This essay concerns fascism and its proper conceptualization at various levels of abstraction. With the fascist smear being levelled at Trump and the Republicans, as well as right-wing populism in Europe, it’s important to nail down what fascism is and clarify its applicability to explaining and understanding present-day conditions. In this endeavor, semantics, conceptualization, valid logic, compelling evidence, and sound conclusions are not the only matters crucial to the dialectical pursuit. Also crucial is understanding mass psychology, to wit, why people are unable to admit to sound conclusions drawn from good evidence and logical argumentation. I will take up this matter later in today’s article. But before getting to that, an explanation of method is in order.
The method I am using is derived from the approach developed by German sociologist Max Weber, best known for the seminal text The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. One of Max Weber’s most important contributions to sociology is his method of constructing ideal types (Idealtypen) as tools for sociological analysis. Ideal types are analytical constructs created by the researcher through the logical organization of chief characteristics of social phenomena. Their purpose is to make complex social realities intelligible by providing conceptual models against which historical cases can be compared.
The best-known example of this is Weber’s three ideal types of legitimate authority: traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational. Traditional authority rests on long-established customs and traditions, as in a monarchy. Charismatic authority rests on the perceived extraordinary qualities of a leader, such as a revolutionary or religious prophet. Legal-rational authority rests on formally established rules, laws, and procedures, with power attached to an office rather than the individual who occupies it. Weber called these “ideal types” because they are analytical models used to understand real systems of authority, which often contain elements of more than one type. If any readers have taken an introductory sociology class, it is almost certain that this was the example they were given when learning about Weber.
Weber’s method is most clearly articulated in his 1904 essay “The ‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy.” There, Weber delineates concept formation, the comparison and contrast of ideal types and reality, causal explanation, and value relevance. By value relevance, Weber means to convey the understanding that reality is infinitely complex; the researcher must therefore select what aspects of it are worth investigating.
To clear up any confusion for those readers who are more familiar with Weber’s work, Weber has been criticized (by Jürgen Habermas and Alvin W. Gouldner most notably) for his value-neutrality principle, that is, the demand that the sociologist should distinguish empirical analysis from personal value judgments; the researcher should not present their own moral or political preferences as scientific conclusions. (I won’t explore that criticism in this essay, but I do here for a different purpose if the reader is interested). By contrast, value relevance (Wertbeziehung) concerns the emphasis the observer places on things included in analytical models. Moreover, values determine the selection of a research problem.
This is an important matter to clarify because social science does not simply reproduce reality; it constructs analytical concepts by generalizing from facts (abstraction). Ideal types are concepts constructed by deliberately accentuating certain elements of empirical reality. Actual cases are compared against the ideal type to identify similarities, deviations, and causal relationships. In essence, the ideal type is a tool for asking why a particular historical configuration occurred. At issue in this essay, those who defend socialism emphasize the right-wing elements of fascism and downplay left-wing elements to save the socialist ideal. However value-neutral the presenter appears in his conclusions, his values shape the elements he includes in the analytical model he used to arrive at those conclusions. My goal in this essay is to focus on the left-wing elements socialists downplay in their advocacy of socialist politics, not to valorize fascism as an acceptable politics, but to show that socialism is unacceptable—because it necessarily results in fascistic arrangements.
I will come to that analysis shortly, but I need to say a bit more about Weber’s methodology. Weber’s method occupies a middle ground between two approaches that he regarded as inadequate. On one hand, a purely historical approach risks describing unique events without identifying broader patterns. This way of proceeding is known as the idiographic, a descriptive account of a society or some other social form. On the other hand, an attempt to discover universal laws of human behavior risks overlooking the meanings and historical contexts that make social action understandable. This is known as the nomothetic. By contrast, Weber’s interpretive sociology (verstehende Soziologie) sought to understand social action by examining the meanings actors attach to their behavior while also identifying and explaining recurring patterns of social organization.
