This approach is a welcome alternative to the tired debates that dominate contemporary political discourse.
One side points to strongmen, flags, paramilitary aesthetics, and the increasingly theatrical performance of masculinity on the contemporary right.
The other replies that today’s populists lack the organisational discipline, revolutionary ambition, or totalitarian aspirations of the movements that marched through Europe a century ago.
Is Donald Trump really a fascist? Is Vladimir Putin? Are the Proud Boys Brownshirts, or merely online trolls who discovered tactical gear and protein powder?
These questions have been posed so many times that they only seem to lead to rote responses, a political version of asking, “Who’s your favourite Beatle?” even though the answer is known in advance.
Male Fantasies offers an escape from this sterile inquiry.
First published in 1987, Theweleit’s book inaugurated a shift in perspective that remains startling nearly fifty years later.
Working through the memoirs, novels, and fantasies of Germany’s post-First World War Freikorps, Theweleit showed little interest in programs, constitutions, or electoral strategy.
What caught his eye were tropes and the anxieties they communicated.
Again and again, Theweleit’s reading discovered bodies in crisis, confronted by floods, slime, softness, women, crowds, and formlessness. Again and again he found these threats countered by fantasies of steel, armour, discipline, hardness, and explosive violence.
The political vocabulary mattered less than the emotional grammar beneath it. The Freikorps soldier did not simply hold reactionary opinions. He inhabited a world in which everything solid was in peril, where every encounter with ambiguity put the integrity of the self in danger.
Within this context, violence wasn’t just instrumental but therapeutic. It restored boundaries that experience was continually eroding.
As Anson Rabinbach and Jessica Benjamin observe in their foreword to Male Fantasies, Theweleit’s great theoretical contribution was to move beyond theories of authoritarianism and toward an account of fascism as an inner experience, one rooted in the fear of dissolution and the passionate celebration of violence.
Seen from this angle, the famous uniforms and steel helmets of interwar fascism become less interesting than the psychic work they performed.
The helmet mattered because it enclosed. The regiment mattered because it disciplined. The border mattered because it separated. Politics became an elaborate technology for maintaining distinctions that the fascist subject experienced as perpetually vulnerable.
This is why Male Fantasies remains so difficult to classify. Theweleit wasn’t offering another theory of capitalism, monopoly finance, or elite manipulation. Nor was he simply updating the Frankfurt School’s account of the authoritarian personality.
His central concern was the body itself: how a fragile self comes to imagine hardness as salvation, impermeability as freedom, and destruction as a strangely pleasurable affirmation of existence.
In this interpretation, fascism is less an ideology than an emotional architecture built around the desperate maintenance of boundaries.
Seen from this angle, contemporary politics looks different.
Consider how much of today’s authoritarian vocabulary revolves around images of contamination rather than disagreement. Borders are not merely crossed; they are invaded. Cultures are not merely changing; they are dissolving.
Universities melt civilisation. Immigration dilutes nations. Gender ideology erases distinctions. Globalism dissolves sovereignty. “Wokeness” weakens men. Diversity fragments peoples.
The deep-seated anxiety of people who believe these statements is not simply that liberal society has chosen the wrong policies, but that liberal society liquefies identities themselves.
Everything that is solid becomes porous. Everything bounded becomes fluid. Everything stable becomes negotiable.
It is striking how often the contemporary right opposes these perceived dangers, not with competing policy proposals but with performances of hardness. Strong leaders. Strong borders. Strong families. Strong men.
Even truth is recast as “hard truth,” as though certainty itself were a muscular achievement.
This helps explain why figures as different as Trump and Putin share an unmistakable political aesthetic. Their ideologies diverge, their historical circumstances differ dramatically, and their political systems are hardly interchangeable. Yet each cultivates the image of bodily certainty.
The carefully choreographed displays of physical vigour, the fascination with domination, the insistence upon instinct over deliberation, the celebration of decisive action over procedural hesitation: all of these are less policy positions than performances of impermeability.
Likewise, groups as diverse as the Proud Boys, European Identitarians, football hooligan movements, and the online “manosphere” differ enormously in organisation and objectives. What unites them is not a coherent doctrine but a common symbolic vocabulary.
Tactical vests, combat sports, beards, flags, Roman statuary, Viking mythology, firearms, “alpha” psychology, civilisational decline, testosterone, discipline, preparedness: these are not merely lifestyle accessories but prosthetic devices for constructing an armoured self.
This is where Theweleit’s framework requires updating rather than simply repeating.
The Freikorps inhabited a world in which military institutions still enjoyed a near monopoly over the production of disciplined masculinity. The cadet academy, the regiment, the officer corps, the paramilitary organisation were the factories in which hardness was manufactured. The armoured body emerged through drill, hierarchy, and shared danger.
