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The Longue Durée of the Far-Right: An Introduction

Richard Saull

Alexander Anievas

Neil Davidson

Adam Fabry

(Referencing information: Richard Saull, Alexander Anievas, Neil Davidson, and Adam Fabry, ‘The Longue

Durée of the Far-Right: An Introduction’, in Richard Saull, Alexander Anievas, Neil Davidson, and Adam

Fabry (eds.) The Longue Durée of the Far-Right: An International Historical Sociology (London: Routledge,

2015), 1-20).

The re-emergence of far-right parties and social movements across the world in recent years,

particularly in Europe, has been widely discussed in the press and the academy.1 The

influence of these parties and movements has been uneven.2 Nevertheless, their general

appearance across time and space suggests that the current era is comparable to the earlier

historical conjunctures of far-right mobilization in the late nineteenth century and inter-war

periods. The varied forms of the far-right have combined with their contrasting ideological

dimensions, which has made the taxonomy of the far-right all the more perplexing. In

particular, the contemporary far-right is divided in two respects: on the one hand between a

‘post-fascist’ rhetorical commitment to liberal democracy and an authoritarian and

demagogic populism; on the other hand, between a neo-fascist commitment to a statist and

protectionist model of capitalism and many of the policy formulas usually associated with

neo-liberalism.

The flurry of scholarly writing that has emerged in response to these political

developments has been dominated by work in comparative politics, which has tended to focus

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on ideological taxonomies, comparative electoral performances, and the ability of far-right

parties to mobilise popular opposition to immigration, European integration, economic

restructuring and globalization.3 Much of this literature has advanced the study of the far-

right as a distinct contemporary strand of politics within mature capitalist democracies,

particularly through its dissection and clarification of the different national variations. It has

also provided explanations for how and why these parties have come to exercise a significant

influence on the conduct of political debate and public policy formation across a number of

European states.

However, the dominance of the comparative methodology, with its positivist and

empiricist mode of enquiry grounded in a methodological nationalism, has also come at the

cost of neglecting some important aspects of the far-right that this volume seeks to address.

First, comparative analyses, along with much of the wider discussion of the far-right across

most of the academic literature, have tended to explain the far-right through a rather restricted

prism of historical development. Through its focus on the ‘return’ of the far-right, existing

studies note the specificities of the contemporary era – the socio-economic context generated

by neoliberalism and the political one framed by the fracturing and realignment of the left

with the end of the Cold War – but largely fail to recognize and discuss the longer-term set of

historical structures and processes out of which it has re-emerged. In consequence, much of

the extant literature struggles to explain why the contemporary far-right has come to replicate

its historical predecessors whilst also remaining significantly different from them.

Assessing the particular manifestation of a political current involves recognizing and

explaining how and why the ideas and positions associated with such currents evolve over

time and how such changes are the products of history: the reshaping of the socio-economic,

political and cultural contexts from which such ideas flourish or disappear. As we have

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already noted, comparative analyses do not ignore history, but historical references tend to

take the form of comparisons between the ideology, social basis and political methodology of

the contemporary far-right and parties and movements of the inter-war fascist era. The

problem is that inter-war fascism ends up being regarded as the ultimate template of a generic

far-right, which in turn serves to obscure those specificities of the far-right as a political

movement that are not reducible to ‘para-militarism’ or any of the other unique

characteristics of historical fascism. The result is not only that the contemporary far-right is

set up to fall short of fascism, thus appearing to question its ‘far-right’ qualities, but also that

the longer-term historical and broader political membership of the far-right are overlooked.

That subsequent forms and modalities of far-right ideologies and politics may differ from

their earlier manifestations during the inter-war period may in fact be explained by the

antecedent socio-historical conditions from which the former emerged. That contemporary

manifestations of the far-right might be considered ‘deviant’ examples of some

undifferentiated template derived from the specificities of the inter-war period simply serves

to demonstrate the inherent limitations of such a historically static comparative perspective:

one obfuscating the spatio-temporally variegated and interactive patterns of socio-historical

development.

To properly understand and explain the far-right, then, we require a methodological

approach and a theoretical framework that can both recognize and account for the historical

evolution of ideas attached to political groupings as they develop through historical time and

space. Comparative analyses do not do this. The upshot is that the contemporary far-right is,

effectively, isolated or detached from history, such that the enduring structural connections

between politics and economics and the far-right are obscured and the evolving character of

the far-right not properly explained. To take only the most obvious example: the type of

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statism characteristic of fascist regimes during the inter-war years is unlikely to be

reproduced if any of the current far-right movements – including their fascist contingents –

were to take power under contemporary neoliberal conditions. There are, in other words,

structural aspects of the capitalist system at any time which are likely to be adopted by far-

right parties: nationalism is a defining characteristic of the far-right, but nationalization is not.

The entry-point of this volume, then, is that it offers a distinct and, we believe,

original perspective on the far-right as a current of modern politics. It provides both a

different understanding of generic far-right politics and a contextualized understanding of the

significance of more recent manifestations, particularly within the advanced capitalist

societies in Europe and the United States that is the geographical focus of this volume. In

their different ways the essays collected in this volume do this through drawing on three

distinct methodological and theoretical positions which the rest of this introduction will tease

out in a little more depth: (i) a longue durée historical perspective; (ii) an engagement with

critical and historical sociological positions, especially Marxist ones, to explain the far-right;

and (iii) an ontology of the far-right that emphasizes the international, in all its varied

dimensions, as constitutive of far-right politics. However, before we outline the

methodological and theoretical framework that informs this volume we will first move to

discuss who or what we are referring to with regard to the ‘far-right’.

What is the Far-Right?