Ideal types operate at an intermediate level of abstraction. They are more general than descriptive historical cases but less abstract than universal theories of human nature. For example, “nineteenth-century British industrial capitalism” refers to a specific historical configuration. It includes concrete institutions (administration, bureaucracy, law, etc.), technologies (industrialism), class relations, political arrangements, and cultural assumptions. “Capitalism,” by contrast, is a higher-level analytical concept that abstracts from concrete cases and emphasizes characteristics such as market exchange, private ownership, wage labor, profit orientation, and capital accumulation. At an even higher level of abstraction are concepts such as the “rational economic actor,” which attempt to identify general tendencies in human behavior.
Weber’s ideal types allow sociologists to move between these levels. They provide a way to compare historical cases without reducing them to universal laws. A real capitalist society will never perfectly match the ideal type of capitalism, just as no actual bureaucracy perfectly embodies the ideal type of rational-legal administration. This is popularly recognized in the phrase: “Communism looks great on paper (or in theory).” The value of the ideal type lies precisely in the comparison: the researcher asks how a particular case resembles or differs from the analytical model and what those similarities and differences reveal. However great communism is in theory, in practice it is anything but great. Indeed, it is terrible.
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The study of fascism provides an especially useful illustration of Weber’s method because the term itself is used at several levels of abstraction. At the most concrete level is Italian Fascism as a historical movement and regime, particularly the fascism developed under Benito Mussolini and philosophically articulated by Giovanni Gentile. Gentile’s conception of fascism centered on the idea of the ethical state. Against liberal individualism, Gentile argued that the individual was not fully realized apart from society but through participation in the collective life of the nation. The state was not merely an administrative institution; it represented the highest expression of the moral community. Fascist doctrine therefore rejected the liberal distinction between the individual and the state, arguing instead that true freedom came through identification with the national collective.
Italian Fascism rejected both Marxist class conflict, its politics also a form of collectivism and statism (Marx and Engels’ implied anarchism under communism notwithstanding), and liberal capitalism, expressing the principles of individualism and property rights, and instead attempted to create a corporatist system that would integrate capitalists and workers into national institutions. Fascism emphasized political unity, mass mobilization, symbolism, ritual, and loyalty to an ideology that embodied national aspirations as articulated by fascists. These characteristics describe a particular historical phenomenon: Italian Fascism in its specific cultural and political context.
Moving to the next level of abstraction, sociologists construct an ideal type of fascism. Here the goal is not to describe a particular concrete case, but to identify the characteristics that allow comparison across cases. A fascist ideal type might include several features: ultranationalism, rejection of liberal pluralism, hostility toward Marxism, belief in national decline and rebirth (palingenesis), authoritarian leadership, mass political mobilization, and the subordination of individual interests to a supposedly organic national community, i.e., collectivism, and statism
At this level, fascism becomes an analytical category rather than a historical description. As an analytical category, the concept becomes useful for present-day application. Otherwise, fascism refers only to historical cases and, consequently, cannot be used to describe any societies that have some of the features identified above. If the first-level abstraction is insisted upon, then there is no fascism to worry about. Denying that fascism is no longer a problem because Italian Fascism and National Socialism no longer exist as social systems disables our ability to detect fascism—of fascistic features, if you like—in the present and future. The next-level abstraction allows scholars and interested observers to compare Italian Fascism and National Socialism with other authoritarian movements and situations. The purpose of the ideal type is not to claim that all cases are identical, but to identify meaningful similarities and differences.
The highest level of abstraction moves away from political systems and toward more general explanations of authoritarian tendencies. Here the focus shifts from fascist movements to concepts such as the authoritarian personality or authoritarian orientation. Associated with traditions of political sociology and social psychology, this approach examines characteristics such as submission to authority, aggression toward perceived outsiders, rigid conventionalism, discomfort with ambiguity, and a preference for order and hierarchy.
