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Totalitarian Movements and Political
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Cloister or cluster? The implications
of Emilio Gentiles ecumenical theory
of political religion for the study of
extremism
ROGER GRIFFIN
a
Professor of Modern History, Oxford Brookes University
Version of record first published: 25 Jan 2007
To cite this article: ROGER GRIFFIN (2005): Cloister or cluster? The implications of Emilio Gentiles
ecumenical theory of political religion for the study of extremism, Totalitarian Movements and
Political Religions, 6:1, 33-52
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Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions,
Vol. 6, No. 1, 3352, June 2005
ISSN 1469-0764 Print/1743-9647 Online/05/010033-20 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/14690760500099804
Cloister or Cluster? The Implications of Emilio Gentiles
Ecumenical Theory of Political Religion for the Study of
Extremism
ROGER GRIFFIN
Professor of Modern History, Oxford Brookes University
Taylor and Francis Ltd FTMP109963.sgm 10.1080/14690760500099804 Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1469-0764 (print)/1743-9647 (online) Original Article 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd 61000000Summer 2005 RogerGriffin Department of HistoryOxford Brookes UniversityOxfordOX3 0BP rdgriffin@brookes.ac.uk
ABSTRACT An important feature of Emilio Gentiles theory of political religion is the
way he conceives it explicitly as one factor within a constellation of related political, social,
and cultural phenomena centring on totalitarianism. He thus presents it as forming an
integral part of a conceptual cluster generating a multi-point perspective on political reli-
gion instead of the single-point perspective still prevalent in the treatment of generic
concepts within historiography and political science. The occasional use of clustering in
these disciplines is contrasted with the considerable significance it has already acquired in
some branches of the natural and human sciences. Gentiles original cluster is then
expanded to encompass a wider sphere of related phenomena and the enhanced heuristic
value it thereby gains is illustrated by reference to fascist studies. These considerations
suggest that the conscious adoption of clustering in approaching key generic terms
would be a sound methodological procedure to offset pernicious forms of reductionist and
dualistic thinking. It would also foster a healthy spirit of collaboration and synergy among
specialists fully consistent with the humanism that ideally should inform the human
sciences.
In the beginners mind there are many possibilities; in the experts mind
there are few.
Zen Mind, Beginners Mind
The award of an international prize for the singular contribution that an aca-
demic has made to a particular area of studies
1
implies that she or he has done
something more than simply produce a number widely cited publications on the
subject. In the case of Political Religions as a Characteristic of the Twentieth
Century there is, as Emilio Gentile would be the first to acknowledge, an abun-
dance of theories and empirical studies already available,
2
some of impressive
scholarship and conceptual sophistication, which makes questions of assessing
the originality and impact of any one expert far from straightforward. This
Correspondence Address: Roger Grifn, Department of History, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford OX3
0BP. Email: rdgrifn@brookes.ac.uk
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34 R. Griffin
article argues that an original feature of Gentiles approach, one that could even-
tually stimulate progress in all areas of the human sciences having a bearing on
political religion, lies in the way both his conceptualisation and his empirical
application of it explicitly highlight linkages with a group of adjacent concepts
often treated as unconnected or even in competition with it. His work thus coun-
teracts the tendency to semantic hair-splitting and theoretical dialogues of the
deaf that has been a feature of so much scholarly work in this area hitherto.
Instead it opens up the prospect of a fruitful synergy between experts working on
different specialised sites and with different conceptual tools within the same
field of study, one that the evolution of politics in the modern world ensures
constant growth.
Educationalists who study learning processes distinguish between convergent
thinkers, who instinctively home in on a single answer to a problem, and diver-
gent ones, whose minds generate a number of different responses to a question
(and recognise that Western educational systems tend to value the former over
the latter even if divergence is more creative and innovative).
3
In political
science excessively convergent thinking can lead to tunnel vision and intellectual
isolationism, while excessively divergent thinking can lead to a hypertrophy of
terms applied and a fuzzy relativism. Gentiles achievement is to have struck a
balance between single-mindedness in attempting to give the concept political
religion heuristic value in specific historical and political contexts, while remain-
ing open to the multiplicity of phenomena to which it relates and the linkages it
forms with them. This fertile combination of exclusiveness with inclusiveness
extends to the language with which he presents his thesis on the subject. In the
face of the intense polemics over the term and the various misunderstandings
which his theory has aroused, he has admitted in public debate that he is quite
prepared to abandon the actual term political religion altogether. What he will
not relinquish is his insistence on the importance to understanding political
modernity of the phenomenon to which the term refers, namely the sacralisation
of politics.
4
This blend of flexibility with intransigence suggests that the key to
his expertise is that he has resisted the temptation to become an expert, if only in
the Zen sense of the term.
The Totalitarian Connection
The three most salient adjacent concepts that Gentile locates within the configu-
ration of concepts surrounding political religion are rarely treated as forming
a single nexus, namely revolution, totalitarianism and the new man. It is
certainly not new to link political religion with revolution. Some 150 years ago
Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the French Revolution was a political
revolution which acted like and began to look like a religious revolution, even-
tually becoming a new kind of religion, an incomplete religion, it is true, with-
out God, without ritual, and without life after death, but one which,
nevertheless, like Islam, flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles and
martyrs.
5
Nor is it unusual to associate totalitarianism with political religion.
6
For example, Waldemar Gurians essay on the intimate relationship between
the two, written in the early days of the Cold War, contains an important
passage locating the source of the totalitarian assault on state and social power
with a redemptive mission, so that its ideology produces an ideocracy func-
tioning as a socio-political religion:
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Cloister or Cluster? 35
What is the formal structure of a totalitarian ideocracy or socio-political
religion? Essential is the belief: there are laws of necessary social develop-
ment, economic or biological ones. After many fights the good forces will
win out; the right order will be established. The victory of these good
forces is dependent upon elites who represent either groups of natural
superiority or those by whom the true interest of the masses becomes
conscious. The domination of these groups is necessary for the world
salvation; indeed it is the worlds salvation.
7
The classic text on totalitarianism by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski
alludes to same relationship when it characterises a totalitarian ideology as char-
acteristically focused and projected towards a perfect final state of mankind that
is to say, it contains a chiliastic claim, based upon a radical rejection of the existing
society with conquest of the world for the new one [sic], thereby endowing it
with a pseudo-religious quality which can elicit in their less critical followers a
depth of conviction and fervour of devotion usually found only among persons
inspired by a transcendent faith.
8
They also allude to the intimate relationship
between this secular faith and an attempted anthropological revolution, referring
to the project of creating a new man which in the Soviet context has had highly
significant human results.
9
This insight too has a surprisingly long pedigree,
since de Tocqueville also observed that the French Revolutions extraordinary
mobilising force stemmed from its aspiration towards the regeneration of the
human race.
10
One author who comes very close to treating political religion, totalitarianism
and (anthropological) revolution as forming a single constellation of concepts is the
theologian Paul Tillich, who in his book Christianity and the Encounter with the
Worlds Religions distinguishes between theistic (for example, Christianity), non-
theistic (for example, Buddhism) and secular quasi-religions. The correspondence
between the last group and what are termed in this article political religions is
clear from the following passage, where, like Gurian, he also uses the term ideoc-
racy to describe the eschatological thinking that determined events in both Nazi
Germany and Soviet Russia:
In both cases it was necessary to deny the ambiguities of life and the
distortions of existence within these systems, and to accept unambigu-
ously and unconditionally their evil elements, e.g., by glorifying the
suppression of individual criticism and by justifying and systematizing
lie and wholesale murder as happened in Italy and Germany and in
Russia under Stalin. The quasi-religious character of any such rule of an
ideology (or ideocracy, as one might call it) makes these consequences
unavoidable.
