Constructing a Reactionary Modernity

Understanding the modernities constructed in both the practices and the imaginaries of radical right-wing movements in the early 1920s has important implications for historiography. Among other things, it compels historians to adopt a holistic approach to these movements and to the societal and political contexts into which they were embedded and which they often attempted to influence or subvert. Such an approach helps to avoid reductionism, in both explanation and analysis: the right-wing radicals of the first post-war decades possessed complex ideological ancestry and were linked to intellectual milieus in which continuities survived the rupture of the Great War. Their often-violent political practices and the processes of meaning-making after the experience of defeat in the world war and of the Bolshevik threat open themselves to analysis only when this broader setting itself is interrogated.