Horwitz's Corollary to Godwin's Law

We all know Godwin's Law of the Internet:  all discussion threads will eventually invoke Hitler and the person invoking him in an invidious comparison is deemed to have lost the debate.  Invoking Godwin's Law has become a way to dismiss one's interlocutor as being a crazy crank. 

Godwin's Law having been just invoked against me on another blog because I referred to the NRA as "fascist," despite the fact that I provided evidence and citations to back up my claim, I hereby announce Horwitz's Corollary to Godwin's Law: 

"When people invoke Godwin's Law in the face of a serious, relevant argument about Hitler or Fascism made with evidence and citations, it reflects their own inability to respond rationally to the claim being made and thus they should be deemed to have lost the discussion."

Comments

[tim]

Oh great - another Corollary ... like we need another...

You seem not to get that 'fascist' is as misused as 'nazi' or 'hitler'. So I am going to side with the person who called you out regardless of what your "evidence and citations" may be.

Besides - you know who else provided evidence and citations?

(if you don't get that last snarky remark then there is no hope for you on the internets)

[NW]

Goodwin's law is silly, it is in no way a legitimate fallacy.

[Rationalitate]

It's kind of weird to address someone in particular on a widely-read public blog and not at least give us the context (i.e., the offending blog post)!

[Steve Horwitz]

Context: http://volokh.com/posts/1228286081.shtml#496081

And as for Tim, well you're entitled to your opinion on the matter of course. And "fascist" and "nazi" certainly are misused. But when one makes an argument with historical evidence that institution A looks a lot like institution B and institution B was part of fascism, and when the creators of institution A *admit* that they were modeling it after the Italian fascists, then it hardly seems "misused" to refer to institution A as being "fascist."

Note further I did not call a *person* fascist, just an institution.

[Rafe Champion]

It is most unfortunate that the term was misappropriated by the left and became a miscellaneous term of abuse. So a useful technical term to describe a particular alignment of political forces has been lost in popular memory. I don't suppose it will help to remind you that these folk are supposed to be the harbingers of sweetness and light. Sometimes it doesn't feel like that when they use personal abuse and censorship to advance the cause. Be patient and understanding!

[sean andrews]

I think you'd all benefit from introducing Polanyi's argument about the causes of fascism--wherein he calls FDR fascist along with virtually every other country on the planet that had previously been subjected to laissez faire capitalism. In short, it has nothing to do with the size of the state in question, but with the force of the uprising from society demanding protection from the disembedded market. He doesn't celebrate fascism, he doesn't say it is a good thing. He just says it is the predictable outcome to subjecting all people to this form of market uncertainty. It wasn't, in other words, just German propaganda or "German Ideas" as Hayek was so fond of saying: it was a cauldron bubbling below the surface that exploded. The fascist tendencies discussed here--in whatever sense they existed--are not just the result of the people giving too much power to the state: they are the result of the state trying to hold society together as it goes through convulsions and disorientations.

I know it is difficult for Austrians to see the waste lain by "creative destruction" as anything but a beautiful gift from the gods of the market, but it might be a good time to evaluate some of your narrow frameworks of human interaction. Since there was some talk about "cultural theory" a few weeks ago, checking out Polanyi, who was an economic anthropologist, might be a good place to start.

I will say, however, that one of the first rules of cultural theory is that you be reflective and self aware: since egotism and machismo seems to be the only mode of self awareness on this site, I have a hard time imagining most of you will be any good at it. But stranger things have happened.

[Rafe Champion]

Sean, I was going to ask, which Polanyi? But of course you mean Karl who found his ideal state in Dahomey, in Africa. As reported by Roger Sandall. http://www.rogersandall.com/Archive_General_Polanyi,-K-and-Polanyi,-M.php

In Dahomey, he says approvingly, "the economic process" was "implemented" by the state, and "production was under the control of the monarchy..." What seemed to be "a kind of ten-year-plan" is mentioned with respect. The king himself "enforced cultivation" while "agricultural affairs were in the hands of a 'minister of agriculture'" with the power to tell farmers what they should grow. In the whole kingdom only 12 forges were allowed to make hoes, "each of which was under the watchful eye of an official."

