Horkheimer held incompatible theories of fascism as both despotism and passing gangsterism

Evidence

In his essay on `The Jews and Europe’, originally written in the same year, he spoke of a new order being produced by the leaders of industry, the military and the Civil Service, and of the authoritarian rule of the administrative, judicial and political machine. In general, the article offered a mixture of elements taken from two different views. On the one hand, Horkheimer held that the epoch of liberal capitalism must be conceived of as a process which made a spiral of lasting despotism possible by atomizing human beings and producing large-scale companies and gigantic organizations. On the other, he also held that fascism was a regime of gangsters ruling through violence and the distribution of plunder; since it had destroyed every illusion and every form of cultural deception, it was guaranteed that this regime would be swept away as soon as the alliance it represented ceased to function successfully against the masses. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1156

Categorization

• XREF: The tension between structural-despotism and transitory-gangsterism readings of fascism recurs across the Institute’s work. — connects to: Horkheimer’s fascism theory generalized beyond orthodox communist capitalism-as-agent doctrine. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1070