Political Ideologies II: Fascism, Gandhism, Feminism

These three share nothing except that each rejects the liberal settlement at its root. Fascism rejects reason, Gandhism rejects the modern state, and feminism rejects the boundary liberalism draws between the political and the private.

This is chapter 9 of the PSIR Optional Notes, from the part on Political Theory in the Paper I syllabus. The complete book is a free download.

Fascism

The core

Fascism is the hardest ideology to define because it was anti-theoretical by conviction, and because both regimes changed their doctrine to suit circumstance. Six elements recur.

• Anti-rationalism. Reason is displaced by will, instinct, myth and the emotional bond of the crowd. Sorel’s myth of the general strike and Nietzsche’s will to power are the intellectual antecedents, both used selectively and against their authors’ intentions.
• Struggle. Social Darwinism applied to nations and races. War is not a failure of politics but its highest expression, and peace is decadence.
• Leadership and elitism. The Führerprinzip: the leader possesses a unique insight into the destiny of the people, so authority flows downward and obedience upward. Democracy in any deliberative sense is incoherent on this view.
• Ultranationalism. The nation, defined organically or racially, is the unit of moral value; the individual has significance only as part of it.
• Totalitarian ambition. All spheres are politicised. There is no private domain the movement does not claim.
• Anti-liberalism, anti-democracy, anti-Marxism. It opposes liberalism for individualism, democracy for weakness and division, Marxism for internationalism and class war, while borrowing the mass mobilisation techniques of the last.

Italian and German fascism compared

UPSC set this directly in 2025. The single organising difference is what occupies the supreme place.

For Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, whose The Doctrine of Fascism (1932) supplied the philosophical section, the state is supreme. The formula is total: everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. The state is an ethical reality that realises a higher collective self, an inheritance from Hegelian idealism. Race was peripheral to Italian Fascism for most of its life; the racial laws of 1938 came late and under German influence.

For Hitler, the state is explicitly a means. The Volk, the racially defined people, is the end, and a state that fails to serve racial preservation has no claim on loyalty. The intellectual root is not idealism but racial biology and social Darwinism. Antisemitism is constitutive rather than incidental, and Lebensraum, living space in the east, follows from the doctrine of racial struggle rather than from ordinary strategic ambition.

Two further differences are worth a line each. Italian Fascism developed corporatism as a distinctive economic doctrine, fusing capital and labour in state-supervised corporations and declaring class conflict abolished; National Socialism had no comparable doctrine and subordinated the economy to rearmament. And Italian Fascism never achieved the total penetration of society that the German regime did, since the monarchy, the army and the Church retained independent standing throughout.

Fascism and parliamentary democracy

The 2023 question, on fascism’s ambivalent stance toward parliamentary democracy, needs the ambivalence stated as a structure rather than as a contradiction.

In doctrine, hostile. Parliament is condemned as a talking shop that dissolves national will into faction, and as the instrument by which liberal elites and Marxist parties frustrate the nation. Gentile’s ethical state has no room for organised opposition, and the leader principle is incompatible with representation.

In practice, instrumental. Both movements entered through constitutional doors. The March on Rome in October 1922 was followed by Mussolini’s appointment as Prime Minister by the King, a governing coalition, and the Acerbo Law of 1923 which awarded two-thirds of seats to the largest list; only after the 1924 election and the Matteotti crisis was the parliamentary system dismantled. Hitler was appointed Chancellor legally in January 1933 and secured the Enabling Act that March through a Reichstag vote taken under conditions of intimidation.

In rhetoric, a rival claim to democracy. Both regimes claimed to be more democratic than liberal states, on the argument that the leader embodies the people’s will directly rather than refracting it through parties, and both used plebiscites to manufacture the appearance of ratification. This is why fascism is better described as anti-liberal democracy than as frankly anti-popular.

The lesson usually drawn, and worth drawing, is that constitutional forms are not self-protecting. Both cases show a democracy dismantled through its own procedures, which is why post-war constitutions, including India’s, contain entrenchment devices and why the basic structure doctrine matters.

Gandhism

The unity of means and ends

This is the axis of the whole system and the point most often missed. For Gandhi the common metaphor of the seed and the tree governs: the means are the seed and the end the tree, and there is the same inviolable connection between them as between the two. There is therefore no calculation in which a violent means can be justified by a peaceful end, which distinguishes him from every consequentialist and from the revolutionary tradition entirely.

The working concepts

Ahimsa is not merely abstention from violence but active love, including toward the opponent, whose humanity the method is designed to reach.

Satyagraha, literally holding firmly to truth, is the political technique that follows. It is not passive resistance, a description Gandhi rejected, because it is active, requires courage rather than weakness, and aims at converting the opponent rather than defeating them. Its forms include non-cooperation, civil disobedience, the fast and the constructive programme; its discipline requires openness about intentions, the acceptance of suffering, and a readiness to compromise on everything except principle.

Swaraj carries two senses simultaneously, and an answer that gives only the political sense has missed the argument. Outwardly it is self-government, the end of foreign rule. Inwardly it is rule over oneself, the mastery of one’s own mind and passions, without which political independence merely substitutes Indian rulers for English ones. Hind Swaraj (1909) makes this explicit: English rule without the Englishman would be not Hindustan but Englistan.

Swadeshi is the discipline of using and serving what is near, of which the charkha is both the instrument and the symbol: economic self-reliance, dignity of manual labour, and a link between the educated nationalist and the village.

Sarvodaya, the welfare of all, is Gandhi’s alternative to utilitarianism, taken from his reading of Ruskin’s Unto This Last. The greatest good of the greatest number is insufficient because it permits the sacrifice of a minority; the rise of all is the only acceptable standard. Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan movement was the attempt to institutionalise it.