Carriers in Dahomey were bound by official rules. "The load for carriers was fixed," and when a delay was reported the Prime Minister himself "immediately sent forth fresh men with orders to punish the villains who had hung back, as, he said, he had himself examined each of their loads and found them all considerably under the regulated weight for carriers." Census data were a state secret, the penalty for disclosure being garotting. Economic rationalists today might feel the bureaucracy was larger, perhaps, than strictly necessary; but then it was traditional for each official in Dahomey to be paired with another who was assigned to watch him. Security was maintained by a system of state spies.

Hundreds of slaves and prisoners were brutally sacrificed each year, and regular wars were undertaken to obtain them. But Karl Polanyi remained unmoved. "Admittedly," he said, "acts of repulsive cruelty, religious mass murder, and endemic techniques of treachery in the political field were the accompaniment of these high achievements. Nevertheless, Dahomey's was an unbreakable society, held together by bonds of solidarity over which only naked force eventually prevailed.

[Unit]

I agree that there are similarities between institution A and institution B, but so there are with the Soviets, the Nazi and many other institutions. So when you choose to use the Italian fascist regime instead of some other regime, there has to be an extra intuition that you want to convey. I'm not an expert on fascism so I'm missing the point. I would have understood if you had said the "statist NRA", or the "central-planning NRA".

[Richard Ebeling]

It is worth recalling the origin of fascism as a political economic system. It was molded together by a variety of Italian intellectuals who joined with Mussolini in the years immediately after the First World War.

One the one hand, it was a brand of national collectivism, i.e., the idea that the essential and defining social unit was neither the individual nor the global working class. It was the nation as embodied in the power and institutions of the state.

(Classical) Liberalism was wrong, they said, in conceiving of the individual as an entity separate from the national community within which he was born and which nurtured him and provided the social and culture context that defined him and gave him a sense of belonging.

The individual passes away; the national collective lives on. Thus, this collective "naturally" took precedence over the individual; and the individual -- understanding that he is nothing outside of the nation-state and everything he can be only within the nation-state – accepts that he must be willing to sacrifice everything for the national collective if called upon by his state to do so.

Fascism also rejected all forms of democracy and republican representative government. Liberal democracy was institutionalized chaos and disorder, in which the “true” and higher interests of the national community, was lost in battles among social and class factions bent on despoiling the nation.

Democracy was the enemy of order and national purpose. Factional interest was placed above the collective interest. Instead, the will, purpose and meaning of the nation was seen as being embodied in the leader – the “Duce” – whose achievement of national power through political struggle demonstrated the rightness of his vision of the national purpose.

As a logical extension of this world-view, fascism rejected free market capitalism. It, too, was the embodiment of the individual’s selfish interest taking precedence over the higher interest of the nation and its unitary calling to greatness.

Mussolini, it should be recalled was one of the leading figures in the Italian socialist movement before World War I. He fell out with many of the Italian socialists due to his insistence that it was in the interest of the nation to join the war on the Allied side to defeat Austria-Hungary and reclaim those areas in the Tyrol populated by Italians, so as to complete the political bringing together of all the Italian people within the borders of the same nation-state.

The mainstream Italian socialists declared that the war was a war among the capitalist powers and the working class should not be the cannon fodder for their plundering of the world.

Mussolini and many other fascists never turned their backs on the socialist critique of capitalism, as a social system of exploitation and social divisiveness through class warfare. Liberalism and capitalism were the two sides of the same coin and both needed to be rejected, they said.