By contrast, today’s neofascist subject is far less likely to have encountered military discipline than algorithmic recommendation.
He performs soldierliness more often than he experiences war. His battlefield is symbolic, his comrades networked, his rituals mediated through platforms that reward identity as performance.
The armoured self Theweleit taxonomises in Male Fantasies hasn’t disappeared. Its methods of production have migrated. Neoliberalism hasn’t abolished the armoured body but privatised it.
This is the transformation that most analyses of contemporary authoritarianism overlook: the market no longer merely commodifies masculinity; it increasingly manufactures it.
Everywhere we look, consumer capitalism is selling products that promise impermeability.
Supplements promise bodily integrity. Tactical clothing promises preparedness. Firearms promise sovereign agency. Pickup trucks promise invulnerability. Testosterone clinics promise restored potency. Cryptocurrency promises independence from corrupt institutions. The podcast promises epistemic certainty in a world of competing truths.
Each commodity addresses the same underlying anxiety about the self’s precarity. The market assembles the promises they make into a coherent style of life long before they crystallise into political commitments.
If the twentieth century built armoured bodies through military discipline, the twenty-first increasingly builds them through consumption. The irony is difficult to miss.
Neoliberalism celebrates precisely those qualities that Theweleit’s fascist subject fears most.
The ideal worker is flexible, adaptable, mobile, and endlessly reinventing himself in response to changing labour markets and technological disruption. Careers become temporary. Communities dissolve. Identity becomes a personal brand under perpetual revision.
These conditions intensify the longing for hardness. The more flexible the economy becomes, the more attractive fantasies of absolute boundaries become. The more identities become negotiable, the greater the appeal of identities that promise certainty.
Contemporary neofascist politics may therefore be one of the characteristic emotional products of neoliberal modernity.
Social media completes the process. Here the armoured self is no longer drilled into existence but assembled recursively through recommendation algorithms.
One video about weightlifting leads to another about testosterone, then to civilisational decline, then to immigration, then to preparedness, then to “high-value men,” then to conspiracies about cultural collapse.
None of these transitions appears especially dramatic in isolation. But together they create an entire emotional ecology.
Identity becomes something continuously performed and continuously reaffirmed. The barracks have transformed into the online feed. The drill instructor has become the influencer.
The algorithm does not invent the armoured self. It finds that people anxious about dissolution are very likely to click on anything that promises hardness.
This also explains why liberal critics so often underestimate contemporary neofascist movements. They delight in exposing their theatricality, their cosplay, their almost comic obsession with masculine imagery.
What they fail to understand is that costume here isn’t concealing an underlying substance. It is the substance: not incidental, but constitutive.
The tactical vest, the Roman bust in the podcast studio, the Viking tattoo, the endless gym selfies, the Spartan quotations, the talk of wolves and lions and civilisations under siege: these are not decorations placed around a political identity but the mechanisms through which that identity is continually stabilised.
That is precisely why they matter. They are the visible form of a self that can only hold itself together by staging hardness, over and over again, in public.
The great insight of Male Fantasies is that style is never merely style. Performance isn’t a mask but a psychic skeleton, holding the self together.
Perhaps the most striking confirmation of this realisation is the curious joylessness that pervades so much of the contemporary hypermasculine right.
Although its defenders present themselves as champions of pleasure in contrast with moralising liberals, their emotional universe is dominated by discipline, optimisation, conquest, abstinence, productivity, and relentless self-overcoming.
Here Theweleit’saccount of fascism as an anti-eros remains astonishingly fresh. The desired outcome of all this striving isn’t happiness, but a fleeting sense of invulnerability.
The lesson of Male Fantasies is not that history repeats itself in costume, tragedy transmuted into farce. What the book demonstrates, a century since the heyday of the Freikorps, is that certain forms of insecurity generate similar political longings.
The armour changes because the institutions that produce it change. Steel gives way to branding. Drill gives way to self-optimisation. The regiment gives way to the platform. The military academy gives way to the recommendation engine.
Yet despite these differences, the same structure of feeling underpins both. A self that experiences the world as dangerously fluid will seek redemption through fantasies of hardness, certainty, and impermeable boundaries.
If neoliberalism has produced a society in which everything is expected to flow, adapt, and reinvent itself, it should not surprise us that one of its most persistent political byproducts is the dream of becoming its opposite, a boulder in the stream.
The tragedy—and the warning contained in Theweleit’s remarkable book—is that the desire for armour rarely stops at self-defence. Sooner or later, it will seek out enemies, hoping to find a battlefield on which to prove the value of hardness.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
