Reclaiming the Differences: Three Neglected Marxian Theories of Fascism in Lukács, Marcuse, and Bloch

1. Herbert Marcuse on “heroic-folkish realism”

Herbert Marcuse is best known today for his post-war writings, led by Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man. The collection Negations (1968), however contains important articles published by Marcuse during the period of his direct affiliation with the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, in its leading outlet, Zeitschrift für Socialforschung. In these articles, Marcuse propounds a Marxian version of ideology critique. This at once recognizes the way that enlightenment appeals to freedom, reason, equality and universality have since the French revolution been placed in the service of continuing forms of material immiseration and inequality under capitalism, whilst upholding these ideas as containing explosive critical, emancipatory potential. For the young Marcuse, the French Enlightenment is to be placed within a tradition looking back to classical antiquity. This tradition’s spokesmen aimed “to save the category of happiness and to comprehend it under the category of truth” (Marcuse Citation1968: 130). Indeed, philosophical appeals to reason, truth, and universality are aligned by Marcuse with the ongoing struggle for human freedom. These ideals, he contends, point beyond their distortion in the realm of “affirmative culture” (high art and theory), which at once insulate them from the concrete living and working conditions of ordinary men and women, and console the latter by promising some wholly “spiritual” redemption which would leave these conditions unaffected. “That man is a rational being, that this being requires freedom, and that happiness is his highest good”, Marcuse writes:

are all universal propositions whose progressive impetus derives precisely from their universality. Universality gives them an almost revolutionary character, for they claim that everyone, not simply this or that particular person, should be rational, free, and happy. (Marcuse Citation1968: 112)

The first of these essays, from 1933, bears the title “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State”, and it stands out from its successors in Negations because of its critical focus on National Socialism and fascism. Marcuse opens by announcing that the “total-authoritarian state” which has been established under Hitler in Germany reflects a new worldview, deeply opposed to that of enlightenment idealism: that of “heroic-folkish realism”. Nazi philosopher Ernst Kriek’s Nationalpolitische Erziehung (1933) explains its basic orientation:

Blood rises up against formal understanding, race against the rational pursuit of ends, honor against profit, bonds against the caprice that is called ‘freedom’, organic totality against individualistic dissolution, valour against bourgeois security, politics against the primacy of the economy, state against society, folk against the individual and the mass. (1)Footnote²

Marcuse situates the sources of this new Weltanschauung, not deep in the Western history of rationalization, but in “all the currents that have been deluging ‘liberalist’ political and social theory since World War I” (1). National Socialist ideology emerges from a struggle within the intellectual realm, “far from the political arena”: in “the philosophical controversy with the rationalism, individualism, and materialism of the nineteenth century” (1). Marcuse observes that, long before Hitler’s ascent, “in almost all branches of the social sciences and humanities, from economics to philosophy” (1), a critical attack had been undertaken “against the hypertrophic rationalization and technification of life, against the ‘bourgeois’ of the nineteenth century with his petty joys and petty aims, against the shopkeeper and merchant spirit and the destructive ‘anaemia’ of existence” (1–2). Set against all this was a new vision of

the heroic man, bound to the forces of blood and soil – the man who travels through heaven and hell, who does not reason why, but goes into action to do and die, sacrificing himself not for any purpose but in humble obedience to the dark forces that nourish him. This image expanded to the vision of the charismatic leader whose leadership does not need to be justified on the basis of his aims, but whose mere appearance is already his ‘proof’, to be accepted as an undeserved gift of grace. (2)

Variants of this worldview were present in the Stefan George circleFootnote³, and in the works of many of the figures who also feature in Lukács’s Destruction of Reason, as we will see presently: Möller van der Bruck, Werner Sombart, Max Scheler, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Jünger. Marcuse positions it as looking back as far as Wilhelm Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie and the rebellious “pathos” of Nietzsche, a genealogy which we will see Lukács extends back farther, to the first generation of German idealists after Kant (2). Heroic-folkish realism brings together intellectual currents which Marcuse groups under the headers of 19th-century “philosophy of life”, “irrationalistic naturalism”, and “universalism”, in an unusual usage we will explain presently (2–4). What Marcuse terms the “historical locus” of the “unification” of these ideas into a political theory vindicating the total-authoritarian state was, however, their concerted opposition to “liberalism”, which, Marcuse notes, becomes in this literature an unscientific catch-all term to “indiscriminately bring together everything against which [these ideologies] fight” (4). Just as Lukács had situated fascism squarely as a deeply anti-enlightenment phenomenon, Marcuse stresses that “if we ask the spokesman of the new Weltanschuung what they are fighting”:

