The origins of twentieth-century totalitarianism never cease to fascinate. This is amply demonstrated by these stimulating books by noted scholars of fascism. James A. Gregor's Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism is the more narrowly focused study, arguing that the totalitarianisms of both left and right can be traced to revisionist forms of Marxism. In The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, Zeev Sternhell ranges more widely, exposing the malign influence of the critics of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment down to the present time. Both authors present engaged, controversial theses that are bound to attract admirers and critics of equal intensity.

Few academics could have more of a personal stake in defending the values of the Enlightenment than Zeev Sternhell. A distinguished historian and public figure on the secular and liberal side of Israeli politics, Sternhell is a survivor not only of the Holocaust but also of an assassination attempt by a right-wing extremist in 2008.

Given that background, it is not surprising that Sternhell's commitment to the Enlightenment, and his condemnation of its opponents, is absolute. He does briefly allow that each of these traditions contains complexities and internal contradictions, but his central message, developed with great determination and in tremendous detail, is uncompromisingly pro-Enlightenment and anti-anti-Enlightenment.

For Sternhell, the tradition of Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau stands for reason, science, toleration, free inquiry, and human rights—the ideals that underpin modern liberal democracy. The anti-Enlightenment tradition, by contrast, rejects these human commonalities and celebrates those things that divide people: historical experience, cultural tradition, nationalism, religion, language, local community, differences, and hierarchies of various kinds. Out of these materials the critics of the Enlightenment—including Edmund Burke, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Thomas Carlyle, Hippolyte Taine, Friedrich Meinecke, Charles Maurras, Oswald Spengler and Hans-Georg Gadamer—constructed the irrational identities and authoritarian principles that led to fascism. More recently (and more surprisingly), similar ideas have animated the “blocked” Cold War liberalism of Isaiah Berlin and the “neoconservatism” of Gertrude Himmelfarb, François Furet, Irving Kristol, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Ernst Nolte, and Francis Fukuyama.

Overall, Sternhell's achievement is impressive. I find his willingness to fight for the Enlightenment deeply sympathetic in the context of the uncritical respect for particularity found in so much contemporary political theory. His discussion of the anti-Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is engaged and exciting—although, it has to be said, not very clearly organized. The book is a huge, swirling debate addressing the thought, in multiple languages, not just of the main players but of many lesser-known figures, too. No doubt there is fuel for controversy here, but on the whole, Sternhell's views in these chapters are persuasive.

It is when he approaches our own time that Sternhell's judgments become less convincing, and indeed harder to follow. For example, it is difficult to see what the so-called neoconservatives are supposed to have in common, apart perhaps from a commitment to capitalism, and even harder to see how this amounts to an attack on the Enlightenment.

I have stronger reservations still about Sternhell's treatment of Berlin. According to Sternhell, Berlin's stance in relation to the Enlightenment is one of barely qualified opposition: “[H]e said a few things in praise of the Enlightenment, but his work as a whole manifests a total rejection of its positions and principles” (p. 23). Berlin sups with the devil when he approves of GiambatistaVico and Herder, endorsing their suspicion of science and reason, and repackaging their relativism and conservatism as “pluralism.”

This picture does contain some elements of truth. When Berlin imagines his way into the worldview of extremists like Joseph de Maistre and Johann Georg Hamann he seems to be enjoying himself too much, and the initial account he gives of Vico and Herder does appear to endorse cultural relativism. More generally, he presents himself as supporting liberty against its enemies, but his arguments are frustratingly oblique.

This is only a very partial picture, however. Sternhell rightly observes that Berlin is a complex and ambiguous writer, but his subsequent discussion fails to reflect this adequately. Berlin does oppose the scientistic or positivist strain of the Enlightenment according to which the methods of the natural sciences provide the only route to knowledge. For Berlin, historical explanation and other ways of understanding and evaluating human conduct can be arrived at only by interpreting human experience from the “inside” rather than by external observation and measurement alone. But that does not mean that he rejects either science, in its place, or reason more generally. He does neither.

Further, even if Berlin takes issue with some of the methods of Enlightenment thinkers, that does not mean that he rejects their values. In this connection, how does Berlin's “Two Concepts of Liberty” fit into Sternhell's picture? Even if we accept that the essay is too narrow in its stress on negative liberty (in my view a concession needing careful qualification), that hardly shows that Berlin hates the Enlightenment. Indeed, his object is clearly to defend liberal democracy against authoritarianism. People may disagree with the details of that defense, but that does not negate his basic political position.

