Paxton’s governing claim is that fascism is best understood as political behavior unfolding through a contingent sequence, not as the mechanical application of a stable ideology. Fascist movements combine a story of collective humiliation or decline with promises of national rebirth, purification, unity, and force. Yet their practical identity is made through choices: which enemies to attack, which early radicals to discard, which conservative partners to court, and which legal limits to abandon.

Fascists do not normally conquer a functioning state by themselves. They become dangerous when an institutional crisis opens political space, established conservatives treat them as useful allies against the Left or disorder, state authorities tolerate selective violence, and ordinary people accept unequal protection under law. Once in office, fascist rule remains a tense coalition among the leader, party militants, state institutions, and traditional elites. War gives the most radical forces room to escape legal and bureaucratic restraint, producing the movement from exclusion to extermination most fully realized by Nazi Germany.

The Five-Stage Model

1. Creation: activists assemble new movements from war, nationalism, anti-liberalism, anti-socialism, racial thinking, and a cult of action.
2. Rooting: the movement finds a usable political space, a constituency, practical allies, and a tolerated role for violence.
3. Acquisition of power: conservative gatekeepers invite fascists into office under crisis conditions, expecting to control them.
4. Exercise of power: leader, party, state, business, military, churches, and civil society cooperate and compete inside a composite regime.
5. Radicalization or entropy: the regime either loses dynamism and settles toward authoritarianism or escalates through war, purification, and self-destructive violence.

Non-deterministic sequence

These stages are analytical, not a law of history. They can overlap, stop, reverse, or fail. The model identifies decision points and coalitions; it does not claim that a movement founded at Stage One must reach Stage Five.

Chapter Summaries

Linked overview

Select a title to jump to the complete chapter note.

• Preface: Paxton chooses an interpretive essay rather than an encyclopedia, emphasizing action, allies, institutions, and regime–society interaction.
• 1. Introduction: Static definitions and dictator-centered images obscure fascism’s changing behavior; a five-stage comparative method better reveals how movements become regimes.
• 2. Creating Fascist Movements: World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution made fascism possible, but national myths, mass politics, institutional weakness, recruitment networks, and human choices determined its first forms.
• 3. Taking Root: Fascists became serious contenders only where they converted grievance into serviceable alliances, selective violence, concrete rewards, and a political space that existing institutions failed to occupy.
• 4. Getting Power: Mussolini and Hitler entered office through conservative decisions under constitutional crisis, not electoral majorities or successful coups; the true seizure came afterward, from within government.
• 5. Exercising Power: Fascist rule was a dynamic, composite coalition rather than a monolith, with leader, party, state, and traditional elites competing while jointly destroying liberal restraints.
• 6. The Long Term — Radicalization or Entropy?: Fascist regimes must sustain momentum; war can free party radicals from remaining constraints, producing cumulative radicalization, genocide, and finally self-destruction.
• 7. Other Times, Other Places: Fascism need not return in period costume; the decisive test is functional—whether an exclusionary mass movement becomes rooted through establishment alliances and abandonment of due process.
• 8. What Is Fascism?: Paxton tests competing explanations, distinguishes fascism from tyranny and authoritarianism, and defines it as mass nationalist political behavior pursuing purification and expansion through redemptive, lawless violence.

Review

Handwrite First

Use this section with the book and notes closed. The point is retrieval, not polished prose.

Before Reading

• Prediction:
• Question I want answered:
• What I already think fascism is:
• What I expect to disagree with:

Closed-Book Recall Dump

• Main claims I remember:

• Cases or evidence I remember:

• People, dates, or concepts I remember:

• What remains fuzzy:

Core Argument from Memory

• The book in one sentence:
• The problem Paxton is correcting:
• The mechanism linking crisis to fascist power:
• The strongest evidence:
• The conclusion I think Paxton wants accepted:

Argument Map from Memory

• Claim:

• Because:

• Evidence:

• Hidden assumptions:

• Therefore:

Feynman Check

• Explain the five stages to someone unfamiliar with the book:
• Give one concrete example of a stage transition:
• Explain why fascism is not simply conservatism, capitalism, tyranny, or military dictatorship:

Pushback from Memory

• Strongest objection to Paxton’s method:
• A case his framework handles poorly:
• Evidence that would weaken his account:

Type Into Obsidian

Complete this after the handwritten recall.

My Assessment

• What Paxton strongly establishes:
• What he establishes only partially:
• What remains underexplained:
• Where I agree:
• Where I disagree:
• How this changes Fascism:

Connections

• Supports:
• Complicates:
• Contradicts:
• Connects to How to Make a Fascist by:
• Best comparison case outside Italy and Germany:

Application Guardrails

• A contemporary analogy that is genuinely structural:
• A contemporary analogy that is merely aesthetic:
• Which stage is actually evidenced:
• What evidence would be needed before escalating the label:

Retrieval Questions

1. Why does Paxton prefer political behavior and stages to a “fascist minimum”?
2. What changes when a fascist movement moves from creation to rooting?
3. Why did squadrismo rescue Mussolini after his 1919 electoral failure?
4. Why did the Nazis grow in Schleswig-Holstein after 1928?
5. Why did fascist movements fail to take root in France and Britain?
6. What did conservative elites believe fascists could provide?
7. Why were the March on Rome and Hitler’s appointment not straightforward seizures of power?
8. What was the real seizure of power in Italy and Germany?
9. How does the four-way struggle among leader, party, state, and civil society shape fascist rule?
10. What is the difference between the normative and prerogative state?
11. Why does selective terror sometimes increase rather than destroy consent?
12. In what sense was fascism revolutionary, and in what sense was it counterrevolutionary?
13. What forces drive radicalization from above and below?
14. Why is war structurally important to fascist momentum?
15. How does Paxton explain the Holocaust as cumulative radicalization without minimizing Hitler’s responsibility?
16. Why did Fascist Italy tend toward normalization while Nazi Germany reached the outer limit of radicalization?
17. What separates a postwar radical-right party from a fascist movement at Stage Two?
18. How does Paxton distinguish fascism from authoritarianism, military dictatorship, and classical tyranny?

Flashcards / Atomic Recall

• Five stages → creation; rooting; acquisition of power; exercise of power; radicalization or entropy.
• Mobilizing passions → crisis, group primacy, victimhood, decline, purification, natural leadership, instinct, redemptive violence, domination.
• Herrschaftskompromiss → a compromise for rule between fascists and conservative power holders.
• Dual state → a legal-bureaucratic normative state coexisting with an arbitrary party-driven prerogative state.
• Parallel structures → party bodies that duplicate, pressure, or replace existing state institutions.
• Gleichschaltung → Nazi “coordination” or leveling of institutions and associations.
• Cumulative radicalization → interacting initiatives from leadership and subordinates that progressively remove restraints and intensify violence.
• Entropy → loss of fascist dynamism and drift toward conventional authoritarian rule.
• Functional equivalent → a movement that performs fascist political functions without copying interwar symbols or language.

Retention Check

• 24 hours: Reconstruct the five stages and one case for each.
• 7 days: Explain why elite collaboration matters without reducing fascism to an elite conspiracy.
• 30 days: Compare Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, and one postwar radical-right movement using Paxton’s boundaries.

Scratchpad

Notes

Book Argument and Reading Map

The chapters build cumulatively. Chapters 1–2 establish the method and the conditions of creation. Chapter 3 asks why a few movements became rooted while most stayed marginal. Chapter 4 identifies the choices that admitted fascists into office. Chapter 5 replaces the image of a solitary dictator with a coalition-in-conflict. Chapter 6 shows how that unstable structure can produce either normalization or escalating destruction. Chapters 7–8 then test the framework across time and place and finally extract a bounded definition.

The recurring causal chain is:

crisis narrative → mobilizing passions → organized movement → tolerated selective violence → political rooting → conservative alliance → entry into office → destruction of restraints → composite rule → normalization or cumulative radicalization

Preface

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Purpose and Method

Paxton presents the book as an interpretive essay rather than a comprehensive reference work. He sees a persistent divide in the literature: broad accounts of generic fascism can become abstract and bloodless, while national monographs can become so detailed that the general phenomenon disappears. His solution is to move repeatedly between comparison and concrete history.

The decisive methodological choice is to put fascist action before fascist self-description. That means examining allies, accomplices, institutions, and the responses of ordinary people alongside leaders and party texts. The book therefore asks how fascism worked: how movements acquired usable political space, how traditional elites helped them, how regimes interacted with society, and why some radicalized further than others.

Reading Guidance

• Treat programs and speeches as evidence of mobilization, not as complete blueprints.
• Compare successful and failed cases so that outcomes do not appear inevitable.
• Attend to choices by gatekeepers, police, military officers, judges, business leaders, churches, and voters.
• Use the notes and bibliographical essay as routes into the specialized literature.

Significance

The preface establishes the book’s central discipline: do not let fascist pageantry, ideology, or retrospective mythmaking erase the institutional relationships that made power possible. Paxton’s subject is not only fascists; it is the political ecosystem that allowed fascism to move.

Chapter 1: Introduction

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Chapter Objective and Through Line

Paxton’s opening chapter clears away the images and methods that make fascism look simpler than it was. Fascism was a distinctively twentieth-century innovation: a mass nationalist movement that combined popular mobilization with dictatorship and directed both against the Left. Yet its familiarity through photographs, uniforms, balcony speeches, and the figure of the dictator can obscure its actual political operation. The chapter therefore asks the reader to shift attention from theatrical surfaces and doctrinal labels to changing behavior.

The through line is that fascism cannot be captured adequately by the early program of one party, the psychology of one leader, or a static list of ideological properties. Movements that began with antibourgeois and even anticapitalist rhetoric later protected private property; movements that advertised unity depended on bargains with conservative elites; and regimes that praised tradition also embraced modern propaganda, technology, industrial organization, and total war. These are not accidental inconsistencies. They reveal a politics that treats doctrine instrumentally and validates ideas through action, will, and the imagined destiny of the group.

Paxton consequently proposes a comparative history of fascism in motion. His five stages—creation, rooting, acquisition of power, exercise of power, and radicalization or entropy—let the analyst ask different questions at different moments. Intellectuals matter greatly when inherited liberal assumptions lose authority and again when later observers interpret the wreckage. But the middle stages turn on institutions, alliances, interests, and choices. The method is designed to restore contingency: most fascist movements failed, and even the successful ones could have been stopped at multiple decision points.

Chapter Structure at a Glance

1. Establish fascism as a novel form of mass politics born from the crisis surrounding World War I.
2. Separate familiar visual stereotypes from the movement’s institutional and social operation.
3. Test misleading equations: fascism with anti-Semitism alone, anticapitalism, reaction, or antimodernism.
4. Explain why ideology and program function differently in fascism than in older political “isms.”
5. Reject both a mere catalogue of movements and a single static essence as sufficient explanation.
6. Introduce the five-stage comparative method and its non-deterministic logic.

Section-by-Section Argument

The Invention of Fascism

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Fascism emerged as something new when nationalist veterans, syndicalists, Futurists, and other activists discovered that mass enthusiasm could be organized behind a dictatorship directed against socialist power. Paxton begins with Mussolini’s Milan meeting of March 23, 1919, not because a mature doctrine appeared fully formed there, but because the gathering contained the volatile ingredients of a new politics.

• The early program was deliberately heterogeneous: republican, anticlerical, nationalist, syndicalist, expansionist, and socially radical elements coexisted.
• The attack on the socialist newspaper Avanti! in April 1919 was more revealing than the program. Violence against an internal enemy supplied unity that doctrine did not.
• Fascism’s first practical identity developed through targets and actions, not philosophical consistency.

Why it matters: origins are best read as a repertoire of possibilities. Later success selected among them.

Connection: Chapter 2 explains the war-shaped emotional and institutional setting that made this political invention thinkable.

Images of Fascism

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Popular images center on the dictator and the ecstatic crowd. Paxton argues that this perspective reproduces fascist propaganda by making the leader appear to act alone and society appear hypnotized. It pushes accomplices—conservatives, officials, professionals, businesses, churches, and ordinary citizens—out of the frame.

• Anti-Semitism is central to Nazism but cannot alone define generic fascism. Early Italian Fascism included Jewish supporters, while some nonfascist authoritarian regimes practiced severe anti-Semitism.
• Fascist anticapitalism was selective. It attacked “foreign,” “parasitic,” or enemy capital while protecting nationally useful producers and suppressing independent labor.
• Fascism was not simply a muscular conservatism. Its mass mobilization, new conception of citizenship, willingness to invade private life, and glorification of violence could threaten conservative institutions.
• It was neither straightforwardly antimodern nor modernist. It combined myths of rooted community with radio, cinema, bureaucracy, industrial war, and technocratic mass murder.