Tillich goes on to identify the driving religious element of such regimes in the
expectation of a new state of things, whether this is expressed in the Christian
symbols of the end of history (as in Hitlers Thousand Year Reich), or in secular-
utopian symbols like classless society as the aim of history. He is also at pains
to distinguish quasi-religions from pseudo-religions, where quasi indicates a
genuine similarity, not intended, but based on points of identity, thereby
acknowledging that the faith called upon by political religions is more than an
issue of mass-manipulation. Instead he argues that it is a natural product of all
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36 R. Griffin
ideologically conscious movements and social groups bent on the consecration
of communal self-affirmation, whether this consecration happens in religious or
secular symbols.
11
Yet, though his case studies in secular quasi-religions are the
two regimes widely considered paradigmatic for the concept totalitarianism, he
does not specifically employ this term. It is for the reader to infer it.
No reading between the lines is called for in Gentiles account of the linkages.
In the chapter of Le religioni della politica devoted to definitional issues he signifi-
cantly changes point of view so that it is the adjacent term totalitarianism that
finds itself under the spotlight.
The term totalitarianism can be taken as meaning: an experiment in
political domination undertaken by a revolutionary movement, with an inte-
gralist conception of politics, that aspires toward a monopoly of power and
that, after having secured power, whether by legal or illegal means,
destroys or transforms the previous regime and constructs a new state
based on a single-party regime, with the chief objective of conquering soci-
ety. That is, it seeks the subordination, integration and homogenisation
of the governed on the basis of the integral politicisation of existence,
whether collective or individual, interpreted according to the categories,
the myths and the values of a palingenetic ideology, institutionalised in
the form of a political religion, that aims to shape the individual and the
masses through an anthropological revolution in order to regenerate the
human being and create the new man, who is dedicated in body and soul
to the realisation of the revolutionary and imperialistic policies of the
totalitarian party. The ultimate goal is to create a new civilisation along
ultra-nationalist lines.
12
It is Gentile himself who italicises the key terms above. This underlines the fact
that, in a deliberate act of holistic thinking, or what is known in German as
vernetztes Denken (networked or joined-up thinking), Gentile is weaving the
concept totalitarianism into a broad web or nexus of complementary, mutually
reinforcing concepts, notably palingenetic ideology, political religion and anthro-
pological revolution. Furthermore, this syncretic definition not only directly
associates the utopian mission that is presented as the driving force of totalitari-
anism with its bid to conquer both political and social power, but makes a specific
link between the attempted destruction and transformation of the existing order
and the creation of a new one. At this point it naturally embraces not just the
autocratic regimes that result from this experiment, but also the anti-systemic
political movements from which they develop. A profound relationship is thus
posited between the totalitarian states deployment of propaganda and terror to
crush individual freedom and inflict the boundless physical and mental suffering
that the works of Hannah Arendt and George Orwell have probed in such
contrasting ways, and the eschatological quest for palingenesis, for total rebirth,
intrinsic to the political religions that originally brought them about, whose
historical roots in religious thinking has been the object of research of such writers
as Eric Voegelin and Norman Cohn.
The richness of a definition of totalitarianism that subsumes a theory of political
religion in this methodologically self-conscious way is thrown into relief when it
is compared to the type, still prevalent in reference works, that focuses primarily
on the totalitarian regimes pervasive use of social engineering. Here is an example
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Cloister or Cluster? 37
taken from the type of electronic study-aid consulted by a new generation of
web-surfing students:
Totalitarianism: a modern autocratic government in which the state
involves itself in all facets of society, including the daily life of its citizens.
A totalitarian government seeks to control, not only all economic and
political matters, but the attitudes, values, and beliefs of its population,
erasing the distinction between state and society. The citizens duty to the
state becomes the primary concern of the community, and the goal of the
state is the replacement of existing society with a perfect society.
13
Though there is an allusion here to totalitarianisms ultimate objective, it is
presented as one of the tools of social control deployed by an autocratic regime,
rather than as the driving force of the movement that originally seized power in
order to carry out a social and anthropological revolution. Nor is there any
allusion to political religion.
Clustering as a Methodological Strategy
The outstanding feature of Gentiles way of conceptualising totalitarianism when
compared to such definitions is its in-built holism that prevents it from being
understood simplistically. It is presented as one aspect of a multi-faceted phenom-
enon that also manifests itself as a political religion, which, because it is driven by
a palingenetic myth, seeks the integral politicisation of existence in order to
create a new civilisation. Seen in this way, each of its defining features form part
of a configuration or matrix of concepts, so that no single one can be explored
adequately without involving sooner or later a consideration of the others. As a
result political religion, the actual subject of Gentiles book, is seen in the round.
This is precisely how Friedrich and Brzezinski originally conceived their famous
six point syndrome of totalitarian dictatorship (whatever the reductionist use
made of it subsequently by others), for they stress in the introduction that they
constitute a:
cluster of traits, intertwined and mutually supporting each other, as is
usual in organic systems. They should therefore not be considered in
isolation or be made the focal point of comparisons, such as Caesar
developed a terroristic secret police, therefore he was the first totalitarian
dictator.
14
(emphasis added)
The allusion to the cluster has a deep resonance within a number of academic
specialisms (though I am not implying the concept does not acquire significantly
different epistemological connotations as it is applied within the context of differ-
ent disciplines and research methodologies). Ever since Robert Tryons book
devoted to expounding the principle published on the eve of the Second World
War,
15
cluster analysis has played a central role in the science of statistics, a basic
concern of which is to organise observed data into meaningful patterns, and
thereby develop taxonomies of phenomena even in the absence of complete iden-
tity between the phenomena under investigation. As a homage to Tyrons achieve-
ments points out, he went on to develop the BC TRY system for the computer
processing of data, a general-purpose and powerful tool for multidimensional
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38 R. Griffin
analysis which has been extensively applied in a widespread set of disciplines,
including geology, political science, business administration, sociology, public
health, psychiatry, and, of course, psychology.
16
Certainly the principle of clus-
tering is now central to all branches of IT that concern the analysis of multivariate
data,
17
such as the mathematical foundations of search engines used to extract
groups of related data from the world-wide web.
18
Given its importance to the taxonomy of unique phenomena, it is not surpris-
ing to find that the concept of the cluster also plays a key role in the classification
of all living phenomena into species and genera.
19
Thus an article on cluster anal-
ysis for students of the life sciences stresses that the cognitive process it involves
is essential for biologists if we are to make sense out of the tremendous diversity
of organisms, molecules, diseases, etc. that we are faced with.
20
At the same time
clustering has come to assume considerable significance in sophisticated areas of
organic theorising outside the sphere of the natural and mathematical sciences.
It is now regularly applied in projects designed to promote economic develop-
ment as a way of conceptualising how best to stimulate or seed the growth of
healthy economic sectors.
21
It has provided the theoretical premises to a project to
deliver distance learning programmes to schools in underdeveloped areas,
22
and
been used as the basis for a theory of art.
23
Not surprisingly, educationalists and
cognition theorists have also been attracted by the idea of a dynamic pattern of
phenomena related in a non-hierarchical, open-ended way. One result is a struc-
tured form of brainstorming called clustering, performed either individually or
as a class activity, and described as a non-linear activity that generates ideas,
images and feelings around a stimulus word. Its protagonists claim that as
students cluster, their thoughts tumble out, enlarging their word bank for writing
and often enabling them to see patterns in their ideas.
