Armin Mohler and the Fascist Style
by Matteo Romano
Matteo Romano explores Armin Mohler’s provocative argument that fascism is defined not by ideology but by a distinctive style of being.
“One is more faithful to a style than to ideas,” wrote Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, and without the slightest doubt we can say that this is the guiding thread running through the brief yet dense essay The Fascist Style (1973) by Armin Mohler, a philosopher and leading figure of the European New Right. Mohler, a scholar of the German Conservative Revolution, Ernst Jünger’s secretary during the postwar years, and a correspondent of Julius Evola, is, as mentioned, known above all for the role he played within the European New Right and for his sharp critique of liberalism.
Here, through a physiognomic description of what he considers to be the attitudinal “style” of the “fascist,” Mohler seeks to identify the essential core of that historical, political, and social experience. The context in which this short essay took shape can be found in a debate among various intellectuals of the European New Right during those years, one whose speculative foundation lay in the ancient medieval dispute between nominalism and universalism. The discussion was carried forward primarily through articles and publications in the journal Nouvelle École [New School], often written by Mohler himself or by Alain de Benoist. This same question was later taken up by Alexander Dugin, who saw in the nominalist worldview the very root of modern liberal individualism.
For Mohler, however, a vision that restores individuality and its existential value to the center (and which we might therefore call nominalist) is precisely what makes it possible to reclaim the most authentic, and equally the harshest, meaning of life. It alone permits a cathartic renewal beyond every empty, abstract, universal, and therefore leveling conception of man, upon which modern liberalism and its various forms of internationalism are founded. It follows, therefore, returning to our subject, that the approach Mohler adopts to define “what is fascist” is (quite rightly, we might add) essentially pre-political and pre-doctrinal. In this, he follows the path traced by other scholars of the phenomenon, such as Giorgio Locchi in The Essence of Fascism.
Mohler writes: “To summarize, let us say that fascists have absolutely no difficulty adapting themselves to the inconsistencies of theory, because they understand one another through a more direct path: that of style.” Elsewhere, referring to the speech delivered by Gottfried Benn on the occasion of Marinetti’s visit to Hitler’s Germany in 1934, Mohler writes: “Style takes precedence over faith; form comes before the idea.”
For Mohler, then, the fascist is not such because he adheres to an ideological, doctrinal, or political framework. He is such because he has experienced within himself, in the deepest intimacy of his being, the mortal weakness of every Enlightenment, rationalist, and democratic myth or value. All of these collapse in the face of wars, revolutions, and economic and social crises. Yet the fascist responds by gathering what is positive within every crisis, becoming the bearer of a creative will that reaffirms the values of spirit, heroism, and the will over life.
Quoting Jünger, Mohler writes: “Our hope rests upon the young who burn with fever because the green putrefaction of disgust consumes them.” For Mohler, this expresses “the longing for another form of life, denser and more real.” It is a denser life because it is more complete, having passed through a naked and renewing experiential tragedy. Mohler speaks of a fusion of “anarchy” and “style,” of destruction and renewal. It is precisely this heroic mortification that leads to a reconnection with the original and unified root of reality and of the individual’s life, in which the opposition between life and death is overcome in an inner indifference. This renewal is something the fascist feels within himself, but only on the condition that he has accepted as his task “the necessity of having to die constantly, day and night, in solitude.” Only then, having reached the zero point of every value (not coincidentally, one section is entitled “The Magical Zero Point”), drawing upon deeper forces and having been virtuously forged through a style “that is not theatrical, but one of imposing coldness towards which Europe should orient itself,” can he bear witness to the birth of a new hierarchy. It is an objective, cold, and impersonal style.
Mohler finds this attitude specifically in the “fascist” man and in the “fascist” style because, according to the author, they place the greatest emphasis on individuality and personal experience. While the National Socialist is characterized above all by his emphasis on the people, the Volksgemeinschaft [people’s community], and social rebellion, Mohler argues that the statist is distinguished by his admiration for what functions, for what is not arbitrary, and for what is well integrated into the framework of the state. That framework, at times suffocating, prevents him from fully experiencing the sense of the tragic that, according to Mohler, is proper to the fascist. Although these three “types” have historically overlapped, Mohler’s aim here, at the theoretical level, is to emphasize the specific character of what he defines as “the fascist man.”
It is precisely the primary necessity of existential conviction that, for Mohler, explains why fascism “lacks a system prepared a priori; it lacks the scientific pretension of explaining everything in a dogmatic and bookish manner.” In this lies the immanent, intimate, and individual character of the revolution that the fascist first carries out within himself, and which animates him, leading him to manifest an inner form, an attitude, and a particular dignity and nobility that can only be attained through an intimate catharsis.
In conclusion, we may say that although Mohler’s interpretation may at certain points appear somewhat forced, it has the merit of refusing to reduce the experience and the phenomenon under discussion to something accidental, contingent, or confined to party membership, political doctrine, or economic theory. Instead, it places it on a deeper and more fundamental level, locating it in that within the individual which stands in communication with the sphere of Being.
Translated from the original Italian version on Identitario.