Left-wing fascism
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Left-wing fascism and left fascism are terms used by a few writers to describe tendencies in left-wing politics that contradict or violate the progressive ideals with which the Left is usually associated.
The most prominent early user of the term left-fascism was Jürgen Habermas, a sociologist and philosopher influenced by the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School. He used the term in the 1960s to distance the Frankfurt School from the violence and authoritarianism of left-wing terrorists.[1][2] Habermas, whose work emphasizes the importance of rational discourse, democratic institutions and opposition to violence, has made important contributions to conflict theory and is often associated with the radical left.
Sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz argues that left-wing fascism in the United States consists of a rejection of American democracy and a devotion to socialism that is merely an idealized abstraction, combined with an unwillingness to confront the actual history of communism. He argues that it operates through mystified language; attributes faults "everywhere and always in an imperial conspiracy of wealth, power or status"; and uses anti-Semitism as a pseudo-populist tool.[3]
The term has also been used to describe unusual hybrid political alliances in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.[4] Historian Richard Wolin has used the term left fascism in arguing that some European intellectuals' have been infatuated with post-modernist or anti-enlightenment theories, opening up the opportunity for cult-like, irrational, anti-democratic positions that combine characteristics of the Left with those of fascism.[5] Bernard-Henri Lévy, a philosopher and journalist, calls this political hybrid neo-progressivism, new barbarism or red fascism. Lévy argues that it is anti-liberal, anti-American, anti-empire, anti-Semitic and pro-Islamofascist.[6]
[edit] See also
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[edit] References
- ^ Wallace, R.A. and A. Wolf, Contemporary Sociological Theory: Continuing the Classical Tradition, 3rd ed. (1991) p. 116.
- ^ Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, Reappraisals: Shifting Alignments in Postwar Critical Theory (Cornell University Press, 1991) ISBN 080149706X, 9780801497063, pp. 9-10 [1]
- ^ Horowitz, Irving Louis, Winners and Losers: Social and Political Polarities in America (Duke University Press, 1984) ISBN 0822306026, 9780822306023, pp. 219 et seq. [2]
- ^ TELOS, Fall 2008 (no. 144)
- ^ Wolin, Richard, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton University Press, 2004)
- ^ http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=288&zenid=15891b1fb6cfe4815931bdf9ba49aeaf