Economic collectivism remained central to the fascist conception of social unity. What they argued was that Italy was not ready for nationalizing socialism along national lines. Italy was a backward country, underdeveloped, a “have-not nation” lacking the riches of global empires like those of Great Britain and France. Italy needed to take advantage of what members of all social classes could contribute to the nation’s development and restored greatness in terms of its ancient Rome past.

The fascist economic model became a form of the medieval guild system, in which each profession, occupation, trade, and industry was controlled and organized for the common good by guild members to maintain “fair prices” and rational rules of improvement and limited competition that other wise could harm the social betterment if left unregulated and guided solely by self-interest.

This conception of a “guild socialism” also had a short period of “fashionableness” among English socialists right after World War I, including Beatrice and Sydney Webb who published a book outlining a new constitution for Britain based on guild socialism.

This became the basis of the Italian theory of “Corporativism” under which all industry would be forced into a network of cartels, and all workers would be compelled to belong and be subservient to mandatory trade unions. The government – again, embodying the essence and purpose of the nation and the people as a whole – would preside over and oversee the setting of prices, wages, production, work conditions, and the direction of all economic activity.

The purpose was to see that all economic activity was coordinated to advance the material, cultural, and spiritual improvement of the nation as a whole.

All would have their place and role within the Corporativist system – workers, businessmen, professionals, intellectuals, etc. – but within a compulsory system of economic planning that did not nationalize the means of production but put all economic activity under the directing and watchful eye of the State.

Because of the “bad press” Nazism and World War II gave to the fascism agenda, it is forgotten the extent to which fascism appealed to many intellectuals in all of the leading countries of the West. Here was a system, it was said, that transcended the errors and cruelty of both unbridled capitalism and wild, revolutionary Marxism socialism.

Here, it was claimed, was the “middle way” that preserved what was useful in business managerial skill and discipline without individualistic, narrow profit-seeking; and also placed the collective interest of the nation before that of the individual without the destruction of national identity and a proper meaning of social hierarchy that Marxian socialism wanted to abolish.

Alistair Horn’s “The Appeal of Fascism” summarizes fascism’s attraction for many European intellectuals; John Diggins’ “Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America” discusses in great detail the draw fascism had for many on this side of the Atlantic.

Gerald Swope, the head of General Electric, presented a fascist plan to get the U.S. out of the Great Depression in 1931. Paul Einzig, one of the leading international economic policy analysts during the interwar period, published a book in 1932 on the “Fascist Economic System” heralding it as a model for other Western societies. (Einzig only turned against fascism as an economic system after 1933 when the German version of National Socialism incorporated racialism as a foundational element.)

The National Recovery Administration under FDR clearly was molded upon the Italian fascist model. Indeed, in an interview with “Newsweek” magazine in 1934, Mussolini praised FDR as a “social fascist” following along many of the same lines as the Italian version.

It not for the brutality and racism of the Nazi variation on the fascist theme and the defeat of Germany and Italy in the Second World War, fascism might have very well have ended up remaining a major ideological competitor in the decades after the 1940s.

Indeed, well into the 1950s in Catholic countries like Ireland and Portugal political and economic thinkers continued to discuss in positive terms the Corporativist model as a social order consistent with a higher ethic than that either Liberalism or communism.

These are the facts about fascism as a political and economic system as I have come to understand it through my readings over the years. Many of the thinkers and policy-makers during those early New Deal days were swept up by this appeal of fascism, and elements of it guided their designing of the recovery programs of FDR's first years in office.

Richard Ebeling

[Mark Hubbard]

I'm chuffed we've got a counter argument finally.

[Rafe Champion]

Taking a cue from Richard Ebling, when the Hawke-Keating government came to power in Australia in 1983 there were moves towards a corporate state with "Summits" where leaders of government, industry and the trade unions were supposed to come together in partnership instead of fighting each other. Fortunately that went nowhere fast (although the unions remained the hidden hand behind the Labor administration) and Keating got on with a limited agenda of deregulation (though it was radical in the local context).

