Trending claims

ANI had ties and influence among conservatives Catholics and business community

Sorel abandoned socialist literature by 1910

Maurras stated socialism liberated from democratic element fits nationalism well

ANI claimed liberal democracy no longer compatible with modern world advocating strong state and imperialism

Corradini spoke of need for nationalist-syndicalist movement led by elitist aristocrats and anti-democrats

Corradini's views were part of wider perceptions within Italian Nationalist Association claiming Italy's economic backwardness was caused by corruption liberalism and socialism

Italian national syndicalists held common principles rejecting bourgeois values democracy liberalism Marxism internationalism pacifism promoting heroism vitalism violence

Sorel denounced democracy as reactionary in The Illusions of Progress

Georges Sorel promoted legitimacy of political violence in Reflections on Violence advocating radical syndicalist action to overthrow capitalism

New theories of social and political psychology rejected the notion of human behaviour being governed by rational choice and instead claimed that emotion was more influential in political issues than reason

William L Shirer sees a continuity from the views of Fichte and Hegel through Bismarck to Hitler Robert Gerwarth speaks of a direct line from Bismarck to Hitler

George Mosse analyzed fascism as an inheritor of the mass ideology and civil religion of the French Revolution as well as a result of the brutalization of societies in 1914–1918

The theme was based on a revolt against materialism rationalism positivism bourgeois society and democracy

The fin-de-siècle outlook was influenced by various intellectual developments including Darwinian biology Gesamtkunstwerk Arthur de Gobineau's racialism Gustave Le Bon's psychology and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Henri Bergson

Bergson's claim of the existence of an élan vital centred upon free choice and rejected the processes of materialism and determinism this challenged Marxism

Zeev Sternhell has traced the ideological roots of fascism back to the 1880s and in particular to the fin de siècle theme of that time

Georges Valois claimed the roots of fascism stemmed from the late 18th century Jacobin movement seeing in its totalitarian nature a foreshadowing of the fascist state

They regarded civilization as being in crisis and as requiring a massive and total solution

Nietzsche's argument that God is dead coinciding with his attack on the herd mentality of Christianity on democracy and on modern collectivism his concept of the Übermensch and his advocacy of the will to power as a primordial instinct were major influences upon many of the fin-de-siècle generation

Gaetano Mosca developed the theory that in all societies an organized minority would dominate and rule over an disorganized majority stating there are only two classes in society the governing and the governed