Your book, The Civic Foundations of Fascism (2010), challenges the "neo-Tocqueville consensus" that the development of a vibrant civil society is always associated with liberal democracies. While an “associational boom” may well have a tendency towards creating more democracy, the book explores the consequences of political disorganisation at the state level and how "thick civic societies" – in some instances – can actually lead to authoritarian politics in the cases of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Romania.

Can you outline your core argument and explain why it suggests we should restructure our theoretical understanding of the relationship between civil society and regime outcomes? I.e., weak civil societies lead to totalitarianism, and strong civil societies lead to liberal democracy.

First of all, I want to paint the picture of the intellectual context in which I was writing at that time, as it was very different from where we are today. Peter Mair's Ruling the Void was based on articles published in the 2000s, and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone was based on articles published in the mid-1990s. The discussion of civil society and the emergence of the Tocquevillian discourse, at this point, were really emerging out of the collapse of state socialism. This was associated with the ‘Fukuyama moment’, and with that came the idea that one of the fundamental problems was an over-focus on the economy and the state, on these realms of political action, and that actually what we needed to do was to think about civil society as the basis for establishing a good society. That played out in different ways across the political spectrum. By the 1990s, I would say that the consensus – seen particularly in the work of John Keane, for example – was that we were in this moment of ‘civil society against the state’.

The other point to make about The Civic Foundations of Fascism is that I'd initially started my research on the rise of Italian fascism but was struck by one point that was just inescapable – the empirical observation that fascism is fundamentally a phenomenon of the north and centre of the Italian peninsula. These were, if you think about Putnam's initial book, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1994), exactly the regions and towns that he had said were the basis of associational life and vibrant civic and Republican forms of politics going back to the Middle Ages. By his account, this tradition of good government and civic activism continued right up until the late 1970s and early 1980s. But that's where fascism was most organised.

I started reading a very rich historical literature about associational life in these areas in Italy, and then I looked at the specifics of how Italian fascism as a party organised itself in relation to the largely agrarian, consumer, and producer co-operatives in those regions. It forced me to rethink the significance of the transition of the socialist co-operative milieu into early fascism, which is a characteristic of Italian fascism, and how, to a certain extent, that works to form the raw material for the party organisation.

I extended the framework of the book to explore this point about associational life in these different areas. I don't think The Civic Foundations of Fascism was an account of authoritarianism as such, because there are many factors that have produced authoritarianism, but it was an account of one of the central preconditions for the organisation of fascism, and particularly the organisation of the fascist party. Authoritarianism, as a broad basket of phenomena, should be distinguished from fascism, which requires a highly mobilised civil society.

What is the Tocquevillian thesis that you're challenging, if not entirely rejecting, in the book?

If you go all the way back to Alexis de Tocqueville himself – and in a certain way also to Marx, who has a similar analysis of French politics – the idea is that the basis of what Hannah Arendt calls totalitarianism is the presence of social atomisation. This creates the idea that when individuals are isolated and disconnected from one another, they will turn to a mythological type of politics that is usually crystallised in a charismatic leader. But in this inter-war period, it also, confusingly, contains a mass party.

The original Tocquevillian thesis was that you have to have social atomisation in order to get totalitarian party organisations. This was first laid out most systematically by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and then it’s followed by Cold War literature, including sociologists like William Kornhauser and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who also connected totalitarianism to social atomisation.

Now the problem with that account was the existence of the mass party. What these accounts could never really explain was how social atomisation could congeal into a mass party organisation. And indeed, if you read The Origins of Totalitarianism closely, this question emerges and is never really answered by Arendt. By the 1970s and 1980s, you’re already beginning to see a real pushback on this argument. Stein Ugelvik Larsen, a Norwegian sociologist, wrote a really important early essay challenging the Arendt consensus. In it he discusses the German case – since Germany, of course, had a very densely organised civil society. In fact, the German case is even more problematic than the Italian one. Then more people built on this critique, most notably Sheri Berman, who wrote a very important article in 1997, ‘Bowling for Fascism: Social Capital and the Rise of the Nazi Party’, which challenged this idea that civil society is automatically democratic, and made the point that civil society organisations were the raw material for the German National Socialists.