At this level, the subject is no longer fascism itself. Rather, the question becomes whether certain psychological dispositions and social relations make individuals more receptive to authoritarian attitudes and movements. However, the Weberian approach cautions against reducing fascism entirely to personality characteristics. Authoritarian dispositions may exist in many societies and do not automatically produce fascist movements. Fascism also requires specific historical conditions: political crisis, mass mobilization, nationalist myths, institutional weakness, and cultural meanings that make authoritarian solutions appear legitimate.
The movement across these three levels demonstrates the usefulness of Weber’s method. The historical case of Italian Fascism allows us to understand a particular political movement in its own context. The ideal type of fascism allows comparison across societies and historical periods. The concept of the authoritarian personality allows investigation of more general human and social tendencies. Each level provides a different kind of knowledge, and none can replace the others. The sociological task, in Weber’s view, is not to reduce complex social phenomena to a single cause but to understand how individual motivations, social structures, and historical circumstances interact. Ideal types provide the conceptual bridge that allows sociology to move between concrete history and broader theoretical explanation.
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Progressives mock conservatives for their claim that the character of fascism is left-wing. I, too, am guilty of this. When I was on the left, it was important to emphasize that my side had nothing to do with fascism. But conservatives are not entirely wrong, and I have had to come to terms with that. Mussolini did not simply move from “left” to “right” in a clean ideological migration. The historical reality is more complicated. He moved away from Marxist socialism, to be sure, but retained several ideas with roots in socialist traditions—especially the rejection of liberal individualism and the belief that society should be organized around a collective purpose. These are big-ticket items, so to speak, and they are core features of Soviet Communism.
As many readers will know, Mussolini began as a socialist. He was a prominent figure in the Italian Socialist Party and edited its newspaper, Avanti!. His break with socialism came primarily over nationalism and World War I. Traditional socialists argued that workers had no nation and should oppose the war as a conflict among capitalist states. Mussolini instead argued that war could be leveraged to destroy the old order and create a new society, one that incorporated the best of Italian history. In fact, Mussolini didn’t leave the Socialist Party. The Party left him. Party leaders expelled him from its ranks in 1914. Mussolini’s fascism retained the socialist language of mobilization, revolution, transformation, and the creation of a “new man.” The difference was that fascism replaced class struggle with national struggle.
This is crucial to understand: the core element that fascism inherited from the revolutionary left was its collectivism and the abolition of individualism and its entailments, civil liberties and rights. Liberalism begins with the individual as the basic social unit: the state exists to protect individual rights. Like socialism, Fascism rejected that premise. For Mussolini, the individual found meaning only as part of a larger organic whole—which he conceptualized as the nation. His famous statement, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” expresses this idea. In that sense, fascism shares with socialism the belief that the community or collective has claims that supersede individual interests. Again, the difference is that socialism traditionally defined the collective in terms of class, while fascism defined it in terms of nation. But, as I noted in a previous essay, it is largely a distinction without a difference.
The right-wing elements of fascism emerged from its rejection of egalitarianism, internationalism, and Marxist class conflict. Fascists defended hierarchy, traditional authority, tradition, militarism, and nationalism. Rather than abolishing classes, Mussolini’s corporatist system attempted to organize workers and employers into state-controlled occupational bodies, subordinating both to national goals. The result was not socialism in the Marxist sense of political economy, because capital and social classes remained; nor was it classical capitalism, because economic actors were expected to serve state objectives. Instead of Marxist socialism, it is national socialist. Because corporatism is socialist in this sense, this is why conservatives often describe Scandinavian countries as socialist. From a Marxist standpoint, they aren’t. But from a national socialist standpoint, they are. It is no accident that these, and other European countries, are often led by socialist parties.