[Dave Prychitko]

Too many words like "invoke" and "invidious" and "interlocutor" in the preamble, followed by repetitions of "invoke" again within the corollary itself.

At five in the morning, this stuff is a pain to read.

[libertyfirst]

The "reductio ad antifascism" is the companion fallacy of the "reductio ad hitlerum". :-)

Good point.

[Steve Horwitz]

So sleep later Dave. :)

And, while I'm at it, "what Richard said."

[Bogdan Enache]

I would like to add one more thing to the excellent comment of professor Ebeling.

Anyone who wants to really understand what fascism was must read one or two books by Renzo De Felice.

De Felice is recognized as the foremost authority on fascism and he wrote an entire library on this subject. What is most interesting however for this debate, is that his personal ideological convictions are to the "left", the "far-left" in fact. He is a member of the Italian Communist Party and after 1956 a leading adherent to the revisionist euro-communism. Therefore he is decidedly anti-fascist and quite keen to separate it from any connexion with socialism.

But De Felice the historian and the scholar of fascism doesn't do that; on the contrary he is one of the first to revise the common left-biased understanding of fascism as a reactionary middle-class bourgeois ideology that still prevails even today. He is driven to recognise that fascism was a progressive socialist ideology, the the first program of Fasci di Combattimmento was by all accounts indistinguishable from that of the Italian Socialist Party : it called for land for peasantry, redistribution of wealth, emancipation of women etc etc

In fact, fascism takes a turn to the "right" only because Mussolini became aware during WWI of the importance that cultural elements play in ideology, politics, and society (We are talking here about those kind of cultural elements which the pseudo-field of study called cultural studies has nothing to do with). He opposed the conquest of Libia and at his call the dock workers in the South of Italy went on strike and made it difficult for the Italian Army to move troops. When WWI started he again opposed war in the name of socialism, workers' brotherhood and peace...but this time nobody listened to him - the workers rallied behind the flag, the national flag not the Socialist International flag.

Consequently he embraced nationalism instead of the internationalism that characterised the original socialist movement. But although nationalist, fascism was not anti-semitic at first (Mussolini's mistress for instance, who actually helped him a lot in his "career", was a Jew; many of the sponsors of the party were at first Jewish Bankers and Industrialists etc) but became anti-semitic only later, for opportunistic reasons and above all under the pressure of the senior partner in the new world alliance, Nazi Germany.

[Richard Ebeling]

Since we are merely attempting to be historically accurate, with no intention of "white washing" the dictatorial character of Mussolini's regime, as Mr. Enache points out Italian fascism was not racist or anti-Semitic in comparison to Nazi ideology and practice.

Jews were members of Mussolini's government; and not until heavy pressure from the Nazis during the war did the Italian government introduce "racial" laws of the German type.

Also, leading intellectual figures in Italy who opposed the regime were persecuted and often prevented from teaching or making public addresses, but they were not subject to the type of arrest, torture and murder that was practiced from the start under Hitler's regime.

For example, Beneditto Croce lived, wrote and published throughout the fascist period, even though he was a critic of the regime.

Guglielmo Ferrero, one of Italy's most respected historians in the first half of the 20th century -- a leading scholar on Rome history, and also a outspoken classical liberal who opposed militarism and state control of the economy -- was prevented from teaching; but in 1930, Ferrero was allowed to leave the country to take up residence in Switerland and teach modern history at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva (where he became the colleague of Mises, Ropke, Michael Heilperin).

Richard Ebeling

[Unit]

Great summary by Richard Ebeling. But I'm not sure that's what people think about when they hear the adjective "fascist". Even though I agree with Steve Horwitz's assessment of the NRA, I understand why other people might be puzzled by that term.

[kurt]

It could only be fitting if Henry Paulson received the 2008 Time person of the year award 75 years after this one:
http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/personoftheyear/archive/stories/1933.html