Authoritarianism, as a broad basket of phenomena, should be distinguished from fascism, which requires a highly mobilised civil society.

There was another problem that I found with the critical literature, particularly in terms of the ‘dark side of social capital’. Many said we can't just talk about civil society in general; we have to make a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ civil society, which struck me as a really weak position. Either the argument for civil society was about the relationship between associations and democracy, or it was just a topology that said, ‘You get democratic organisations when you have democratic organisations’. I also found and continue to find it to be a crude interpretation of interwar fascism, which is a movement that has a very complex relationship to democracy, in my opinion. It is not the case that, in the minds of fascists themselves, they were proposing an anti-democratic form of politics, but their politics was orientated against liberalism as a set of institutional structures.

The reason they rejected liberalism was because they saw it as non-representative – this is a key point. When I say that, people think that I'm somehow an apologist for fascism. But that's not what I'm arguing; what I'm trying to say is that you could say that fascism was a form of authoritarian democracy, in that it mobilised democratic sentiments in the service of a project that was itself authoritarian. If you look at the rhetoric and the ideology, and even the nature of these early fascist organisations, they're claiming that they want to establish a state that is the true expression of the population's interests and desires against a false liberalism. Liberalism is a very important value, particularly on the left, but it is not democracy. It has a different structural basis than democracy itself.

An important part of the book is your use of Gramscian hegemony. Can you talk a bit about that level of political disorganisation during this process of unification, where states were forming or were formed within the last generation, and how that disorganisation between elites has a really significant impact on the ability for counter-hegemony to form?

I'm really glad you asked me that question as I regard my attempt to formulate the relationship between hegemony and civil society development as my key contribution to the debate. The foundations of these observations about civil society and the critique of the Tocquevillians, which I adopted and extended, had already been laid out to some extent in previous literature. But this focus on hegemony was new.

So what are we talking about when we talk about hegemony? In my understanding of it, hegemony is a particular type of political relationship. It's when a specific subgroup is able to successfully claim that its particular interests also serve a more general interest. And so the hegemonic group does not renounce the pursuit of its particular interest, but it links the pursuit of those particular interests to the general interests of the group.

To give an example, there was the old slogan from the 1950s in the United States: ‘What's good for General Motors is good for the country’. That's a hegemonic idea. In the context of Italian unification – and the same thing could be said with respect to German unification – the Italian middle class (bourgeoisie) was unable to successfully articulate or develop a hegemonic politics. Its particular interests remained particular.

In Italy, there was never a ‘bourgeois revolution’ that established a state to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie while also establishing basic freedoms for the entire country. For example, the Italian bourgeoisie was not a force for extending suffrage or even basic civil rights to the wider population. In fact, the state that emerges from the Italian unification process features an extremely restricted layer of highly privileged elites, the consolidation of a backward agrarian sector in the south of the country, and the denial of basic political rights to the mass of the population in the north.

If you look at the old Marxian idea, it suggests that when the bourgeoisie makes a hegemonic claim, it will always, in some sense, be unfulfilled. This creates the context in which the working class can make its own claims. In France, unlike Italy, Spain, and Romania, the bourgeoisie is hegemonic, as exemplified by the revolution of 1789. The idea of socialism then emerges within the bourgeois notion of universal freedom. The new socialist working-class movement does not say that the French Revolution was wrong – let's abandon it. Instead, it claims that the French Revolution could not fulfil its own idea of freedom and that we must develop a more substantial idea of freedom. And so it forms its own political personality within the context of an established hegemony.

On the one hand, in the case of Italy, Romania, and Spain, this forms an opportunity for the working class to establish their own hegemony. In the Italian case, the two major factions of property – the bourgeoisie and landowners – fail to cohere into a national project. While they may be in an economic or ‘corporate’ alliance, they are not focused on developing a popular national will. So if the bourgeoisie is incapable, the task devolves on the working class, or the working class in alliance with the peasantry.

