Fascism as a recurring possibility: Zeev Sternhell, the anti-Enlightenment, and the intellectual history of European modernity

Abstract

The article offers an overview and a critical assessment of the work of Zeev Sternhell, focussing on the questions of fascism and of the anti-Enlightenment tradition. It claims that the career of the Israeli historian revolves around the intuition of a history of European modernity marked by a central opposition: that between the Enlightenment and the anti-Enlightenment. I show how the idea is already present in his initial works, and argue that it produces a specific kind of intellectual history, concerned with the unity of traditions over large temporal horizons. I claim that it has the advantage of offering an historically grounded reading of fascism which nonetheless is capable to account for its emergence in apparently very dissimilar contexts. After having examined some of the shortcomings of this approach, I offer an historical explanation for the type of intellectual history practiced by Sternhell, arguing that it must be tied to his political activism in Israel.

Keywords: Enlightenment; Israel; Zeev Sternhell; anti-Enlightenment; fascism; nationalism.