Antifascist geographies

Chris Philo's excellent and elegant Adorno and the Antifascist Geographical Imagination finds a geographical imagination in Theodor Adorno's reflections on and against fascism. This renews the seriousness of debates over space, time and difference among geographers. It also places Geography within the discourses and politics of Never Again. In this spirit, I want to pull a little at the thread of ‘meaningful differences’ and at the related space-times of ‘big picture historical geography’ discussed by Chris (Philo, 2025: 48, 51).

As Chris explains, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno describe enlightenment as a disenchantment of the mythic world, basing understanding now upon the ‘principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition […]. What was different is equalized’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972 [1944]: 12). Chris finds an echo of this in what it might mean to think fascistically: ‘slashingly broad brush-strokes, bloated generalisations, crass simplifications, and constant demands for “purity”, with all impure, dissenting contents […] rejected and abjected’ (Philo, 2025: 1). There is, then, an obsession with purity which establishes an association between a fascist way of thinking and a fascist way of being in the world. Chris can assert ‘hateful affinities between the anti-Semitic maw of mid-twentieth fascism and the longue durée of anti-Black racism or “white supremacism”’ (Philo, 2025: 32). In this respect, the idiographic focus of regional Geography, ‘very much concerned with the study of individual phenomena’ (Hartshorne, 1961: 382), might put something in the balance against the fascist imagination, with its purity complex.

There is, however, a second way that the nomothetic energy of the enlightenment can feed the fascist imagination, and this is through hypostasising social relations as concepts. In this way, a certain manner of thinking about a set of phenomena becomes an explanation for those phenomena. In such fashion, a German nation can be postulated as having interests, derived from an understanding of a general conception of that entity, that pass far beyond the understanding, even the survival, of any number of German people. Thus, in a late speech, Adolf Hitler could demand the ultimate sacrifice from all in service of the abstract Volk: ‘I expect every able-bodied German to fight with complete disregard for his personal safety; I expect the sick and the weak or those otherwise unavailable for military duty to work with their last strength […] to safeguard freedom and national honor and thus the future of life’ (New York Times, 1945; Wegner, 2004). The nature of the Volk thus explains the characteristics of individual Germans, but also exists as an ideal form beyond any gathering of specific Germans (Viereck, 1941).

In a passage quoted by Chris, Adorno in Minima Moralia presents this sort of leap from particular cases to the explanatory general category, not only as a species of idealism, but also as a temptation to dissolve the dignity of specific lives within a calculus of fate: ‘the bourgeois coldness that is only too willing to underwrite the inevitable’ (Adorno, 2005 [1951]: 74). I agree with Chris that pausing over specificity, as insisted upon by the idiographic bent of traditional Geography and geographers (‘for whom the geographical particularity of unique places, areas, regions and spatial settings must always be patiently excavated and demonstrated’ (Philo, 2025: 96)), is a helpful check against some of the risks of hypostasising practices, but, Adorno goes further, as Chris also notes, and asks that this attention to particularity be done ‘so insistently’ that the ‘isolation’ of the particular ‘is dispelled’ (Adorno, 2005 [1951]: 74; Philo, 2025: 97). In dialectical terms, the particular is not understood as an instance of the general but, rather, as comprehended by ‘the working-up of observation and conception’ (Marx, 1973 [1858]: 101), with the latter being theoretical reflection upon the conditions of possibility for the social and material relations making possible such particular cases. In many cases, then, the abstractions that appear as thought have already been produced as abstractions in reality. If we examine the mechanics of the production of the abstraction ‘the German Volk’, we find, I think, something a little different to the purity obsession of Self-Other.