24
Clustering Concepts in Political Science
The potential relevance of cluster thinking to advancing knowledge in the
human sciences is considerable (though clearly, like all methodologies, the
insights it will produce will be no more banal or innovative than the researchers
who use it). It is arguably a hallmark of human intelligence which blends diver-
gent with convergent thinking to use terms organically or holistically as
forming interconnected constellations, thus ensuring they are never treated
essentialistically as epitomising the quintessence of the phenomenon under
investigation, reductionistically as the unique key to understanding the world,
or dualistically as one of an aesthetically pleasing but specious pair of opposites
with which to unlock the secrets of complex phenomena. Instead, they are to be
approached synergically as complementary components forming an open-
ended nexus of heuristic devices with which to arrive at a deeper understanding
of particular aspects of reality, a methodological principle compatible both with
Max Webers theory of ideal type formation
25
and with Wittgensteins philoso-
phy of language.
26
It is consistent with this that cluster thinking is frequently
encountered in the works of original political theorists. For example, in his study
of Antonio Gramscis theory of hegemony, one of the most innovative political
thinkers to have been produced by the Marxist intellectual tradition, Walter
Adamson has to warn readers that his concepts are almost always formulated in
tandem like so many double stars so that it is unlikely that one has understood a
Gramscian concept until one has recognized the implicit syntagmatic relationship
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Cloister or Cluster? 39
it is intended to evoke. Moreover, he worked with a continually expanding
network of concepts which he never effectively encompassed or delimited. As a
result:
sets of Gramscian double stars sometimes form a constellation. Consent
(as opposed to force), hegemony (as opposed to domination), organic (as
opposed to conjunctural), civil society (as opposed to political society),
and passive revolution (as opposed to complete revolution) are all more
or less related.
27
In The Terms of Political Discourse,
28
William Connolly treats politics itself as
precisely such a constellation, defining it as an internally complex concept with
a broad and variable set of criteria, and stressing that each criterion itself is
relatively complex and open, so that to make the concept of politics intelligible
we must display its complex connections with a host of other concepts to which it
is related and the broader conceptual scheme within which it is implicated. He
goes on:
We shall call a concept with these characteristics a cluster concept. We
often find that various people jointly employing such a cluster concept
weight the importance of shared criteria differently; they might also
interpret the meaning of particular criteria jointly accepted in subtly
different ways, and some persons might find it advantageous [i.e. heuris-
tically useful] to add new criteria to, or drop old criteria from, the estab-
lished list, while other groups object to such moves.
29
In 1999 Connollys book won the Benjamin Evans Lippincott Award of the
American Political Science Association. Yet the sophisticated cluster approach
that he consciously adopts to such essentially contested concepts as politics,
power and freedom still seems as far from being paradigmatic among human
scientists as it was on its publication over three decades ago when it comes to the
process of defining terms and classifying phenomena which is their bread and
butter. Inevitably, there are exceptions. The leading expert on the evolution and
conceptualisation of ideologies, Michael Freeden, argued in a seminal article on
ideological morphology that political concepts acquire meaning not only
through temporally accumulative traditions of discourse, and not only through
spatially diverse cultural contexts, but also by means of their particular structural
position within a configuration of other political concepts which can be conceived as
a spatial structural network (emphasis added).
30
The main object of his research
has been to establish how such a methodology allows political scientists to trace
the evolution and mutation of political ideologies over time and to map the
complex interrelationships formed both by the permutations of the same ideol-
ogy and its competitors for political space. However, it clearly has a profound
bearing too on the way academics handle the key generic terms used in these
exercises, such as the ones at the ones under scrutiny in Gentiles theory of polit-
ical religion. Occasionally an academic may stumble across this highly advanced
perspective on conceptualisation in politics by chance, as when a guide to key
terms in constitutional thinking argues that the rule of law refers to three
kindred conceptions that form a cluster.
31
But apart from the odd glimmer of
light, there is little evidence that clustering, let alone the BC TRY computer
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40 R. Griffin
programme, has come to play a major role in political science thinking, whatever
Tryons obituarist fondly imagined.
Had cluster analysis in fact made more headway within the humanities in
general, it might have deterred more political theorists, historians and sociolo-
gists from applying concepts in a reductionist, exclusive manner, thereby
encouraging them to conduct terminological and definitional discussions with
their colleagues in a spirit more appropriate to the conference hall than the
court-room. The controversy aroused by Emilio Gentiles theory of political reli-
gion provides several examples of such methodologically ill-conceived objec-
tions,
32
while the protracted debate over the definition of fascism has on occasion
provoked some particularly caustic, vituperative reactions, even from academics
whose own theory proves to have a deep kinship with the very one they are
attacking.
33
Such a combative, territorial approach to academic debate is surely both out of
place and counterproductive in what should be a collaborative exercise, given the
fact that all those in human sciences are in the same boat on the ocean of
phenomena to be investigated, exploring the infinity of empirical realities it
contains on the basis of speculation controlled by incomplete data and mediated
through the inadequate medium of language. Less unseemly, but equally symp-
tomatic of methodological confusions, are the many occasions when key generic
concepts are treated as mutually exclusive, with little energy being expended in
considering whether they may in fact turn out to be convergent and mutually
reinforcing in a way that enhances the heuristic value of each term when used
singly. Thus Ian Kershaw, undoubtedly one of the worlds greatest authorities on
the Third Reich, poses the question whether it was totalitarian or a form of
fascism without dwelling on how each term can be used in such a way that it
complements the other,
34
and dismisses the relevance of the term political reli-
gion to Nazi studies out of hand.
35
In contrast, Michael Burleigh in the introduc-
tion to his prize-winning work on the Third Reich makes political religion a key
term for understanding Nazism and asserts that theories of totalitarianism have
rarely been incompatible with theories of political religions.
36
Even then he
makes no effort to establish the nature of their compatibility for the benefit of
the reader, or to use their intimate relationship as a heuristic tool for probing into
the realities of Nazism in the rest of the book.
It is against this background that the originality of Gentiles deliberately multi-
faceted, multi-nodal cluster concept of political religion is thrown into relief. He
presents it as an integral component of a synthetic definition of totalitarianism
formulated in such a way that, in Connollys words, it displays its complex
connections with a host of other concepts to which it is related. As a consequence
the mental straightjacket of the single-point perspective imposed by a freestand-
ing definition of the term is replaced a modular construct in which the mind can
freely move around its object to achieve a multi-point perspective. This enables
political religion, or any other star in the conceptual constellation thus formed,
to be understood, not two-dimensionally and statically like a photograph, but
three-dimensionally and dynamically like a hologram, or like a computer-gener-
ated model that can be rotated in the scientific imagination and understood as a
multifaceted whole whose appearance changes radically according to the angle
from which the object is observed. In art-historical terms Gentiles definition
crosses the threshold (in reality a highly fuzzy boundary) dividing the Renais-
sance perspective on reality to the modernist one.
37
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Cloister or Cluster? 41
Expanding Political Religions Conceptual Cluster
One of the outstanding merits of Gentiles cluster approach to political religion
over conventional, single-point perspective ones is that each star that makes up
the constellation can in turn be associated with its own cluster, thus locating it in
an ever widening conceptual kinship, and revealing ever more nodal points of
intersection with other historical realities. Already the definitional chapter in The
Religion of Politics has created an instructive Verfremdungseffekt by locating politi-
cal religion within an expanded cluster definition of totalitarianism. If we then
zoom in on some of its other kindred components new linkages soon emerge.
