Fascism completed a three-stage merger of private power with public organization

Evidence

Liberalism, characterized by the use of money as a universal medium of exchange and by compromise between individual parliamentarians and between parliamentarians and the government, had been followed by mass democracy', characterized by the existence of central banks able to compete with governments, and by voluntary contracts between the leading groups, capital and labour, and their subsidiary organizations. In Kirchheimer's eyes, fascism, as the successor to these two stages, had imposed itself as a system which was marked by the fact that the absorption of individual rights into group rights, and the sanctioning of this by the state, had reached an extreme form. The monopoly of labour was thus acquired by the state, while industrial private monopolies were furnished with the powers of the state. Thus the process of cartelization has reached its logical conclusion in the final merger of private power and public organization.’ However, the interests of the various partners in this compromisethe monopolies, the army, industry and agriculture, as well as the various levels of the party bureaucracycould be reduced to a common denominator only by means of the fascist programme of territorial expansion. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 973

Categorization

• DEFINE: Kirchheimer’s staged history of compromise — liberalism to mass democracy to fascism — defines a distinctive analytical framework worth keeping for the institutional-history purpose.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that territorial expansion is the only common denominator uniting the divergent interests of monopolies, army, industry, agriculture, and party bureaucracy in fascism is a dense causal thesis about why fascist states must be expansionist.
• XREF: connects to: Fascist state intervention in the private sector served capitalist interests, not state power — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1713; Fascism absorbed the bourgeoisie, Vatican, and industrial capital by 1924 — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 158; Fascism reimposed the economic-political divide that workers had breached — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 583

Broader Connections

• Fascism reimposed the economic-political divide that workers had breached #expands (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 583
• Fascist state intervention in the private sector served capitalist interests, not state power #expands (0.78) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1713
• Fascism absorbed the bourgeoisie, Vatican, and industrial capital by 1924 #corroborates (0.75) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 158