As indicated above, the scholarly discussion of ‘who’ or ‘what’ constitutes the far-right has

come to dominate much of the recent literature on the far-right (see especially, Caiani, 2012;

Eatwell, 2004; Hainsworth, 2008; Ignazi, 2006; Mudde, 2007; Prowe, 2004; Wodak et al,

2013 ). Much of this material is associated with a wider history of ideas literature that has

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sought to identify an ‘objective’ definition of fascism (Eatwell, 1996, 2009). Indeed, much of

the discussion as to who or what is the far-right concerns the degree to which the

contemporary far-right can be considered ‘post-fascist’ (Griffin, 2000; Ignazi, 1997). Our

concern in this volume is less with arriving at some kind of ‘ideational objectivity’ derived

from a study of the rhetoric and programmatic announcements of the dramatic personae of

the far-right and more a focus on the enduring social and political positions and articulations

of a range of movements, parties and political currents that are not all obviously comparable

to fascism. Consequently, the politics of the far-right extends beyond the fascist experience

with respect to two other currents: those movements and ideological currents that co-existed

with fascism during the inter-war era and that shared its illiberalism, anti-cosmopolitanism,

extreme nationalism and visceral hostility to communism; and those social and political

movements that pre-dated fascism in the late nineteenth century and who were also

distinguished by their ‘anti-capitalist’ populism, hostility to the growth of a politicized

working class and demands for an authoritarian model of politics embodied in an all-

powerful charismatic figurehead.

From this point of view it is important to question the assumption that pervades much

of the writing on the far-right that fascism represents a ‘pure’ or, to paraphrase Lenin on

imperialism, the ‘highest stage’ of the far-right. Given the historical significance and

notoriety of fascism there are good reasons why the fascist experience and its ideational

attributes have come to determine the substantive meaning of the far-right as a generic form

of politics. We are not questioning the significance of fascism nor suggesting that fascist

tendencies have been erased from the politics of mature capitalist democracies. Rather, we

are insisting on the need to recognize the wider complexion of the far-right and the specific

and unique dimensions of the fascist era. Thus, following Michael Mann (2004: 1-30) we can

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see fascism as being defined by a distinct kind of racialized para-militarism which was a

product of the generic militarism that pervaded the wider reproduction of capitalist-

imperialist states of the time, combined with the conjunctural properties of the hyper-

militarized politics of the era of the Great War and its aftermath, which permeated the wider

cultural fabric of the period. What also distinguished the politics of this period, and which

infused the politics of fascism as a ‘revolutionary’ current, was the deep-seated fear, in some

cases amounting to paranoia, across European ruling classes and political elites concerning

communist revolutionary movements inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.

This has to be further considered alongside the depth and intensity of the Great Depression of

the 1930s and the ruling class offensives taken to ameliorate its most socially explosive

effects. Thus, whilst these elements can be seen as reflective of a generic far-right, they exist

both before fascism, in the militarist populism and enmity towards the burgeoning working

class movements of the late nineteenth century, and in its current manifestation with the

contemporary far-right’s reification of a nationalist past defined by militarist glory and an

opposition to the social democratic victories of the post-war European working classes. The

uniqueness of the fascist form of far-right, then, derives from the particular constellations of

capitalist development, geopolitics and revolution that defined the inter-war era.

The key point we want to emphasize here is that any definition of the far-right needs

to visualize it as both an ideology and socio-political movement whereby the rhetoric and

textual statements of the far-right must be be connected to the actual behaviour of such

movements and their respective material impact on states and societies (Mann 2004).

Consequently, the search for any ‘ideal type’ or the determination to identify a core

‘objective’ definition of the far-right – or, indeed, fascism – based on an ideational account

(Eatwell, 1996; Griffin, 1993) alone will likely overlook the socio-economic and political

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substance of such movements and the evolving structural contexts within which they operate.

How might we then define the far-right?

The definitional attributes of the far-right relate to enduring political and ideological

qualities as well as those social layers produced by capitalist development most drawn to the

far-right style of politics. The key appeal is to ‘the people’ understood as a racially-defined

demos, premised on a gendered social hierarchy and obscuring the class cleavages associated

with capitalist development. This is significant as it reflects an acceptance, indeed, an

embrace of the possibilities of mass-democracy and particularly through the way in which

this political form enables a censoring of elites, whether traditional, liberal-cosmopolitan or

otherwise.4 Further, in appealing to a people through language and symbols that both reify

and fetishize particular qualities and attributes associated with the cultural identity of ‘the

people’, the far-right not only articulates those values and institutions that it sees as key to the

identity of a people (e.g. race/ethnicity, culture rooted in fixed narratives and symbols,

history, masculinity, etc), but also seeks to erase and obscure those other qualities – notably

the socio-economic – that are, arguably, central to the material and lived reality of concrete

individuals within capitalist societies.

At a very basic level, then, the ideological values, social basis and political objectives

of the far-right have and continue to overlap – to varying degrees – with those of the

traditional or conservative right. Thus, the far right tends to be committed to preserving what

they regard as the essential and indigenous social, ethnic, moral and cultural bases of society

in the face of change. Like traditional conservative forces, the far-right also opposes the

advances of (cosmopolitan) liberalism and the wider left in these domains, which are

perceived as undermining and corrupting what are conceived of as ‘natural’ and organic

values and institutions. There is, then, with conservatism, a shared sense of an idealisation of

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the past, a sense of cultural pessimism (Mudde, 2000: 11) and an importance attached to what

are viewed as ‘natural’ social hierarchies (Caplan, 1979; De Hart, 1991).

