The intellectual basis of right-wing anti-partyism

This paper shows the long and prestigious intellectual tradition of anti-party arguments. Even before political parties emerged as unitary political actors, there were already well-developed arguments with which to express hostility towards them. The emphasis on unity and harmony in Western civilization moulded political thought. While this cultural framework was broken in the brief but extraordinarily powerful experience of the Medieval Italian Republican Cities, the acceptance of organized dissent failed to emerge. Instead, this experience left the vivid memory of the danger of factionalism. In eighteenth century France, both revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries viewed parties as political maladies, and nineteenth century liberalism produced only a diffident defence of parties. At the end of the nineteenth century, hostility towards parties was nurtured in both Germany and France by elevating the ideals of the State and of the Nation. Italian and German fascists drew on and developed these philosophical anti-party traditions in the 1920s and 1930s. Since 1945, however, few anti-party parties have developed their own detailed or comprehensive philosophical critiques of parties; the Italian MSI is a notable exception.