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say "On the Apotheosis of the Romantic Will" to "romantic self-asser–
tion, nationalism, the worship of heroes and leaders, and in the end to
Fascism and brutal irrationalism and the oppression of minorities."
In the longest single essay in this volume, Berlin does not focus on
the roots of Fascism within romanticism or nationalism, however, but on
its sources in the thought of Joseph de Maistre. In one sense this is not
surprising, since Maistre's writings provide a paradigm for monism, and
he was the model for Berlin's earlier portrait of the hedgehog who
"knows one big thing," in contrast to the pluralist fox. On the other
hand it is puzzling (a mark of the originality of Berlin's interpretation),
since Maistre is familiarly classified as a champion of the restoration of
throne and altar after the French Revolution, while Fascism is not
identified with the cause of an hereditary monarch or with support of
the Catholic Church.
The resolution of this puzzle depends in part upon the meaning as–
cribed to Fascism, especially whether it involved an essential reference to
a reorganization of the economy. In the propaganda of Fascist and Nazi
movements - the programs of the corporate state in Italy or Spain with
its governmental control of industry and labor, or, for the nationaliza–
tion and socialization of business and finance in Germany, the promise
expressed in its name, National Socialist Workers party - the econorrUc
factor seemed to be central to the definition. In the historical memory of
Fascism, this appears as a secondary aspect of the development of totali–
tarian states in continuous pursuit of military expansion.
Apart from the economic issue, Berlin's thesis requires the distinction
between the conservative critics of the French Revolution like Burke and
the proto-Fascism of Maistre. Both share an opposition to any effort to
impose the "abstract" revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and frater–
nity against the historical and institutional wisdom concretized in the
traditional order, hierarchy and patriarchy. Despite Maistre's claims for
restoration of the traditional institutions, however, Berlin sustains the
distinction by sketching the totality of Maistre's ideological counter–
revolutionary passion, which would subvert any effort to conserve a bal–
ance between liberty and order or equality and hierarchy. Most signifi–
cantly, the conservative recognition of the inevitability of force in
political arrangements emerges in Maistre as the celebration of the ubiq–
uitousness and the utility of terror.
(Perhaps, particularly from the American perspective, there is some
significance in Burke or Toqueville's supporting American independence
or the American revolution, and at the same time condemning the
French, while Maistre could see in both the bitter fruit of rational ideas
applied to politics. Thus, Maistre suggests that since the city of
Washington is the projected product of rational planning, rather than of