Why it matters: superficial traits can yield false positives and false negatives. The relevant unit is the movement–ally–institution relationship.

Connection: Chapters 4–6 show how those relationships shaped accession, rule, and exterminatory radicalization.

Strategies

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Paxton evaluates several common research strategies. Defining fascism entirely from programs treats tactical rhetoric as a constitution. Starting with a “fascist minimum” can be useful for classification but tends to freeze a phenomenon whose priorities changed as it sought different partners. A bestiary of national movements, meanwhile, can catalogue resemblance without explaining success or failure.

• Fascists differed from classical liberal, conservative, and socialist parties in their contempt for universal reason and their elevation of instinct, myth, emotion, and action.
• Intellectuals helped discredit inherited liberal assumptions and made fascist possibilities culturally available, but they did not themselves supply the coalitions that brought fascists to power.
• Roger Griffin’s “palingenetic” or rebirth-centered definition captures a genuine core passion, but Paxton thinks it needs an account of institutions and stages. Compare Griffin's own formulation.
• Comparison should explain variation: why similar rhetoric remained marginal in one country and became a regime in another.

Why it matters: a method that begins and ends with texts misses the transformations imposed by political competition.

Connection: the rest of the book follows fascism through precisely those transformations.

Where Do We Go from Here?

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The chapter culminates in the five-stage model. Each stage poses a different causal question, so evidence decisive at one stage may be secondary at another. Cultural revolt helps explain creation; political space and local alliances explain rooting; conservative choices explain access to office; institutional rivalry explains governance; war and the removal of restraints explain radicalization.

• Stages can overlap and reverse.
• Most movements never progress beyond creation.
• A movement can become less doctrinally “pure” as it becomes more politically consequential.
• Only Nazi Germany approached the outer limit of radicalization.

Why it matters: the model prevents hindsight from turning contingency into inevitability.

Connection: Chapter 2 begins at Stage One by asking what conditions and passions created movements.

Key Concepts and Distinctions

• Concept: Fascism as political behavior.
  • Significance: The object of study is what movements and regimes do within relationships, not merely what their manifestos say.
• Concept: Five-stage process.
  • Significance: It separates the causes of founding, growth, power, rule, and radicalization instead of forcing one explanation onto all phases.
• Concept: Mobilization versus doctrine.
  • Significance: Fascist ideas organize feeling and action but can be amended whenever tactics or alliances require it.
• Concept: Selective anticapitalism.
  • Significance: Fascists attack allegedly alien or parasitic capital while preserving property, hierarchy, and productive national firms.
• Concept: Alternative modernity.
  • Significance: Fascists reject liberal modernity while enthusiastically using modern technology, bureaucracy, propaganda, and war.
• Concept: Contingency.
  • Significance: Crises create openings, but individual and institutional choices determine whether fascists occupy them.

Essential Evidence and Examples

• The March 1919 Milan meeting contained mutually inconsistent proposals, while the April attack on Avanti! supplied a clear political enemy.
• Early Italian Fascism’s Jewish members and supporters show why anti-Semitism alone cannot define the generic phenomenon.
• Fascist regimes suppressed independent labor while protecting nationally useful property, contradicting literal readings of early socialist rhetoric.
• Kristallnacht reveals the role of institutions and ordinary acquiescence beyond Hitler’s personal will.
• The five-stage model explains why movements with similar founding language produced radically different outcomes.

Chapter Conclusion and Significance

Paxton replaces the search for a pristine essence with a disciplined study of development. Fascism has recognizable passions and aims, but its historically decisive form is produced through changing relations among movement, society, state, and conservative allies.

This method also contains a warning for contemporary diagnosis. One should neither call every ugly nationalism fascist nor wait for an exact copy of Hitler or Mussolini. The crucial questions concern organized mobilization, tolerated violence, elite alliance, destruction of legal restraint, and the stage the movement has actually reached.

Questions for Reflection

1. Does a stage-based account risk making fascism too dependent on the Italian and German paths, or does it provide the best protection against superficial analogy?
2. How should an analyst balance fascist ideas with the opportunistic shifts that occur as a movement seeks allies and office?
3. Which matters more for explaining fascist success: the movement’s own qualities or the institutional weaknesses and choices surrounding it?

Chapter 2: Creating Fascist Movements

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Chapter Objective and Through Line

Chapter 2 asks why fascist movements became thinkable and organizable after World War I. Paxton rejects a single-origin story. Fascism did not flow automatically from one philosopher, one class, national character, or economic crisis. It arose where a cluster of conditions converged: mass politics, wartime mobilization, brutalized veterans, nationalist disappointment, fear of socialist revolution, weakened liberal institutions, and cultural languages that made biological hierarchy, cleansing violence, and national rebirth appear legitimate.

The through line distinguishes conditions of possibility from sufficient causes. Intellectuals and artists undermined confidence in liberal reason, celebrated action and struggle, and supplied myths of organic community. Yet similar currents existed across Europe, including countries where fascism remained marginal. World War I intensified them by normalizing propaganda, command economies, sacrifice, and mass death, but even this did not make fascism inevitable. Movements still had to recruit, choose usable national traditions, and build organizations in competition with socialist, Catholic, conservative, and liberal subcultures.

Paxton condenses fascist motivation into “mobilizing passions”: felt crisis, group primacy, victimhood, fear of decline, purification, male leadership, instinct over reason, the beauty of violence, and the right of a chosen people to dominate. These passions explain commitment better than a logical doctrine, but they do not predict success by themselves. Recruitment was socially mixed, local, and unstable. Many workers remained protected by socialist or Catholic networks; many early militants were young people or veterans seeking fraternity, status, action, or a way to fuse rebellion with nationalism. The chapter ends by warning that origins do not define the mature movement. Later alliances and opportunities transform it.

Chapter Structure at a Glance

1. Identify World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution as decisive immediate conditions without treating them as automatic causes.
2. Reconstruct the intellectual, cultural, and emotional repertory from which fascists selected national myths.
3. Define the recurring mobilizing passions beneath programmatic inconsistency.
4. Examine long-term political and institutional preconditions created by mass suffrage and a divided Left.
5. Compare precursors that anticipated parts of fascism but lacked the complete postwar setting.
6. Analyze mixed recruitment and the protective force of rival subcultures.
7. Conclude that later trajectories cannot be read directly from origins.

Section-by-Section Argument

The Immediate Background

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The war transformed politics and social imagination. Total mobilization expanded state power, accustomed citizens to propaganda and command, gave violence patriotic legitimacy, and left millions of veterans with intense memories of fraternity and sacrifice. Defeat, mutilated victory, inflation, unemployment, border revision, and revolutionary unrest then made ordinary parliamentary bargaining look inadequate.

• Italy, Germany, Austria, and Hungary produced related radical nationalist movements without a single command center.
• The Bolshevik Revolution simultaneously inspired the revolutionary Left and terrified property holders, officers, churches, and the middle classes.
• Veterans’ organizations supplied personnel, styles, and a claim to moral authority.
• Wartime polarization made internal dissent easier to describe as treason.

Why it matters: fascism was born from a transformed field of political possibility, not from a timeless human appetite for dictatorship.

Connection: Chapter 3 shows how movements converted these diffuse pressures into concrete local alliances.

Intellectual, Cultural, and Emotional Roots

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Before 1914, European culture already contained attacks on liberal rationalism, egalitarianism, materialism, and parliamentary compromise. Social Darwinism, racial science, eugenics, myths of decline, aestheticized violence, and longings for organic community made fascist arguments conceivable. Paxton nevertheless warns against a genealogy that treats every critic of liberalism as a proto-fascist.

• Fascists borrowed selectively from national traditions rather than following a universal canon.
• The same thinker could be appropriated by incompatible movements.
• National myths mattered because activists could turn them into narratives of humiliation, enemy contamination, and rebirth.
• Intellectual influence is strongest in delegitimating the old order; it is weaker in explaining who actually organized power.

Paxton’s mobilizing passions give emotional structure to this diversity: crisis beyond ordinary solutions; duties to the group above rights; victimhood licensing unlimited retaliation; dread of decadence; purification; natural leadership; instinct and will above universal reason; violence as beautiful and effective; and domination as proof of worth.

Why it matters: these passions organize action even when formal programs contradict one another.

Connection: Chapter 8 returns to them as the implicit ideas deduced from fascist behavior.

Long-Term Preconditions

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Fascism required mass politics. Conservatives could no longer govern through deference alone once broad suffrage and organized labor brought new groups into public life. Some conservative elites therefore sought techniques capable of mobilizing the crowd for national and antisocialist ends rather than simply excluding it.

• Liberal institutions had to manage new electorates, industrial conflict, and total-war legacies simultaneously.
• Socialist parties had become powerful but also more disciplined and class-centered.
• The split between reformist socialists and communists weakened resistance.
• Fear of Bolshevism encouraged conservatives to tolerate allies they otherwise considered vulgar or dangerous.
• Failures of parliament, market coordination, education, and public order eroded the credibility of ordinary solutions.

Why it matters: fascism was a response to mass democracy in crisis, not a return to premodern absolutism.

Connection: the same conditions become politically decisive only when Chapter 4’s gatekeepers choose a fascist alliance.

Precursors

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Movements before 1914 anticipated parts of fascism without yet possessing its complete setting. Boulangism, Action Française, Georg von Schönerer’s pan-Germanism, Karl Lueger’s populist anti-Semitism, the Cercle Proudhon, radical national syndicalism, and the first Ku Klux Klan combined different elements of nationalism, anti-liberalism, mass appeal, violence, or racial exclusion.

• Precursors reveal that no single national tradition owned the ingredients.
• They generally lacked the postwar fusion of veterans, revolutionary fear, mass suffrage, total-war political techniques, and state breakdown.
• The Klan is functionally illuminating because it fused grassroots mobilization, racial purification, ritual, and tolerated violence in defense of a national hierarchy.

Why it matters: resemblance is not identity. Historical conditions determine whether a repertory becomes a fascist movement.

Connection: Chapter 7 uses the same functional caution when considering postwar and non-European cases.

Recruitment

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No single class owned fascism. The movements recruited disproportionately from middle strata in many settings, but they also drew workers, elites, students, veterans, professionals, peasants, and people between settled social positions. What united recruits was less a shared income than a shared interpretation of crisis and a desire for belonging, action, authority, or national restoration.

• Youth and veteran status often mattered more than a fixed class location.
• Intense male fraternity and uniformed activism provided status and community.
• Socialist and Catholic subcultures “immunized” many workers by supplying strong institutions and identities.
• Local political competition shaped who was available to recruit.
• Psychohistorical labels that pathologize followers can become an alibi for the ordinary people who joined or accommodated.

Why it matters: a cross-class movement can become a catch-all vehicle where inherited parties are narrow or discredited.

Connection: Chapter 3 tests how successful leaders broadened this recruitment into durable political rooting.

Understanding Fascism by Its Origins

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Origins can mislead when treated as destiny. The first militants often preserve radical antibourgeois language, while later leaders subordinate it to antisocialism, property, national production, and conservative alliance. Mussolini’s disastrous 1919 result—4,796 votes in Milan against 315,165 for the socialist list—showed that his original Left-nationalist synthesis had little political space.

• Early purity may correlate with marginality rather than historical importance.
• Movements shed followers and promises as they discover what brings resources and allies.
• The “real” movement cannot be identified only with its founding manifesto.

Why it matters: the mature political function of fascism emerges through adaptation.

Connection: Chapter 3 begins where origins leave off: the search for a concrete and profitable political space.

Key Concepts and Distinctions

• Concept: Immediate background versus sufficient cause.
  • Significance: War and revolution enabled fascism but did not mechanically produce it.
• Concept: Mobilizing passions.
  • Significance: Visceral perceptions of crisis, victimhood, purification, leadership, and violence unify followers more reliably than doctrine.
• Concept: National selection of myths.
  • Significance: Fascists construct locally resonant traditions rather than importing one uniform ideology.
• Concept: Political immunization.
  • Significance: Dense socialist, Catholic, union, or community networks can prevent fascist recruitment.
• Concept: Cross-class recruitment.
  • Significance: Fascist support cannot be reduced to one social class, even where middle strata are overrepresented.
• Concept: Origins fallacy.
  • Significance: Founding rhetoric does not predict what a movement becomes after tactical adaptation and alliance.