What we might regard as the conservative-aligned dimensions of the far-right contrast

with its unique political characteristics that distinguish it as a method of politics. The

distinction is that whereas conservatism tends to be concerned with preserving existing

political institutions, the far right has a more ‘radical’ orientation evidenced in a commitment

to a more fundamental restructuring of state-society relations at the domestic and

international levels (Schmitt, 2006). Moreover, what continues to characterize the far-right, in

ways distinguishing it from more ‘mainstream’ variants of traditional conservatism, is its’

attachment to a ‘politics as conspiracy’; a conspiracy of elites detached from indigenous-

nativist ideological moorings and/or ‘corrupted’ by internationalist and cosmopolitan

ideological frameworks through whose machinations the ‘people’ are deprived of their true

nationalist political calling. Implicit within this conspiratorial view is the need to reconstitute

political society at quite a radical level thus removing ‘foreign’ – read liberal-cosmopolitan –

institutional, legal and ideological influences over society. This is the political project of the

contemporary far-right – to varying degrees – and which provides it with a significant

semblance of continuity with its fascist predecessor.

In many respects, then, and as a number of the following chapters will emphasize, the

politics of the far-right – who it is, the social constituencies from which it tends to draw its

support, and the ideological devices it uses – are intimately connected to the type of society,

politics and conflicts and insecurities bequeathed by capitalist development. It is also

inextricably tied to the myriad ways by which capitalism comes to reconstitute the meaning,

terrain, and dynamics of the political. It is through the distinct transformations unleashed by

capitalism that the identities of individuals as connected to ‘a people’ are articulated as they

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are both confronted and shaped by the processes of capitalist development. It is through these

processes that the idea of the nation is developed and also the way in which the particular

forms of identity, nationalism, xenophobia, racism and support for traditional social and

cultural hierarchies are expressed. These issues and the precise ideational form that they take

are not static as the defining quality of capitalist society is its evolving and contradictory

dynamics. As such, the ways in which they have been communicated by the far-right, as well

as their actual social and political substance, has also substantially varied. Thus, the issue of

racism was primarily articulated via a policy of imperialism, which involved a politics of

conquest and extermination during the era of the far-right covering the period 1870-1945

(that is, from the origins of the far-right to the fascist experience). By contrast, in the more

contemporary guises of the far-right, racism has come to be expressed in quite a different

manner, reflecting in part the different realization of racial/ethnic relations within European

states in a post-colonial world order. These tend to entail a politics of exclusion and

separation targeted at the presence of ethnic minorities within the historical metropole and the

need to ‘defend European culture’ from ‘alien cultural subversion and degeneration’. The

political instrumentalization of Islamophobia as a central identity-reinforcing component of

far-right discourses has thus become much more prevalent

Yet, whilst the dislocations and ruptures associated with capitalism have been integral

to the identity of the far-right, along with the social constituencies it has come to rely on and

the type of changes it has tried to achieve, what has come to define the far-right is a

generalized ambivalence towards the social logic of capitalism. The paradox, indeed,

perversity, of a far-right politics, then, is that whilst its emergence, evolution – and the

greatest temporal opportunities for its political advance – have been fundamentally shaped by

the convulsions of capitalism, it has articulated a politics that explicitly denies the causality

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of capitalism and/or seeks resolution through a reconstitution of society based on a racialized

politics and gender hierarchy entirely compatible with capitalist property relations. In terms

of the political strategy for mobilizing ‘the people’ this ambivalence has often been

‘resolved’ through anti-Semitism. Here, the pathologies of capitalist development are

embodied in the figure of the Jew who combines dual aspects of modernity: not only

money/finance capital (rather than organic ‘productive’ capital) and cosmopolitan or

globalized capital (‘dis-embodied and rootless circulation’), but also the Jew as representative

of a revolutionary socialism which would destroy the organic community through an

emphasis on class. As is clear, these are not questions of political economy but ones of

cultural and racial identity and whilst the contemporary far-right – with notable exceptions,

such as the Hungarian Jobbik Party – has tended to avoid the kind of explicit anti-Semitism

of the pre-1945 era, the change in racial signifier has not altered the fundamental orientation

towards a nationalist and separatist orientation.

The Historical Sociology of the Longue Durée

As already mentioned, academic writing on the far-right has tended to focus on its

expressions within particular national locales and specific temporal moments. We will

discuss the significance of the former in the following section but our concern here is the

problematic historical treatment of the far-right as a long-term and structural political-

ideological current generated within specific international socio-economic structures and

processes. The issue, then, is the need to overcome the existing conceptualizations of the far-

right that treats it in historically discrete ways as self-enclosed phenomena emerging from

temporally-specific factors, disconnected both from earlier historical manifestations and the

longer-term maturing of processes and contradictions that only appear at particular moments.

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This is what a longue durée approach offers. The term itself, at least within

historiography, is associated with the French Annales school and, most famously, in the work

of Fernand Braudel (1980). In the work of Braudel and other writers, the concern was to

emphasise the analytical primacy of long-term structural trends over momentary events and

contingencies in accounting for the movement of history in a rather determinist fashion. The

chapters collected here have a slightly different understanding and application of longue

durée analysis. To be clear, we are not endorsing a structuralist account of the evolution of

the far-right in the style of Braudel. If anything, the chapters here are much closer to the kind

of historiography of Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and his emphasis on the analytical importance of

specific historical conjunctures of crisis from which longer-term historical trends and

tendencies can be sourced and which lay the foundations and parameters for subsequent

historical developments, but where contingencies of social agency are also recognized.

What we mean by a longue durée methodological perspective is to adopt a position

that treats the far-right as a product of historically specific social and political determinations

rooted in a set of structural arrangements and processes that crystallized in the mid to late

nineteenth century and which are connected to a particular kind of social order. Thus, with

the emergence of the far-right in the nineteenth century, politics was transformed and that

change was fundamentally premised on the breakdown of the defining social pillar of the

ancien regime, the landlord/peasant nexus, in a spatially and temporally uneven fashion. As

we shall see below, the process of uneven and combined development, the interpenetration of

the archaic and the modern in the process of capitalist development, is central in the historical

sociology of the longue durée, since the changes it unleashed and the reconfiguration of

social order that resulted provided the necessary structural framing from which the far-right

would emerge (Trotsky, 1977).

