Talk:Seward Collins
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[edit] Hello, and who did this article?
Hello, hello! I'd love to know who did this article. I'm the Michael Tucker referenced at the end of the piece and it would be fun to share notes with the Wikpedian responsible. Those of us who have even heard of "poor Sewie" (as his friends called him) are a darn small group, and those who've written about him a rare breed indeed. --Mjt57 13:33, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
I do wish whoever it is that keeps adding material to this entry would ID themselves. I'd love to share data with what seems to be the only other Collins scholar on the planet. MJT57 --72.70.52.59 18:03, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] What I really said about Collins
I am amazed and flattered to discover that my book -- And Then They Loved Him: Seward Collins and the Chimera of an American Fascism – seems to have sparked a bit of a debate here on Wikipedia. That being the case, I thought I ought to inform the community a bit more about what my book actually says about Collins.
First, a concession. Collins reportedly did call himself a “Fascist” and there is not a doubt in the world that the American Review published many things that were complimentary about Mussolini and Italian Fascism. However, a quibble. If we made complimentary comments the sole criteria of whether or not someone was a Fascist, then rather quickly, we would have to put virtually the whole of the American intellectual community of the 1920s and 1930s into the dock. Everyone from Ida Tarbell to Will Rogers said kind things about Fascism at one time or another.
Moreover, and rather more importantly, if one looks behind (as it were) the words themselves, one discovers a curious thing. Enter Collins’ private papers, or even read his editorials closely, and you find that he uses the word “Fascism” in a very odd way. He consciously redefines it to mean “Distributism,” that is, the post-capitalist, post-industrial traditionalism of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Collins’ utopia is not that of the jack-booted SS man, but rather that of the rural life, the local squire, the parish priest, and the general paternalism of pre-industrial civilization. Thus, in an 1933 editorial, he would offer the opinion that Fascism was a return to the age of “monarchy, property, the guilds, the security of the family and the peasantry, and the ancient ways of European life.”
I submit the above is simply not Fascism, or, at least not any Fascism with which the average reader is familiar. Nowhere in Collins do we find a cult of personality, nor a call for a militarized society, nor an organized plan for the imperial expansion of a revitalized nation. All that we do have is a vague anti-modernism. Or, to put it rather more simply, if Collins was a Fascist then he was a poor one indeed, though he would have made a rather good Hobbit.
Now, that said, I will also confess (and I do discuss this in the book) there are those who suggest that Distributism, anti-modernism, and so on are themselves Fascistic, or, at least, closely related to Fascism. One reading of Zeev Sternhell’s theory of Fascism, for example, is that the ideology grew out of a larger intellectual tradition which dates back to the Enlightenment but which rejects the Enlightenment’s individualism and materialism in favor of hierarchy and community — in effect, rejecting Gesellschaft for Gemeinschaft.
Yet, what concerns me is that if we accept this interpretation, then we have to identify other community-oriented movements — like the Green Party and the YMCA — as being similarly related to Fascism. This seems a somewhat uncomfortable conclusion. If it were true, then it would mean we would have take Collins at his word, and imply that he, unlike us, merely had the courage to link correctly our own benevolent impulses with their most destructive manifestation. --Mjt57 01:47, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
- Mr. Tucker,
- All of the above is particularly interesting reading; thanks for contributing to the discussion. Please understand, however, that Wikipedia is not really the place to present "original" arguments. As a "neutral" encyclopedia, the intention should be (ideally) to report what multiple sources say on a subject, rather than provide a particular spin drawn from our own beliefs. Wikipedia welcomes experts on subjects, such as yourself, but with a caveat that the site doesn't differentiate users based on their knowledge of the subject-- in fact, recognition of expertise in editing was a hotly contested issue recently, with a "rejected" guideline at WP:EXPERT.
- Content in articles such as this one should not aim to correct what we see as public mis-impressions, or try to present what we personally believe to be "true." Rather, it must be drawn from what Verifiable and Reliable Sources have already published on the topic.