The most accurate way to describe Mussolini is not that he “went from left to right,” but that he combined elements from both revolutionary socialism and conservative nationalism into a new synthesis. He took the socialist critique of liberal individualism and the idea of collective mobilization and redirected them away from class revolution and toward the authoritarian nation-state. That synthesis—anti-liberal, anti-Marxist, collectivist, hierarchical, and nationalist—is what made fascism a distinct political form rather than merely a version of either socialism or conservatism.
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This is where the term “National Socialism,” the Hitlerian version of fascism, becomes especially misleading. The two words point in somewhat different directions. Like Italian Fascism, Hitler’s Nazi movement did borrow from certain socialist traditions, but it rejected the core Marxist meaning of socialism—especially class struggle and international working-class solidarity. However, it remains a popular movement. It is worth keeping in mind the name of the party: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), or National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi for short). At the same time, and this is crucial to grasp, the “national” part should not be understood as meaning a narrow, defensive patriotism. Nazi ideology was intensely expansionist and ultimately envisioned a racial empire that would transform Europe and, eventually, the world. It described itself as nationalist, but it was in fact a species of globalism.
Like Italian Fascism, Nazism rejected liberal individualism. The individual existed to serve a larger collective. But Hitler’s collective was not simply the state (as in Mussolini’s famous formulation); it was the racial community (Volksgemeinschaft, the “people’s community”). The state was an instrument for realizing the destiny of the Germanic racial type. In this sense, Nazism borrowed from nineteenth-century racial nationalism, Social Darwinism, including the progressive scientism of eugenics, and völkisch movements rather than from traditional socialism. The enemy was not primarily the capitalist class; it was defined in racial and ideological terms—above all Jews, Marxists, liberals, and other groups portrayed as threats to the racial organism.
However reluctant a man is to classify Nazism as a socialist phenomenon, he would have to recognize that the socialist language served several purposes. Nazi propaganda appealed to workers by promising to destroy the old class divisions and create a unified national community. It attacked finance capitalism, especially what it portrayed as “Jewish” finance, and promised economic planning in the national interest. These are all things today’s democratic socialist can get behind. Once in power, the Nazis did not abolish capital or place workers in control of production. Industrialists remained wealthy, and the labor movement was destroyed. Independent industrial trade unions were replaced by the state-controlled German Labor Front (effectively, a public employee union). The economy became a form of state-directed capitalism: private ownership remained, but production was subordinated to corporate state power. Such arrangements are the terminal points of today’s Democratic Party’s platform.
The right-wing character of Nazism appears most clearly in its hierarchy and racial ideology. It rejected equality as a universal principle. Human beings were understood as belonging to biologically determined groups with unequal value. The Nazis embraced militarism, obedience, traditional gender roles, anti-communism, and imperial expansion. In this sense, Nazism was deeply connected to the European radical right of the early twentieth century. However, today’s left embraces hierarchy and racial ideology, imagining a hierarchy where whites are at the top, and then, when in power, reordering things so that whites (and white-adjacent groups) are sent to the back of the line and other racial groups are privileged in educational institutions, occupations, and politics. Whereas previous iterations of the left rejected identity politics, present-day left-wing politics are tribal. And it’s not just race. Gender and religious hierarchies are preserved but inverted.
Nazism began with German nationalism, but it was not simply a doctrine of national self-determination. Hitler’s concept of Lebensraum (“living space”) required territorial conquest, particularly in Eastern Europe, which he viewed as the foundation for a German racial empire. The ultimate vision was not a world of separate nation-states peacefully competing; it was a hierarchical racial order dominated by Nazi Germany. The “nation,” discerned through a racial lens, was a vehicle for an expansionistic racial project. It was, in a word, transnationalist. This explains Hitler’s contempt for borders.
Similarly, the Schengen Area, a passport-free travel zone comprising twenty-nine European countries, has abolished border controls in the region. The European Union is the political apparatus of this regionalist project. The facts of corporatism in many of these countries, as well as NATO, a pan-European military apparatus, punctuate the parallel of present-day Europe to Hitler’s globalist ambitions. What Hitler could not achieve in war, European leaders have achieved by manufacturing consent for Germany’s central role in determining the region’s fate. Thus we have the paradox of the left supporting, and the European far-right opposing, the ambitions of National Socialism.