The racism against Jewish people may be set within a broader strategy of classification and hierarchy: ‘categorization served the National Socialists as an indispensable means of propagating new liabilities, social relationships, values and morals’ (Wünschmann, 2010: 576). Within the wider society, classification dissolved social solidarity, preparing groups for persecution. Although there were multiple grounds for identification as a social enemy (politics, social character, race (Wachsmann, 2008)), a broadly eugenic understanding of society could present each as an existential threat, with, for example, an ‘asocial’ defined by a directive of 1938 as someone who ‘demonstrates through conduct opposed to the community … that he does not want to adapt to the community’ (Wachsmann, 1999: 625), and then included within the euthanasia policy as persons not only for incarceration, but later for extermination (Burleigh and Wippermann, 1991). The ‘system of classification based on coloured triangles’ may have begun as a categorisation of crimes, but these social enemies were often little more than identities, and the system was easily expanded, for example to include categories of prisoners of war ranged in ‘greater or lesser proximity to “German blood”’ (López, 2024: 470, 472). These multiple categories of lesser humans were not only corralled within camps, they were also labelled and marched in public into and out of places of work where, in full view of others, they were constrained to the most dangerous of tasks. There were between 10 and 15 million people impressed as forced labour in Germany during the war (Spoerer and Fleischhacker, 2002) and, for example, about ‘3000 Nazi forced labor camps scattered through Berlin’ alone (Museumsportal Berlin, 2025). There was a geography of unfree labour in the Nazi war economy with degrees of coercion adjusted to race and location across its imperium of central and eastern Europe (Tooze 2006).

Nazi classification and hierarchy included everyone within their scales, virtually all might fall under suspicion as a potential enemy of the people. Arendt (2017) describes this ‘atomized and individualized mass’ (p. 416) as a precondition for totalitarian rule and describes the camps as ‘laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible is […] verified’ (p. 573). The mechanism of classification, then, is deployed in practices that have political, economic and social effects. Furthermore, these are practices of inclusion under radical subordination, rather than of the purification of the national space. This is what Foucault (1977 [1975]: 197–8) called ‘a political dream of the plague’, with ‘disciplinary mechanisms’ staving off the ‘haunting memory of “contagions”, of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder’. If classification and difference rather than purity itself is the ontological wager of fascism, then, a geography that pursues a chorography of distinctions is not inevitably on the side of the angels, think for example of studies of the regional geography of British ‘races’ with their designation of Irish ‘negritude’ (Beddoe, 1885; Bonnett, 2000).

Adorno sought the worm of fascism within the apple of enlightenment, and while a poststructuralist critique of the basic categories of fascist thought is effective, it gives less purchase upon the claims made and practices conducted under that banner because it was never primarily a matter of rational belief, and thus the incoherence of the fascist ideology is not decisive, even perhaps relevant. An understanding of the way that obsessions with purity matter might entail following the material geographies of the classifying impulse into the organisation of exterminations and forced labour, into the proliferation of types of social enemy, and into a public sphere where both speech and speakers were pulverised. Some geographical studies of these phenomena are discussed by Chris, but mapping Adorno's critique of the Enlightenment onto debates over positivism within human geography recruits a much broader swathe of geographical scholarship for the antifascist cause.

I am concerned that treating antifascism as a poststructuralist ontology risks losing the specificity of realist causal explanation (Lawson and Staeheli, 1990; Sayer, 2015). I see a similar risk in the big-picture historical geography Chris excavates from Adorno and Horkheimer's treatment of Odysseus as, in Chris's words ‘the early man-of-enlightenment’ (p. 53), bartering with ‘indigenous peoples’ in a ‘manner akin’ to a ‘colonial-capitalist’ (p. 56), and, indeed for Adorno and Horkheimer (1972: 61) ‘the Odyssey is already a Robinson-ade’ for both Crusoe and Odysseus ‘embody the principle of capitalist economy, even before they have recourse to a servant’. Marx used the term ‘Robinsonade’ (Marx, 1875: 30) to describe the myth of the bloodless birth of capitalism from the savings practices of businessmen, as with Robinson Crusoe balancing his accounts and improving his island based on his own self-discipline and self-denial. Marx's point was that this occluded the violent dispossession upon which private property was established. Adorno and Horkheimer extended this fairy tale back to Ancient Greece. Their argument was that story of Odysseus was emblematic of a disenchantment of the natural world that reduced nature to mechanism and to property, and that this grounded the relations of domination that nurtured capitalism and ultimately fascism. One might reply, with Marx, against this back-dated Robinsonade, that it is an idealist account of the origins of private property and that to approach an explanation of twentieth-century fascism in terms of ideological shifts among Ancient Greeks separates cause from effect to a bewildering degree.

