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PARTISAN REVIEW
Both communism and national socialism were, in Borkenau's
view, reactions against the
laissezjaire
order of modern Europe . The
resulting concept of totalitarianism, more than a catchall, also gave
a polemical point to a civilizational theme, dramatizing the incipient
disintegration of the West as constituted in modern times. As Peter
Drucker's
End of Economic Man
(1939) shows, such ideas were in the
air. In part they represent a secular variation on the charge of "neo–
paganism" brought in Catholic critiques of Nazism. Yet Borkenau
stands alone in having raised a polemical commonplace to the level
of Spenglerian revisionism.
It is worth noting that just as Borkenau's Spenglerianism is
antithetical to the arbitrary pieties of Toynbee, so his interpretation
of fascism - still anthologized in Nolte's
Theorien uber den Faschismus
(1967) - is a rejection of various theories by European socialists and
communists. Those schools of thought, basically relying on Marxist
immiserization theory and the consequent model of ever-increasing
communist strength, defined fascism as a desperate expedient in–
stalled by a beleaguered bourgeoisie to ward off the worst. Accord–
ing to Borkenau, this beautiful theory founders on the facts of how
fascism actually came to power in the various European countries.
As a rule, he emphasized, fascism triumphed not before an immi–
nent revolution but after a failed attempt. The deeper implication of
Borkenau's position, according to which both the disintegration and
the earlier constitution of modernity turn on the
laissezjaire
order of
things, is at odds with the older academic periodization stressing
Renaissance and Reformation, as the basis of modernity. Politically
and somewhat anachronistically, the Marxist view of modernity as
the age of capitalism tacitly excludes what the Clausewitzian idea of
modernity emphasizes, namely the era of liberation from empire,
thanks to the nation-state.
II.
Lowenthal says that in Borkenau's first
magnum opus, Ubergang
(The Transitionfrom the Fe.udal to the Bourgeois World View: Studies in the
History of Philosophy in the Age of Manufacture)
the highly original questions Borkenau raised were clearly
In–
spired by Marxist sociology, for he tried to show that the struc–
ture of society was influencing the categories of thought and thus