we hear in reply of the ‘ideas of 1789’, of wishy-washy humanism and pacifism, Western intellectualism, egotistical individualism, sacrifice of the nation and state to conflicts of interest between particular social groups, abstract, conformist egalitarianism, the party system, the hypertrophy of the economy, and destructive technicism and materialism. These are the most concrete utterances – for the concept ‘liberal’ often serves only for purposes of defamation …  (4)

Marcuse’s convergent tasks in “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State” are, firstly, to critically understand the distinct claims of the new ideology and its different aspects and developments and, secondly, to unearth the social function of these ideas in the political struggles of the period, in relationship to the evolution of liberal societies into forms of monopoly capitalism by the first decades of the 20th century.

Anticipating Lukács’s more developed theorization of this category, Marcuse contends that the understanding of fascist ideology begins from recognizing what he calls its fundamental “irrationalism”. This involves at the epistemological level a scornful denial of critical or autonomous reason – as against forms of strategic, technological, administrative and instrumental rationality, including racial pseudo-sciences, placed in service of the diktat the rulers and the “movement”. In place of scientific inquiry, downgraded as “materialistic” and “rootless” in its pursuit of value-free universal laws to explain natural and social phenomena, fascist thought instead makes competing appeals to intuitive or unmediated forms of accessing putative deeper, “primal” truths, beyond the reach of scientific inquiry–“‘nature’, ‘blood and soil’, ‘folkhood’, ‘existential facts’, ‘totality’ and so forth” (10). These irrational givens are positioned as at once unquestionable “natural” facts, and as ultimately unsurpassable an unquestionable norms, “which places reason under the heteronomy of the irrational” (10). Critical reflection hence gives way to a sacrificio intellectus:

‘Reality does not admit of knowledge, only of acknowledgement’ [Das Ende der humanistischen Illusion]: in this ‘classical’ formulation irrationalist theory arrives at the extreme antipode to all rational thought and at the same time reveals its deepest intentions. (10)

In order to contribute to comprehension of what Marcus calls this ideological configuration’s “real social function”, he stresses its three “constitutive components” (13). He terms the first “universalism”, by which he means the fascist theorists’ subordination of individuals, their wants, need, and capacities, to the socio-political Whole. As in organic life, Ernst Krieck argues in Nationalpolitische Erziehung, so in political existence:

the whole is primally given in its organic segmentation: the members serve the whole, which is superordinate to them, but they serve it according to the unique character that appertains to them as members … and, at the same time, it is in this uniqueness that their personal destiny and the meaning of their personality are fulfilled to the extent that they participate in the whole. (Krieck: 13)

Secondly, as in this passage from Krieck, the social whole is conceived by fascism as an “organic-natural” reality, “released from its economic and social content”, and “withdrawn from the range of all human planning and decision” (15):

In ever new formulations, heroic-folkish realism emphasizes the natural properties of the totality represented by the folk. The folk is ‘subject to blood’, it arises from the ‘soil’, it furnishes the homeland with indestructible force and permanence, it is united by characteristics of ‘race’, the preservation of whose purity is the condition of the folk’s ‘health’. (15)Footnote⁴

The result is to falsely present as already achieved a utopian social totality in which the particular interests of individuals and groups have been harmonized, “a real folk community which elevates itself above the interests and conflicts of status groups and classes” [Köllreuter, Algemeine staatslehre] (15). Thereby, the actual divisions between classes in highly polarized societies are conjured away, and their material causes blamed on enemies of the People:

The naturalistic myth begins by apostrophizing the natural as ‘eternal’ and ‘divinely willed’. This holds especially for the totality of the folk, whose naturalness is one of the myth’s primary claims. The particular destinies of individuals, their strivings and needs, their misery and their happiness – all this is void and perishable, for only the folk is permanent. (16)

Fascist organicism or naturalism hence serves to refigure contestable social and political relations as dehistoricized and incontestable, subject now only to the laws of an inscrutable destiny or providence:

The folk is nature itself as the substructure of history, as eternal substance, the eternally constant in the continual flux of economic and social relations. In contrast with the folk, the latter are accidental, ephemeral, and ‘insignificant’. This dehistoricization marks all aspects of organicist theory … (16)

Faced with the realities of a highly monopolized economic system, soon to be placed on a permanent war footing, Nazi organicism hence verges into “a radical devaluation of the material sphere of existence, of the ‘external riches’ of life” (18). In the place of these “materialist” comforts, “the ‘heroism’ of ‘poverty’ and ‘service’ of sacrifice and discipline” (18) are celebrated, as the militarization of social and international relations increasingly turns all citizens into warriors who can be called upon by the Leaders at any time to kill and die for the Volk.

The third feature of fascist irrationalism is embodied in the existentialism of Carl Schmitt, Alfred Baeumler, Ernst Forsthoff, Martin Heidegger, and others. It involves the attempt to elevate the absence of any rational, legitimizing grounds for decision-making into its own kind of suprarational vindication for the exercise of unchecked domination (21). As Marcuse cites Baeumler here, alongside passages from Heidegger (23–26; cf. Kellner Citation1984: 99–100), in this existentialism, sheer action itself, its event or performance, is refigured as heroic and authentic, in contrast to weak attempts which would need to lean on appeals to reasoned justifications:

Action does not mean ‘deciding in favor of’ … for that presupposes that one knows in favor of what one is deciding; rather, action means ‘setting off in a direction’, ‘taking sides’, by virtue of a mandate of destiny, by virtue of ‘one’s own right’. … It is really secondary to decide in favor of something that I have come to know. (Baeumler: 23)

For Schmitt, famously, the political sovereign is He who can decide, in a situation of existential crisis, on who is friend and who is enemy, and call down whatever measures are needed to eliminate the latter, even to the point of “physical killing” – as in the jurist’s infamous endorsement ([1934] 2003) of Hitler’s action in The Night of Long Knives. All boundaries between state and civil society, public power and private right, are swept away in the resulting “existentialization and totalization” of “the political” (25), as is all capacity to criticize the decrees of the Leaders:

At the level on which political existentialism moves, there can be absolutely no question whether the state in its ‘total’ form is right in making such demands, whether the system of domination that it defends with all available means guarantees anything like the possibility of more than illusory fulfilment for most men. The existentiality of the political structure is removed from such ‘rationalistic’ questions … (25)

At this irrationalist terminus, Marcuse contends, existentialist philosophy furnishes “a philosophical foundation for the ideal of man projected by heroic realism” (22), a theoretical vindication of the total state (24), and, in the direct political engagements of Heidegger and Schmitt – which Marcuse’s article is amongst the first to consider – “the Fall of the Titans of German philosophy” into the most abject complicity with Nazi tyranny (30, 29; cf. Jay Citation1996: 122–123).

2. Gyorgy Lukács on fascism as irrationalism

Marcuse’s “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian Theory of the State” hence ends by underscoring a troubling convergence between interwar existentialist philosophy, including Heidegger’s thought, and German Nazism. Gyorgy Lukács’s 1952 work, The Destruction of Reason, develops the case for this convergence at far greater length, and with detailed recourse to many more thinkers, looking farther back in German history, than Marcuse. Whilst Marcuse’s text was written in the fateful year of 1933, moreover, Destruction is a post-war, post-Holocaust, work. Lukács calls it a “discite moniti” or warning “addressed to the thinking people of all nations” (10, 90).Footnote⁵ The atrocities committed by Hitler’s Germany, Lukács maintains, were so great that “each individual and each nation should try and learn something for their own good” from their confrontation (91). This responsibility is especially pressing for philosophers, “whose duty it should be to supervise the existence and evolution of reason in proportion to their concrete share in social developments.” Yet, in 1952, Lukács expressed the concern that philosophers “have neglected this duty both within and outside Germany” (91), failing to understand that “no philosophy is ‘innocent’ or merely academic” 90), and that “the possibility of a fascist, aggressively reactionary philosophy is objectively contained in every philosophical stirring of irrationalism” (10, 11; see Koves Citation1997: 34–35).