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Progressives become quite animated when a conservative describes National Socialism as a left-wing phenomenon. Socialism is not nationalist, they insist. They reduce socialism to its Marxist variety by ignoring the long history of socialism being defined in other ways. They never learned, or forget (or want others to forget), for example, that Henri de Saint-Simon’s vision of socialism was centered on replacing the disorder and inequality of feudal and capitalist society with a rationally organized, productive society directed toward the common good.
In Saint-Simon’s scheme, society should be administered by those with genuine productive and technical expertise—engineers, scientists, industrialists, and skilled workers—rather than by hereditary aristocrats or idle capitalist elites. Production should be organized cooperatively to improve the material and moral condition of the poorest members of society. Saint-Simon was less concerned with abolishing private property outright than with reorganizing economic and political institutions so that productive activity served social needs rather than private privilege.
Saint-Simon’s vision was technocratic: society would progress from domination and exploitation toward an industrial order in which productive work, scientific knowledge, and rational administration replaced inherited status as the basis of social organization. Today’s left would deny this is socialism, but even Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto no less, admit that Saint-Simon’s utopian system was socialist. And the vision of America articulated by today’s democratic socialist is essentially Saint-Simon’s vision. It should not escape the reader that many elements of National Socialism also reflect Saint-Simon’s utopian idea of modern industrial society.
Once more, conservatives are not entirely wrong. Adolf Hitler did not simply “put socialism together with nationalism.” He took the language of collective struggle and revolutionary transformation and fused it with globalism and technocracy. The result was a movement that was revolutionary in its ambitions but radically anti-egalitarian in its vision of the future. Many of the elements present in Nazi Germany are present in modern-day European and North American countries. Hierarchy remains, just reconfigured, and identity politics is central to claims on authority, that is, legitimate power, as defined by Weber. The difference between left-wing and right-wing fascism is that, in deconstructing the nuclear family and marginalizing Christianity (or coopting and repurposing its language), the former assails convention and tradition. Left-wing fascism is not conservative—but, then, Hitler’s appeal to conservatism was rather a propagandistic add-on. His vision was anything but conservative.
Ironically, the effect of left-wing fascism means that the characterization of today’s right as fascistic because of its appeals to convention and tradition is fallacious. These traits have never been the essence of fascism. Indeed, these are traits at the core of the American Republic. The nuclear family is not a right-wing idea. Rather, the integral family lies at the heart of a just society. Militarism and nationalism are also traits of the Republic. These are hardly fascistic. The United States is a nation founded on the principles of individualism and free-market capitalism, principles that must be wrapped in duty and virtue. The individual is part of the nation, but the nation does not determine the individual’s fate; it enables the individual to determine his own fate by choice and effort.
To be sure, these principles have been corrupted, but what has corrupted them proves the argument this essay is advancing. The corrupting force is the combination of administrative rules, collectivism, corporatism, identity politics, and technocracy. These are core elements of fascism. They are also the true tenets of progressivism. To be sure, these are not characteristic of Marxist socialism. Yet both are socialist in the tradition of Saint-Simon. Moreover, the democratic socialist’s appeal to Marxist socialism provides no escape from totalitarianism; the entailments of that species of socialism produce the same problem as corporatism. Individualism is destroyed in an administered society controlled by administrative and political elites determined to engineer substantive equality for the sake of social justice—and those elites will determine the meaning of social justice.
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At the most abstract level of the ideal type is the work of inferring the subjective elements of historical systems. The research question can be put straightforwardly: why are some members of society receptive to totalitarianism? Studying the authoritarian personality has been a decades-long interest among social scientists. However, the fascist experience has biased the question. If the personality traits that create susceptibility to fascism’s pull are drawn from the first-order ideal type, then they risk associating attributes such as conformity, conventionalism, traditionalism, destructiveness, and so on, with Italian Fascism and National Socialism.