Our portal for this brief reconnaissance of the diverse conceptual spaces that
form round political religion will be what Gentile refers to as the objective of
conquering society.
When political religion is associated with the attempted conquest of society in
direct association with political domination and the monopoly of power, these in turn
summon up such concepts as social engineering and social control, which in the
context of inter-war totalitarianism connote the pervasive use of state propaganda,
the regimentation of youth and leisure in mass organisations, and, in the case of
Nazism and Stalinism, an elaborate capillary apparatus of state terror. They also
connote not just the marginalisation, cooption, or destruction of the state and
national institutions that underpinned the now superseded old order, but also a
vast programme of ideological, social, cultural, eugenic, racial or ethnic cleansing
intended to suppress or destroy ideological, social and/or racial enemies and
remove the causes of decadence. In the case of Nazi Germany the radicalness of the
cleansing led eventually to campaigns of systematic genocide waged against
gypsies, Slav communists and Jews. The important contribution of Gentiles clus-
ter to clearing up the many misunderstandings caused by this aspect of totalitari-
anism (and hence of political religion) is that it specifically links the horrific human
destruction involved in these campaigns to the revolutionary quest to create a new
civilisation inspired by palingenetic myth. This precludes seeing it as resulting from
the pathological nihilism either of the leader or the nation, or from some perverse
attempt to resist modernity
38
or transcendence,
39
but rather encourages it to be
understood as the product of the palingenetic logic of destruction and (attempted)
creation, a dialectic that ran like a red thread through every aspect of the regime.
If instead we focus on the conquest of society as the bid to install a new state
based on a single party, this perspective immediately encourages us to explore
political religions relationship to five intertwined modern realities: populist
nationalism, the nation state, the centralising bureaucratic/political state, the masses and
mass democracy. When conquering society is understood in terms of the integral
politicisation of existence, then it highlights political religions profound link
to the partial replacement of legal-rational political processes by spectacular
(theatrical/liturgical) politics.
40
This in turn immediately summons up the
concept of aesthetic politics, here used not in the Marxist sense given it by Walter
Benjamin which confined it to fascism, but as integral aspect of all totalitarian
political religions once in power (including state communism). At this point it
sheds its connotation of reaction, mass deception and revolutionary faade, and
is seen instead as an expression of the project to carry out an anthropological
revolution and create a populist palingenetic ethos of regeneration and renewal.
The extensive appropriation and manipulation of cultural production and the
staging of a form of politics based on magic or cultic elements
41
is then
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42 R. Griffin
understood from Gentiles cluster perspective, not as elaborate exercises in mass
brainwashing and manipulation, but (at least in the formative phase of a
regime) as the manifestation of a conscious bid by the new rulers to realise the
myth of rebirth, bring about a revolution in the political, aesthetic and moral
culture of the people, and colonise time itself, thus bringing about a temporal
revolution.
42
At the same time the multi-nodal, interconnected nature of the clus-
ters concepts prevents the reduction of totalitarianism either to culture, as some
critics of Gentile have implied,
43
or to ideology, a charge made against some
theorists of fascism who stress the palingenetic thrust of its ideology.
44
A crucial
aspect of totalitarianisms attempt at cultural transformation (but only an
aspect) is illuminated by post-structuralist studies of the symbology and semiot-
ics of collective belief in modern societies, in particular by Guattari and
Deleuzes concept of semiotic territorialization in bringing about a change in
political culture and social mores.
45
The dynamics of the relationship between
nodes of political religion relating to social control considered earlier and
those implicated in cultural revolution are illuminated by Gramscian theory,
particularly his distinction between dominion (coercion and subjection to the
cause) and cultural hegemony (persuasion and conversion to the cause).
Tracing the project of conquering society back to the palingenetic myth that
drives it forms another mini-constellation around political religion, invoking such
terms as utopianism and political myth conceived as an integral component all
modern political movements. As for the notion of national rebirth and the renewal
of historical time itself, this immediately invokes studies of millenarianism (chili-
asm, eschatological thought, gnosticism), though the constraining effect of the
cluster reinforces the need to treat modern political religions not as throw-backs to
the messianic Christian movements and mystic philosophies of history of early
modern Europe, but rather as manifestations of the archetypal human drive to
abolish linear time especially in times of social crisis.
46
Such a line of investigation
throws into relief the relevance to political religion of the concept of charismatic
politics in the original Weberian sense which treats it both as a response to the need
for political legitimacy in an age where traditional political legitimation has broken
down, and as a reaction to the progressive disenchantment of the world under the
impact of rationalisation.
Another star in this mini-cluster, but one that has yet to shine brightly, since it
has so far been curiously neglected by scholars in the context of totalitarian politics,
is the revitalisation movement, a concept familiar in anthropology to describe the
powerful socio-cultural movements headed by a shaman and bent on the ritual
regeneration of the world charismatic leader that can emerge when pre-modern
societies are in crisis, and may continue to surface in modern guise.
47
This aspect
not only links back to political religions attempted temporal revolution and
production of political liturgy, but to studies which illuminate of the dynamics of
collective belief systems, new religions and the psychology of crowds under modern
social conditions.
48
Moving in another direction it also points the enquiring mind
in the direction of specialist studies (steadily proliferating since 9/11) concerned
with illuminating the nexus between politics and religion, whether in the form of
the politicisation of traditional religions or the sacralisation of politics to create
what Tillich calls quasi-religions.
Finally (though this is a matter of respecting word limits and the patience of
the reader, for the cluster concept by definition precludes closure, since each
component concept can form the nodal point of a large number of different
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Cloister or Cluster? 43
clusters and the centre of its own cluster), by joining up the dots that lead from
conquering society to anthropological revolution and a new civilisation we are led to
another mini-cluster whose gravitational centre is the modern. The first is
modernity itself, which, in the context of the cluster is shorn of its exclusively
Enlightenment connotations. Instead, it is re-imagined in a way that makes it an
integral component of the bid by totalitarian movements to use state power to
integrate the people, now unfettered from the hierarchies of tradition, into a new
type of society bound together through mass organisations, communal activities
and shared ideology of the new age. It is a concept that opens up vistas onto a
wealth of sociology in the lineage of Weber, Durkheim and Tnnies probing the
new type of communal bonds that hold together society in the post-traditional
age. All of these cast some light on the function of political religion in creating a
new type of community to replace the atomistic society that had emerged
under liberal capitalism and that particularly in inter-war Europe was widely
experienced as woefully inadequate to serve the material and existential needs of
the majority of its citizens.
The second is modernism. Under the aegis of Gentiles cluster this highly
contested concept can be understood as the manifestation in every sphere of
cultural production (including political ideologies) of the striving to imagine and
realise a new type of reality on the other side of the Wests organic process of
decadence and dissolution which so many artistically and ideologically sensitive
minds of the late nineteenth century were convinced was reaching its crisis point.
It was a highly diffuse longing for regeneration that incubated a plethora of
movements attempting to renew history itself through the power of vision
combined with symbolic, social or political action. This idea of modernism links
back to the earlier theme of temporal revolution, a connection brilliantly explored
in Peter Osbornes investigation of the alternative temporalities generated by the
European avant-garde in the earlier twentieth century in his groundbreaking The
Politics of Time.
49
This work establishes the subtle but important linkages between
aesthetic, philosophical and political manifestations of modernism in the way the
historical process is conceived, in turn casting a new light on the monographs
concerning individual manifestations of the nexus between artistic modernism
and totalitarianism.