Essential Evidence and Examples

• World War I normalized state coordination, propaganda, sacrifice, and political violence on a mass scale.
• The Bolshevik Revolution supplied both a model of revolutionary success and the conservative fear that helped fascists.
• French, Austrian, German, Italian, and American precursors contained fragments of the later phenomenon without producing identical outcomes.
• Socialist and Catholic organizational cultures limited fascist inroads among many workers.
• Mussolini’s 1919 electoral defeat forced a decisive move away from an uncompetitive Left-nationalist identity.

Chapter Conclusion and Significance

Fascism’s creation required a historically specific convergence of mass democracy, total war, revolutionary fear, weakened liberal authority, and emotional languages of national victimhood and rebirth. None of these ingredients alone explains the movement, and none makes later success inevitable.

The chapter’s deepest lesson is methodological: fascist origins reveal the available repertoire, not the final political function. To understand that function, one must follow movements into local conflicts, organizational choices, selective violence, and alliances.

Questions for Reflection

1. Which element of the postwar setting was most indispensable to fascist creation, and which could have been present without producing fascism?
2. Do Paxton’s mobilizing passions clarify the phenomenon better than an ideological program, or do they risk becoming too broad?
3. How do strong rival subcultures and institutions prevent grievance from being recruited into a fascist movement?

Chapter 3: Taking Root

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Chapter Objective and Through Line

Chapter 3 moves from the widespread creation of fascist groups to the far rarer achievement of political weight. Nearly every society with mass politics produced activists who resembled fascists, but most remained noisy, exotic, or ephemeral. Rooting required a movement to become useful: it had to represent concrete grievances, deliver tangible benefits, reward ambitious followers, occupy a political space abandoned by existing institutions, and persuade powerful actors that its violence served a defensible purpose.

The through line is adaptation. As fascists competed for influence, they could no longer promise everything to everyone. They chose constituencies, enemies, and partners. Mussolini’s movement survived its 1919 failure by turning toward agrarian squadrismo in the Po Valley, where landowners, police, army officers, and some peasants found different reasons to support attacks on socialist organization. Hitler’s party expanded after 1928 by tailoring appeals to distressed farmers and other constituencies while presenting selective violence as proof that only Nazism could defeat communism and restore order. Both movements retained a revolutionary style while becoming indispensable to antisocialist politics.

Comparison supplies the causal leverage. France possessed abundant antiliberal thought, right-wing leagues, agricultural distress, and political scandal, yet fascists did not displace functioning conservative organizations or secure equivalent state toleration. Belgium’s Rex surged and collapsed; Mosley’s British Union of Fascists repelled potential allies; authoritarian regimes in Hungary and elsewhere had no need to share power. Paxton therefore locates successful rooting not in national character or intellectual preparation alone but in a weak or failed liberal order, institutional incapacity, a leader willing to compromise, selective violence tolerated by respectable citizens, and allies who open the political system to the movement.

Chapter Structure at a Glance

1. Define rooting as the transition from expressive protest to useful, consequential political action.
2. Show how Mussolini’s movement found a constituency and patrons through Po Valley squadrismo.
3. Show how the Nazis became a catch-all electoral force by adapting to the Depression and constituency-specific grievances.
4. Use France to identify the protective effect of responsive institutions and durable conservative organizations.
5. Compare additional failures to distinguish a large protest vote from lasting implantation.
6. Synthesize the roles of weak liberalism, selective violence, parallel structures, leadership, and elite assistance.

Section-by-Section Argument

Successful Fascisms

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Rooting changes a movement. To become a serious participant, fascists must narrow their priorities, accept compromise, provide measurable services, and reveal who will benefit and who will be attacked. Their early antibourgeois rhetoric survives, but in practice anticapitalism becomes selective and antisocialism becomes central. Leaders who prize doctrinal purity usually preserve only marginal sects; Mussolini and Hitler seek power.

The Po Valley, 1920–22. Squadrismo rescued Italian Fascism. Large landowners believed the liberal state had abandoned them after socialist victories gave labor exchanges great leverage over rural hiring, wages, and working conditions. Fascist squads offered organized violence against socialist institutions while presenting themselves as veterans defending nation and order.

• Squads burned labor exchanges, socialist newspapers, cooperatives, and clubs; local police and army personnel sometimes supplied weapons, vehicles, or passive protection.
• Fascists also offered jobs, public works, and in some cases small parcels of land, weakening socialist unions among peasants who desired ownership rather than collectivization.
• By early 1922, local ras such as Italo Balbo and Roberto Farinacci exercised de facto power in parts of northeastern Italy.
• Success changed the movement’s personnel and program: landowners’ sons, officers, and policemen replaced some radical syndicalists and antibourgeois idealists.
• Mussolini progressively abandoned republican, anticlerical, anti-imperial, and confiscatory positions while retaining the language of revolution.

The comparison with D’Annunzio is decisive. D’Annunzio mastered nationalist theater at Fiume but would not construct a practical coalition. Mussolini copied the theater and combined it with services to landowners, tactical flexibility, and parliamentary entry. Performance alone was insufficient.

Schleswig-Holstein, 1928–33. The Nazi rise followed a different route but the same logic of finding usable space. Cattle farmers battered by falling prices, debt, foreclosure, and distrust of Berlin abandoned traditional conservatives and an ineffective local protest movement. The Nazis offered national organization, modern campaigning, occupation-specific appeals, and a politics that linked local distress to national humiliation and communist threat.

• Schleswig-Holstein gave the Nazis 51 percent in July 1932, the only German state to provide an outright majority in a free election.
• Nazi growth from 2.8 percent nationally in 1928 to the largest party in 1932 reflected constituency targeting and institutional collapse more than a single class revolt.
• Business contributions before power were more limited and hedged than the “capitalist puppet” thesis suggests; mass rallies, sales, fees, and small donations mattered.
• Street violence and electioneering reinforced each other: violence dramatized disorder, isolated stigmatized enemies, and advertised the movement as the only effective antidote.

Why it matters: rooting requires both movement skill and a political ecology that rewards the movement’s services.

Connection: once rooted, fascists possess numbers and coercive capacity that Chapter 4’s conservative gatekeepers may try to harness.

An Unsuccessful Fascism: France, 1924–40

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France tests explanations based on ideas, crisis, or noisy activism. It had a distinguished antiliberal tradition, right-wing leagues, Depression-era conflict, fear of communism, and the violent demonstrations of February 6, 1934. Yet the movements failed to form a national fascist contender.

• The Popular Front government banned paramilitary leagues in 1936, an assertion of state authority that German chancellor Brüning had not sustained.
• Colonel François de La Rocque’s Croix de Feu grew large only as it moderated into the electoral Parti Social Français; the closer small groups came to copying foreign fascism, the less successful they were.
• The Third Republic remained capable of governing, and the Depression was less devastating than in Germany.
• Mainstream conservatives did not feel desperate enough to invite fascists into power.
• Rival chefs preferred doctrinal independence, and no single leader gathered the whole nonsocialist protest public.

Henry Dorgères’s Greenshirts offer a rural comparison with Italy. French farmers also suffered falling prices, and Greenshirt harvest volunteers sometimes opposed strikes. But the state protected the harvest, established farm associations supplied services, and republican or communist traditions channeled anger in many regions. Dorgères could arouse rural crowds but could not build an urban-rural catch-all party.

Why it matters: a crisis produces fascist opportunity only when existing institutions fail badly enough to create dependence on the movement.

Connection: French failure highlights the gatekeeping decisions and institutional collapse examined in Chapter 4.

Some Other Unsuccessful Fascisms

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Other cases separate transient votes from durable rooting. Hungary’s Arrow Cross and Romania’s Legion won substantial support, but already entrenched authoritarian rulers had no need to surrender control. Léon Degrelle’s Belgian Rex won 11.5 percent in 1936 by promising to sweep away corrupt parties, then collapsed when conservatives, socialists, and the Catholic Church united against it.

• A heterogeneous protest electorate can leave as quickly as it arrived unless a movement represents durable interests and distributes rewards.
• Mosley’s British Union of Fascists alienated elites through public violence at Olympia and later anti-Semitic confrontation; economic recovery and Conservative rule left little political space.
• Dutch, Norwegian, Irish, and other imitators adopted shirts, marches, and foreign styles without acquiring a comparable crisis, coalition, or institutional tolerance.
• Purity often marked political impotence: movements that never adapted remained visible but irrelevant.

Why it matters: voting strength, spectacle, and ideological resemblance are insufficient measures of political implantation.

Connection: Chapter 7 applies the same standard to postwar radical-right parties.

Comparisons and Conclusions

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Paxton’s synthesis shifts explanation outward from the movement. Intellectual culture helped discredit liberalism, created a nationalist pole for protest outside the Left, and made violence respectable. Yet similar cultural revolt existed in many countries. The critical differences lay in the health of institutions and the availability of allies.

• Weak liberalism: states unable to manage mass politics, industrial conflict, economic dislocation, or national humiliation offered the “least-barricaded gate.”
• The nationalization of the masses: fascists showed conservatives how to mobilize, discipline, and stage-manage a mass electorate that old notable parties could no longer command.
• A gatherer: one leader had to subordinate rivals, accept compromise, and build a catch-all movement.
• Selective violence: attacks signaled that the state was weak and that fascists alone could defeat “antinational” enemies; respectable citizens tolerated violence they did not expect to suffer themselves.
• Parallel structures: party police, militias, welfare bodies, and policy agencies demonstrated an alternative capacity to govern while eroding the state’s monopoly.
• Accomplices: police, military officers, administrators, coalition builders, and courts could restrain violence or reward it with legitimacy.

The analysis rejects determinism. Defeat, Bolshevik fear, late industrialization, mass suffrage, and cultural crisis created risks, not outcomes. Successful fascism still required decision-makers willing to share power with challengers.

Why it matters: the final precondition is not an impersonal structure but a choice by people with authority.

Connection: Chapter 4 reconstructs those choices at the point of entry into government.

Key Concepts and Distinctions

• Concept: Political space.
  • Significance: A movement grows when it occupies grievances, constituencies, and functions that existing parties and institutions leave unserved.
• Concept: Rooting.
  • Significance: Rooting means durable representation, rewards, allies, and influence—not mere publicity or a single high vote.
• Concept: Catch-all party of engagement.
  • Significance: Fascists crossed class and confessional boundaries while presenting militants as more committed than career politicians.
• Concept: Selective violence.
  • Significance: Targeted violence can attract support when citizens see its victims as outsiders and its perpetrators as restorers of order.
• Concept: Parallel structures.
  • Significance: Party institutions challenge the state before power and may compete with it after power.
• Concept: Crisis of weak liberalism.
  • Significance: Fascism flourished less in triumphant capitalist democracies than in liberal systems damaged, illegitimate, or unable to govern.
• Concept: The gatherer.
  • Significance: Successful leadership means assembling disparate nonsocialist grievances while sacrificing purity for power.

Essential Evidence and Examples

• Po Valley squads destroyed hundreds of socialist organizations in early 1921 with assistance or tolerance from state personnel.
• Mussolini’s program moved rightward as squadrismo brought landowner support and parliamentary respectability.
• Schleswig-Holstein’s 51 percent Nazi vote in July 1932 shows how agricultural collapse opened a constituency-specific route to rooting.
• The French state’s protection of harvests and the durability of farm organizations denied Dorgères the Italian opening.
• Rex’s rapid rise and collapse demonstrates that a protest vote is not the same as durable implantation.
• The Potempa murder controversy illustrates how unequal membership in the nation legitimated violence beyond ordinary law.

Chapter Conclusion and Significance

Movements take root when they become useful to both followers and powerful partners. Fascism’s growth therefore tells us as much about institutional failure, conservative strategy, and public tolerance as about fascist doctrine. The movement’s radical image can coexist with programmatic accommodation because practical antisocialism binds militants to traditional interests.

This chapter also supplies a demanding diagnostic threshold. A society may contain racist groups, theatrical extremists, or intense grievance without a rooted fascism. Danger rises when institutions fail, targeted violence becomes respectable, a catch-all leader consolidates protest, and established actors begin to treat the movement as necessary.

Questions for Reflection

1. At what point does tactical adaptation cease to be compromise and become the defining substance of a fascist movement?
2. Why did state capacity and conservative organization block fascist rooting in France despite substantial ideological and social preparation?
3. How can selective violence create legitimacy among people who consider themselves defenders of law and order?