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To discuss the far-right (or any other form of political agency) requires an analytical

sensibility able to both recognize and explain the origins of the phenomenon under purview,

the forces and processes that have shaped its evolution, as well as teasing out the

particularities and novelties of its contemporary appearances. As we have emphasized, this is

not to reduce the sense of the longue durée of the far-right to socio-economic determinism. It

is clear that the far-right has evolved and changed since the nineteenth century, and that the

reasons for and consequences of those changes cannot be read-off from the structural logics

that produced the initial spaces and moments of the far-right. Yet, within this structurally

framed, but agency conditioned logic of development, how the far-right appears at any one

particular historical moment (the 1890s, the 1940s, or the 1990s) is a product of the

cumulative socio-historical developments that have both preceded it and provided the

possibilities for its success. In this respect, the two different moments of the far-right – before

and after fascism – are exemplary.

In the case of the former, the emergence and early development of the far-right were

imbued with the ideological influences and social agency of the vestiges of the ancien régime

ruling class and state machineries. These cumulative aggregates help to explain the particular

manifestation of the far-right at this time, its sources and methods of social and political

mobilization and its possibilities of success. Fascism was to emerge from this pre-existing

far-right. In the case of the contemporary phenomenon of ‘post-fascism’, the defeat and

associated infamy of inter-war fascism combined with the structural changes in the social

order and in the connections between geopolitics and socio-economic reproduction set the

parameters of the subsequent far-right.

The central point here is the need to ensure that recognition of the contemporary far-

right needs to be situated and explained in relation to its long-maturing past and the

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associated structures and processes associated with historical development. Furthermore, it

requires us to draw particular attention to those moments and conjunctures where the far-right

takes on a much more central role within the social and political fabric of states. Thus, whilst

those particular moments suggests the need to examine the particularities of the moment (e.g.

what are the unique properties of this particular conjuncture), we can only understand and

account for these moments by connecting them to longer-term structural processes and

dynamics through which crisis-tendencies are generated and incubated within deeper social

and political logics that are not always immediately visible. It is also the case that many,

though not all, of these tendencies are recurring and thus structural and organic to the socio-

economic order and, as such, require the methodology of a longue durée analysis to

adequately explain why both the far-right persists, reproduces itself and is able, at particular

moments and in particular contexts, to ‘occupy’ the political terrain. Implicit, then, within the

longue durée perspective that the contributions to this volume draw upon is a sense that the

far-right is a pathology of capitalism and liberal democracy.

This requires a perspective capable of capturing the mediated articulation of general

structural tendencies of an entire epoch with the particularities of a specific conjuncture

differentiating it as a distinct, but in no sense autonomous temporality. The real trick then is

in formulating a methodological perspective that avoids the dual dilemmas of a historically

under-specified causality or a radically contingent historicism: either subsuming the

conjunctural politics of the far-right under unmediated ‘abstract’ sociological laws or treating

them as part of a hermetically-sealed temporality constituted by entirely contingently-

determined, self-contained causes. Such a perspective has, in other words, to interweave the

interaction of structural and conjunctural factors into a single, unified analytical optic.

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Here, it is worth noting the particular advantages of the kind of longue durée analyses

offered by the historical materialist-informed approaches pursued, in one form or another, in

the following chapters. For while the concept of the conjuncture is in no way unique to

historical materialism, such a theoretical orientation does offer a distinctive method for

pursuing conjunctural explanations. This relates to the analytical hierarchy of causality or

‘hierarchy of conditions of possibility’ (Sayer, 1979: 110) embedded within historical

materialist conceptualizations of social structures as historically-specific ‘modes of

production’. The mode of production is the orientating theoretical abstraction for any

historical materialist analysis, delimiting different social systems and historical epochs from

one another. Of course, the concept has not been without its many theoretical confusions and

controversies, particularly in regards to the category’s employment in time and space. But,

the key point necessary for our discussion here is that the causal weight attributed to the

mode of production – defined in terms of a particular configuration of relations and forces of

production – in no way obfuscates the specificities of the ‘changing forms and contingent

interactions of the historical process’. Rather, it seeks to root these forms and interactions

within firm theoretic propositions about the general characteristics of modern social

development as a whole (Rosenberg, 2005: 30). These propositions relate to the organic

tendencies characterizing capitalist development in general, including, above all: its ceaseless

drive to competitive accumulation; revolutionary technological dynamism; spatial

expansiveness; capital/labor antagonisms, and; the recurrent nature of socio-economic crises.

The different forms these tendencies will take are nonetheless entirely ‘contingent’ upon the

continually evolving structures of capitalism as a concrete social formation and lived reality,

taking a variety of different forms within specific temporalities and locales. Thus, the sharp

counter-posing of the abstract-theoretical and historical-empirical is necessarily false; the

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content of even the most general theoretical categories only hold meanings in their

historically-determinant concrete forms.

Such an analysis of the dialectical interaction between the ‘general’ and ‘particular’,

or the ‘structural’ and ‘conjunctural’, has been given renewed vigour by recent studies,

particularly within historical sociology and International Relations,. These have sought to

develop Trotsky’s theorization of the process of uneven and combined development into a

genuinely international historical sociology – that is, a historical sociological approach that

uniquely incorporates the international dimension of sociohistorical causality into its basic

theoretical premises.5 Indeed, the concept of uneven and combined development seems a

particularly apposite theoretical tool in capturing the multiplicity of determinations, both of a

general and particular nature, explaining the inherently multilinear and interconnected

character of all capitalist development from which the politics and ideologies of the far-right,

past and present, have emerged. Many of those studies drawing on the concept have thereby

demonstrated the unique ability of historical materialist theories combining a longue durée

perspective with detailed conjunctural analysis, without subsuming the specificities of the

latter to the former (see, in particular, Davidson 2006; Davidson 2009; Matin 2007; Allinson

and Anievas 2010; Rosenberg 2010; Fabry 2011; Green 2012; Anievas 2013; Saull 2013).

