Kirchheimer staged fascism as the third stage after liberalism and mass democracy.

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. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 257

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School volume’s treatments of Pollock’s state capitalism and Neumann’s Behemoth as competing diagnoses of the same fascist state. — connects to: Fascism completed a three-stage merger of private power with public organization — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 973; Fascism emerges organically from liberalism within a single capitalist social order — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 403
• DEEPTHINKING: Requires sitting with: rights do not vanish under fascism but are transferred from persons to compulsory groups, with the state as sanctioning party.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Fascism completed a three-stage merger of private power with public organization — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 973; Fascism emerges organically from liberalism within a single capitalist social order — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 403