Fascism in Its Epoch
[1]: 47 Using the methods of phenomenology, Nolte subjected German Nazism, Italian Fascism, and the French Action Française movements to a comparative analysis.
[1]: 48 In a Hegelian dialectic, Nolte argued that the Action Française was the thesis, Italian Fascism was the antithesis, and German Nazism the synthesis of the two earlier fascist movements.
[2]: 86 [4]: 27 The second type is "theoretical transcendence", the striving to go beyond what exists in the world towards a new future, eliminating traditional fetters imposed on the human mind by poverty, backwardness, ignorance, and class.
[3]: 433 Nolte cited the flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961 as an example of "practical transcendence", of how humanity was pressing forward in its technological development and rapidly acquiring powers traditionally thought to be only the providence of the gods.
By "monotheism" and "anti-nature" he did not imply a political process: he related these terms to the tradition of Western philosophy and religion, and left no doubt that for him they were not only adjuncts of Rousseau's notion of liberty, but also of the Christian Gospels and Parmenides' concept of being.
[6]: 39 Nolte's theories about Nazi anti-Semitism as a rejection of modernity inspired the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka to argue that Nazism was an attack on "the very roots of Western civilisation, its basic values and moral foundations".
In reviews by, among others, Klaus Epstein, Hajo Holborn, James Joll, Walter Laqueur, George Mosse, Wolfgang Sauer, Fritz Stern and Eugen Weber, this masterly work was hailed as a very great book.
Professor Nolte's work contains such a wealth of observations, information, insight and throwaway ideas that are well worth keeping that inevitably one takes issue with some.
[9] Especially objectionable to Sternhell was Nolte's insistence on focusing solely on the ideas of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Charles Maurras as the causal factors of fascism.
[9]: 369 Sternhell commented that the effect of this single-minded focus on ideas and personalities was that: In some ways, Ernst Nolte's approach recalls that of Gerhard Ritter and Friedrich Meinecke: Thomas More, for Ritter, Machiavelli, for Meinecke, and now Maurras, for Nolte, are so many proofs of the universality of evil, so many proofs that it was almost by accident, by a mere conjunction of political circumstances, that the Nazis arose in Germany.
[4]: 27 From the right, historians such as Karl Dietrich Bracher criticized the entire notion of generic fascism as intellectually invalid and argued that it was individual choice on the part of Germans, rather than Nolte's philosophical view of the "metapolitical", that produced Nazism.