The specific utility of uneven and combined development for our purposes is

contained in a sentence from the first detailed exposition of Trotsky’s argument in The

History of the Russian Revolution, ‘[t]he [backward] nation...not infrequently debases the

achievements borrowed from outside in the process of adapting them to its own more primitive

culture’ (1977: 27). Trotsky is thinking here of the way in which Russian Tsarist autocracy

adopted some of the most advanced technologies and forms of industrial organization in order to

better defend the feudal-absolutist state from international military competition. But he also

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noted elsewhere that the obverse was also true: that the countries which were most advanced in

capitalist terms – including the most advanced of all, the USA – were also subject to uneven and

combined development, but from, so to speak, the opposite end, where ‘the most advanced

industrial development co-existed and interacted with the most backward – for all classes –

ideology’ (Trotsky, 1972: 117). In a striking passage in an essay of 1933 considering the

nature of National Socialism, Trotsky commented on their persistence, not only in Nazi

Germany but generally in the developed world:

Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives

alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million

people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms.

The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation

of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous

mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What

inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!

(Trotsky, 1975: 413).

In a general sense the far–right deploys these archaic, pre-scientific ideological elements

to mobilize a popular base. There are parallels here with the notion of ‘non-synchronism’

developed at roughly the same historical moment by a very different Marxist thinker, Ernest

Bloch, by which he meant the ‘unsurmounted remnants of older economic being and

consciousness’. According to Bloch, these remnants, which he saw embodied in fascism,

were

not dangerous to capitalism’: ‘on the contrary, capital uses that which is

nonsynchronously contrary, if not indeed disparate, as a distraction from its own

strictly present-day contradictions: it uses the antagonism of a still living past as a

means of separation and struggle against the future that is dialectically giving

birth to itself in the capitalist antagonisms (1977: 29, 32).

There are difficulties in Bloch’s conception, as there are with Trotsky’s, not least in the

implication that fascism, or the far-right more generally, is necessarily functional for

capitalism. Davidson discusses some of the difficulties with this assumption in his chapter,

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but handled carefully, the notions of uneven and combined development and non-

synchronism are useful theoretical tools for investigating our subject.

Another theoretical point of departure mobilized by some of the contributors of the

volume is the thought of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and, in particular, his concepts

of hegemony and passive revolution. As Nicola Short’s chapter argues, Gramsci’s writings on

Italian fascism during the interwar years, which conceived of the fascist phenomenon as a

‘passive revolution’ – representing here a particular form of ‘revolution from above’ in which

capitalist social relations were fundamentally modified and further expanded, thereby

resulting in a kind of dialectic of ‘revolution-restoration’6 – was organically connected to the

‘praxeological challenge’ of uneven development in all its national and international

dimensions. Hence, like Trotsky, Gramsci took his methodological and ontological point of

departure not from the nation-state conceived as a spatio-temporal ‘freeze frame’ (as

represented by the comparative politics approaches discussed above), but rather from

capitalism in its internationally constituted world-historical development. In this sense, then,

one might consider Gramsci’s ‘passive revolution’ concept as complementary to – if not

organically emergent from – Trotsky’s notion of uneven and combined development as it

directs our attention to the differential nature of ruling class ontologies which molecularly

absorb antitethical class challenges from both below and without (as exemplified by the

Bolshevik Revolution during the interwar years) in ways comprised by and constitutive of the

international.7

Here, the question of hegemony – conceived by Gramsci as a dialectical fusion of

consent and coercion, ideological legitimacy and political domination – comes to bare. For

the historical conditions giving rise to strong far-right movements are most often those in

which the hegemony of the extant ruling order comes under duress – a crisis in which, as

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Gramsci put it, ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’. This is precisely the situation

Gramsci found himself in during the interwar years marked by the fascist and Nazi seizures

of state power, one which, in some ways, finds parallels in both the late 19th

century during

the ‘Great Depression’ of 1873-1896 and the current conjuncture (see Saull’s chapter).

Indeed, turning to the canonical period of fascism, the interwar years, the generalized crisis of

capitalism represented by the First World War, Bolshevik Revolution, and Great Depression

of 1929, presented the propitious conditions for the emergence of the far-right as both a

challenge and possible solution to reconsolidating capital’s political-ideological hegemony

(see the chapters by Worth and Shields on the contemporary neoliberal epoch). This was, in

fact, explicitly recognized, for example, within German ruling class circles on the eve of the

Nazi Machtergreifung. In the bi-weekly private newsletter, Deutschen Führerbriefe, which

circulated to leading echelons of the German ruling class and their political representatives,

including Cabinet members, high-ranking officials of the Reichswehr and the immediate

circle around Hindenburg, an article of September 1932 titled ‘The Social Reconsolidation of

Capitalism’ argued for the necessary inclusion of the Nazis in any future government to

ensure its popular legitimacy. As the article put it:

The problem of consolidating a bourgeois regime in post-war Germany is in

general determined by the fact that the leading group—namely the bourgeoisie

operating the economy—has become too narrow to account for its own rule. For

this hegemony it needs…to bind itself to a layer that are not part of it socially but

which provide the essential service of anchoring its hegemony within the people,

thereby becom[ing] the actual or final support of that hegemony (quoted in Neebe

1981, 160).

What was at stake in Germany’s turn to authoritarianism, and later fascism, was nothing less

than the social reconstitution of the political rule of capital on new hegemonic foundations.

