>>17920395
Zeev Sternhell is an Israeli author who wrote a good book on fascism that I'd describe as a "sober unideological appraisal." That is, it's about fascist ideology but it treats it as a serious and coherent ideology. From a review:

>This is an excellent and sophisticated introduction to what Sternhell believes is the primary fascist doctrine developed by French and then Italian non-conformist revolutionaries just prior and subsequent to the Great War — before the seizure of power in Italy forced a wide-spread accommodation with many of the pre-existing institutions of Italy. This body of thought was no less coherent, he thinks, than Marxism (which had already suffered many alterations and deviations by this time. Thus, the “origins of fascist ideology” of the title.

>Fascism was a synthesis between two very strands of 19th cen. European thought. First, the organic, integral nationalism of Maurice Barrès and Enrico Corradini which saw the nation as the primary unit (of which the individual was just a dim expression) that had its roots deep in occult realms of Romantik and the Counter-Enlightenment and which was intensely anti-intellectual, anti-rationalist, and anti-individualist. And, secondly, and an anti-materialist (i.e. Nietschean) and vitalist deviation of non-conformist (anti-Reformist) Marxists connected with the Cercle Proudhon, Georges Sorel, and the Anarcho-Syndicalist, and of which the polemics of the young Mussolini was the final culmination.

>A very good book, and largely persuasive — though Sternhell’s strong emphasis on the French origins of this synthesis have proven to be controversial.