50

The attempt by a movement or regime to revolutionise or reawaken the people
and usher in a new dawn (that is, an alternative modernity) necessarily involves
the project of conquering society through a blend of dominion and cultural hege-
mony, thereby producing a quasi-religion which is one of the principal manifesta-
tions of politics under modernity. Once this is realised, the accelerated excursus
through the sub-clusters that form round Gentiles original totalitarian model of
political religion loops back upon itself, forming a conceptual mega-cluster with
numerous permutations of internal linkages and a considerable potential for
further growth through the accretion of new stars.
A Multi-Point Perspective on Fascism
The issues raised by this assessment of the significance of Gentiles achievement
may become somewhat more concrete if we consider for a moment the implications
of the cluster concept of political religion to my own area of specialism.
51
When I
first ventured onto the vast terrain of comparative fascist studies over two decades
ago, scholarly thinking on the subject was deeply fragmented and sectarian, with
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44 R. Griffin
a plethora of rival definitions and approaches carried out in a spirit that often
seemed to inhibit rather than foster collaboration and synergy. As a consequence,
a postgraduate Candide like myself in search of an Eldorado of academic intelli-
gence, lucidity and consensus about the nature of fascism soon came across a
number of key terms and conflicting approaches with little encouragement to
reflect on the possibilities opened up by any compatibility or convergence that
might be found between them. I also met en route many a Pangloss convinced he
had already developed a comprehensive theory of fascism, and more than one
latter-day Martin pouring cold water on the first sign of enthusiasm about the
possibility of making progress towards a more consensual and heuristically useful
definition of the term.
Cultural osmosis ensured that I absorbed the intellectual climate that prevailed
at the time in this area of research, so that the first exposition of my own approach
in The Nature of Fascism
52
is oblivious of the notion of the conceptual cluster and
shows minimal interest in establishing synergy with existing approaches. It is
dominated instead by a single-point perspective whose focus is almost exclusively
on the palingenetic component of fascisms ideology, even if I do make some effort
to take other aspects into account when the definition is then discursively
unpacked and applied to its various historical manifestations. Predictably, in
pursuing my strategy for constructing the new ideal type of fascism, the ultimate
objective of my research, I did not act like someone applying for membership of a
club of academic specialists with converging interests. I behaved more like a
greenhorn staking a territorial claim in the rush for academic gold that involved
fighting off competition from more experienced and wilier prospectors. Or, to
resort to the metaphor I actually used at the time, laying out a new stall in an
already crowded marketplace.
53
Symptomatic of my impetuousness was the short
shrift I gave to the contention that fascism could be usefully considered as a polit-
ical religion, dismissing all attempts to do so as an abuse of religious concepts.
It was an arrogant, ill-informed judgement that made no distinction between
Voegelins heuristically dubious concept of gnostic politics based on a highly
idiosyncratic reading of the history of Western religion, and Gentiles sophisticated
and historically grounded theory of political religion, an early version of which he
had recently expounded in an article on Fascism for the Journal of Contemporary
History.
54
It was an act of throwing out a baby with the bath water that acquires
considerable irony given my subsequent conversion to the term to which this
article bears witness.
In the ensuing years the situation has changed to the point where at least some
degree of scholarly consensus (though far from unanimity) has begun to emerge
about how to define the concept fascism in a heuristically useful way.
55
Almost
every new contribution to studying generic fascism in the last decade, no matter
how distinctive the elements in the existing conceptual cluster that they emphasise,
or the new ones they add to it, recognises the importance of ideology in shaping
fascism as a historical phenomenon, and sees as the hallmark of this ideology, in
one way or another, the revolutionary drive towards a regenerated national
community. Moreover, at a safe distance from the controversy over fascisms
actual definition, which continues to generate so much bad blood, comparative
fascist studies have seen a number of major collaborative projects come to fruition
over the years attempting to establish common patterns in the sociology and polit-
ical history of its many variants. Some of these date from a time when hardly
anyone could agree on what actually constituted the subjects remit.
56
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Cloister or Cluster? 45
There is thus no reason to believe that there is less hankering after cooperation
and consensus in this field of the human sciences than anywhere else. But even
methodologically aware, vastly experienced and cooperative experts are liable to
be affected by the long tradition of unjoined-up thinking in fascist studies. Thus
when Stein Larsen, one of the most enterprising academics in this area, as editor
of a collection of seminal essays on non-European fascism, decided to produce his
own account of fascism to accompany them, he rejected available definitions
wholesale as methodologically flawed, and set about constructing an entirely new
model. What results is an impressively comprehensive survey of fascism as a
global phenomenon which tends to emerge in modernising states wherever
political space opens up for it within traditional or liberal regimes. However, it
curiously lacks a crucial section that actually defines what constitutes fascism and
distinguishes it from nationalist variants of authoritarianism, totalitarianism and
military or personal dictatorships. Had Larsen adopted a cluster approach to the
concept of fascism and seen its investigation as a collaborative exercise, he may
have been deterred from allowing the term to inflate to the point where it seems
to refer loosely to any dynamic form of nationalism or authoritarianism, and
would have put less emphasis on distancing himself from existing scholarship. As
it is, we are offered a whistle-stop tour of fascism in every corner of the globe that
cumulatively makes the contours of the concept not sharper, but increasingly
out of focus, and hence unusable as a tool of taxonomy and forensic analysis to
historians.
57
If Larsen is open to the charge of thinking too big, there are also scholars in this
area who arguably think too small. An example of this is the article Charisma,
Politics and Violence: The Legion of the Archangel Michael in Interwar Romania
by Constantin Iordachi.
58
In it the Weberian concept of charisma is applied with
considerable scholarly creativity to Codreanus movement, but no account is taken
of the debate over political religion which directly impinges on it, and only the
most fleeting allusions are made to other kindred concepts. The article thus fails
to offer a rounded analysis of the Iron Guard by highlighting the link between the
charismatic dimension of its paramilitary violence, ritual politics, leader cult,
revolutionary assault on Romanias political and ethical culture, and its bid to be
the vanguard of the new man, omul nou, the hallmark of a totalitarian movement
before it achieves power. Nor is the movement, for all its idiosyncrasies, located
effectively within mainstream currents of generic fascism.
A similar narrowness informs the premise of an article submitted to the Journal
of Political Ideologies in July 2004. Purge Politik: The Political Functions of
Decadence of Fascism enthusiastically expounds the thesis that the rhetoric of a
purgation of societal decadence, however defined, is a good indicator of both
crypto-fascist instinct and potentially fascist ideology, and that the purgation of
decadence motif is to be seen as an overarching concept that interacts with the
many other definitional properties that scholars have attributed to fascism. The
author (whose identity was not revealed to the reader asked to write a report on it)
seems blissfully unaware of the fact that the palingenetic drive to cleanse society
of decadence and create a new society has been a familiar topos in fascist studies
ever since G.L. Mosse and Zeev Sternhell published their theories of fascism in the
1970s, and that its corollary, the war against decadence, has been extensively
explored for over three decades. His article is thus a prime example of how
academics can be lured by lack of scholarship or by naivety into reinventing, or
redesigning, the wheel, instead of focusing on how they can impart even greater
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46 R. Griffin
momentum to a sizeable vehicle (bandwagon?) which has already travelled a
considerable distance without their assistance.
