Let’s not forget that bourgeois liberty, i.e., modern (liberal) capitalist class society, was not quite safe until very recently. It should not be forgotten, either, that this element played an important role in the anti-fascist struggle (not understood by purely and uncompromisingly proletarian radicals like Amadeo Bordiga and some, by no means all, left communists). An explanation is here in order. Fascism and National Socialism are constantly interpreted, not without justification, as instances of ‘reactionary modernism’, as a sub-species of twentieth-century revolutionism, etc., initially in order to stress their not negligible parallels and similarities with ‘communism’, especially Stalinism, often under the aegis of the (untenable) ‘totalitarianism’ dogma. However justified and novel these approaches were, they contributed to the (all too frequent) neglect of the obvious. Southern and Catholic fascism wanted to introduce the Ständestaat (always translated as ‘corporate state’ but literally meaning ‘the state of estates’, a sort of new caste society), based on the theories of Othmar Spann, Salazar and others, all inherited from Count Joseph de Maistre, the Marquis de Bonald and Don Juan Donoso Cortés, with a mix of the ‘elite’ theories of Vilfredo Pareto and others. There were variants of the same neo-feudalism in Nazism, too, with racist and sexist elements of ‘arischer Männerbund’ (Aryan male fraternity) and similar pseudo-historical nonsense, very much in vogue then among fashionable people like Carl Schmitt and others of his ilk.
What all this verbiage amounted to was a quite serious attempt to re-introduce caste society, that is, human groups with radically different entitlements and duties (against uniformizing and levelling, ‘mechanistic’ conceptions of egalitarian liberalism and socialism and bourgeois individualism): the Führerprinzip in all occupations (witness Heidegger’s infamous ‘Rektoratsrede’, i.e., commencement address); vocational groups dissolving classes (e.g., steel-workers would have meant, in the future, Krupp and Thyssen as well as the steel-workers proper); untouchables (Jews and other condemned races), and so on. The fascists were quite serious in wanting to go back to before 1789, as they (or at least their predecessors) had been announcing loudly since the 1880s. Since pre-modern and aristocratic memories were still alive in Central and Southern Europe, the modernist-egalitarian impulse against fascism was quite strong, and since this impulse was carried by the Left, and since the murderous attack of fascism and Nazism was directed against them and the liberal bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, small wonder that Popular Fronts were born and were quite sincere in their fight against the revival of an oppressive past, and against an anti-egalitarian and anti-Enlightenment obscurantism. This fight was pre-socialist in its historical and ideological character, but unavoidable (and one has to admire the gall of Horkheimer and Adorno in disregarding this aspect altogether).
So, egalitarian, anti-aristocratic and anti-caste – thus ‘Rousseauian’ – struggles were fully justified as late as the Second World War. We forget the backward-looking character of fascism and Nazism at our own peril. Serious attempts to create a new nobility were launched, beginning with the vitéz or warrior ‘estate’ in the first, radical phase of Vice-Admiral von Horthy’s counter-revolution in Hungary and ending in Himmler’s SS mystique; the vitéz (former First World War soldiers, commissioned and non-commissioned, of impeccably Gentile ancestry) were offered land and a small stipend and were organized in quite an effective knights’ order from 1920; their Supreme Captain was the Regent, von Horthy, himself. The vitéz order was revived in Hungary after 1989, albeit only as a nostalgic association of the extreme right. But ‘corporatist’ ideology is still alive in contemporary Hungary; from time to time there are proposals to revive an unelected upper chamber consisting of delegates of all ‘respectable professions’, all the bishops, etc. Most recently such a proposal was advanced by a ‘socialist’ prime minister, a former Communist central committee member.
[For complete context see
Gáspár Miklós Tamás: Telling the truth about class http://www.grundrisse.net/grundrisse22/tellingTheTruthAboutClass.htm