Political Extremes by Backes Uwe;

Author:Backes, Uwe;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Sciences
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

8

Lines of development of the extremism concept in the twentieth century

1 Extremism and early totalitarianism discussion

As shown in Chapter 6, the first attempts to systematically conceptualize the term extremism go back to the first decade after the Russian Revolution – to a time when the new type of radical challenge to the liberal constitutional order established in wide areas of Europe in the nineteenth century became obvious. To this, Maxime Leroy and Luigi Sturzo offered the first contributions from a – in the broadest sense – liberal perspective. In their critique, both of them reached back to interpretations of the anti-democratic/anti-liberal movements and ideologies that had become an established part of the political interpretation culture from the end of the eighteenth century on.

The intellectual familiarity with a perspective that included the wing positions of the pluralist political spectrum in its analogies and isomorphies might, however, have contributed to the fact that Leroy’s and Sturzo’s ideas did not play an essential role in the debates of the following decades. Although Luigi Sturzo achieved great influence with the totalitarianism term he developed, his extrapolations on extremism, however, remained largely ignored. Nevertheless, in the course of the international totalitarian debate, which had been becoming more intense since the 1930s, quite a few authors reached back to the older, structurally similar extremism concept.

Former communists such as Franz Borkenau (1900–57), who changed into a supporter of the totalitarianism concept under the impression of the Hitler– Stalin pact, belonged to them. In his much read book The Totalitarian Enemy of the year 1949, he sharply criticized the ‘antagonistic fanaticisms’1 which, due to their fundamental common ground, he believed should be characterized as ‘brown Bolshevism’ and ‘red Fascism’.2 Here, however, the attribute ‘extremist’ was used in a relativizing form. This is how Borkenau characterized the supporters of any extreme position. Accordingly, there were ‘extremists’ in the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) as well as among the ‘liberal bourgeoisie’.3 He rather moved along Aristotelian trains of thought when he referred to the English tradition of liberty: ‘Traditional English liberty always consisted of checking extremes. For no extreme is compatible with liberty’.4 From this perspective, National Socialism (NS) was marked by ‘extreme forms of mob rule’ slipping into ‘extreme forms of autocratic tyranny’.5 In this way, Borkenau sought to understand the specific mass basis of the NS movement in contrast to traditional forms of ‘autocracy’ such as the Tudor regime. Bolshevism, on the other hand, had distanced itself under Stalin from its internationalist, Messianic origins and developed into an ‘extremely nationalist’ regime, the ‘most extreme form of totalitarianism’.6

In those years, one could also subject the ruling system of ‘Bolshevist extremists’7 to a fundamental critique from the point of view of the ‘ultra-left-wing’. The Council’s communist Otto Rühle (1874–1943), a companion of Trotsky in his Mexican exile, did not interpret ‘totalitarianism’ under Stalin as the foremost result of ‘nationalist’ deviation but as a product of Lenin’s, which had deceived the Council’s movement that was ‘anti-centralist, anti-parliamentarian and anti-unionist’8 in its core, and then instead erected a ‘dictatorship over the proletariat’.

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