Consider, for example, the attributes of superstition, the belief in mystical determinants of one’s fate, such as occult influences and supernatural forces, and stereotypy, that is, a tendency to think in rigid, categorical, simplified terms, especially about people and social groups. Woke progressivism scores highly on these scales. One can see this with gender identity doctrine and racial and religious identitarianism. Because these traits occur on the left, they are not exclusively right-wing attributes. If they are attributes of the authoritarian personality, then the left-wing personality is authoritarian. Of course it is. The left is collectivist and illiberal. The authoritarian personality is not necessarily fascist in the historical sense. The authoritarian personality was also a feature of mass consciousness under Soviet Communism.
One can see the authoritarian personality at work in the inability of work progressives to admit to facts and conclusions even though they are cognitively capable of reason. The capacity to admit that one is wrong is among the highest intellectual and moral virtues. Yet this ability requires more than intelligence or logical competence. A person may be fully capable of understanding a valid argument, recognizing compelling evidence, and following that evidence to a sound conclusion, while, at the same time, rejecting it. The obstacle is often not a deficiency in reasoning itself, but the complex psychology that shapes how human beings process information. Motivated reasoning, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, the illusory truth effect, tribal identity, ego investment, and other psychological mechanisms frequently prevent individuals from accepting conclusions that threaten deeply held beliefs or social commitments. The problem, therefore, is not simply one of logic but of the human mind’s capacity for self-deception. Self-deception is a hallmark of mass consciousness in authoritarian movements.
This insight suggests that the study of rationality must extend beyond formal logic into psychology. This is why I have spent a lot of time writing about how people think. Logical reasoning explains how conclusions ought to be reached; psychology explains why people so often fail to reach them. The most dangerous errors are not those produced by a lack of intelligence, but those sustained by emotional attachment, group loyalty, or identity. Human beings can construct elaborate rationalizations that preserve prior commitments even when contrary evidence is overwhelming. Consequently, genuine intellectual honesty requires not only the ability to reason correctly but also the psychological discipline to subordinate one’s identity and preferences to the force of evidence. This is difficult in a collectivist society, hence the value of individualism, and the teaching of logic and critical thinking.
One influential attempt to explain this phenomenon was the concept of the authoritarian personality discussed in the previous section. The approach was developed by thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School, including Erich Fromm and, more empirically, Theodor Adorno and his collaborators. Their work represented an important contribution by identifying psychological traits associated with conformity, submission to authority, and hostility toward out-groups. However, as noted, much of this tradition remained tied to the historical content of fascism and National Socialism. In doing so, it risked treating authoritarianism as primarily a phenomenon of the political right rather than identifying the broader psychological characteristics that can emerge under many ideological systems.
Drawing on Weber’s methodology of ideal types, a higher level of abstraction would separate the defining characteristics of authoritarianism from the specific historical movements in which they first appeared. Once those characteristics are abstracted—unquestioning obedience to authority, ideological conformity, suppression of dissent, moral absolutism, dehumanization of opponents, and the subordination of truth to collective identity—they become recognizable across diverse political and religious movements. The same psychological patterns can be observed not only in fascist regimes but also in Stalinist communism, revolutionary cults, and other authoritarian systems. The ideological content changes; the underlying psychological structure remains remarkably similar.
This broader perspective helps explain episodes of mass political and social irrationality. Daniel Goldhagen, in his 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, argued that Nazi Germany drew upon a reservoir of cultural attitudes that enabled ordinary citizens to participate in extraordinary crimes. He conceptualized this as “eliminationist antisemitism.” Similarly, movements such as the Peoples Temple under Jim Jones demonstrate that intelligence alone offers no immunity from collective delusion. In each case, many participants possessed the cognitive ability to understand evidence and reason logically. What failed was not intellect but the psychological capacity to resist conformity, authority, fear, and ideological commitment. The essential lesson is that rationality depends as much upon character and self-awareness as upon intelligence. To know how to reason is indispensable, but to recognize why we resist reason may be the more profound achievement.