Chapter 4: Getting Power

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Chapter Objective and Through Line

Chapter 4 dismantles the myth that fascists took power through irresistible popular majorities or heroic insurrection. Mussolini’s March on Rome was a badly organized bluff rescued by King Victor Emmanuel III. Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch failed when conservative authorities used force, and his later appointment as chancellor resulted from a “backstairs” bargain among conservative insiders. Neither man won a free electoral majority, overthrew the state in a successful coup, or entered office alone.

The through line is conservative gatekeeping under crisis. Fascists helped make democratic government unworkable through polarization and violence, but they did not create every source of deadlock. In Italy, the socialist–Catholic split prevented a progressive majority while liberal governments lost authority. In Germany, Depression, reparations, mass unemployment, parliamentary fragmentation, and presidential emergency rule hollowed out Weimar government. Conservative leaders rejected cooperation with the moderate Left, feared communism more than fascism, and believed fascist popularity could furnish the mass base they lacked. Fascist leaders, in turn, moderated inconvenient radicalism and negotiated a “compromise for rule.”

Entry into office was only a foothold. The real seizure of power came afterward, when Hitler and Mussolini used office, emergency, tolerated party violence, compliant allies, and legal forms to eliminate restraints. Hitler exploited the Reichstag fire, the February 28 decree, and the Enabling Act. Mussolini used the Acerbo Law, electoral coercion, the opposition’s errors, and the Matteotti crisis before establishing one-party rule. At every stage, alternatives remained available. The chapter’s causal center is not destiny but a narrowing sequence of choices by identifiable actors.

Chapter Structure at a Glance

1. Reconstruct the March on Rome as a bluff enabled by royal and military nonresistance.
2. Trace Hitler’s shift from failed putsch to a legal strategy and conservative appointment.
3. Reject election, coup, and solo triumph as accurate models of fascist accession.
4. Explain the reciprocal alliance and “compromise for rule” between fascists and conservatives.
5. Identify what fascists offered elites: votes, youth, coercion, worker defections, and mass legitimacy.
6. Define the prefascist crisis of deadlock, revolutionary fear, and refusal to work with the moderate Left.
7. Separate entry into office from the later destruction of constitutional limits.

Section-by-Section Argument

Mussolini and the “March on Rome”

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Fascist myth presented October 1922 as a victorious conquest of the capital. Paxton shows instead that the state possessed sufficient force to stop the Blackshirts. Prime Minister Facta reinforced Rome, police halted many trains, and only about nine thousand poorly supplied marchers reached the outskirts in rain.

• Mussolini stayed in Milan near a possible Swiss escape and kept negotiations open.
• The Italian parliamentary system was weak: socialists and Catholic Popolari together held a large majority but could not cooperate.
• Giolitti had already legitimized Mussolini by including Fascists in his 1921 National Bloc.
• The July 1922 socialist “strike for legality” collapsed and increased Mussolini’s image as an antisocialist savior.
• King Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign martial law and invited Mussolini to form a government, probably fearing military disunity, civil conflict, or a dynastic challenge.

Mussolini arrived by sleeping car on October 30; the Blackshirt parade occurred only after he was in office. The regime later converted October 28 into a sacred founding myth.

Why it matters: Fascist force mattered because conservative authorities declined to use greater lawful force against it.

Connection: the case establishes the chapter’s central role for gatekeepers and mythmaking.

Hitler and the “Backstairs Conspiracy”

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Hitler initially believed Mussolini’s myth and attempted a Munich putsch in November 1923. Bavarian authorities ordered police to fire, the coup collapsed, and Hitler learned that conservative opposition made insurrection futile. He thereafter pursued office through legality combined with selective violence.

• Depression and the Young Plan intensified national humiliation, unemployment, and governmental paralysis.
• The Great Coalition collapsed in March 1930 over taxes and unemployment benefits; thereafter chancellors relied on President Hindenburg’s emergency decrees.
• Nazi representation rose from 12 seats in 1928 to 107 in 1930, making normal parliamentary coalitions increasingly difficult.
• Social Democrats waited for an overt Nazi coup and remained legalistic even after von Papen’s unconstitutional removal of Prussia’s elected government.
• Communists treated Social Democrats as “social fascists” and expected Nazi rule to hasten revolution.

Hitler’s position weakened after the November 1932 election: votes fell, funds dwindled, and Gregor Strasser explored compromise. Franz von Papen rescued him. Seeking revenge on Schleicher and believing Hitler could be contained, von Papen arranged a cabinet with Hitler as chancellor and himself as vice-chancellor. Hindenburg made the appointment on January 30, 1933.

Why it matters: Hitler’s tactical ability was necessary, but his accession depended on a small conservative circle’s miscalculation.

Connection: the appointment illustrates how a rooted movement’s leverage interacts with elite choice.

What Did Not Happen: Election, Coup d’État, Solo Triumph

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The Nazis never won a majority in a free national election. They received 37.2 percent in July 1932, fell to 33.1 percent in November, and reached 43.9 percent in March 1933 only after Hitler controlled state resources and SA intimidation was widespread. Italian Fascists won only 35 of 535 seats in their one free parliamentary election.

Nor did either leader conquer a resistant state. Both were constitutionally appointed by heads of state acting within their formal powers under exceptional pressure. Fascist coups against determined authoritarian rulers generally failed: Romanian and Austrian examples show that state force could crush them.

Why it matters: “seizure of power” hides the responsibility of respectable actors who invited fascists into government.

Connection: the true seizure occurs in the post-appointment destruction of restraints.

Forming Alliances

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Fascists and conservatives entered a reciprocal but mistrustful bargain. Conservatives could repress the movements, tolerate them, or co-opt them. At crucial moments in Italy and Germany, they chose tolerance and legitimacy, applying a double standard to fascist and Left violence.

• Giolitti’s electoral coalition and Hugenberg’s public appearances with Hitler made outsiders respectable.
• Business financing was less decisive before power than later apologias and Marxist accounts claimed; most firms hedged toward traditional conservatives.
• Once Hitler held office, business money and accommodation increased sharply.
• Fascist leaders purged or marginalized radicals who endangered negotiations.
• Party militants repeatedly resisted “normalization,” forcing leaders to balance coalition credibility against their independent mass base.

Paxton calls the resulting bargain a Herrschaftskompromiss, or compromise for rule. It was neither capitalist creation of fascism nor fascist conquest of passive conservatives.

Why it matters: both partners chose a second-best arrangement because they considered the Left or military rule worse.

Connection: Chapter 5 shows why this bargain continues as a conflict-ridden governing coalition.

What Fascists Offered the Establishment

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Fascists offered resources old conservative parties lacked: a mass electorate, militant youth, street force, modern propaganda, cross-class recruitment, and a way to detach some workers from Marxism. They also offered to restore order after helping create disorder.

• Hitler’s large party made a non-Left parliamentary majority conceivable after years of presidential rule.
• National belonging could compete with class solidarity.
• Selective violence could divide workers and destroy holdouts after limited recruitment had broken unity.
• Conservative elites assumed educated insiders would run the state while the charismatic outsider managed crowds.
• Fascists reassured property owners by subordinating economic policy to national production, discipline, and rearmament.

Why it matters: the alliance becomes comprehensible without imagining either that conservatives shared every fascist goal or that they were innocent victims.

Connection: these complementary assets become the four-way power struggle of Chapter 5.

The Prefascist Crisis

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The Italian and German crises differed in timing but shared a structure: economic dislocation, national humiliation, constitutional deadlock, a growing militant Left, and conservative refusal to govern with reformists. Perceived revolutionary danger mattered as much as actual capacity.

• Italy’s biennio rosso, land seizures, strikes, and factory occupations made communism appear imminent even when socialist strategy was incoherent.
• German communists and Nazis were the parties gaining during Depression-era collapse.
• Fascists intensified polarization, but liberal systems had independent weaknesses.
• No fascist movement is likely to reach office while democratic government functions effectively and commands legitimacy.

Why it matters: crisis opens the gate but does not determine who walks through it.

Connection: gatekeepers’ choices among remaining alternatives decide the outcome.

Revolutions after Power: Germany and Italy

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Appointment gave each leader constitutional office within a coalition, not dictatorship. The actual seizure of power was the subsequent coup from within.

In Germany, the Reichstag fire enabled a rapid spiral:

• Hindenburg’s February 28 decree suspended speech, assembly, property, and personal liberty and centralized police authority.
• Terror disabled the Left, yet the Nazis still lacked an electoral majority on March 5.
• Arrested communist deputies and Catholic Center support supplied the two-thirds vote for the Enabling Act.
• Other parties were dissolved, Dachau opened, and the dictatorship retained a veneer of legality.
• The Night of the Long Knives in June 1934 eliminated SA leaders and selected conservative rivals, demonstrating Hitler’s supremacy.

In Italy, the process was slower:

• Mussolini initially governed with conventional conservatives and orthodox economic policy.
• The Acerbo Law, passed under Blackshirt pressure, manufactured a large parliamentary majority.
• Giacomo Matteotti’s exposure of coercion and his murder created a genuine opportunity to remove Mussolini, but king and conservatives again refused decisive action.
• After party militants pressured him, Mussolini’s January 3, 1925 speech initiated laws that destroyed opposition and produced one-party rule by 1927.

Why it matters: constitutional forms can be used to legalize the destruction of constitutional government.

Connection: Chapter 5 begins with the composite regimes produced by these internal seizures.

Comparisons and Alternatives

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Comparison reveals that entrenched authoritarian rulers usually suppress fascist junior partners or keep them decorative. Franco, Salazar, Antonescu, and Vargas had no reason to share real power. Nazi occupation likewise seldom empowered local fascists; Hitler often preferred established collaborators capable of administering conquered societies.

The Italian and German outcomes therefore required a particular conjunction: democratic deadlock, a rooted fascist movement, elite fear of the Left, and leaders who thought mass fascist energy could be controlled. Alternatives existed—reformist Left coalitions, technocratic government, continued emergency rule, or military dictatorship—but conservative elites repeatedly chose the antisocialist route.

Why it matters: explaining fascist accession means reconstructing paths not taken, not narrating the winner backward as inevitable.

Connection: the same allies who open the gate remain indispensable, if increasingly subordinate, within fascist rule.

Key Concepts and Distinctions

• Concept: Entry into office versus seizure of power.
  • Significance: Legal appointment preceded the later destruction of constitutional restraints.
• Concept: Conservative gatekeeping.
  • Significance: Heads of state, military leaders, party brokers, judges, and business elites could exclude or admit fascists.
• Concept: Herrschaftskompromiss.
  • Significance: Fascists and conservatives locate enough common ground to share rule against common enemies.
• Concept: Prefascist crisis.
  • Significance: Deadlock, economic dislocation, national humiliation, revolutionary fear, and failed legitimacy create an opening.
• Concept: Selective legality.
  • Significance: Fascists exploit legal forms while violating equal protection and due process.
• Concept: Coup from within.
  • Significance: Office supplies state resources with which to eliminate rivals and convert emergency into dictatorship.
• Concept: Narrowing alternatives.
  • Significance: Fascism becomes possible through a sequence of contingent decisions, each closing less destructive paths.

Essential Evidence and Examples

• Facta’s forces stopped many Blackshirts, but the king’s refusal to sign martial law converted a failing march into Mussolini’s appointment.
• Hitler’s 1923 putsch failed precisely because Bavarian conservatives defended the state.
• The Nazi vote peaked at 37.2 percent in a free national election and declined before conservative insiders appointed Hitler.
• Von Papen expected to control Hitler from the vice-chancellorship and instead dismantled the last conservative barrier.
• Catholic Center votes helped pass the Enabling Act after communist deputies were arrested.
• The king’s inaction during the Matteotti crisis gave Mussolini a second avoidable opportunity to consolidate dictatorship.

Chapter Conclusion and Significance

Fascists reached office neither alone nor irresistibly. They exploited crises they partly intensified, but conservative elites possessed legal and coercive alternatives. Their refusal to cooperate with the moderate Left, their unequal treatment of political violence, and their confidence that they could domesticate fascist outsiders made accession possible.

The chapter relocates responsibility. Hitler and Mussolini remain central agents, but myth obscures the officials and institutions that opened the gate and then acquiesced in the coup from within. Fascist power is a process of alliance, appointment, emergency, legal erosion, and coercive consolidation.