This idea in Gramsci is rooted in Leninism, who argued that the problem for Russia was the weakness of its bourgeoisie, and as it was so dependent on the autocracy, it cannot fulfil its basic purpose of developing a national project. And so the proletariat has to fulfil the tasks that the bourgeoisie should have done, and then, of course, it goes beyond it to establish socialism. So while Gramsci takes up this idea, he points to a potential problem that may develop: that instead of becoming a hegemonic class, there is a danger that Italian socialism reproduces the same economic corporate logic that was already there in the ruling class. This means that it could simply become another interest group. In the Italian case, instead of an ascending process where the hegemonic framework is laid out by a bourgeois revolution, you have a descending process in which the lack of hegemony among the dominant class cascades downward into the proletariat and the peasantry.

So while you may have the presence of strong associational culture, if the broader political framework is lacking, it will be undermined by it. Gramsci's entire political project, in one sense, is to try to move things in this hegemonic direction. He is a very peculiar thinker, because he is both associated with the concept of hegemony (wrongly in some ways, because this was a concept that already existed in the Russian tradition, so Gramsci is rather the theorist of hegemony in the West), yet his own historical experience saw the failure of the bourgeoisie to establish a hegemony in his own country.

All of the cases in the book – party fascism in Italy, traditionalist fascism in Spain, and statist fascism in Romania – were based on the promise of breaking from “oligarchic liberalism” and realising the “democratic demand” of a developing civic society. But the rise of fascism also emerged within different types of civil society, ranging from autonomous, elite-led, and state-sponsored development.

Can you outline the differences in the process of “rapid associational development” in each of these countries?

‍One of the main confusions in the civil society literature is the idea that voluntary associations and the organisational structures of voluntary associations are always autonomous from either political authority or economic elites. They're not. There are two dimensions of civil society. One concerns civil society's organisational associational strength – how many people are participating in it. And the second concerns civil society's relationship to the state or to political or social elites. The question here is: how do you understand an organisation that requires mass participation from the general population but is also, let's say, funded by the government?

So in the Romanian case, Romanian liberalism is very interested in establishing co-operative organisations. They look around Europe to figure out what producer and consumer co-operatives are doing, and they try to seed these things, which go on to become relatively successful. So what do you say about an organisation like that? Well, you can decide this is not civil society because it does not fit into the legal understanding of civil society in the liberal western sense. Or, and this I think is probably the more useful way of thinking about it, you can say that the idea that civil society develops organically from below is certainly one possibility, but it's not the only one. There are different ways that associational life can be formed. You can have an associational life that begins as a project of the state and then spins off into its own initiative. Or you can have the opposite phenomenon, an associational life that begins outside the state but then fuses with the state or the party at a later moment of its existence. It's important when trying to understand the reality of the associational sphere not to introduce what is basically a legal distinction between private and public into our understanding of the social reality.

So the Romanian case is essentially state-sponsored. And then the Spanish case is an elite-sponsored project: here the co-operative movement is in the hands of Catholic agrarians and big landholders who fund, sponsor, and often preside over the mutual sphere. The co-operative movement in Spain is heavily dominated by Catholicism, although there is also an anarchist strand. Socialism is a weaker formation in Spain; it's mostly restricted to the urban areas. And then there are also the Catalan nationalist organisations. But the elites are very heavily involved, and this is a third path of civil society development.

I think that something that we need to think about a lot more in this literature on associationism and civil society is explanations of where it comes from. Where do you get these dense associational fabrics? We don't really have very good answers for this phenomenon. You have historical descriptions, and you have a line of thinking that says that it's generally associated with capitalism – that civil society is something that is produced by the separation of political power from economic power. And then you have a series of cultural explanations. But none of these have really been brought together in a consistent framework for actually explaining why you get this in some places and not in others, and at some times and not in others. I don't think we have great accounts of this, although we have lots of great descriptive accounts of where this comes from. So my proposal is that we not think about civil society as always emerging from below; it can be created in different ways. And that can have very different consequences – not, however, necessarily democratic consequences.

Dylan Riley is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe. He is also an editor at New Left Review.