Lukács’s assessment of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the “dialectic of enlightenment” which would supposedly adequately explain the genesis and features of fascist barbarisms is well known. Far from carrying forward the progressive or Marxian legacy as he understood it, he charges the Frankfurt School thinkers with having taken up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss” (Lukács Citation1971: 67). As he had described in his own 1933 article on fascism bearing this title, the “hotel” is the uncanny residence of intellectuals who feel a mandarinate scorn for the mass cultures of modern societies, but whose disgust for the mundane, material realities of liberal-capitalist life prevents their criticisms from addressing the economic determinants of these realities. Instead, they compete in diagnosing an abyssal modern “crisis” which is at once invisible and all-pervasive, and could only be overcome by a spiritual transformation with deeply uncertain economic and socio-political bearings. From the perspective of the ruling groups, the resulting angst represents a satisficing ideological compromise formation, redirecting many in the critical intelligentsia who might otherwise ally themselves with socialist forces into more or less harmless forms of elitist cultural critique and quietism (Lukács Citation2021).

In Destruction of Reason, Lukács’s position hence profoundly opposes that of Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Far from an inevitable outcome of Western rationalism, Lukács follows Marcuse in positing that fascism represented an irrationalist revolt against a humanistic legacy which had culminated in forms of moral universalism, socialism, and Marxism. Again, this revolt does not look back to Homeric Greece, but a legacy of German philosophical thought hailing from Schelling’s and Schopenhauer’s responses to Kantian critical philosophy, then developed in increasingly radical directions by Friedrich Nietzsche, the vitalistic “life philosophies” of the imperialistic period, and the interwar existentialist theories of figures like Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger – figures tellingly largely absent from Dialectic of Enlightenment. The expressed intention of spokespeople of this philosophical irrationalism, far from being to continue the universalist, rationalist ambitions of the French or German Enlightenments and “the ideas of 1789” (liberty, equality, fraternity), was to radically overcome these shallow modern ideas, and the institutions they had brought in their wake.

Although Lukács never gives a single definitive account of the minimal features of irrationalism, the following inventory captures the shared features of these philosophies, in contrast to those belonging to the enlightenment and then Marxist lineages:

1. a radical critique of reason and the sciences for being not simply limited (as in Kant), but unable to fathom the deepest truths of reality, coupled to forms of subjective idealism with relativistic implications (variants of the claim that, since individuals, cultures, races, or “peoples” know the world only through their particular categories, there can be no culture-transcendent, universal truths);

2. a valorization of intuition (or analogues, like “moods”) as the extrarational means to disclose the deepest truths (or “Things in themselves”) unavailable to reason and science, leading invariably into a prioritization of art, the figure of the artistic “genius” and “great thinker”, over the sciences and even philosophy;

3. an aristocratic epistemology supporting the notion that only a few “geniuses” of intuition, insight, ability or elan can fathom the deepest truths, coupled with a deep scorn for ordinary people (“the herd”, “the mob”, “the masses”, etc.), and the modern political forms which enfranchise them (liberalism, democracy, socialisms) (Ringer Citation1969; Löwy Citation1979: 22–67);

4. a rejection of intellectual, socioeconomic, ethical, political, or indeed rational-scientific progress and universalism as vulgar “bourgeois” myths, as well as forms of cultural, historical, and even eschatological pessimism;

5. a positing of ontological, extra- or suprarational grounding principles explaining the experienced natural and historical worlds, unavailable to the sciences (i) and ordinary inquirers (iii), from will (Schopenhauer), the will to power (Nietzsche), “life” (vitalism), to “race” and “blood” (Gobineau, Gomplowicz, Chamberlain); a “deepening” which serves to devalorize, obscure, or mystify “shallow”, “materialistic” attempts to scientifically understand social and historical realities, and validate the appeal to secularized religious claims and forms of mythology.

The overlap between Marcuse’s 1933 diagnoses of fascist “heroic-folkish realism” and Lukács’s conception of the invariant features of the irrationalist philosophies which he sees as making National Socialism’s ascent possible in Germany is clear. We stress that the latter’s genealogy of the ideological roots of National Socialism goes much farther than his predecessor’s, looking ultimately back to the generation of philosophers responding to Kant. Yet, like Marcuse’s critique of fascism as irrationalism, Lukács’s Destruction of Reason has largely been passed over, both in the Soviet East (where its conception of philosophical history was frowned upon as unorthodox), and in the liberal-capitalist nations (Google Scholar for instance suggests just 693 citations, as of the writing of this piece in 2022).Footnote⁶