Both Iordachi and the would-be publisher of the piece on Purge Politik might
have been helped to understand the wider historical context of their chosen
aspects of fascism had Michael Manns Fascists been available to them at the time
of writing.
59
The conceptual framework that structures the six case studies of
fascisms development in inter-war Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania
and Spain is based on its definition as the pursuit of a transcendent and cleansing
nation-statism through paramilitarism, which has a deep resonance with the Iron
Guards peculiarities as a political movement. Certainly, Mann uses his ideal type
to make a major contribution to an understanding both of the complex sociological
dynamics of inter-war fascism and of how the uneven success of the individual
movements he considers was determined by the interplay of the economic, politi-
cal, military and ideological sources of political power in particular historical
contexts. Yet the book fails to be the groundbreaking work that its author and his
publishers would like to imagine. Not only is its basic definition a reworking of
one that has been familiar in fascist studies ever since the 1970s, but we learn noth-
ing about the political cultures that produced them, their achievements in the
sphere of technology or art, their party structures, their mass organisations, or
their highly individual relationship to cultural and political modernism. In short,
the whole dimension of fascism as a political religion is simply invisible. There
would be nothing wrong with either the definitional framework or the glaring
gaps in the comprehensiveness of the treatment except for the exaggerated claims
of originality and totality made for the book.
Such lopsided analyses would not have been possible had the research that
produced them been carried out within a conceptual framework informed by a
clustered approach to the phenomena under consideration. Once Gentiles
concept of political religion is applied to generic fascism it becomes possible to see
it in its disparate manifestations as a totalitarian movement driven by a revolutionary
variant of ultra-nationalism. As such it manifests itself, at least in inter-war Europe
and in some other Europeanised societies, as a political religion, driven by the utopia
of regenerated national community saturated with mythic and palingenetic thinking
reminiscent of early modern forms of European millenarianism without being a
direct perpetuation of them, but bent instead on purging society of alleged sources
of socio-cultural and/or racial decadence within historical time. As such it tends
in periods of acute social breakdown naturally to assume the form of charismatic
politics (most obviously in the leader cult and mass rallies), drawing support from
a trans-class social base. It also tended naturally to adopt elaborate forms of aesthetic
(spectacular, theatrical) politics, and once in power made extensive use social
engineering in the form of propaganda and mass organisations. Its manipulation of
cultural production was integral to realising its goal of an anthropological revolution
in order to achieve an alternative modernity, thereby making fascism a form of
political modernism (however anti-modernist some of its aesthetic stances). In order
to fulfil its goal of a regenerated national community conceived as an organic
whole, fascism naturally adopted forms of politicised racism and was predisposed
to developing policies of racial exclusion, even if only a minority of fascist move-
ments would have carried out eugenic and genocidal programmes like those
implemented by the Nazis had they seized power.
Clearly the fascist conceptual cluster can be extended considerably further if
the focus shifts to particular historical expressions of fascist praxis, such as the
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Cloister or Cluster? 47
creation of a single-party regime, the sociological basis of support for a totalitar-
ian movement, the monopolist accumulation of state and economic power, para-
militarism and the creation of a police state, imperialism, the leader cult, or
cultural production. Doubtless new aspects and new patterns of phenomena are
waiting to be identified. What is more doubtful is that discoveries will be made
that invalidate the relevance of seeing fascism simultaneously as a political
religion and as a totalitarian movement in the way Gentile has proposed. If both
novice scholars and seasoned experts approached fascism from this open-ended
multi-point perspective it would enable them to concentrate on individual
nodes, such as charisma, decadence, paramilitarism or sociological composition
in a way that avoided the pitfalls of either excessive modesty and immodesty of
ambition. Researchers exploring the minutiae of an individual movement or even
a single fascist activist would find it easier to locate their findings within a wider
framework, while those offering a reinterpretation of generic fascism itself would
be encouraged to seek out the linkages between their approach and existing
scholarship and the nuances it brings about in traditional perspectives rather than
treat rival theories as so many pesky flies to be swatted.
Empty Minds and the Humanist Community
This article has argued that, whatever the cogency of particular elements of
Emilio Gentiles theory of political religion, and the abundant scholarly verve
and empirical rigour he has demonstrated in applying it both to the history of
Fascism
60
and of modern politics,
61
its outstanding value lies in the way he
inserts the term into an extended family of related concepts and phenomena.
This has two fundamental advantages over approaches that do not proactively
seek to cluster the concept in this way. The first is methodological, concerning
the nature of the human sciences and the relationship of the enquiring mind to
the phenomenal world it investigates. In his classic inquiry into the natural
sciences relationship to reality, Wholeness and the Implicate Order,
62
David Bohn
suggested that it is possible to use scientific method constantly to refine the
concepts with which human beings strive to understand the world in which we
live and hence move from the explicate realm of how things seem towards the
levels at which it starts to reveal how it is, the implicate order. I would argue that
a parallel movement from the phenomenal towards the ultimately unknow-
able noumenal lies at the heart of the human sciences as well, which have to
battle constantly not just with the limitations of the data available, but short-
comings in the human faculty of conceptualisation, and the inadequacy of
language itself.
In such a delicate undertaking a major danger is posed by the natural tendency,
encouraged by the utopian quest for definitive explanations and total understand-
ing, to close off potential sources of fresh insight by approaching each of the
myriad questions posed by human reality in a narrow, monocausal, reductionist
spirit. To avoid this it is essential for researchers to blend elements of the optimistic
know-all, Pangloss, with the sceptical doubting Thomas, Martin, while keeping
alive the ingenuousness of Candide. Candides gift is that, in contrast with those
who have reached set conclusions about the basic nature of the human world, he
is endowed with what in the Zen tradition is called beginners mind, one of the
features of which is that it avoids the twin traps of reductionism and arrogance. As
one Zen master put it:
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48 R. Griffin
For Zen students the most important thing is not to be dualistic. Our
original mind includes everything within itself. It is always rich and
sufficient within itself. You should not lose your self-sufficient state of
mind. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and
a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is
open to everything. In the beginners mind there are many possibilities;
in the experts mind there are few. If you discriminate too much, you
limit yourself. If you are too demanding or too greedy, your mind is not
rich and self-sufficient. If we lose our original self-sufficient mind, we
will lose all precepts.
63
The inbuilt open-ended and multi-perspective aspect of the cluster approach to
political religion and hence all its related concepts is conducive to the realisation
that, no matter how prestigious their careers, academics must always retain some-
thing of the beginner and avoid becoming an expert. It implies that we should
(at least in our academic activities) cultivate the adolescent enthusiasm and recep-
tiveness to the infinite possibilities of life that prevents us from becoming fully
adult, lest our pursuit of concepts leads us to abandon the basic precept of our
calling, the benign passion for humanistic understanding that acts as a prophylac-
tic against the dangerous forms belief and belonging that give rise to or legitimate
acts of repression and violence against fellow human beings. It is a passion that
turns humanism itself into a secular, or quasi- (but not a pseudo) religion, and
the humanities into a vocation as a well as a career, a confession as well as a
profession, but one where fanaticism of any sort is the betrayal of the basic creed.
In more down-to-earth terms, this means that specialists in any field of the
humanities should, for their own sakes and for the sake of others, remain open to
the potential insights to be drawn from competing ideal types of the same
phenomenon. They should also be proactively interested in exploring the new
insights generated when the key term of the investigation is harnessed to others
in the search for a more adequate understanding, definite but never definitive, of
the reality under examination.