Questions for Reflection

1. Why were conservative elites more willing to risk fascist rule than cooperation with reformist socialists or Catholics?
2. At which decision point in Italy or Germany was a nonfascist outcome most realistically available?
3. Does describing fascist accession as quasiconstitutional clarify elite responsibility, or risk understating the coercion that preceded appointment?

Chapter 5: Exercising Power

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Chapter Objective and Through Line

Chapter 5 replaces the propaganda image of a solitary, omnipotent dictator with a model of fascist rule as composite, conflict-ridden, and dynamic. No ruler governs alone. Hitler and Mussolini needed military officers, police, judges, civil servants, industrialists, landowners, professionals, churches, and at least passive public cooperation. Because conservative institutions had helped them enter office, the resulting regimes were not pure party states. They were coalitions whose members shared enemies but competed over authority, policy, personnel, and spoils.

The through line is a four-way struggle among the charismatic leader, the fascist party, the inherited state apparatus, and organized civil society. Ernst Fraenkel’s “dual state” illuminates one part of this structure: a normative state of law and bureaucratic procedure coexisted with a prerogative state governed by party will, emergency, and group destiny. Paxton expands the model because businesses, churches, professional bodies, families, and local associations also retained varying power. Nazi Germany allowed party institutions and the SS to invade the state much further than Fascist Italy, where Mussolini feared the ras, preserved a professional police, and never escaped king, Church, army, and bureaucracy.

This coalition did not produce mere stalemate. Competition could drive subordinates to anticipate the leader’s wishes, while selective terror silenced designated enemies and allowed many ordinary citizens to accommodate or support the regime. Fascism was revolutionary in abolishing due process, redefining citizenship, politicizing private life, and mobilizing society for national power. It was counterrevolutionary in preserving property and social hierarchy, destroying independent labor, and subordinating economic policy to rearmament and war. Fascist power was thus an unstable epoxy: conservative order bonded to fascist dynamism.

Chapter Structure at a Glance

1. Reject the monolithic image and define fascist government as a coalition under continuing tension.
2. Use the dual-state model to explain coexistence between legal bureaucracy and arbitrary party power.
3. Expand to a four-way struggle among leader, party, state, and civil society.
4. Compare the fascist–conservative and leader–party contests in Germany and Italy.
5. Show how the state’s institutions, especially police and judiciary, were incorporated rather than simply abolished.
6. Analyze the mixture of consent, accommodation, social integration, and selective terror.
7. Specify what was genuinely revolutionary and what preserved the old social order.

Section-by-Section Argument

The Nature of Fascist Rule: “Dual State” and Dynamic Shapelessness

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Fascist regimes were neither ideologically pure nor administratively monolithic. Their conservative allies retained vital control over expertise, property, arms, administration, and cultural authority. At the same time, fascist militants demanded offices, social transformation, expansion, and purification. The leader depended on both camps and prevented either from eliminating the other.

• Fraenkel’s normative state continued courts, civil-service routines, property rules, and bureaucratic recruitment.
• The prerogative state acted outside law whenever party will, racial destiny, or national emergency supposedly required it.
• In Nazi Germany, the prerogative sector steadily contaminated and overran the normative one, especially in wartime and occupied eastern territories.
• In Italy, the monarchy, bureaucracy, Church, police, and army retained substantially more autonomy.
• Islands of separateness—parishes, fraternities, professional bodies, and informal networks—could resist, appropriate, or bargain with party institutions without opposing the regime as a whole.

Paxton broadens duality into a four-part model:

1. the leader, claiming charismatic identity with the nation;
2. the party and its impatient militants;
3. the inherited state and its professional functionaries;
4. civil society’s economic, social, religious, and cultural power holders.

Parallel organizations made this structure more chaotic. Nazi party police, foreign-policy offices, courts, youth bodies, and militias duplicated state functions. Mussolini initially permitted similar duplication, then subordinated the party to prefects and state authority. This “polyocracy” did not negate leadership; it encouraged officials to compete for approval by discovering more energetic ways to fulfill the leader’s broad aims.

Why it matters: fascist power is best explained as structured competition under removed legal limits, not as a perfectly organized machine.

Connection: Chapter 6 shows how this rivalry can accelerate into cumulative radicalization.

The Tug-of-War between Fascists and Conservatives

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Conservatives who helped Hitler into office expected superior education, administrative experience, and social position to keep him dependent. They misread the effects of mass support, emergency power, tactical audacity, and willingness to murder.

• By July 1933, the one-party law made open legal resistance impossible.
• Hindenburg’s decline and death removed a potential counterweight.
• The Night of the Long Knives killed not only SA radicals but conservative critics associated with von Papen.
• The 1938 Blomberg–Fritsch crisis subordinated the military command, while Ribbentrop’s appointment brought the Foreign Office under party control.
• Most conservatives swallowed objections at each ratchet of repression and aggression because they shared anti-Marxism, nationalism, hierarchy, and the rewards of rearmament.

Some later resisted, most notably the July 20, 1944 conspirators, but by then the alliance had enabled the regime for more than a decade. Italy produced a different balance. Mussolini had to accommodate the king and a stronger Catholic Church, and he often used the state to contain his own party. Traditional institutions retained enough power to remove him in July 1943.

Why it matters: conservative defeats do not erase earlier complicity or the durable overlap of interests.

Connection: the unequal outcomes explain why Italy drifted toward authoritarian normalization while Germany radicalized.

The Tug-of-War between Leader and Party

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Leader and party were not fused. Militants expected a “second revolution” that would deliver offices, redistribute status, and continue the movement’s early radicalism. Leaders needed their energy but also needed order, expertise, production, and conservative cooperation.

• Hitler suppressed Walter Stennes and Gregor Strasser before power and destroyed Ernst Röhm’s SA leadership in 1934.
• Party violence against Jews and political opponents in spring 1933 was useful but threatened economic order and the state monopoly of force.
• War and occupation later gave militants outlets for plunder, domination, and racial projects.
• Mussolini faced more durable pressure from local ras and squadristi.
• He briefly elevated Roberto Farinacci after the 1925 dictatorship, then dismissed him when uncontrolled violence threatened normalization.

Why it matters: the leader’s supremacy is made through purges, patronage, and selective release of party energy, not assumed from the beginning.

Connection: the unresolved need to satisfy militants becomes a motor of Chapter 6’s radicalization.

The Tug-of-War between Party and State

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Fascist leaders generally preserved inherited state machinery because it possessed expertise and capacity. Civil servants, police, judges, and professionals often cooperated willingly: they shared preferences for authority, public order, national power, and freedom from liberal procedural restraints.

• Hitler sacrificed the SA’s military ambitions to the professional army in 1934.
• Himmler progressively removed the German police from normal ministerial control and centralized it under SS leadership.
• German judges had already punished communists more harshly than right-wing militants and accepted Nazi special courts in exchange for professional continuity.
• Medical and welfare professionals welcomed new authority and research resources, helping turn public health into racial selection and “medicalized killing.”
• Italy retained a professional police under Arturo Bocchini and a more conventional judiciary, a major difference from Nazi Germany.

Why it matters: regimes can commit radical crimes through existing professions as well as through party fanatics.

Connection: the Holocaust required both prerogative violence and bureaucratic, technical, military, and administrative participation.

Accommodation, Enthusiasm, Terror

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The simple choice between popular consent and terror is false. Both regimes used terror, but it was selective for much of their existence. Many citizens approved repression directed at communists, Jews, Roma, homosexuals, disabled people, pacifists, colonial subjects, or other stigmatized outsiders; others accommodated because daily life, career, patriotism, or institutional loyalty mattered more than objection.

• The Gestapo could operate with relatively few officers because citizen denunciations supplied information.
• German workers were contained through terror, division, limited concessions, and integrative organizations such as Strength Through Joy.
• Fascist corporatism abolished independent labor and left employers dominant even when official unions handled grievances.
• Mussolini won broad approval through the Lateran Treaties and the conquest of Ethiopia; Hitler benefited from employment and bloodless foreign-policy victories.
• Youth organizations used sociability, uniforms, peer pressure, rank, and adventure to make conformity attractive.
• Intellectuals ranged from resistance through guarded accommodation to enthusiastic collaboration.

Italian repression after consolidation was far less lethal than Nazi repression, but colonial warfare, Matteotti’s murder, the Rosselli assassinations, imprisonment, and forced residence prevent the regime from being treated as comic or benign.

Why it matters: ordinary support may rest precisely on the belief that coercion is aimed at someone else.

Connection: public accommodation and professional cooperation enlarge the space for later escalation.

The Fascist “Revolution”

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Fascists did not carry out the socioeconomic revolution suggested by some early rhetoric. Property, hierarchy, and national producers remained. The intended revolution was moral, political, anthropological, and geopolitical: remake citizens, abolish autonomous rights, merge private life into the community, mobilize youth, purify culture, and prepare the nation for greatness and war.

• The Rechtsstaat—government bound by law—vanished; acquittal no longer protected a person from arbitrary detention.
• Elections gave way to plebiscites and ceremonies of assent.
• Schools, youth movements, leisure organizations, and propaganda sought to create a disciplined “new man” and properly maternal “new woman.”
• Independent unions, parties, churches, and associations were subordinated or treated as competitors for loyalty.
• Cultural control remained incomplete because popular entertainment, family life, and institutions retained some autonomy.
• Economic policy served political goals, especially autarky and rearmament; business and regime had converging but nonidentical interests.
• Welfare was not abolished but racially and politically restricted.

Fascism was revolutionary in citizenship, rights, state intrusion, and mobilization. It was counterrevolutionary toward liberty, labor power, social equality, property redistribution, and peace.

Why it matters: the category “revolution” must be specified rather than accepted or rejected wholesale.

Connection: a regime premised on mobilization and greatness cannot easily settle into routine without losing its distinctively fascist energy.

Key Concepts and Distinctions

• Concept: Dual state.
  • Significance: Legal-bureaucratic administration coexists with arbitrary party power and emergency.
• Concept: Polyocracy.
  • Significance: Multiple overlapping authorities compete for the leader’s favor, producing both chaos and radical initiative.
• Concept: Four-way tension.
  • Significance: Leader, party, state, and civil society are analytically distinct actors inside fascist rule.
• Concept: Islands of separateness.
  • Significance: Some institutions preserve partial autonomy without necessarily becoming democratic resistance.
• Concept: Selective terror.
  • Significance: Violence can coexist with substantial consent when it is directed at excluded groups.
• Concept: Charismatic supremacy.
  • Significance: The leader claims direct embodiment of the people’s destiny, making authority powerful but succession brittle.
• Concept: Political revolution versus socioeconomic revolution.
  • Significance: Fascism transforms citizenship and state power while largely preserving property and hierarchy.

Essential Evidence and Examples

• Nazi Germany never formally abolished the Weimar constitution; emergency prerogative hollowed it out while legal forms persisted.
• The Night of the Long Knives simultaneously disciplined the party and terrorized conservative critics.
• Himmler’s control of police shows a party parallel structure absorbing a core state function.
• Citizen denunciations allowed a relatively small Gestapo to project pervasive surveillance.
• The Lateran Treaties and Ethiopian victory demonstrate how accommodation and success generated Mussolini’s consent.
• Business profited from labor discipline and armaments while resisting some controls, illustrating converging but nonidentical interests.

Chapter Conclusion and Significance

Fascist regimes were composite dictatorships held together by shared enemies, practical exchange, and the destruction of legal restraint. Their internal conflicts were not incidental imperfections. They shaped policy, distributed power, and sometimes pushed subordinates toward greater extremity.

The comparison between Italy and Germany also warns against equating all fascist governments. The same coalition elements existed in both, but their relative weight differed. Mussolini preserved more state and conservative autonomy; Hitler empowered party and SS institutions much further. That difference becomes decisive when war removes the remaining limits.

Questions for Reflection

1. Does the dual-state model explain fascist power better than the image of totalitarian central control?
2. When citizens approve repression of designated outsiders, where should analysis place the boundary between consent, accommodation, and coercion?
3. Is fascism’s transformation of citizenship enough to call it revolutionary despite its preservation of property and hierarchy?

Chapter 6: The Long Term — Radicalization or Entropy?

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Chapter Objective and Through Line

Chapter 6 asks what happens after fascist rule becomes established. A charismatic regime has promised unity, purification, regeneration, expansion, and a privileged relation with history. Routine administration cannot indefinitely satisfy those expectations. Fascist rule therefore confronts a structural choice: lose dynamism and decay toward conventional authoritarianism, or sustain momentum through ever more ambitious mobilization, exclusion, and war.

