François Furet

"The bourgeoisie is a synonym for modern society. The word designates the class that gradually destroyed, by its free activity, the old aristocratic society founded on a hierarchy of birth."

"In many thundering discourses, Hitler expressed his respect, if not admiration for Stalinist Communism and its leader."

"The American people were possessed by the capitalist spirit without ever having had a bourgeoisie; French political society, in contrast, created a bourgeoisie devoid of the capitalist spirit."

"In Fascism, as in Communism, the idea of the future was based on a critique of bourgeois modernity ... It rose from a variety of currents and from authors of very different origins, all of whom demonized the bourgeoisie. The doctrine was cast as post-Marxist, not as pre-liberal."

"The fact that Communism and Fascism assigned contradictory roles to history and reason—the emancipation of the proletariat versus the domination of the Aryan race—mattered little."

"What was new about Hitler and Stalin was what Friedrich Meinecke, in an attempt shortly after World War II to express his horror at Hitler’s moral nihilism, called a ‘ Machiavellianism of the masses."