These methodological reflections have already touched on the second inference
I would like to draw from the heuristic power of Gentiles model of political reli-
gion, and relates to the nature of academia as collaborative human activity. The
cluster approach he has pioneered in this field of studies and the manner in which
he has proceeded, always giving full acknowledgement to the contributions of
others, directs intellectual energy away from reductionism, factionalism, exclu-
siveness, territorialism, competitiveness and professional paranoia. Instead it is
conducive to compatibility, collegiality and synergy. Healthy enquiry should be
carried out in the fresh air of open debate mythically associated with the Greek
agora rather than in the cloistered, ascetic spirit of withdrawal from the world or of
lofty disdain for the other participants in the discussion which leads an academic
to be confined to contemplating the horizon visible through the conceptual bars of
their self-constructed klaustros.
It is a fact familiar to political scientists that in party politics some activists func-
tion as polarisers, fomenting factions and internal ideological conflicts, and others
as integrators, striving instead to heal divisions and move debates on by encour-
aging dialogue and collaboration.
64
Perhaps the long-term importance of Gentiles
work is that it invites all academics involved in the study of political religion, and
the many subject areas that have a kinship with it, to draw a sense of purpose and
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Cloister or Cluster? 49
identity from the knowledge they belong to an open society of scholars, a virtual
(although largely unfunded!) research cluster of global extension. The result
would be more proactive cooperation on numerous issues relating to the concep-
tual framework and contextualisation of political extremism, Left, Right and
religious, encouraging researchers to stress the contribution their work makes to
a greater communal understanding of the whole. They would be less prone to
thinking they have found the missing key, once they realise the door has been open
all the time. Such an approach, even if it could not have prevented the 1980s
Historikerstreit in German academia, would have at least stopped it degenerating
at times into an unseemly Hysterikerstreit. In the increasingly important field of
research into political religion, cluster analysis opens up the prospect of marginal-
ising conceptual fundamentalism and fostering collegial ecumenicalism, thereby
giving the idea of the academic community, at least in this sphere of humanist
inquiry, genuine substance, if only at an imagined level of reality.
Notes
1. See Maria Cattaruzza, Speech in Honour of Emilio Gentile on the Occasion of His Winning the
2003 Sigrist Prize, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5/1 (Summer 2004), pp.14.
2. For an overview of the extensive scholarship that exists on the term, see for example, the select
bibliography in Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Macmillan, 2000),
pp.9223; and in Emilio Gentile, Le religioni della politica (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2001), pp.2201.
3. L. Hudson, Contrary Imaginations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966); D. Kolb, Learning Style
Inventory: Technical Manual (Boston: McBer and Company, 1976).
4. See Emilio Gentile, Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion: Definitions and Critical
Reflections on Criticisms of an Interpretation, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5/3
(Winter 2004), where this point is clarified.
5. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), Book 1, Ch.3, pp.99101.
6. One of the earliest to make the connection explicit was Bertrand Russell: see The Practice and Theory
of Bolshevism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1920), p.16. For works which explored the association
before Gurian, see Gentile (note 2), ch.3.
7. Waldemar Gurian, Totalitarianism as Political Religion, in Carl J. Friedrich (ed.), Totalitarianism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), pp.1245. Gurians essay is also important as
an adumbration of Gentiles work for (i) the recognition (p.123) that totalitarian regimes grow
out of totalitarian movements, and (ii) for the clarity with which it distinguishes theistic
religions from the religions of totalitarianism, affirming, for example, that totalitarian movements
are secularised religions. They do not have beliefs in a transcendent reality beyond this world,
beyond political power and social order (original emphasis).
8. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1965; 1st edn. 1956), pp.22, 26.
9. Ibid., p.17.
10. de Toqueville (note 5), p.101.
11. Paul Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994;
1st edn. Columbia University Press, 1963), pp.45.
12. Emilio Gentile, Le religioni della politica: Fra democrazie e totalitarismi (Bari and Rome: Laterza, 2001),
ch.6; reprinted as Emilio Gentile, The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and
Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism, trans. Robert Mallett, Totali-
tarian Movements and Political Religions 1/1 (Summer 2000), pp.1855. Gentile also uses a cluster
approach to generic concepts in his article Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion (note
4), where he specifies, in the opening section An interpretation in three definitions, that two of
the constituent elements subsumed by fascism are totalitarianism and political religion.
13. Totalitarianism, Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th edn. (2001), http://www.bartleby.com/65/to/
totalita.html, accessed 26 April 2005.
14. Friedrich and Brzezinski (note 8), pp.212. Cf. Gentiles statement (note 4), p.328, that his lengthy
definition was a deliberate choice, stemming from the intention to highlight the reciprocal
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50 R. Griffin
connection between all the elements contributing to my concept of totalitarianism, both essential
and complementary, so as to represent, in so far as a theoretical definition permits, the historical
reality actualised by totalitarian regimes during the twentieth century. In my opinion, this reality
cannot be theoretically identified with any of its constituents separately from the others [They]
are thus to be considered interconnected both logically and chronologically, within a dynamic and
dialectical relation. This article can be seen as a detailed exposition of (and defence of) his cluster-
ing approach to the key generic concepts involved in the study of political religion.
15. Robert Tryon, Cluster Analysis (Ann Arbor, MI: Edward Brothers, 1939).
16. http://dynaweb.oac.cdlib.org:8088/dynaweb/uchist/public/inmemoriam/inmemoriam1969/
@Generic__BookTextView/774 Accessed 26 April 2005.
17. Consider, for example, the claim made for its importance by the distributors of Clustan data anal-
ysis software: Cluster analysis is an exploratory data analysis tool for solving classification prob-
lems. Its object is to sort cases (people, things, events, etc) into groups, or clusters, so that the
degree of association is strong between members of the same cluster and weak between members
of different clusters. Each cluster thus describes, in terms of the data collected, the class to which
its members belong; and this description may be abstracted through use from the particular to the
general class or type. Cluster analysis is thus a tool of discovery. It may reveal associations and
structure in data which, though not previously evident, nevertheless are sensible and useful once
found. The results of cluster analysis may contribute to the definition of a formal classification
scheme, such as a taxonomy for related animals, insects or plants; or suggest statistical models
with which to describe populations; or indicate rules for assigning new cases to classes for identi-
fication and diagnostic purposes; or provide measures of definition, size and change in what
previously were only broad concepts; or find exemplars to represent classes. http://
www.clustan.com/what_is_cluster_analysis.html, accessed 26 April 2005.
18. See, for example, Ji-Rong Wen, Jian-Yun Nie and Hong-Jiang Zhang, Clustering User Queries of a
Search Engine, a web article tracked down at http://www10.org/cdrom/papers/368/ by Google
using a clustering algorithm, accessed 26 April 2005.
19. See, for example, J.L.B. Mallets entry on species concepts in P. Calow (ed.) Encyclopaedia of Ecol-
ogy and Environmental Management (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1998), pp.70911, which proposes the
use of a genotypic cluster definition to resolve the problems posed by the scientific definition of
species in a non-essentialist way.
20. The website on cluster analysis: http://149.170.199.144/multivar/ca.htm, accessed 26 April 2005.
21. For example, see The Importance of the Cluster Concept in Economic Development, OECD Proceedings,
Boosting Innovation: The Cluster Approach (Paris: OECD, 1998).
22. Avrill Crawford, The Cluster Concept: A Strategy for Delivery and Support of Distance Learn-
ing, http://www.col.org/resources/publications/SmallStates00/2_conf_proc_Crawford.pdf,
accessed 26 April 2005.