The through line is that radicalization is neither a fully prewritten plan nor a spontaneous process without leadership. Paxton integrates intention and structure. Leaders establish hatreds, goals, rewards, and permissive signals. Party militants, administrators, police, soldiers, and technical experts then compete to “work toward” those goals, often improvising harsher solutions to local problems. Overlapping jurisdictions and the expansion of the prerogative state weaken restraint. War is the great accelerator because it creates emergency, conquered space, vulnerable populations, secrecy, scarcity, and freedom for party institutions.

Nazi Germany alone reached the outer limit. Paxton explains the Holocaust as cumulative radicalization: segregation gave way to expulsion; territorial conquest created both new opportunities and unmanageable populations; failed “intermediate solutions,” logistical blockages, ideological hatred, and prior killing programs lowered inhibitions; local initiatives and central coordination ratcheted one another upward toward extermination. This account does not dilute Hitler’s responsibility. His anti-Semitic aims, protection of radicals, broad authorization, and likely verbal approval were indispensable. It shows how a leader’s murderous worldview became an administrative reality.

Italy reveals a weaker and irregular version: Ethiopian conquest, colonial violence, a totalitarian cultural campaign, racial laws, disastrous war, and the Salò Republic. Spain and Portugal reveal entropy, where rulers suppressed fascist dynamism and relied on traditional authority. Fascism’s promise of permanent movement ultimately makes it unstable and potentially self-destructive.

Chapter Structure at a Glance

1. Define the regime’s need for momentum and the alternative paths of normalization or radicalization.
2. Contrast Franco and Salazar’s authoritarian demobilization with Nazi Germany’s expanding prerogative state.
3. Explain radicalization through leader intention, party pressure, institutional rivalry, and “working toward” the leader.
4. Establish war as the central accelerator and spatial release from legal restraint.
5. Reconstruct the Holocaust as a stepwise interaction of ideology, initiative, blockage, coordination, and killing capacity.
6. Trace Mussolini’s intermittent radicalization through empire, racism, war, and Salò.
7. Conclude that the fascist drive for limitless success can consume even the nation it claims to save.

Section-by-Section Argument

Momentum, Normalization, and the Opening Comparison

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Fascist legitimacy depends on visible movement. Without fresh victories and purification, the leader’s charisma decays and the regime begins to resemble an ordinary authoritarian dictatorship. Franco and Salazar demonstrate deliberate demobilization.

• Franco subordinated the Falange, arrested Manuel Hedilla, and relied on army, Church, officials, landowners, and business.
• Salazar crushed Portugal’s National Syndicalists because their feverish demand for “more” threatened order.
• Both regimes adopted some fascist techniques while preferring a passive population and stable hierarchy.
• Nazi conquest in the east moved the opposite way, creating a lawless space where party radicals could pursue racial fantasies.
• Mussolini oscillated: he repeatedly curbed party radicals, preserved professional administration, and compromised with the Church, yet later sought renewed energy through empire and war.

Why it matters: not every brutal right-wing dictatorship is fascist, and not every regime with fascist origins remains equally fascist over time.

Connection: the forces that determine direction lie in the regime’s internal structure and external opportunities.

What Drives Radicalization?

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Neither pure intentionalism nor pure structuralism is sufficient. The leader’s aims matter, but orders require institutions and willing agents. Initiatives from below matter, but they occur within expectations and rewards set by the leader.

• Party militants press for jobs, spoils, ideological fulfillment, and release from conservative limits.
• Overlapping offices create competitive radicalism as subordinates seek recognition.
• Hitler’s loose working style encouraged officials to anticipate his wishes rather than await detailed commands.
• Mussolini’s micromanagement, distrust, and repeated preference for order produced more inertia.
• The leader can alternately channel, reward, or purge militants while preserving them as leverage against traditional elites.

War completes the mechanism:

• It legitimates sacrifice and emergency.
• It gives violence a national purpose.
• It opens occupied territories beyond normal law.
• It generates shortages and security problems that radicals define in racial terms.
• It makes retreat appear fatal to charismatic credibility.

Fascist war differs from temporary democratic emergency because a fanatical party minority gains freedom to treat cleansing and domination as ends in themselves.

Why it matters: radicalization is a relational process, not a single command or a bureaucratic accident.

Connection: the Holocaust represents the process’s most extreme outcome.

Trying to Account for the Holocaust

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Paxton’s explanation has two foundations: Hitler’s obsessive anti-Semitism and the participation of thousands of subordinates; and a stepwise development in which initiatives from above and below intensified one another.

From segregation to expulsion

• Party attacks in spring 1933 were partially channeled into an official boycott.
• The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped citizenship and prohibited intermarriage.
• Kristallnacht in 1938 showed militant violence returning; economic officials then converted destruction into organized “Aryanization.”
• Annexation of Austria enabled Eichmann to develop coerced emigration financed by Jewish assets.
• Conquest of Poland brought millions more Jews under Nazi authority, while administrators competed to expel unwanted populations into one another’s territories.

From expulsion to extermination

• Plans for Madagascar or deportation east remained official possibilities while quick victory seemed likely.
• The failure to defeat the Soviet Union rapidly blocked mass expulsion and magnified supply, security, housing, and resettlement crises.
• Some local commanders crossed from killing male “security threats” to murdering whole Jewish communities, including women and children, before central coordination was complete.
• The January 1942 Wannsee Conference is therefore better seen as coordination and systematization of an already radicalizing policy than as the sole moment of decision.

Dress rehearsals and capacity

• The T-4 euthanasia program killed more than seventy thousand disabled or mentally ill people and trained personnel in organized gassing.
• Einsatzgruppen murdered Polish elites, communist officials, Jews, Roma, and eventually whole communities.
• Millions of Soviet prisoners of war were deliberately starved or worked to death; Zyklon-B was tested on Soviet prisoners at Auschwitz.
• Shooting, gas vans, and finally fixed killing centers made murder more efficient and less psychologically burdensome for perpetrators.

Responsibility and complicity

No surviving written Führer order is necessary to establish Hitler’s central responsibility. His hatred was public, he received reports, he rewarded radical initiative, and officials knew he would protect extreme measures. At the same time, the machinery required soldiers, administrators, railway personnel, doctors, engineers, police, and occupied-territory officials. Knowledge of mass killing became widespread enough that distance, indifference, fear, and wartime suffering—not simple ignorance—helped suppress resistance.

Why it matters: cumulative radicalization explains implementation without turning genocide into an impersonal process.

Connection: the destruction of the normative state in conquered space realizes the logic introduced in Chapter 5.

Italian Radicalization: Internal Order, Ethiopia, Salò

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Italian Fascism contained the same pressure for renewed achievement but faced stronger constraints and a more cautious leader. Mussolini’s Ethiopian war supplied a burst of imperial enthusiasm, colonial space for party domination, and brutal violence beyond metropolitan restraints.

• The 1935 invasion answered nationalist grievance, revived party energy, and moved Italy toward dependence on Hitler.
• Italian forces and colonial authorities used severe racial separation, internment, reprisals, and mass killing.
• The regime’s post-Ethiopia “totalitarian leap” imposed Fascist language, salutes, uniforms, marching style, and a campaign to produce the new Fascist person.
• The 1938 racial laws barred Jews from public service and professions and prohibited intermarriage.
• These laws had domestic roots in colonial racism, Catholic anti-Judaism, and Fascist anti-Semites even though alliance with Germany accelerated them.

World War II destroyed Mussolini’s remaining charisma. After the king removed him in July 1943, German rescue created the puppet Italian Social Republic at Salò. Freed from monarchy, Church, and business restraint but dependent on German arms, Salò revived social-radical promises, participated in persecution of Jews, executed Fascist “traitors,” and waged a murderous civil war. Its weakness prevented a Nazi-scale outcome.

Why it matters: Italian radicalization was real but discontinuous, constrained, and geographically concentrated.

Connection: comparison shows why a generic fascist impulse does not produce identical regimes.

Final Thoughts

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The radicalization stage reveals fascism’s most distinctive potential: violence valued not merely as an instrument but as proof of racial or national mastery. The comparison with Stalinism identifies shared contempt for due process but also differences in aims, institutional rivalry, and fascism’s idealization of cleansing war.

• Expansionist war is the central condition of full radicalization.
• Party institutions gain unusual freedom in conquered territory.
• Traditional state services remain complicit even when some professionals object.
• Genocidal projects can displace rational military priorities.
• In defeat, the movement may turn against its own nation rather than admit that history has rejected it.

Hitler’s final orders and fantasy of pulling Germany down with him expose the endpoint: the nation ceases to be a real beneficiary and becomes material for the leader’s redemptive drama. Fascism’s promise of permanent momentum makes stable succession difficult and entropy toward authoritarianism more likely than institutional continuity.

Why it matters: fascism is not a durable conservative solution; its dynamism destabilizes both partners and polity.

Connection: Chapter 7 asks how to recognize the functional danger without expecting an exact replay.

Key Concepts and Distinctions

• Concept: Radicalization versus entropy.
  • Significance: Established fascism can escalate toward limitless cleansing or lose dynamism and normalize into authoritarian rule.
• Concept: Working toward the leader.
  • Significance: Subordinates anticipate broad wishes and compete to implement increasingly extreme versions.
• Concept: Cumulative radicalization.
  • Significance: Local initiative, central signals, institutional rivalry, blockage, and crisis ratchet policy toward greater violence.
• Concept: War as accelerator.
  • Significance: War produces emergency, conquered space, vulnerable populations, secrecy, and a demand for renewed success.
• Concept: Intermediate solution.
  • Significance: Ghettos, forced labor, and expulsion plans failed or created new problems, making extermination appear to perpetrators as the next “solution.”
• Concept: Fascist entropy.
  • Significance: Suppressing party energy and relying on traditional institutions converts a fascist or partly fascist regime into conventional authoritarianism.
• Concept: Terminal self-destruction.
  • Significance: At its outer limit, fascist purity and will take precedence even over survival of the proclaimed national community.

Essential Evidence and Examples

• Franco’s absorption of the Falange and Salazar’s suppression of National Syndicalism show authoritarian demobilization.
• Hitler’s overlapping jurisdictions encouraged officials to “work toward” his known wishes.
• T-4, Einsatzgruppen operations, and the treatment of Soviet prisoners supplied personnel, precedent, and killing techniques.
• The invasion of the Soviet Union removed spatial and legal restraints while blocking earlier expulsion projects.
• Wannsee coordinated an exterminatory process already underway rather than creating anti-Jewish policy from nothing.
• Ethiopia, the 1938 racial laws, and Salò trace the uneven radicalizing arc of Italian Fascism.

Chapter Conclusion and Significance

Fascist regimes cannot indefinitely live on the memory of their founding victory. Their promise of regeneration demands new demonstrations of unity, force, purification, and historical mastery. When conservative institutions contain that pressure, fascism decays toward authoritarian routine; when war and party power remove restraint, radicalization can outrun rational interest.

Paxton’s account of the Holocaust holds agency at every level. Hitler’s worldview and authority are indispensable, but so are the choices of institutions and individuals who converted permission, ideology, professional skill, and local crisis into an industrial system of murder. The endpoint is not national restoration but catastrophic destruction.

Questions for Reflection

1. Does cumulative radicalization explain the transition to genocide more convincingly than either a detailed master-plan theory or a bottom-up bureaucratic theory alone?
2. Why did war radicalize Nazi Germany so much further than Fascist Italy, despite both regimes’ expansionist commitments?
3. Is decay into authoritarianism the likely long-term fate of a fascist regime that avoids self-destructive war?

Chapter 7: Other Times, Other Places

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Publication horizon

This chapter surveys politics only through the early 2000s. Its examples are notes on Paxton’s argument at the time of publication, not a current classification of the named parties, countries, or leaders.

Chapter Objective and Through Line

Chapter 7 asks whether fascism ended in 1945 or can recur in altered form. The public disgrace of Hitler and Mussolini made open imitation electorally toxic in most established democracies. Postwar prosperity, consumer individualism, nuclear deterrence, European integration, and the decline of revolutionary communism also removed much of the interwar setting. Yet Paxton rejects the comforting conclusion that fascism is permanently confined to period uniforms and symbols.