The Nazi far-right offered such a foundation. The ruling classes could no longer rule for

themselves as internecine rivalries and class challenges from below and without opened the

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door to their relinquishing the reigns of governing: such were the historical material

conditions that gave rise to the Nazi catastrophe and, under similar circumstances, Fascist-

rule in Italy. Whether the current conjuncture offers similar conditions is an open question

which many of the contributors of this volume take up.

Yet the significance of far-right politics and movements on the particular articulations

of hegemonic rule in its domestic and international dimensions is not limited to their direct

occupation of state power. Rather, their effects can be much more subtle as demonstrated by

Mark Rupert’s chapter detailing the many ways by which the ideological tropes and cultural

influence of the American far-right have fundamentally shaped the contours of US hegemony

at home and abroad by ‘policing dissent’, helping to define the limits of acceptable political

discourse. In these ways we can see the politics and ideology of the far-right as integral to the

construction of hegemony and thus constituting a not insignificant part of the underlying

American power and structures of global hierarchy. Here, as elsewhere in the collection, we

see the decisive importance of the interaction of the domestic and international in relation to

the politics of the far-right.

The International as Constitutive of the Far-Right

This brings us to the final aspect of the research framework that informs the contributions to

this volume, the ontological re-orientation towards the ‘international’ as constitutive of the

far-right that combines with the historical sociological perspectives that we have just

discussed. Thus, we move to the ‘international’ mode of causality often missing from

conventional analyses of the far-right. The ontology of the far-right, meaning the spatial

context where scholars have sought to explain it – notably in the comparative politics

literature – has been defined by a methodological nationalism whereby theoretical arguments

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are derived from cross-national synchronous comparisons of different far-right movements.

Whilst international factors (such as immigration, membership of international institutions

and the broader consequences of neoliberal globalization in terms of employment and job

security, etc.) have been recognized as important in accounting for the far-right the tendency

is for most existing accounts to treat the ‘international’ as an ad-hoc theoretical addendum to

an overwhelmingly static set of nationally-constituted comparative cases. Consequently, the

analytically and politically significant international causality of the far-right, both structural

and contextual, is lost. Indeed, as suggested above with reference to an historical sociology of

the longue durée, it is possible to see the transformations in the character and constitution of

the international politics of the nineteenth century as also amounting to a reconfiguration of

the fabric and political imaginations of the ‘domestic’ politics of the epoch. There are two

ways in which we can see the international as constitutive of the far-right and thus

constituting the ontology of the far-right and the analytical requirement of an international

historical sociology.

The first is through the ways in which far-right movements, themselves, notably in

their rhetoric, propaganda and programmatic positions fixate on the international as the

‘spectre’ and source of fear, hostility and opportunity. The international, understood as those

ethnic/racial, ideological, geopolitical and cultural forces deemed ‘outside’, ‘separate’ or

‘inferior’ to the ‘people’, is the reference for the ills, fears and insecurities that the far-right

centres on. Thus, whilst the politics of the far-right is one that ‘racializes’ or ‘ethnicizes’ the

world it does this through projecting local and domestic problems onto the international

plane, thereby asserting and requiring a reconstitution of the domestic-international

relationship as the means to resolve the difficulties identified, be it through population

expulsion, territorial annexation, disengagement from international co-operation and/or what

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a contemporary writer has called ‘welfare nativism’ (Mudde, 2007: 119-37). Although all

political currents – to varying degrees – refer to the international within their propaganda and

programmes, it is the far-right that, arguably, focuses a unique kind of attention towards the

world outside the state-community in the sense that the forces and processes associated with

the international are regarded as innately and pathologically inimical to the interests of ‘the

people’ as articulated by the far-right. If this is accepted – and the rhetoric and programmes

of the far-right tend to demonstrate this orientation – then it is curious that most existing

treatments of the far-right do not adequately address the centrality of the international as

constitutive of its identity and orientation.

The second way in which the international can be regarded as constitutive of the

politics of the far-right is in the methodological sense of how we study this particular

phenomenon. As we have already suggested, existing accounts in comparative politics do not

recognize the international as of ontological significance for the study of the far-right and,

consequently, fail to recognize, let alone explain the bifurcated nature of states, which look

and act both inwards and outwards, and how the structure and workings of the international

system come to shape and condition the parameters and content of ‘domestic’ politics.

Simply put, any study of a far-right movement located within a particular national locale

needs to recognize and explain how the ‘domestic’ political spaces within which the far-right

operates provides both opportunities and openings based on how the international comes to

constitute the material and ideological fabric of domestic political life.

Further, this is not a static arrangement but, instead, an evolving and shifting one

based on the different ways – across time and space – in which states are connected to

international political and economic structures and, in particular, how far they may be seen as

benefiting or securing particular material and/or ideological advantages from the structure

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and constitution of the international system at any one time. Take the classic example of Nazi

Germany. From the longue durée perspective, the developmental ‘peculiarities’ often

associated with the so-called German Sonderweg explanation for the descent into Nazism

(Fischer, 2007; Wehler, 1985) was not, as this approach assumes, the result of Germany’s

lack of modernity, but rather its over-stimulation by modernity from both within and without.

This was a consequence of the particularly intensive character of Germany’s industrialization

and national-state formation processes, pressurized in time and space by the strategic

interaction of a multiplicity of unevenly developing societies (See Eley, 1983; Saull 2013). In

other words, the origins of Nazism must be situated within the broader dynamics of this

international conjuncture. For once this is recognized the so-called ‘peculiarities’ of German

development leading to Nazism might then be conceived as one developmental trajectory

among the many variegated patterns of uneven and combined development characteristic of

the conjuncture as a whole (cf. Anievas, 2014; Bauman, 1991).