23. Berys Gaut, Art as a Cluster Concept, in Noel Carroll (ed.), Theories of Art (Madison, WI: Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Press, 2000). See the critique of this approach in Thomas Adajian, On the Cluster
Concept of Art, British Journal of Aesthetics 43/3 (October 2003).
24. See http://www.sdcoe.k12.ca.us/score/actbank/tcluster.htm; Cf. David Dowes clustering,
mixture modelling and unsupervised learning page, http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/dld/
cluster.html, accessed 26 April 2005.
25. For a valuable synthetic account of Webers highly dispersed theory of conceptualisation, see
Thomas Burger, Max Webers Theory of Concept Formation, History, Laws and Ideal Types (North
Carolina: Duke University Press, 1979).
26. There is a self-evident kinship between the cluster approach to conceptualisation in the human
sciences and theories of definition based on Wittgensteins concept of family resemblances,
which he first introduced in Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), a topic obviously
too vast to be explored here.
27. Walter Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution. A Study of Antonio Gramscis Political and Cultural
Theory (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), pp.911.
28. William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1974; 2nd edn. Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
29. Ibid., p.14.
30. Michael Freeden, Political Concepts and Ideological Morphology, Journal of Political Philosophy 2/
2 (1994), p.141. He developed this article into a fully elaborated theory that surpasses Connolly in
sophistication in his Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1998). Obviously the concept of the cluster itself forms part of a conceptual cluster that embraces
Wittgensteins concept of family resemblances, Freedens concept of concepts as configurations
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Cloister or Cluster? 51
of definitional components and other multi-dimensional or non-linear approaches to conceptuali-
sation.
31. law.ualberta.ca/ccskeywords/rule_law.html, accessed 26 April 2005; the kindred conceptions are
(1) that government must follow the law that it makes; (2) that no one is exempt from the opera-
tion of the law that it applies equally to all; and (3) that general rights emerge out of particular
cases decided by the courts.
32. See Gentile (note 4).
33. I have in mind particularly the scathing criticisms of my theory offered by A.J. Gregor, Robert
Paxton and Michael Mann in their recent books on generic fascism. The special issue on fascism
theory, Erwgen, Ethik, und Wissenschaft 5/3 (Autumn 2004), contains a number of vituperative
articles by German and Anglophone historians and social scientists contesting central theses of my
main article or its style of exposition in a manner that, however valid the points they are making,
suggests a failure to appreciate the ultimate inadequacy of all models of human realities and
hence the need to search for areas of consensus as well as of disagreement.
34. See The Essence of Nazism: Form of Fascism, Brand of Totalitarianism, or Unique Phenomenon,
in Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, 4th edn. (London: Arnold, 2000).
35. Ian Kershaw, Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism, Journal of Contemporary History 39/2, (2004),
note 25.
36. Burleigh (note 2), p.18.
37. On the importance of the single-point perspective in Renaissance art and its subsequent transcen-
dence, see apart from the two classics, Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (Cambridge
MA: Zone Books 1991; 1st edn. 1927); and E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology
of Pictorial Representation (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961) John White, The Birth
and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London: Faber and Faber, 1957). Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and
Time. The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 18802001 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001) illuminates brilliantly the structural link between modernism and the
emergence of the multi-point perspective generated by thinking analogically in constellations or
clusters of concepts.
38. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermanns otherwise excellent The Racial State (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), for example, treat the Nazis racial programme as anti-modern
and leave the relationship with the totalitarian drive of the regime to create a new civilisation
obscure.
39. A central thesis of Ernst Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Munich: Piper, 1963), p.51; English
edition Three Faces of Fascism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965).
40. George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975), is a seminal
text for exploring nationalisms transformation into a political religion in nineteenth-century
Germany as a precondition for the charismatic style of Nazism, though at the time he favoured the
term civic religion. He uses civic religion interchangeably with political religion and the sacra-
lization of politics in his autobiography, Confronting History (Madison, WI: University of Wiscon-
sin Press, 2000, pp.1778.
41. Cf. for Nazism, Klaus Vondung, Magie und Manipulation: ideologischer Kult und politische Religion
des Nationalsozialismus (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1971); Michael Burleigh, National
Socialism as a Political Religion, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1/2 (Autumn 2000);
for Fascism, seminal pieces are Emilio Gentile, Fascism as a Political Religion, Journal of Contem-
porary History 2/3 (1990); and idem, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1994).
42. See, for example, M. Berezin, Making the Fascist Self (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997);
Richard Fenn, The End of Time: Ritual, Religion, and the Forging of the Soul (London: SPCK, 1997).
43. See Bosworths attacks on Gentiles culturalism in R. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems
and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998); and Gentiles
reply (note 4), in his contribution to the special issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Reli-
gions 5/3 (Winter 2004), dedicated to the topic Fascism as a Totalitarian Movement.
44. See David Renton, Fascism (London: Pluto Press, 1999), p.29; cf. Michael Mann, Fascists
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.12.
45. For example, Malcolm Quinn, The Swastika: Constructing the Symbol (London and New York:
Routledge, 1994). See also Roger Griffin, Notes Towards the Definition of Fascist Culture: The
Prospects for Synergy Between Marxist and Liberal Heuristics, Renaissance and Modern Studies 42
(Autumn 2001).
46. The seminal works on this topic are still those of Mircea Eliade, notably The Myth of Eternal Return
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971; 1st edn. 1949).
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52 R. Griffin
47. Victor and Edith Turner, Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1982.)
48. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 2nd edn. (Dunwoody, GA: Norman
S. Berg, 1968), is still the classic text on this topic.
49. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time (London: Verso, 1995).
50. Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000); Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art (London, 1990).
51. Readers interested in this aspect of my argument are urged to read the special issue of Totalitarian
Movements and Political Religions 5/3 (Winter 2004), devoted to the topic Fascism as a Totalitarian
Movement. In it several scholars critically investigate the nexus between totalitarianism, political
religion and fascism in the light of their specialism. My editorial essay elaborates on a number of
the points only touched on here.
52. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991).
53. Ibid., p.26.
54. Ibid., pp.302.
55. See the special issue on fascism of Erwgen, Ethik, und Wissenschaft 5/3 (Autumn 2004).
56. For example, Walter Laqueur (ed.), Fascism: A Readers Guide (Berkeley, CA: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1976); G.L. Mosse (ed.), International Fascism: New Thoughts and New Approaches (London:
Sage, 1979); S. Larsen et al., Who were the Fascists? Social Roots of European Fascism (Oslo: Univer-
sitetforlaget, 1980); S. Larsen and B. Hagtvet, Modern Europe after Fascism 19431980s (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998); S. Larsen (ed.), Fascism outside Europe, Boulder Social Sciences
Monographs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); International Fascism 19191945,
special issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 2/3 (Winter 201).
57. Stein Larsen, Was there fascism outside Europe? Diffusion from Europe and Domestic Impulses,
in Larsen (ed.), Fascism outside Europe (note 56).
58. Constantin Iordachi, Charisma, Politics and Violence: The Legion of the Archangel Michael in
Interwar Romania, Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures and Societies 14 (2004).
59. Mann (note 44).
60. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics (note 41).
61. Gentile (note 2).
62. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980).
63. Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1970),
Prologue, http://www.sfzc.com/Pages/Library/zmbm.html, accessed 26 April 2005.
64. Ellis Krauss and Jon Pierre, The Decline of Dominant Parties: Parliamentary Politics in Sweden
and Japan in the 1970s, in T.J. Pempel (ed.), Uncommon Democracies: The One-Party Dominant
Regimes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
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