There is, however, a big-picture historical geography resident in the Crusoe tale that complicates Marx's own account of primitive accumulation. By presenting the development of capitalism out of the contradictions of feudalism within England, Marx simplified his story the better to illustrate its temporal dialectics, but in doing so he occluded its necessary spatial dialectics. One can certainly read Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as myth-making not only for capitalism, but also for colonialism (Reddleman, 2023). One might go further and suggest that the historical geography of capitalism needs to acknowledge the overwhelmingly colonial roots of primitive accumulation (Kearns, 2024). This opens the way to a somewhat different genealogy for fascism.

As a Jewish refugee in New York, and horrified by the verified accounts of the camps during 1943, Hannah Arendt felt ‘as though the abyss had opened’ (Young-Breuhl, 2006: 37). There could be no political fix for this irredeemable crime of race slaughter. There could only be a vigilance against the very likely recurrence of the conditions that had produced it; solidarity and mobilising against Never Again. This is where the question of analysis and genealogy is critical. In bourgeois society democracy promises representation to a majority, that is also denied equality in the direction and fruits of the economy. Arendt (2017 [1951]: 138) speaks of a mob, which ‘hates society from which it is excluded’. Stabilising this inclusion of the excluded may be attempted by the seeming representation of an ethnicity (or a race), which is precisely not a class and ‘does not identify with a sociologically determinable part of a population’ (Rancière, 1999 [1995]: 99), but is instead ‘a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies’ (Agamben, 1998 [1995]: 177). The formal electoral equality which is not a substantive economic equality is secured as the space for a politics of the mob, mobilising assent to an agenda for the race. If race was a solvent against class, ‘binding together a centralized state and an atomized society’ (Arendt, 2017 [1951]: 302), then, its geographical mission was imperialism. For the nations of central and Eastern Europe (those ‘late’ colonisers), Arendt suggested that this first animated a European territorial project variously on behalf of dispersed pan-Germanism, or pan-Slavism. Racisms were multiplied at the contact zones of the colonial frontier, be that in Ireland with the British administering a lethal famine in the mid-nineteenth century (McVeigh and Rolston, 2021), or in south-east Africa where in the early-twentieth-century German colonists exterminated the Herero people the better to clear the land for grazing (Häussler 2021 [2018]).

Agamben (1998 [1995]: 4) concludes that ‘a biopolitical perspective is altogether lacking’, in Arendt's analysis but her Origins of Totalitarianism provides a more helpful big-picture historical-geographical context for the emergence of fascism than does Adorno's evoking Homer's epic as disclosing the colonial roots of an Enlightenment narrative of domination. And, indeed, it is not too difficult to add a biopolitical perspective onto Arendt's analysis for, as with the Irish example, the mediation of a right to life through market entitlements sets up a radical division between lives worthy of being allowed to continue, and those that hardly deserve to be lived at all. Under colonialism, the differentiation of lives allows the extortion of the marginalised to the point where they can no longer subsist. In an ironic reversal of the biblical story of the wedding feast where it was precisely ‘the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind’ who were to be fed (Luke 14:21, King James Version), Malthus's (1803: 531) nature was altogether more cruel, for the person who was born into a family without property and who ‘cannot get subsistence from [their] parents, and if the society do not want [their] labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where [they are]. At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for [them]. She tells [them] to be gone […]’. There is a eugenics imaginary at the core of the logic of capital and it is first practised without restraint in the colonies but it is also critical to the inclusion of difference as hierarchy within the body politics of the metropole. Focusing upon these material and biopolitical geographies leaves me worrying about the idealism of Adorno's critique of enlightenment philosophy when offered as an explanation of, and protection against the return of, fascism. Rather than straining after resonances between Homer and Marx or mapping Adorno onto debates over positivism in Geography, perhaps the big-picture historical geography we need for these dark times is an excavation of the biopolitics of capital. That said, I do find echoes and resonances intriguing, and I applaud Chris for the rich ambition of this project from which I am continuing to learn a lot.