Approaching the far-right from this ontological perspective offers a way of explaining

and theorizing those moments when the far-right has been ascendant across a range of

national locales because of the way in which the international conditions and comes to

constitute the interiors of states thus diluting, though not expunging, the singular differentia

specifica we find when comparing different states. This also relates to the state given that the

international, above all through imperialism, can provide significant material and ideological

resources for the reproduction of particular socio-economic and political orders conducive to

the far right.8 The key, then, to unlocking those conjunctural moments of the far-right – of its

relative quiescence and strength – is provided by an internationally-centred explanation of

these movements.

**************************************

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The remaining chapters in the volume proceed as follows. We begin with Richard Saull’s

chapter that focuses on the origins of the modern politics of the far-right. It argues that the

far-right emerged in the nineteenth century as a product of a unique kind of internationally-

framed social and political order defined by the increasing dominance of a capitalist market

economy as a basis of social order and the emergence of mass/democratic politics. The main

focus concerns developments during the second half of the nineteenth century emphasizing

the watershed of the 1848-9 revolutions through the way in which the working class emerged

as an independent revolutionary subject and how the (counter-revolutionary) outcomes of the

revolutions fostered the beginnings of far-right movements. Whilst the chapter frames the

origins of the far-right within the context of a geopolitically-directed international capitalist

order it argues that the kind of far-right currents that emerged in the mid-late nineteenth

century continue to be an enduring pathology of liberal politics. This is because the far-right

has been defined by a double ambivalence: on the one hand as a product of mass/democratic

politics – through the idea of ‘the people’ yet hostile to the liberal-representative institutions

of liberal democracy; on the other hand through its perverse ‘anti-capitalism’ – with its

fetishization of production and reification of finance and cosmopolitan capital.

Ishay Landa’s chapter takes issue with Liberal explanations of fascism founded on the

ambivalence of classical liberal responses to the rise of democracy and mass politics in the

nineteenth century. In arguing against the claim that fascism can be best understood as a

‘revolt of the masses’ he explains fascism – drawing on the writings of Marx and Engels – as

a ruling class response to class mobilizations from below. Landa focuses particular critical

attention on Alexis de Tocqueville highlighting that he was more than just an observer of

political events, but also a political participant in the turbulent events that defined the short-

lived French Second Republic. Corresponding with Saull’s chapter, Landa brings out both

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Tocqueville’s theoretical shortcomings and his problems at the level of liberal practice

through highlighting the role played by Tocqueville (and other Liberals) in the destruction of

the Second Republic and the establishment of the Bonapartist dictatorship; a political form

which many regard as proto-fascist.

In Sefika Kumral’s chapter, the success of fascist militarism after the World War I is

connected to the rising nationalism and militarism of both conservative and liberal political

currents as located within the broader context of the hegemonic crisis and transition of the

capitalist world system. With this longue durée perspective, Kumral argues that the

pendulum-like movement of mobilization for war and peace that characterized these periods

of hegemonic transition and reconsolidation provided an opportunity structure for classical

fascist parties (e.g. the Italian Fascist Party and German National Socialist Party) to take

advantage of. In doing so, these ‘mainstream’ political currents responding to the contexts of

war and peace and mapping onto the geopolitical dynamics of hegemonic transition – through

war – and reconsolidation – during the post-war peace – served to ‘normalize’ the social and

political positions of fascism.

Angelos-Stylianos Chryssogelos’s chapter examines the ways the far-right has

historically adapted to and instrumentalized changes in international geopolitical and

political-economic constellations to survive and remain relevant over the longue durée.

The far right is defined by its two constitutive and conflicting imperatives: an ‘extremity

imperative’ that arises from its self-understanding as a force of fundamental reaction; and

a ‘modernization imperative’ that arises from its need to adapt to evolving conditions and

to create out of this opposition relevant alternative visions of political rule. The far-right

has resolved – at various moments – the internal tension created by these two imperatives

by translating stakes of international competition and conflict into domestic politics in a

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radicalized form, and by engaging with contemporary international norms to update its

opposition to modernity. Chryssogelos substantiates his argument through an examination

of the Austrian far-right and how it has realized a significant capacity of political agency

to adapt to changes in international politics, e.g. by selectively embracing or opposing

aspects of modernisation and denationalisation of policy processes in the security and

economic fields.

Nicola Short’s chapter, ‘Passato e Presente? Gramsci’s Analysis of Fascism and the

Far Right,’ seeks to consider the contribution that Gramsci’s political theory can make to

understanding the politics of the far-right through an examination of his discussion of fascism

and its influence on other, often better-known, aspects of his political theory. Short highlights

that Gramsci’s analysis of fascism is grounded in attention to three elements and their

mutually constitutive relationships: (1) the international economic crisis of the early twentieth

century; (2) the historically-constituted class formations of European states in the context of

the uneven development of industrial capitalism, and; (3) the logics of political power,

organization and leadership that could succeed in such contexts. These elements span

Gramsci’s pre-prison and prison writings, and are condensed in the latter under the rubric of

‘passive revolution’, a concept that, for Short, illustrates Gramsci’s historically-dialectical

understanding of the relationship between capitalist uneven development, class and state.

Furthermore, Gramsci’s analysis of fascism can be used to illuminate the conditions of the

contemporary far-right, through its attention to the impact of the development of new

technologies of (financialized) accumulation on social relations, the political significance of

the ‘new’ petit bourgeoisie, and the ‘Caesarist’ logics of political power in times of crisis.

Neil Davidson’s chapter, ‘The Far-Right and “the Needs of Capital”’

addresses a long-standing debate over the relationship between the socio-economic

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reproductive needs of capital and the politics of far-right mobilizations. He argues that far-

right politics are only coincidentally, and in certain circumstances, supportive of capital

accumulation. Drawing on the experience of Nazi Germany Davidson demonstrates that

many aspects of the Hitler regime were either irrelevant or detrimental to German capitalism,

and ultimately undermined it. However, Davidson suggests that this does not mean that there

is no connection between capitalism and far-right political currents but, instead, that the

connection lies in the way in which capitalist development generates far-right ideological

positions, rather than because the latter are necessarily functional for capital. The chapter

concludes by looking at the US Tea Party and British UKIP and how their influence on

mainstream politics might prove destabilising for US and British capital.