Finally, although Berlin did not make a very good fist of separating pluralism from relativism, those ideas are not the same. For the cultural relativist, each culture is an autonomous and irreproachable source of value; for the pluralist, there are at least some values that cut across cultures and that consequently serve as criteria for evaluating those cultures independently of their self-evaluation. Further argument is needed to connect this view with liberal democracy, but it is not simply the relativist vehicle that Sternhell assumes it to be.

So from an Enlightenment point of view, Berlin's performance is perhaps not all it should be, but he does not deserve the red card issued by Sternhell. Perhaps the difference between Sternhell and Berlin comes down to the contrast between the forms of totalitarianism that exercise them most. For Sternhell the focus is fascism, for which the most obvious intellectual source is the anti-Enlightenment. Berlin would agree with that judgment, but he is less concerned with fascism—seemingly finished by the time he hits his stride in the 1950s—than with Soviet communism. Berlin's argument that twentieth-century state communism owed less to anti-Enlightenment irrationalism than to Enlightenment scientism is plausible. Again, this is not to reject science, reason, and the Enlightenment as such, only one narrow interpretation of these.

Indeed, might it be that Enlightenment scientism contributes not only to communism but also to fascism? This is a possibility implicit in Gregor's excellent book. His basic thesis is that the twentieth-century totalitarianism of both left and right, communist and fascist, has its roots in Marxism. Thus, he refers to “that variant of Marxism we now speak of as Fascism” (p. 149).

Many will find this a shocking association. But Gregor explains that the widespread assumption that Marxism is antifascist is largely the result of the political pragmatism required by the Allied cause in World War II, rather than of any very profound difference in doctrine. Fascists and Marxists meet within the broad tent of totalitarianism, agreeing in their rejection of liberalism and parliamentary democracy, and their commitment to violent revolutionary change led by a disciplined elite.

Moreover, Gregor points to deep affinities in their intellectual roots. Fascist doctrines, he argues, evolved out of the efforts of the successors of Marx and Engels to shore up the sagging foundations in the edifice left behind by the founders. Two problems were especially salient:

First, the role of ethics had been reduced by orthodox Marxism to a mere “reflection” of class identity and the material realities of the economic base. For the thinking Marxist, this failed to capture the centrality of ethics to lived experience, and it could not account for the origin of many influential ethical judgments, including those of Marx and Engels themselves. Second, the determinism of orthodox Marxism seemed to leave little room for the role of human choice in revolutionary action, and in particular it appeared to obviate the elite leadership that Marxist intellectuals thought they were providing.

Gregor proceeds to examine a number of attempts to address these shortcomings in the orthodox view, each of which brings us closer not only to the Bolshevism of Lenin but also to the Fascism of Mussolini. Ludwig Woltmann, for example, tries to reinforce the scientific claims of Marxism by reconciling it with Darwinism. The result is an account of how the forces of production develop at different rates in different societies because of racial differences. Georges Sorel supplements Marx with Bergsonian vitalism in order to reconceive revolution as a willed act of moral regeneration through violence. Lenin emphasizes the need for revolution to be directed by a disciplined leadership subject to periodic cleansing purges. Mussolini gathers up all these ideas and adds a shift from class to national identification as the necessary vehicle for a mass revolutionary consciousness. All of these thinkers begin as orthodox Marxists and end as defenders of hierarchy.

The connections made by Gregor are subtle and intriguing, but do they quite justify the thesis that fascism is a “variant” of Marxism? For example, when he says that “Woltmann's racism was the natural child of classical Marxism” (p. 71), the implication seems to be that racism was a logical place for Marxists to go, or that the classical founders were somehow responsible for Woltmann's racism. But, of course, there is nothing logically required about Woltmann's move; other Marxists made no such move. Similarly, a consistent Marxist could reject Lenin's demand for a vanguard elite.

What Marx and Engels certainly are responsible for is a crude and reductive worldview that cannot account for moral values, judgments, and decisions. Gregor shows that fascist thought developed in response to these defects in Marxism, but that is consistent with regarding fascism as a departure from Marxism, rather than a variant of it.

If Gregor is correct that fascism grew historically out of Marxism, this further undermines Sternhell's harsh view of Berlin. To the extent that fascism grew out of Marxism—ironically, an insight that Gregor attributes to Sternhell (p. xi)—it thereby grew out of a major product of Enlightenment scientism. So when Berlin draws attention to the unintended consequences of scientism, he thereby helps to expose an important source not only of communism but of fascism, too.

Gregor's and Sternhell's books are committed, partisan arguments that will be immensely irritating to a range of readers—Marxists in Gregor's case; relativists, communitarians, and conservatives in Sternhell's. But these are also works of deep scholarship, embodying the maturity of two long and distinguished careers, and even those who disagree with them will have to take them seriously.