The through line is functional comparison across stages. Stage One movements—small groups organized around exclusion, decline, purification, and violence—can appear in any mass democracy. The more demanding test is Stage Two: does such a movement become rooted as the bearer of significant interests, win durable constituencies, reward followers, normalize attacks on internal enemies, and receive tolerance or cooperation from established conservatives? Exact visual resemblance is weak evidence. A future fascism would probably use familiar national and religious symbols, moderate its public language, and deny any connection to disgraced predecessors.

Paxton surveys western European legacy movements, normalized anti-immigrant parties, post-Soviet nationalism, the Balkan wars, Latin American populist dictatorships, imperial Japan, American nativism, and religious fundamentalism. He often concludes that brutality, militarism, charismatic rule, or borrowed corporatism are insufficient. Perón, Vargas, imperial Japan, military client states, and theocratic movements arose through different structures and performed different political functions. The strongest warning signs remain crisis, democratic deadlock, loss of legitimate opposition, exclusionary mass mobilization, and conservative willingness to suspend due process with a radical ally. Fascism’s return would be recognizable by relationships and behavior, not costume.

Chapter Structure at a Glance

1. Test the claim that fascism’s historical era ended with military defeat and moral disgrace in 1945.
2. Use the five stages to distinguish fringe survival from renewed political rooting.
3. Examine western European legacy parties and post-1970s normalized radical-right movements.
4. Consider post-Soviet nationalism and Balkan ethnic cleansing as possible functional equivalents.
5. Compare non-European dictatorships and movements without treating all brutality or mass mobilization as fascism.
6. Consider whether American civic and religious symbols could carry a locally authentic fascism.
7. End with institutional warning signs rather than aesthetic litmus tests.

Section-by-Section Argument

Is Fascism Still Possible?

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Classical fascism emerged from a unique conjunction: mass democracy’s early instability, World War I, Bolshevik revolution, wounded nationalism, and liberal incapacity. Military defeat and revelation of the camps then made explicit Nazism and Fascism repellent. But historical inoculation weakens as memory fades, and a future movement would adapt to local conditions rather than repeat foreign symbols.

• Overt neo-Nazis may remain at Stage One while a respectable-looking movement moves closer to Stage Two.
• The identity of the demonized enemy can change with national context.
• The relevant question is whether violence, exclusion, and surrender of rights become acceptable routes to national renewal.
• Skinheads become politically consequential only when elites or broad publics treat them as useful rather than disgraceful.
• Normalization can be strategic: moderate public presentation may coexist with coded reassurance to extremists.

Why it matters: searching only for swastikas may cause observers to miss an indigenous functional equivalent.

Connection: the stage model converts historical analogy into a testable set of institutional questions.

Western Europe since 1945

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The first postwar radical Right consisted largely of legacy movements. West German neo-Nazis remained divided and electorally weak; Italy’s MSI maintained a small but durable base; British and French activists mobilized around decolonization, anti-communism, and immigration. Most were quarantined from coalition and therefore did not cross into power.

After the 1970s, new conditions opened space:

• deindustrialization and durable unemployment weakened working-class institutions;
• postcolonial immigration became visible and permanent;
• globalization and European integration seemed to reduce national control;
• welfare-state strain encouraged conflict over who deserved protection;
• scandal and rigid party systems created demand for “antipolitics”;
• the collapse of communism left the far Right with less competition as a protest vehicle.

Paxton tracks how Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National, Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party, the Italian MSI/Alleanza Nazionale, the Vlaams Blok, and other parties combined anti-immigrant politics with attacks on established parties. The most successful muted explicit fascist symbolism, accepted elections, and often embraced markets rather than classical fascist corporatism.

• The French FN developed durable constituencies and local offices, approaching Stage Two despite internal splits.
• The MSI’s transformation into the “postfascist” Alleanza Nazionale enabled participation in Berlusconi governments.
• Austria’s rigid power-sharing system left the Freedom Party as the principal available protest alternative.
• Britain’s majoritarian Conservative Party occupied more right-wing space and reduced opportunities for an independent radical party.

These parties echoed themes of decline, identity, alien contamination, and authority but generally omitted one-party dictatorship, full economic regimentation, and expansionist war.

Why it matters: postwar radical-right success can share parts of fascism without completing the historical pattern.

Connection: classification requires both programmatic content and a movement’s relation to institutions, violence, and allies.

Post-Soviet Eastern Europe

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Post-Soviet collapse revived older nationalist, anti-Western, and anti-Semitic currents under conditions of economic failure, contested borders, new democracies, and weak institutions. Paxton treats Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s early electoral success as evidence of available space but notes that presidential power and erratic leadership limited the movement.

The wars following Yugoslavia’s disintegration present a harder case. Slobodan Milošević did not lead an outsider fascist party into power; he was an incumbent communist official who adopted expansionist Serbian nationalism and mass victimhood as a new basis of legitimacy. Yet the regime’s ethnic cleansing, revenge politics, public enthusiasm, and project of a purified Greater Serbia performed some functions closely analogous to fascism.

• The path to power differed from the Italian and German sequence.
• The violent mass politics of victimhood and ethnic purification nevertheless resembled a functional equivalent.
• Croatian nationalism under Franjo Tuđman also revived symbols associated with the wartime Ustaša and expelled Serbs.
• The case demonstrates that stage sequence and regime function can point in different classificatory directions.

Why it matters: “fascist” should not substitute for causal analysis, but neither should unusual origins conceal a substantively similar politics of purification.

Connection: Chapter 8’s boundary work must accommodate both family resemblance and historical difference.

Fascism Outside Europe

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Paxton uses a strict threshold: fascism is a pathology of mass politics in which a society gives up free institutions through mobilized enthusiasm. Mere dictatorship, cruelty, or foreign sponsorship is not enough.

Latin America. Brazil’s Integralists formed an authentic mass fascist movement, but Getúlio Vargas suppressed them and ruled through a modernizing authoritarian state. Juan Perón borrowed corporatism, ceremony, press control, charismatic leadership, and organized labor, yet came to power through a military setting and worker mobilization rather than an outsider party exploiting failed democracy. Peronism broadened participation, raised labor’s share of income, lacked an exterminatory internal enemy, and rejected expansionist war.

Imperial Japan. Japan combined expansion, militarism, mobilization, and some fascist borrowing. But the emperor and military crushed radical “fascism from below,” preserved traditional authority, and built no autonomous mass party. Paxton therefore classifies it more plausibly as an expansionist military dictatorship with state-sponsored mobilization.

The United States. Explicitly foreign-looking fascist groups remained marginal. Paxton is more concerned with an indigenous politics that could fuse national humiliation, piety, nativism, racial hierarchy, compulsory patriotism, and attacks on civil liberties. Familiar symbols would not be fascist by themselves; they would become diagnostic only when used as obligatory tests against an internal enemy.

Religion. Religious identity can perform the integrating work of nationalism, but theocratic violence is not automatically fascist. Movements arising where free institutions never existed fail Paxton’s democratic-breakdown criterion. A religious fascism would require mass mobilization that abandons existing freedoms for purification, unity, and redemptive force.

Why it matters: comparison should sharpen boundaries, not flatten unlike regimes into a moral category.

Connection: the chapter closes by returning to Stage Two and the decisive role of establishment alliance.

Key Concepts and Distinctions

• Concept: Legacy fascism.
  • Significance: Direct heirs can preserve doctrine and symbolism while remaining politically quarantined and weak.
• Concept: Functional equivalent.
  • Significance: A movement may perform fascist functions through local symbols and a novel path without copying interwar aesthetics.
• Concept: Normalization.
  • Significance: Radical-right parties can moderate language and appearance to gain allies, office, and broader constituencies.
• Concept: Stage One versus Stage Two.
  • Significance: Founding an extremist group is common; becoming a durable political representative with elite partners is the critical threshold.
• Concept: Borrowed instrument versus shared structure.
  • Significance: Corporatism, uniforms, propaganda, or one-party forms can be borrowed by regimes whose origins and aims are not fascist.
• Concept: Democratic-breakdown criterion.
  • Significance: Fascism involves mobilized abandonment of free institutions, not simply predemocratic or externally supported tyranny.

Essential Evidence and Examples

• Open neo-Nazi parties in postwar Germany remained weaker than normalized movements able to enter respectable politics.
• The Italian MSI reached government only after rebranding and occupying space left by the collapse of Christian Democracy.
• Le Pen’s FN built a durable anti-immigrant constituency but met a broad democratic barrier in the 2002 runoff.
• Milošević’s rule illustrates functional resemblance without the classical movement-to-power path.
• Vargas suppressed Brazil’s Integralists, and Japan’s emperor suppressed radical officers, showing authoritarian power defeating fascist activism.
• Perón’s expansion of participation and labor income differentiates his populist dictatorship from classical fascist destruction of independent labor for national war.

Chapter Conclusion and Significance

Fascism can recur, but recurrence is unlikely to announce itself with inherited insignia. The concept remains useful only if applied through disciplined comparison: the movement’s relation to democracy, its mass base, its enemies, its violence, its allies, its institutional rooting, and the functions it performs.

The most ominous threshold is not the appearance of an ugly fringe. It is the moment when established conservatives, facing real or manufactured crisis, borrow the fringe’s mobilizing passions, excuse unequal treatment under law, and cultivate a radical movement as an ally. Historical knowledge matters because choices still determine whether Stage One proceeds further.

Questions for Reflection

1. How can one identify a functional equivalent of fascism without stretching the term to cover every exclusionary or authoritarian movement?
2. Should Paxton’s democratic-breakdown criterion exclude movements that pursue fascist functions in societies with weak or newly created free institutions?
3. Which evidence would demonstrate that a normalized radical-right party had crossed from electoral protest into Stage Two fascist rooting?

Chapter 8: What Is Fascism?

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Chapter Objective and Through Line

The final chapter returns to the definition Paxton postponed. A usable definition must cover early movements and governing regimes, capture ideas without treating programs as fixed blueprints, and include the settings, allies, and choices through which fascism becomes powerful. Fascism in action is not a pure substance. It is a network of relationships that bonds nationalist militants to traditional elites around common enemies and a shared project of regeneration.

The through line is critical comparison. Paxton reviews interpretations that illuminate one part of the phenomenon but become misleading when treated as complete: fascists as thugs, agents of capital, psychological deviants, products of uneven modernization, an atomized mass, a lower-middle-class revolt, developmental dictatorship, totalitarianism, political religion, ideology, or cultural style. Each perspective contributes evidence; none explains the whole cycle. Class accounts overlook cross-class recruitment and elite partnership. totalitarianism highlights instruments of control but obscures the Nazi coalition and institutional chaos. Cultural analysis decodes images but may not establish their political influence.

Paxton then draws essential boundaries. Fascism differs from classical tyranny because it mobilizes mass enthusiasm and abandons already existing freedoms in pursuit of unity, cleansing, and expansion. It differs from military dictatorship because the party and public are activated rather than merely obeying officers. It differs from authoritarianism because authoritarians prefer passivity, preserve private and intermediary spheres, limit state ambition, and defend the status quo. The chapter culminates in a behavioral definition centered on perceived collective decline, compensatory unity and purity, a mass nationalist party, collaboration with traditional elites, abandonment of democratic liberty, redemptive violence, internal cleansing, and external expansion.

Chapter Structure at a Glance

1. Explain why a definition must incorporate later stages, alliances, and changing behavior.
2. Review major psychological, social, economic, institutional, ideological, and cultural interpretations.
3. Retain partial insights while rejecting single-cause explanations.
4. Distinguish fascism from tyranny, military rule, authoritarianism, and merely borrowed fascist style.
5. State a behavior-centered definition and reconnect it to mobilizing passions.
6. End with a contemporary warning grounded in stages, equal law, and elite choice.

Section-by-Section Argument

Opening: From Process to Definition

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The process method cannot eliminate the need for a boundary. If only the earliest, most doctrinally radical movement is called “real fascism,” then the regimes that made war and committed mass murder become corrupt exceptions. If only governing practice counts, the passions that formed militants disappear. A workable definition must span the cycle.

Fascism in power is a compound. Conservative, nationalist, social-radical, bureaucratic, military, religious, and economic forces enter different proportions through alliance and conflict. The movement’s identity emerges from relationships and choices rather than from a chemically pure essence.

Why it matters: generic fascism must explain both resemblance and variation.

Connection: the chapter now tests the leading alternatives against the complete historical cycle.

