Two Sides of the Same Coin.

• Author: Muravchik, Joshua
• Position: Review

1. James Gregor, The Faces of fanus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 240 pp., $30.

   WHEN, in her famous article "Dictatorships and Double Standards", Jeane Kirkpatrick emphasized the distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism, she was accused of seeking to excuse the misdeeds of rightwing regimes. In fact, she was only invoking a taxonomy that had been widely employed in academia as recently as the 1950s and 1960s but had since fallen into disfavor. More precisely, it had been driven from general academic discourse on the grounds that it was too polemical. The concept "totalitarian", which grouped communist and fascist regimes in a single category, was said to be a Cold War throwback, gratuitously smearing the far Left with the discredit belonging to the far Right.

1. James Gregor, professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, has now taken Kirkpatrick's point a step further. Not only can communism and fascism be twinned, he argues, but they are, for all intents and purposes, the same thing. In 1979 Gregor published Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism. This masterful reconstruction of Mussolini's evolution from Marxist leader of Italian socialism to avatar of fascism evoked a response quite similar to the one that greeted Kirkpatrick's writing. "Gregor's admiration for Mussolini's coherent convictions and intellectual integrity" is "complete", raged Dennis Mack Smith in the New York Review of Books.

   In truth, Gregor was no more an apologist for Mussolini than Kirkpatrick was for right-wing dictators. What Gregor had done was merely to show that Mussolini's fascist doctrine had evolved in a series of logical steps from his earlier Marxist convictions. To those for whom the term "Marxism" holds happy connotations, this may sound like praise of Mussolini, but that was scarcely what Gregor intended.

   In his new book, Gregor approaches the same topic from the opposite direction, proposing to use "Mussolini's Fascism as a paradigmatic instance of what revolution in our time might be taken to mean." Why not, he asks the reader, look upon communism as a form of fascism?

   To sustain this proposition, Gregor marshals a variety of evidence and argument. To begin with, he defines fascism as a creed possessing the following characteristics: a leadership principle; a hegemonic party; large-scale state intervention in the economy; extensive...