From the ‘Nobleman’s Sword’ to the ‘Flag of the Fascist Ideals’

Abstract

This article examines the ideological trajectory of Ioannis Metaxas and his intellectual Weltanschauung. It argues that he was strongly influenced by several German developments, including the Kultur vs. Zivilisation debate. Furthermore, from the 1920s he explicitly transformed key fascist ideas and drew on those of the ‘Conservative Revolution’. It shows that Metaxas addressed all key historical developments, from the turn of the century, to the establishment of his dictatorship, to the Second World War, through his ideological and intellectual prism: national reconstruction and palingenesis and a new cultural orientation for the Greek nation. Metaxas’s thinking is examined from its formative period in Germany (1899–1903) to his dictatorship (1936–1941). The methodological framework draws on the work of Peter Wagner, who conceives the period from 1870 to 1940 as the heyday of the ‘first crisis of modernity’; the work of Roger Griffin, Aristotle Kallis, and António Costa Pinto centred around the palingenetic, modernist dynamic of fascism; and finally, the notion of ‘intellectual appropriation of technology’ developed by Mikael Hård and Andrew Jamison.