Conflicting Interpretations

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Paxton treats major theories as partial lenses:

• Thugs in power: captures criminal violence but cannot explain timing, location, public support, or respectable collaboration.
• Agent of capitalism: identifies real accommodation and benefit but overstates business creation of fascism, ignores autonomous popular appeal, and falsely predicts inevitability.
• Capital’s victim: magnifies policy friction and postwar self-exculpation while ignoring profit, labor discipline, and cooperation.
• Psychohistory: notices obsession and charisma but cannot diagnose absent subjects reliably or explain why millions responded.
• Uneven modernization: connects rapid industrial change and surviving old elites to political conflict, but similar dual economies did not always produce fascism.
• Mass society and atomization: helps with the final destruction of restraint but fits initial recruitment poorly, since Nazis mobilized dense existing associations.
• Lower-middle-class extremism: recognizes an important constituency but fails to explain fascism’s cross-class composition, changing membership, or elite role.
• Developmental dictatorship: mistakes politically driven autarky and war preparation for rational economic modernization.
• Totalitarianism: compares technologies of control in Nazism and Stalinism but obscures Nazi alliance with inherited elites, overlapping authority, and distinct racial aims.
• Political religion: illuminates ritual, sacred community, and faith but risks assuming secularization caused fascism or that churches and fascism were simply enemies.
• Ideology and culture: reveal language, symbols, aesthetic force, and mobilizing myths, but programs changed and cultural influence must be demonstrated rather than inferred.

Paxton favors synthesis. Business and fascism were practical but not inevitable partners. Hitler’s will mattered, but so did people “working toward” him. Ideas mattered, but often as visceral passions and flexible legitimations. Social composition mattered, but no single class explains the movement.

Why it matters: monocausal theories mistake one stage, one constituency, or one institutional layer for the whole.

Connection: the boundaries section identifies which combination is distinctively fascist.

Boundaries

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The first boundary separates fascism from classical tyranny. A tyrant can terrorize subjects without mass participation. Fascism arises in mass politics and persuades citizens to surrender existing freedoms for national unity, purification, and power.

The second boundary separates fascism from military dictatorship. Both may glorify arms, but military rulers normally demobilize society, monopolize force through professional officers, and suppress autonomous militias. Fascists seek an armed political fraternity and preserve a party capable of pushing the state.

The third and most important boundary separates fascism from authoritarianism:

• authoritarians prefer a passive public; fascists excite and mobilize;
• authoritarians leave real private and intermediary domains to Church, family, army, notables, and economic associations; fascists seek to absorb them;
• authoritarians defend established hierarchy and routine; fascists proclaim a new order and national rebirth;
• authoritarians usually limit intervention and expansion; fascists subordinate economy and society to purification and war;
• authoritarians may borrow shirts, corporatism, or single-party decoration while suppressing autonomous fascist militants.

Franco, Salazar, and early Vichy illustrate authoritarian systems that preserved traditional institutions and demobilized citizens, even when they were murderous or adopted fascist devices.

Why it matters: moral horror alone does not define regime type; distinctions improve causal explanation and warning.

Connection: the definition combines mass mobilization, elite alliance, abandoned liberty, cleansing, and expansion.

What Is Fascism?

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Paxton defines fascism as political behavior organized around obsessive perceptions of collective decline, humiliation, or victimhood and compensatory promises of unity, energy, and purity. A mass party of nationalist militants enters an uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties, and pursues internal cleansing and external expansion through redemptive violence unconstrained by law or ethics.

The formulation includes several causal relationships:

• felt crisis makes ordinary procedures appear inadequate;
• group primacy and victimhood convert duties to the nation into permission to violate universal rights;
• purification divides authentic members from internal enemies;
• natural leadership and instinct displace deliberation and abstract law;
• violence and will become morally beautiful because they demonstrate collective vitality;
• elite collaboration provides institutional access, expertise, legitimacy, and coercive resources;
• mass party organization provides enthusiasm, intimidation, and independent pressure;
• expansion keeps charisma and movement alive.

Ideas therefore remain indispensable, but they are best inferred from repeated choices and actions rather than taken literally from changeable platforms. The definition is a “short handle,” not a substitute for the historical process.

Why it matters: the definition identifies a bounded family of behavior while preserving contingency and institutional context.

Connection: contemporary danger becomes visible when legal inequality and elite alliance move a movement beyond Stage One.

Key Concepts and Distinctions

• Concept: Network of relationships.
  • Significance: Fascism’s operative identity emerges from interaction among militants, elites, state agencies, and publics.
• Concept: Behavioral definition.
  • Significance: Repeated choices and actions weigh more heavily than a supposedly immutable program.
• Concept: Mass mobilization versus demobilization.
  • Significance: Fascism activates public passion; traditional authoritarianism prefers passive obedience.
• Concept: Abandonment of free institutions.
  • Significance: Fascism is a crisis of an existing or attempted mass democracy, not merely the persistence of old tyranny.
• Concept: Redemptive violence.
  • Significance: Violence is presented as cleansing, regenerative, and exempt from ordinary legal or moral limits.
• Concept: Internal cleansing and external expansion.
  • Significance: The purified community and aggressive destiny connect domestic exclusion to war.
• Concept: Partial theory.
  • Significance: Class, psychology, culture, totalitarian control, and modernization each illuminate one dimension but cannot stand alone.

Essential Evidence and Examples

• Business generally preferred conservative authoritarians before fascist accession but accommodated and often profited after fascists entered power.
• Nazi recruitment through clubs and organized constituencies contradicts a simple atomized-mass origin theory.
• Fascist membership shifted across stages, undermining any fixed single-class explanation.
• Nazi–Stalinist similarities in coercive tools do not erase differences in social coalition, institutional structure, and racial exterminatory aims.
• Franco and Salazar suppressed or domesticated fascist militants while preserving traditional intermediary institutions.
• Paxton’s final definition unites passions, party, elites, legal abandonment, violence, cleansing, and expansion.

Chapter Conclusion and Significance

No single cause or trait captures fascism. Paxton’s definition works because it nests recognizable passions inside a political process: mass nationalist mobilization, alliance with traditional elites, destruction of democratic restraint, and violent projects of purification and expansion. The concept remains narrow enough to distinguish military and authoritarian rule but flexible enough to recognize national variation.

The final warning is also a statement of agency. Fascism’s progress is not automatic. Crisis matters, but elites, institutions, and citizens choose whether to enforce equal law, tolerate selective violence, cooperate with extremists, or surrender free institutions. Understanding the past improves the chance of recognizing the consequential choices before the movement reaches power.

Questions for Reflection

1. Does Paxton’s final definition successfully integrate ideas, institutions, and process, or does one element still dominate?
2. Which boundary—tyranny, military dictatorship, authoritarianism, or totalitarianism—is most important for preventing conceptual overreach?
3. Can the requirement of external expansion be retained in a definition meant to identify twenty-first-century functional equivalents?

Bibliographical Essay: Research Map

Attachment (file not included in this release)

Paxton’s bibliographical essay is selective rather than exhaustive and reflects scholarship available through the book’s 2004 publication. Its greatest value is as a map of interpretive disputes and research traditions.

Starting Points Identified by Paxton

• General comparative history: Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945.
• Definitions and generic theory: Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism; Kevin Passmore, Fascism; Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History.
• Nazism and documentary evidence: Anthony J. Nicholls, Weimar and the Rise of Hitler; Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, Nazism 1919–45: A Documentary Reader.
• Italian Fascism: Alexander De Grand, Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Development; R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini.
• Hitler and society: Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris and Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis.
• Authoritarian and totalitarian boundaries: Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes; Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy.
• Comparative movements and social roots: Stein U. Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, and Jan P. Myklebust, eds., Who Were the Fascists?

How to Use the Essay

1. Start with a broad comparative work to locate the national case.
2. Read the interpretive literature to identify the live causal dispute.
3. Move to local institutional histories, membership studies, business archives, police records, and public-opinion evidence.
4. Separate evidence about movement creation from evidence about accession, governance, or radicalization.
5. Supplement Paxton’s list with post-2004 scholarship before treating it as a current bibliography.

Whole-Book Synthesis

Paxton’s Strongest Contributions

• He relocates fascism from doctrine alone to behavior in institutional context.
• He explains why most fascist movements fail and why a few become consequential.
• He makes conservative alliance and state complicity central without reducing fascism to a capitalist puppet.
• He separates appointment from the later internal seizure of power.
• He replaces the monolithic regime with a dynamic struggle among leader, party, state, and civil society.
• He integrates leader intention with initiative from below in the concept of cumulative radicalization.
• He supplies boundaries that distinguish fascism from tyranny, military rule, and authoritarianism.

Productive Tensions and Limits

• The five stages derive primarily from Italy and Germany; unusual paths can produce functional resemblance without matching the sequence.
• A behavioral method can understate the independent causal force of coherent ideological commitments, especially racial worldviews.
• The final definition includes external expansion, which may complicate application to movements pursuing internal purification without territorial war.
• The contemporary survey is historically bounded by a 2004 publication horizon and should not be used as a current political classification.
• The concept of conservative alliance is powerful, but the balance between elite initiative and genuine mass demand varies by case.

One-Sentence Retention Formula

Fascism becomes politically decisive when a mass nationalist movement turns perceived collective decline into purification and redemptive violence, gains conservative and institutional allies, abandons equal law, and uses power to mobilize society toward internal cleansing and external force.

Preserved Earlier Working Synthesis — LonerBox-Derived

Provenance and status

The material below is preserved from the earlier version of this note. It was derived from LonerBox’s public Paxton notes, not from a complete reading of the book. The full chapter notes above supersede it for source fidelity, exact structure, and interpretation.

Robert Paxton’s process-centered account complements definitions based on a fixed list of beliefs or symbols.

Fascism as Political Behavior

Paxton treats fascism less as a logically consistent doctrine than as a form of political behavior that changes as a movement seeks followers, allies, office, and unconstrained power. Programs can be contradictory because mobilization and coalition are often more important than theoretical consistency.

This helps explain why a movement may attack elites while cooperating with established elites, promise social revolution while preserving property, or shift economic positions without abandoning its authoritarian and exclusionary trajectory.

Mobilizing Passions

Recurring fascist appeals include:

• a community portrayed as humiliated, declining, or victimized;
• national rebirth through unity, energy, purity, and sacrifice;
• the primacy of the group over universal or individual rights;
• fear that decadence, minorities, outsiders, or the left are dissolving the nation;
• a leader or militant vanguard liberated from ordinary legal restraints;
• violence presented as cleansing, defensive, redemptive, or necessary.

These are not a checklist where one item proves fascism. They become diagnostic when they organize a mass movement, justify abandonment of democratic restraint, and enable exclusionary or expansionist power.

The Movement’s Path to Power

Paxton’s full model distinguishes stages from intellectual creation through movement-building, acquisition of power, exercise of power, and eventual radicalization or entropy. The practical lesson is that fascism is not inevitable merely because fascist ideas exist.

The Conservative Alliance

One of Paxton’s most important claims is that fascist movements generally do not seize power alone. Traditional conservatives, business interests, military figures, or state officials may cooperate because they fear socialism, disorder, parliamentary paralysis, or national decline and believe they can control the radicals.

The alliance is uneasy: fascists need institutional access and legitimacy, while conservatives seek mass energy and coercive force. Once democratic restraints are dismantled, the partners may discover that the movement cannot be safely contained.

Violence as Constructed Necessity

Fascist violence is commonly narrated as reaction rather than aggression. Militants describe the nation as already under attack and present extraordinary force as self-defense. Street conflict can then serve simultaneously as evidence of chaos, a method of weakening opponents, and a demonstration that only the movement can restore order.

This is especially attractive to law-and-order constituencies when violence against the left or a stigmatized minority is treated as regrettable but necessary.

Why Fascism Sometimes Fails

Fascist movements are less likely to break through where institutions retain legitimacy, conservative parties can govern without radical allies, political competition remains functional, and crises do not convince powerful actors that ordinary rules are intolerable.

That means diagnosis should examine institutions and coalitions, not only rhetoric. A society can contain ugly ideas without a viable fascist path to power; conversely, elite collaboration and democratic breakdown can make a previously marginal movement dangerous quickly.

Comparison with Existing Notes

• How to Make a Fascist explains the cultural and intellectual ingredients: war, modernity, myth, violence, racial thinking, syndicalism, and nationalist rebirth.
• Fascism compares scholarly definitions and historical tenets.
• This note supplies the missing process: how movements move from ideas to organized power.

Source Trail

• LonerBox, “Anatomy of Fascism notes”
• Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism — the supplied PDF is the authoritative source for the full chapter notes above.