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    • Tag: fascization

    • The President of the German Association of University Presidents warns

      Nicola Kuhrt, Markus Weisskopf: Interview with Walter Rosenthal: “The science system is facing its greatest test since reunification,” Research.Table, February 4, 2026.

      Rosenthal’s interventions in this interview can be read as a warning based on institutional theory: In his role as president of the German Rectors’ Conference, he does not talk about science as a pure idea, but as infrastructure, as a structure of legal norms, financial flows, procedures, and self-governing bodies. His statement, “We must secure science in such a way that it can withstand illiberal times,” is programmatic and marks a shift: freedom does not appear here as a normative postulate, but as a construction task.

      When Rosenthal speaks of the “greatest stress test since reunification,” he is not referring to a singular conflict, but to the simultaneity of structural tensions: geopolitical shifts, growing authoritarian movements, and a growing discourse of mistrust toward expertise. In such a constellation, science is not only criticized but also politically instrumentalized. Its autonomy is not a matter of course but a contested status.

      Rosenthal’s reference to structural vulnerability is central. Academic freedom depends on concrete arrangements. Where funding is fragmented on a project basis, where planning horizons are shortened, where responsibilities remain diffuse, political dependence arises. Autonomy is then formally asserted, but materially relativized. In this sense, the demand for reliable basic funding is not a detailed budgetary issue, but a condition of epistemic sovereignty.

      At the same time, Rosenthal does not understand resilience as isolation. Science should not retreat into the role of a misunderstood collective of experts. It must explain itself, prove its ability to engage in discourse, and not allow itself to be reduced to populism. Trust is not created by gestures of authority, but by transparent procedures and comprehensible communication. This is precisely where the tension lies: science depends on the public, but must not become dependent on it.

      Essentially, Rosenthal advocates conscious institutional precaution. If illiberal dynamics operate not through abrupt breaks but through gradual shifts, then science does not need hectic alarmist rhetoric, but robust structures. In this context, safeguarding means a clear distribution of competences between the federal and state governments, strong self-administration, long-term financing, and international networking as a counterweight to national narrow-mindedness.

      Rosenthal’s position could therefore be read as a reaffirmation of democratic politics: Science does not stand outside society, but is part of the political order – and for this very reason it depends on specific protective mechanisms. In this understanding, freedom is not a state that is achieved once and then preserved. It is an ongoing institutional process. In a nutshell: science remains free only if its freedom is produced organizationally and desired politically – even and especially when political majorities change.

      ↗ https://table.media/research/analyse/walter-rosenthal-im-interview-wissenschaftssystem-steht-vor-groesster-belastungsprobe-seit-der-wende?utm_source=share&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=article_share

    • Fascism – normality, not exception

      Alberto Toscano: Late Fascism. Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis, New York (Verso) 2023.

      That Alberto Toscano has struck a nerve with his book, which was recently translated into German, was evident at the end of June at the Volksbühne in Berlin. The book launch, a conversation between Toscano and prominent guests (Bafta Sarbor, Lama el Khatib, and Quinn Slobodian), took place in the large auditorium, which was nearly sold out. Toscano does not offer a diagnosis of the present à la “this is fascism now”, and he strictly rejects any definition of the term based on a checklist of core characteristics. As a reader seeking orientation, this approach can be frustrating. But you are rewarded for reading on: above all with an invitation to think of fascism not as something spectacular, as a state of emergency, as the radical opposite of freedom and democracy, but as a potential and a process that thrives especially within liberal democracies and is experienced very differently by groups with different positionalities—along lines of race, gender, and sexuality.

      The book is divided into seven chapters, which build on and refer to each other, but can also be read individually depending on your interests. All chapters have in common that Toscano gives the authors who inspired him ample voice and often relates them to each other in surprising ways. I would like to briefly introduce two chapters that I consider particularly important: Chapter 2: “Racial Fascism” and Chapter 3: “Fascist Freedom.” In Chapter 2, drawing on anti-colonial thinkers and scholars/activists of the American Black Radical Tradition of the 1970s, Toscano turns the conventional historical classification of fascism on its head. Following Aimé Césaire, W.E.B. DuBois, and others, he argues that already the brutal colonial rule and the exploitation and violence-based as well as violence-generating capitalist divisions of the US Reconstruction period (1861-1877) should be understood as early forms of fascism. These, he argues, paved the way for and helped shape the regimes of the interwar period in Italy, Germany, Croatia, and elsewhere, which are now regarded as “historical fascism.” In a second step, Toscano takes up the insight that fascism did not end with “historical fascism” and its capitulation in the 1940s—at least not for those who were and are subjected to brutal disenfranchisement and violence even in democracies. He quotes, among others, from the prison writings of Angela Davies and George Jackson and states:

      “Jackson and Davis are profoundly aware of the disanalogies between present forms of domination and historical fascism, but they both assert the epistemologically privileged vantage point provided by the view from within a carceral-judicial system that could fairly be described as a racial state of terror. In distinct ways, they can be seen to relay and recode that foundational gesture of anti-racist and Black radical anti-fascism crystallized in Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. As the Martinican poet and politician tells it: ‘And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the Gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.’” (Toscano 2023, 32)

      Fascism and fascist processes are persistent and yet often invisible to those who have the privilege of not being directly exposed to the violence and the terror. In the chapter on “Fascist Freedom,” Toscano seeks to clarify the relationship between fascism and neoliberalism. I find this chapter particularly important because the terms fascism and neoliberalism are frustratingly unclear today, while being at the center of diagnoses of the present that see them as competing rather than consider them together. People ask: is this (still) neoliberalism or (already) fascism? For Toscano, this is the wrong question. He shows that the conventional idea that neoliberalism is fundamentally critical of the state, while fascism abolishes all forms of freedom in favor of state power, is neither theoretically nor historically accurate. He quotes from the writings of Mussolini, Reinhard Höhn, Ludwig von Mises, and others to prove that neoliberalism is indeed pro-state, but pro a very specific type of state, namely one that unleashes market forces and defends private property. Fascism, on the other hand, is indeed pro-freedom, but only for very specific freedoms enjoyed by privileged groups. In the Third Reich, too, the regime’s supporters and executors were granted considerable freedoms. According to Toscano, it is a mistake to overlook and dismiss the “spontaneities and enjoyments that fascism offers to its managers, militants or minions” (Toscano 2023, 61). Those who read on to the end are rewarded with tentative attempts at a definition in the short concluding chapter. Toscano identifies “four interlocking dimensions of the history and experience of fascism” (Toscano 2023, 156) that he wants to make his readers aware of. In a nutshell, these are: 1) that fascism existed before “historical fascism” and that it has survived it, 2) that fascism is by no means experienced in the same way by everyone, 3) that fascism can be understood as a mode of preventive counter-violence in response to epochal panics (such as the panic of the “Great Replacement”), and 4) that fascism not only demands submission from its supporters and perpetrators, but also offers them certain forms of freedom—such as the freedom to exercise violence and enjoy doing so.

      ↗ www.versobooks.com/products/2627-late-fascism