To the extent that critics have engaged with the key claims of Lukács’s book, passing beyond a striking refutation ex silentio, they gravitate towards charging that Lukács allegedly tried unfeasibly to blame certain philosophies for the horrors of National Socialism. As Ernst Traverso (Citation2022: loc. 463–474) writes:

Defining Nietzsche and Paul de Lagarde as ‘ancestors’ of Hitler arouses a certain scepticism. According to Lukács, it does not matter whether Dilthey and Simmel were ‘witting forerunners of fascism’ or not, simply because, regardless of their intentions, their works do not escape ‘the objective dialectics of the development itself’. But this means reducing dialectic to teleology and intellectual history to a form of deterministic causality.

We note that if one were to grant this inference about Lukács, we would also have to increase our scepticism, one hundredfold, towards the more widely discussed epochal narratives of texts like Dialectic of Enlightenment or Heidegger’s “history of Beyng”. The issue here is that Lukács’s position is only dimly reflected in Traverso’s commentary, as it is in Adorno’s similarly brisk dismissal of the text (Adorno Citation2007: 166). In fact, the opening chapter of Destruction of Reason is devoted to a historical, economic, social and political analysis of Germany between 1789 and 1933; a choice reflecting Lukács’s materialist position that ideas have, at best, a relative autonomy from the socioeconomic realities informing them, which notably also moves his analysis in a materialist direction, beyond anything we find in Marcuse.

Destruction of Reason is far from situating philosophy as the primum mobile behind fascism, since philosophy itself as he sees it is not autonomous or self-causing (Snedeker Citation1985/Citation86: 439). Lukács contends instead that the rise of “irrationalism” in Germany is one necessary condition, in the intellectual-ideological domain, for the later ascent of fascist demagoguery and terrorism. The book examines not how philosophy somehow could “cause” a mass movement, but how “philosophical formulations, as an intellectual mirroring of Germany's concrete development towards Hitler, helped to speed up the process” (4). As such a specific condition, irrationalism is a product of the particular national conditions of Germany, the deracination of the intelligentsia, and the apologetic needs of the bourgeois and feudal remnants in their growing struggle against popular mobilization after 1789 and 1848. Its particular uptake within Germany, as against other European nations, reflected the unusually weak position of the bourgeois class, which after the revolutions of 1848 saw them shift from supporting the workers’ movements, into an uneasy anti-socialistic alliance with remnants of the Junker class (Snedeker Citation1985/Citation86: 442–443). Then there is the lateness of German unification, from above, under Bismarck, together with the extraordinary rapidity with which the new nation industrialized and urbanized, becoming an imperial technological superpower whose cities, led by Berlin, were also at the vanguard of cultural and artistic experimentation (Eksteins Citation2002: 70–94).

“When, where and how such a – seemingly innocent – possibility [as irrationalist philosophy] turns into a dreadful fascist reality is not decided philosophically, in the philosophical realm”, Lukács underscores (32–33). The circulation of these imperialist-era ideologemes, as they developed in Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and then Weimar vitalists and racialist theorists, remained relatively small. To intellectual elites, they provided “comfort” in a period in which the progress of the sciences and modernization saw them increasingly marginalized, coupling a faux freedom (independent of real-world engagement or change) and a sense of “spiritual” superiority over the mass society which was shunning them (22–23; Ringer Citation1969; Löwy Citation1979: 22–67). Intellectuals would, as a matter of record, be amongst the quickest classes to “coordinate” under the new regime in 1933 (Eksteins Citation2002: 305–310; Fest Citation1970: 262). Nevertheless, Lukács argues, the influence of irrationalism percolated outwards, and

via universities, public lectures, the press, etc., these ideologies also spread to the broadest masses – needless to say in a coarsened form, but that strengthened rather than weakened their reactionary content, their ultimate irrationalism and pessimism …  (84)

In the case of interwar Germany, the peculiar political-economic conditions for the popular receptivity to irrationalist ideas still required the shock of the Great war, ignominious defeat in 1918, a punitive imperialist treaty, a failed social revolution, a stymied and unpopular parliamentary system, as well as the Great Depression and mass unemployment. To “transfer to the streets” the motifs of imperialist vitalism and racial theory, infused with the irrationalism cradled by Schelling and Schopenhauer and most militantly and artfully expressed in Nietzsche, Hitler, Rosenberg, et al. had to “strip them of everything ‘private’ and ‘spiritually high-flying’ and convert what was left into a determined and uncouth form of popular corruption” (85). With that said, Lukács underscores that only a “radically irrationalist worldview” could have supported fascism’s ability of “converting … anti-capitalist mass drifts … into the naked absolute dominance of monopoly capitalism” and, in Hitler’s case, a program of exterminatory imperialism (79–80).