Owen Worth’s chapter speaks to some of the issues raised in Short’s and Davidson’s

contributions. He focuses on the debate on the re-emergence of the far-right across a range of

mature capitalist democracies, a politics that can is seen as either complimentary to the

overall reproduction of a neoliberal capitalist order or something that actively serves to

contest the fabric of neoliberal capitalism. Worth suggests that the longue durée of the far

right has embodied both traditions, allowing for both to emerge in different guises through

different historical orders. Intervening in this debate he focuses on the issue of hegemonic

change. From this he goes on to argue that the deep contradictions over the far-right’s

response to and connections with neoliberalism, particularly with respect to economic

management, has resulted in two distinct, yet interrelated trends. One has been – at least

tentatively – geared towards creating a form of alternative hegemonic (or counter-hegemonic)

project to challenge the rhetorical and ideational bases of neoliberal capitalism, whilst the

other has been geared towards hegemonic change through challenging neoliberal legitimacy.

Due to the fragmentation and contradictions across these respective positions, Worth suggests

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that the far-right’s ‘hegemonic challenge’ is diminishing in significance as nationalist bigotry

and cultural exceptionalism become increasingly embedded within the neoliberal form of

‘common-sense’.

Stuart Shields’ chapter asks why opposition to neoliberalism in post-communist

Poland has so frequently taken the form of populist and regressive nationalist appeals to

workers, as far-right movements make greater headway than the left. The resurgence of far-

right populism as a socio-political force in Poland (and elsewhere in Europe) pits a virtuous,

homogeneous national people against self-serving ‘powers-that-be’. This articulation has

been accompanied by struggles that engender specific forms of socio-political mobilization

which (re)combine long-standing ‘vertical’ allegiances to kin, trade, ethnicity or creed with

budding ‘horizontal’ allegiances of class, reinventing long-standing Polish traditions of anti-

imperialism, nationality and statehood. Shields focuses, particularly, on the international

context of the populist re-ascendancy, associating it to a particular and differentiated

development of capitalism in the region associated with ongoing neoliberalization. Drawing

on Gramsci's writing on the relationship between democracy and fascism, Shields

explores far-right populism as two aspects of a single reality where the Polish petit

bourgeoisie reacts to a loss of political importance in society in two ways: one revolutionary,

the other reactionary. This feeds into contemporary debates surrounding resistance to

globalisation and neoliberalism by underlining the concrete social formations engendered

through the process of post-communist transition and offers a fruitful analysis of the specific

forms of socio-political response to capitalist crisis.

Finally, Mark Rupert’s chapter focuses on what he terms, the ‘ideological tropes of

militant Americanism’ – with their narratives of ‘disloyalty’ and ‘betrayal’ by an ‘enemy

within’. He argues that such rhetorical positions have not been confined to the margins of the

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far-right but have played a much more central role in defining mainstream American political

identity as well as helping to shape the historical structures of US global power by policing

dissent and marking the limits of acceptable American political discourse in ways involving

both coercive power and ideological consent. For Rupert, this articulation of a normative

Americanism by reference to an enemy within as well as without, serves to reveal the

disproportionate cultural influence of far-right ideology as integral to the construction of

hegemony underlying American power and structures of global hierarchy and which

continues to resonate across American political life.

1 We use the term ‘far-right’ as it indicates a position on the spectrum of right-wing thought and practice: the

alternatives – ‘reactionary right,’ ‘radical right,’ ‘populist right,’ or ‘extreme right’ – are either meaningless

(‘radical’) or only offer partial definitions (‘populist’). 2 Thus, far-right have parties have participated in governing coalitions in western Europe (the Austrian Freedom

Party over 2000-5 and the Italian Lega Nord over 2001-6 and again between 2008-11 whilst the Dutch Party for

Freedom provided parliamentary support to a minority government from late 2010 to April 2012 ) and in India,

with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) forming the mainstay of the government over 1996-2004), to spawning

violent Islamophobic street movements such as the English, Scottish and Welsh Defence Leagues in the UK and

the Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in Greece. 3 Some recent contributions to this literature include: Albertizi and McDonnell, 2008; Caiani, 2012; Goodwin,

2011; Mammone et al, 2012; Mudde, 2007; Rydren, 2013; Wodak et al, 2013) 4 Hence, the liberal-conservative critique of mass-democratic politics, initially associated with the writings of

the French political theorists, Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville which they saw as opening the door

to a generic far-right politics, that represented a ‘vulgar and plebeian politics of the mob’ resulting in the

possibilities of authoritarian and demagogic dictatorship. See the chapters by Landa and Saull in this volume. 5 For a review of what has developed into a large and growing contemporary literature on uneven and combined

development, see http://unevenandcombineddevelopment.wordpress.com/writings/. 6 As Gramsci puts it, ‘The problem is to see whether in the dialectic ‘revolution/ restoration’ it is revolution or

restoration which predominates; for it is certain that in the movement of history there is never any turning back,

and that restorations in toto do not exist’ (Gramsci 1971: 219; Q13§27). 7 For recent attempts to draw out these organic links between passive revolution and uneven and combined

development see Allinson and Anievas (2010) and Morton (2007). 8 In the sense that imperial structures, especially those which are premised on the direct connection between

geopolitical aggrandisement and material accumulation, are the basis of power for a ruling class such that the

coercive machinery of the capitalist state is directly implicated in the reproduction of a ruling class and whereby

such forms of political economy are promoted via populist far-right mobilizations of subaltern social layers.

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