Revolution? Counterrevolution? What revolution

Almost any discussion of fascism is bound to involve consideration, explicit or not, of its revolutionary or counterrevolutionary nature. Fascists claimed to engage in a revolution. Their opponents denounced them as counterrevolutionaries. Most students divide unevenly about this: many consider the fascists' counterrevolutionary role self-evident, a few prefer to begin by taking the fascists at their word, some still judge the charges unproven. At any rate, the debate suggests the high symbolic, hence passional and practical, value of terms like revolution and counterrevolution, increasingly loaded, in intellectual and political intercourse, with an ethical burden that even the mass media perceive. The revolutions of the 18th century stood over the cradle of the modern world; the modern world remembers. It is a long stretch from the fall of the Bastille to the launching of a revolutionary new detergent, but it is worth the trip. As Sellers and Yeatman would have said, revolution is a good thing. One never hears of a counterrevolution in automobile design, though one might be in order. Better accentuate the positive. As a result, the struggle for political advantage involves minor but important skirmishes for semantic advantage. Like the hero in a Western movie, the movement that comes in riding on revolution can, as a rule, expect our sympathy. I shall suggest that, as of today at least, the issue is wrongly joined. Like 'Left' and 'Right', Revolution and Counterrevolution have become anachronistic stereotypes, real because installed in vocabulary and minds, but confusing as categories for understanding and scholarly analysis

Political science · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

• Black shirt, red heart

  Open Access•Anthony James Joes•Society•1981

  Incluir item

• Nineteen-Thirties Japan

  Gavan Mccormack•Bulletin of Concerned Asian…•1982

  Incluir item

• A sociology of counter‐revolution in Egypt

  Open Access•Atef Shahat Said•Sociology Compass•2021

  Incluir item

• A New Consensus? Recent Research on Fascism in Europe, 1918–1945

  Open Access•Arnd Bauerkämper•History Compass•2006

  Incluir item

• Didactic Motherhood and Narrative Responsibility in Anca Vlasopolos’s Memoir No Return Address

  Cazan Cazan•Studies in American Jewish…•2017

  Incluir item

• A German Racial Revolution

  Open Access•Milan Hauner, Milan L Hauner•Journal of Contemporary History•1984

  Incluir item

• Republicanism and Civic Virtue in Treatyite Political Thought, 1921–3

  Open Access•Seán Donnelly•The Historical Journal•2020

  Incluir item

• Professor Renzo De Felice and the Fascist Phenomenon

  Open Access•A James Gregor•World Politics•1978

  Incluir item