National Socialist ideology itself was a demagogic “mish-mash” which developed out of the five recurrent features of irrationalism, tailored to speak to the despair, anguish, and desire for revenge of the Germans after World War I and Versailles. Its bricolage drew ideas and motifs from 19th-century vitalism in the celebration of dynamism, force, life, kultur versus the lifeless, mechanical (“Jewish” and/or “Latin”) kivilization allegedly uniting socialism with liberalism (Goebbels Citation1938), interpreted through the lens of racialist theory positing “Aryan”, “Germanic”, or “Nordic” supremacy, and the brutalization of the Front generation, with the celebration of industrialized war, the sacrificial heroism and Frontsgemeinschaft of the soldiers facing death (Eksteins Citation2002: 305–318). In Nazism, the irrationalist hostility to democratization and modernization was radicalized into a militant mass movement which set out brutally to crush liberal institutions and the socialist resistance. Epistemological aristocratism prepared educated elites to blink at the anti-democratic contempt of the movement leaders’ rabble-rousing, avowed so clearly by the Führer in Mein Kampf. It found its political vulgarization in the faith of the Volksgenosse (fellow community members, compatriots), up to and including leading philosophers, that the providential “genius” and indomitable Will of Hitler and his henchmen would always find a way, even though this way and its rationale could not be discerned by the masses, let alone by strangers to the Volk (5). The philosophical critiques of reason in Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spengler and dozens of other, lesser names, paved the way to the wholesale embrace of irrationalist myths, repackaged via demagogic baiting into an imperialist program to conquer a pan-European Grossraum in which Germans would expel or enslave other races through exterminatory violence, beyond and despite what Goebbels, Himmler, and other Nazis scornfully called “humanitarian sentimentality”. Nazism racism, certainly, proposed itself in some propaganda, and in the aspirations of some of its intellectuals, as “scientific”. But Lukács is reaffirmed by recent scholarship highlighting how, for Hitler, Rosenberg, and others, it was also conceived of as a mobilizing myth whose epistemic basis, according to leading “racial scientists” such as Hans Günther or L. F. Clauss, lay in the healthy, relativistic intuition of the racially superior Germanic people (Varshizky Citation2019, Citation2021). As Ernst Krieck explained, “‘biological philosophy’ … signifies something intrinsically different from laying philosophical foundations with the existing specialist science of ‘biology’”, and Alfred Rosenberg rejoined that “soul … means race as seen from within” (728; Varshizky Citation2012; Snedeker, Citation1985/Citation86: 444).

This configuration is for Lukács nothing more than a direct, brutal, and conscious attack on the universalistic principles of the enlightenment, critical reasoning, as well as the forms of liberal, democratic, and socialist polity which they had promoted. As Goebbels would proclaim in 1938, relative to the Enlightenment’s “equality of everything that bears a human form”, the “authoritarian nationalism” of the fascists represented something “essentially new”. “In it”, he underscored, “the French Revolution is superseded”, and the hated “ideas of 1789” destroyed (Goebbels Citation1938).

3. Bloch, fascism, irrationalism, and its non-synchronous bases

In both Lukács’s Destruction of Reason and Marcuse’s “Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State” we have now recovered assessments of fascism and its key ideological antecedents that deeply oppose those presented in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and authors influenced by it. Unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, both Marcuse and Lukács extensively cite ideologists and theorists directly involved in these movements. These citations underscore the fascist thinkers’ undialectical, total opposition to what they perceive the Enlightenment to have propounded. Unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, these accounts highlight that, whereas of course fascist governments in power availed themselves of forms of administrative, strategic and technological rationality, they did so in the service of profoundly irrationalist ends, aiming to overthrow the egalitarian legacy of the Enlightenment in the name of wilful collective self-assertion. Whereas both thinkers identify a relativization of the claims of the sciences and shunning of “merely” materialist accounts of the economic dimensions of political life as defining marks of irrationalism, Lukács goes much farther than Marcuse in the direction of recovering a contextualist, materialist understanding of the social conditions which promoted irrationalist philosophizing, and its widespread dissemination. It is Lukács who pays more attention to the question of why, amongst the different monopoly capitalist societies of the 20th century, it was specifically Germany which first fostered the radical irrationalism of Marcuse’s “heroic-folkish realism”, then succumbed to National Socialism. It is a matter of what Lukács terms (Citation1980: 717–718) the “German misery”: the ideological alchemy, appealing to damaged ethnic or national pride, of revalorizing forms of economic and cultural backwardness as signs of a more profound, imperilled spiritual condition.

