Renewed Latvia. A Case Study of the Transnational Fascism Model
This article examines the lesser-known authoritarian regime of Kārlis Ulmanis, the Vadonis [Leader] of Latvia from 1934-1940, as a case study of transnational fascism. Specifically, by investigating the nature of Mazpulki [Latvian 4-H] – an agricultural youth organization modeled on American 4-H which became during the Ulmanis regime a sort of unofficial ‘Ulmanis Youth’ institution – and its international connections, and particularly with Italy, the article contends that we should view the Ulmanis regime as having been part of the transnational fascist wave that swept over Europe in the period between the two world wars. The article also makes the historiographical point that the transnational fascism model offers key analytical methods for interpreting fascism’s syncretic nature, especially in the case of those regimes which had some recognizable features of ‘generic’ fascism but which have previously been categorized as merely authoritarian. Future studies of such regimes will expand our understanding of the nature of and links between the many varied manifestations of interwar fascism.
To Expand or not to Expand? Territory, Generic Fascism and the Quest for an `Ideal Fatherland'
Constructing a theory of generic fascism that is both comprehensive and elaborate, flexible and heuristically useful, has always been a daunting task. This has largely (though by no means exclusively) been the result of fascism’s own dual identity — a political ideology underpinned by a set of generic values; and the varying interpretation of such values in each national context. It is this pluralism of meaning that fascism acquired in the different countries that renders meaningful generalizations extremely difficult and always open to critique. The existing grand theories of generic fascism have endeavoured to square this methodological circle by employing two different strategies. Some, like Roger Griffin and Roger Eatwell, have lowered the threshold to the absolute minimum that suffices to distinguish fascism from its nationalist, authoritarian and populist predecessors or siblings. Others, like Stanley Payne and Renzo De Felice, have focused on a sort of fascist ‘maximum’, an ideal type of what fascism aspired to be, thus producing elaborate lists of features which need apply partly (but not necessarily in toto) to the fascist case studies. The former strategy rests on abstraction — stripping the fascist experience down to its unique differentia specifica; the latter distils the whole spectrum of fascist manifestations into an all-embracing paradigm which sets the highest standard of what fascism intended to become and to do. Both approaches strive to define fascism, to distinguish it from kindred ideologies and political conducts in an already overcrowded spectrum of concepts. In so doing, one cannot but recall J.J. Linz’s argument that fascism was an ideological ‘latecomer’, struggling to occupy its own autonomous space in the kaleidoscope of established world-views. No matter how concise or dense the definitions
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.