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This past April I published How Different Were Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union? Analytically, a Lot. Phenomenologically, Not So Much. The present analysis used a prominent sociological approach to elaborate on my thoughts in that essay (which used a more phenomenological approach). Weber’s method of ideal types, applied across ascending levels of abstraction, reveals that fascism cannot be confined to the historical or contemporary right-wing ideas. While I have long preferred the Marxian understanding of socialism (admittedly in part for abandoned aspirational reasons), I cannot ignore that definitions of socialism do not reduce to the Marxist one.
At the concrete historical level, Italian Fascism and National Socialism arose as distinct regimes. At the intermediate level of the ideal type, however, the defining features—ultranationalism or its functional equivalent in identity-based collectivism, rejection of liberal pluralism and individualism, mass mobilization, authoritarian leadership, subordination of the person to an organic community, corporatist or technocratic economic direction, and the fusion of revolutionary rhetoric with hierarchical reorganization—prove portable. These traits appear wherever the liberal individual is dissolved into a higher collective and the state or its administrative proxies claim comprehensive moral and organizational authority.
At this analytical level, the left is not exempt. Progressive politics in contemporary Europe and North America routinely display the same pattern: the individual is redefined as a node in racial, gender, or identity collectives; civil liberties yield to administrative rules enforcing substantive equality; corporatist arrangements subordinate market actors to state-directed social goals; technocratic elites claim the authority of scientific expertise to redesign society; and dissent is pathologized as moral failure. The collective is no longer the nation or the race in the classical fascist sense, but the identity coalition or the administered public. The content of the myth changes; the structure of collectivism, illiberalism, and state-centered transformation remains. In Weberian terms, the ideal type of fascism fits these configurations as readily as it fits Mussolini’s ethical state (Stato etico) or Hitler’s people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft).
The highest level of abstraction confirms the point. The authoritarian personality—conformity, moral absolutism, hostility toward designated outsiders, intolerance of ambiguity, and the subordination of evidence to group identity—is not the exclusive property of the right. It is observable wherever motivated reasoning, self-deception, and tribal loyalty shield collective doctrines from falsification. Woke progressivism scores high on these measures precisely because it is collectivist and illiberal. The same psychological dispositions that once sustained fascist and Stalinist regimes reappear under new ideological banners.
The methodological movement from historical case to ideal type to psychological disposition demonstrates that fascism is not a right-wing monopoly. It is a recurring form of anti-liberal politics that can, and does, attach itself to left-wing thought whenever the latter abandons the individual for the collective, elevates administrative power over rights, and treats truth as subordinate to identity. This is why liberalism is often identified as lying on the right-wing end of the political spectrum in free societies. But recognizing this is not a partisan exercise; it is the logical consequence of applying Weber’s own criteria of concept formation, comparison, and causal understanding without ideological restriction. This is work we must do if we are to save the free and open society. As a liberal, am I on the left or the right? It depends, I suppose. (I address this matter in Why “Left” and “Right” Are Useless Political Labels—and Probably Always Were.)
It is fitting that this essay closes with Weber’s opinion of socialism. Weber was strongly critical of socialism, particularly Marxist socialism, arguing that a socialist economy would necessarily require a large, centralized bureaucracy to administer production and distribution. His concern was that replacing private capitalism with state ownership would not eliminate domination; instead, it could produce an even more powerful bureaucratic apparatus from which individuals could not escape. He moreover rejected the Marxist idea that class conflict alone explained the development of modern society. Perhaps this is why today’s leftists have shifted their rhetoric from class struggle to identity politics (see Marx and the Protestant Work Ethic).