The place of uneven development as a causal factor in explaining the ideological forms, and also the popular appeal of fascist mass movements, is the subject which our third thinker, Ernst Bloch in his 1935 work The Heritage of Our Times, elevates to the centre of the analyses of fascism in ways which arguably take his analyses of fascism beyond those of both Marcuse and Lukács (cf. Zipes Citation2019: 51–60). Like both of these thinkers, with whom he was a contemporary, Bloch was under no illusion about the role philosophical and cultural irrationalism, and the attack on the “ratio”, played in the rise of fascism. For him as for Marcuse and Lukács, the Third Reich was not the direct product of rationality triumphant, or of its cunning, but of a reactionary embrace of the “Irratio”:

Age-old regions of utopia are thus being occupied by St Vitus's dancers, the Germanic Romanticism of blood has gone down well with the petit bourgeois, has bugled up a whole army of vehme murderers and ‘Guardians of the Crown’. … Their sinking … abandons even more the thin layer of reason of the ‘modern age’, brushes in falling very old modes of drive, ways of life and superstructures, and thereby provokes ‘Irratio’. So roughly and so full of warlike eroticism, so usefully as well for the darkest forms of imperialism, one of these young Nazis exclaimed: ‘You do not die for a program you have understood, you die for a program you love.’ (59; emphasis added)Footnote⁷

Conclusion: The heritage of Marxian critiques of fascist irrationalism

This article has sought to recover from comparative neglect the critiques of fascist irrationalism which can be found in three significant Marxists, Herbert Marcuse, Gyorgy Lukács, and Ernst Bloch. We have established that in these thinkers, National Socialism was understood in ways deeply opposed to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment and kindred accounts of fascism as the putatively inevitable triumph of modern, technological or administrative rationality. Each of these figures’ accounts of fascism avoids what John Abromeit (Citation2012: 426) has called the synchronic and diachronic “de-differentiation” in Adorno and Horkheimer’s assessment of fascism – which collapses its distinctions from other forms of “State capitalism”, liberal and socialist, and traces its origins back millennia, to pre-Socratic Greece. For each, the ideological sources of fascism, in contrast to these other regime-types, arose in 19th-century irrationalist reactions against modernization, industrialization, and the advent of mercantile capitalist societies: amongst the educated elites, in irrationalist philosophical motifs set down in Schelling, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche; in the more popular register, in forms of eugenics and racialist teachings which proliferated in the imperialist period across Europe, then populist demagoguery. She who would talk of fascism, for these thinkers, need not talk of the cunning of a civilizational dialectic whose bases lie in something as basic to any collective action, Left or Right, as means-end reasoning. She who would oppose fascism, or contemporary forms of far right ethnonationalist authoritarianism, hence need despair neither of critical reason and its modern developments, nor of collective alternatives to the decline into the Irratio which seems once more to be upon us in this “post-truth” era of the regenerated Far Right.

There are extensive debates about whether contemporary political movements like Trumpism, or contemporary forms of authoritarianism, can be best understood as “fascist”. Massive economic, social, and political changes have attended the interceding seven decades, between 1945’s “zero hour” for European fascism (outside of Franco’s Spain), and the period following the Global Financial Crisis (2008–9) which has seen the well-documented, international rise in the political stakes of far right parties and movements, as well as the online proliferation of forms of right-wing (or “Alt-Right”) provocation and proselytizing. Scholars and activists need to be careful before simply “applying” insights from interwar, and immediately post-war, anti-fascist critiques to today’s political struggles. With that said, given the evident commonalities between today’s ethnonationalist, populist, authoritarian, anti-immigrant, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-liberal, and anti-socialist movements (such as Trumpism in the US) – as well as the common intellectual heritages adduced by Rightist “thought leaders” such as Steve Bannon, Alain de Benoist, Richard Spencer, or Aleksandr Dugin (Beiner Citation2018; Sharpe Citation2020; Teitelbaum Citation2020) – to wholly ignore such theoretical sources would also seem to us to be reckless and potentially perilous.