Trusteeship applies the same logic to property. The wealthy are to regard their wealth as held in trust for society, taking only what they need. It avoids the violence of expropriation and depends entirely on voluntary conversion, which is precisely the objection to it.

The critique of modern civilisation

Hind Swaraj (1909) is directed less at the British than at the civilisation the Indian elite wished to inherit. Machinery is condemned as displacing labour and creating dependence; railways as spreading famine and plague and enabling centralised extraction; lawyers as thriving on quarrels; doctors as enabling people to persist in the habits that made them ill. The underlying charge is that modern civilisation multiplies wants and calls the multiplication progress, while true civilisation is the deliberate limitation of wants.

The state, as Chapter 2 sets out, is rejected as violence in concentrated form, and the alternative is the oceanic circle: authority flowing outward from self-governing individuals to villages and upward only by consent, so that the centre serves the periphery rather than commanding it.

Assessment

Gandhism’s achievements are not in dispute: it made mass politics possible in a colonial society without an armed struggle, it supplied a method that has been used from Montgomery to Manila, and it placed the moral quality of political action permanently on the agenda.

The criticisms an answer must record are Ambedkar’s, that the village Gandhi idealised was the principal instrument of caste oppression and that varnashrama could not be reformed into equality however sincerely reinterpreted; the Marxist charge that trusteeship left the structure of property untouched while diverting mass energy into moral self-improvement; and the practical observation that satyagraha works against an opponent with a conscience and a free press, which is why it has no answer to a genuinely totalitarian regime.

Feminism

The waves

Simone de Beauvoir‘s claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman is the hinge between the first and second waves, because it separates sex, the biological fact, from gender, the social construction built upon it, and thereby makes subordination a political question rather than a natural one. Judith Butler pushes further, arguing that gender is performative, constituted by the repeated acts said to express it, and that the sex–gender distinction itself presupposes a pre-social body that is already culturally read.

The personal is political

The slogan, from the title of Carol Hanisch’s 1969 paper circulated in 1970, is the second wave’s central theoretical claim and the subject of UPSC’s 2025 question. Its argument has four steps.

1. Liberal political theory treats the family as private, and therefore as beyond the reach of justice and outside politics.
2. But that boundary is not natural. It is drawn by law, upheld by the state, and it has been drawn differently at different times, which shows it to be a political decision.
3. The private sphere so protected is precisely where women’s subordination is organised: in the division of domestic labour, in control over reproduction, in violence within marriage, and in the transmission of gender roles to children.
4. Therefore what women experience as individual, personal difficulty, unhappiness in marriage, exhaustion, the assumption of caring duties, is a systematic and political phenomenon, and consciousness-raising is the method by which it is recognised as such.

The practical consequences are large and concrete: domestic violence becomes a public wrong rather than a family matter, marital rape becomes intelligible as rape, unpaid care work becomes visible as labour, and reproductive autonomy becomes a political right. In India the legislative trail runs from the Dowry Prohibition Act 1961 through the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005 to the sexual harassment legislation of 2013, and the marital rape exception in the criminal law remains the sharpest unresolved instance.

The standing objection, from Jean Bethke Elshtain among others, is that collapsing the distinction entirely leaves no protected private sphere at all, which is a loss for women as much as for anyone, since the same logic can license state intrusion into intimate life. The reply is that the claim is about the justification of the boundary, not its abolition: a private sphere is defensible, but only one whose limits can be publicly argued for.

The strands

• Liberal feminism. Subordination arises from unequal legal rights and irrational custom; the remedy is equal access to education, employment and office. Wollstonecraft, Mill, Friedan. Criticised for accepting the public–private division and for speaking for professional women.
• Socialist and Marxist feminism. Women’s oppression is bound to capitalism, which relies on unpaid reproductive labour to produce and maintain the workforce at no cost. Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Zetkin, Mitchell; Hartmann’s dual-systems account treats patriarchy and capitalism as distinct but interlocking. Criticised for subordinating gender to class.
• Radical feminism. Patriarchy is an independent and primary system of domination, not a by-product of anything else. Millett, Firestone, MacKinnon. Its strength is the analysis of sexuality and violence; its weakness is a tendency to universalise the experience of particular women.
• Post-modern feminism. The category “woman” is itself produced by the discourse that claims to describe it. Butler. Its strength is analytical; its difficulty is that dissolving the subject makes collective political claims harder to ground.
• Post-colonial and Indian feminism. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” (1986) attacks the construction of a singular “third world woman” as victim in western feminist writing. In India, Dalit feminist scholarship, notably Sharmila Rege’s argument for a Dalit standpoint, holds that mainstream Indian feminism universalised the experience of upper-caste women and that caste and gender must be analysed together.

Mill on the subjection of women

UPSC quoted Mill’s opening claim in 2023: that the legal subordination of one sex to another is wrong in itself and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement. The Subjection of Women (1869) argues that the existing relation between the sexes is a survival of the law of the strongest into an age that has abolished it everywhere else; that no one can know women’s nature because it has only ever been observed under conditions of subjection, which he calls an eminently artificial thing; that marriage law makes the wife the nearest analogue to a slave the law still recognises; and that the loss is not only to women but to society, which forfeits half its talent and corrupts men by giving them unearned authority. It is a liberal argument in form, resting on liberty, utility and the removal of artificial restraint, and its limitation is correspondingly liberal: it addresses law and opinion rather than the division of domestic labour, which is what the second wave added.

They say means are, after all, means. I would say means are, after all, everything. As the means so the end

M.K. Gandhi, Young India, 17 July 1924

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949

The principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes, the legal subordination of one sex to the other, is wrong in itself

John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, 1869

Read the rest. This chapter is one of 58 in the complete PSIR Optional Notes, covering Paper I and Paper II in full — free to download.

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