Weber recognized serious problems with capitalism and supported various social reforms to address these problems. Bureaucracy and technocracy were problems in capitalism, as well, especially in its corporate form. This was the conclusion in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Yet Weber’s central concern in his work was individual freedom and political efficacy, rather than capitalism as an end in itself. The question concerned the type of capitalism at work, not capitalism per se.
Weber feared that socialism would abolish the capitalist boss only to replace him with the bureaucratic state. Capitalism appears in various forms. It even permits worker ownership (see The Problem is Not Worker Ownership but Socialism at Scale). But socialism tends towards one form in which the individual disappears into the collective and liberal freedoms are extinguished. This dynamic appears as well in the corporate state (See The Administered Life and its Discontents; Republican Virtue and the Unchained Prometheus: The Crossroads of Moral Restraint and the Iron Cage of Rationality; Stahlhartes Gehäuse and the Drive to World War III).
Weber died in 1920, before fascism emerged as a fully developed political system; however, aspects of his analysis of modernity can be read as anticipating its institutional dangers (which is why the Frankfurt School incorporated his insights in critical theory). Weber’s critique of bureaucracy, rationalization, and technocracy focused on the growing power of impersonal organizations, administrative expertise, and rule-bound institutions that could subordinate individual judgment to organizational imperatives. Weber worried that modern societies were becoming increasingly governed by systems that demanded efficiency, discipline, and technical competence while narrowing the space for individual autonomy and political responsibility.
However, the Bolshevik Revolution occurred in Weber’s lifetime, and he did have things to say about it. He regarded the Bolsheviks’ attempt to abolish capitalism and establish a socialist state as likely to produce more bureaucracy rather than less. His fear was that a centrally planned economy would require an enormous administrative apparatus to manage production, distribution, and social life. Once established, such a bureaucracy would come to possess tremendous power over individuals because there would be few independent economic institutions capable of resisting it. Weber also worried that revolutionary leaders who claimed to act in the name of historical necessity could undermine individual freedom and political responsibility.
Fascist regimes did not simply embody Weberian bureaucracy. They combined bureaucracy with charismatic leadership, ideological mobilization, and extreme political repression. They demonstrated how modern administrative and technological capacities could be placed in the service of authoritarian power. It should not escape the reader that really-existing socialism is a paradigm of Weber’s fears. Like National Socialism, the Soviet Union combined bureaucracy with charismatic leadership, ideological mobilization, and extreme political repression. Both regimes were prepared to sacrifice freedom—and people—for a utopian vision of a collectivist endstate. This is the vision of woke progressivism, as well as Islam, hence the usefulness of both to the transnationalist project.
Despite describing his politics as democratic socialist, George Orwell despised both European fascism and Soviet communism for the same reasons: they were bureaucratic systems that erased liberty. Despite appealing to Orwell, Conservatives are too quick to dismiss critical theory’s insights on this problem. The similarity of these systems in practice obsessed Orwell, and his focus on the problem of socialism, despite having taken a bullet in the Spanish Civil War, in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four testifies to this. Likewise, the Frankfurt School arrived at a similar conclusion. Both Orwell and the Frankfurt School followed a similar path, one that did not reject Marx outright, but rather critiqued the entailments of this mode of thought by those whose politics claimed him. (See Communism and Fascism—A Distinction Without a Difference?)
In that sense, Weber’s famous image of the “iron cage” offers a powerful lens through which to understand one of the dangers of twentieth-century totalitarianism: the possibility that highly rationalized institutions could become extraordinarily efficient instruments of domination. The problems of capitalism are not solved by socialist revolution. They are addressed through reform. And socialists are the last people to put in charge of reforming capitalism. Healing the patient cannot be achieved by killing the patient. Indeed, resolving the crisis of late capitalism requires the revitalisation of liberalism, and the focus should be on deconstructing the corporate state.
freedom and reason 