We saw above how for both Marcuse and Lukács, one marker of fascist ideology was its denigration of the structuring socioeconomic conditions of political life: in theory, as “materialist” and “soulless”; in practice, as the raw materials to be reshaped by the world-forming “will” of heroized Leaders enjoying mythologized connections with their Peoples. Whereas Marcuse does not extensively consider the political-economic and class bases of fascist mobilization in Germany (part 1) – no more than Adorno and Horkheimer, and many forms of post-structuralist analyses – this becomes a grounding consideration in Lukács’s Destruction of Reason’s analysis of the “malaise” attending Germany’s rapid, uneven, and chaotic economic, political, and cultural modernization preceding 1933 (Part 2). Moreover, we saw in Part 3 how Bloch’s account of the non-synchronism of different classes coupled his analysis of fascist irrationalism to a socio-theoretical explanation of why the threatened German middle classes and rural populations felt powerfully drawn precisely to this “witch’s kitchen”. In this perspective, political irrationalism becomes at once an index of societies whose “progress” callously leaves too many people behind, and the opium of non-synchronous groups within them:

… the middle class cannot hold out ideologically within ‘rationalization’ and sacrifices ratio that much sooner, the more it has appeared to the middle class only in hostile form, doubly hostile. That is, it appears as a mere late capitalist rationalization and as a subversion of traditional intrinsic values – equally late capitalist, but understood as ‘Marxist-Jewish’. The superman, the blond beast, the biographical cry for the great man, the witches’ kitchen, of a time long past – all these signs of flight from relativism and nihilism, which had become the stuff of educated discussions in the salons of the educated upper classes, became genuine political land in the catastrophe of the middle class. (Bloch Citation1997: 27)

Does not Bloch’s analysis tellingly apply to the American middle classes today, outside of the coastal metropoles, including the old labour aristocracies associated with the secondary industries which “globalization” saw rapidly offshored, leaving ghost towns and mass unemployment in its wake? (Cf. Léger Citation2022). The objective contradictions of neoliberalism have overturned the previously advantageous position of this class and increased alienation through the offshoring of manufacturing, rising costs of living, declines in real wages (outside of managerial and financial elites), loss of access to quality education and services, and the increasing commodification of everyday life. Surely, the Left should not be surprised, Bloch’s analysis suggests, when the resulting pent-up anger has activated not alliances with the inner city progressive forces – let alone with social movements like Black Lives Matter, defending other, structurally disadvantaged members of American society – but a popularizing of far right ideologemes which appeal to imaginary, idealized pasts, from a (deunionized) monocultural 1950s, via reinstated “Judaeo-Christian values”, into lurid fantasies of colonialist-era prerogatives over peoples of colour, and walled ethnostates (Cf. Hendricks Citation2021). To combat today’s rising tide of ethnonationalist irrationalism, the analyses presented here suggest, a democratic-socialist Left instead needs to reach out to economically declining and imperilled groups. Whilst continuing to oppose all forms of intergroup and inter-racial prejudice, and to decry the sometimes-exotic irrationalism and inhumanity of many far right claims, it needs also to provide viable socioeconomic and political alternatives which can restore the dignity and security of all those immiserated by the inhumanities of neoliberal capitalism, to prevent the non-synchronous appeal of irrationalist fantasies of lost “greatness” drawing millions in with their false, hate-filled promises.

The analyses of fascism as based ideologically in “heroic-folkish” irrationalism which Herbert Marcuse, Gyorgy Lukács, and Ernst Bloch provide us hence deserve reconsideration today, both as comparatively neglected, vital chapters in intellectual history, and as sources of orientation in present struggles against Far-Right, authoritarian ethnonationalisms. Developing more discerning theoretical understandings of fascism, its socioeconomic preconditions, and the sources of its ideological appeal, is of course in no way sufficient to prevent the scourge of these political movements. It is however a necessary task if the latter are to be opposed – a long and multi-dimensional struggle to which we hope to have contributed theoretically here.