Depending on your taste, ''Male Fantasies'' might be judged exceptionally rich or just plain disorderly. Mr. Theweleit, who is a West German freelance writer, himself calls the book ''meandering,'' and a reviewer is more than usually hard pressed to summarize its argument. It contains a good deal of unanchored psychoanalytic theorizing, numerous asides and long stretches of text that have no obvious bearing on the Freikorps movement. In addition it begs more than its share of empirical and conceptual questions. Nonetheless, one can't read it without feeling that Mr. Theweleit is onto something: the piling up of examples eventually begins to take its toll on even the most skeptical.

His central contention is that the Freikorps soldiers were afraid of women. Indeed, not just afraid, they were deeply hostile to them, and their ultimate goal was to murder them. Women, in their view, came in only two varieties: Red and White. The White woman was the nurse, the mother, the sister. She was distinguished above all else by her sexlessness. The Red woman, on the other hand, was a whore and a Communist. She was a kind of distillation of sexuality, threatening to engulf the male in a whirlpool of bodily and emotional ecstasy. This, of course, was the woman the Freikorps soldier wished to kill, because she endangered his identity, his sense of self as a fixed and bounded being. In this manner Mr. Theweleit links the Freikorps soldiers' fantasies of women to their practical life as illegal anti-Communist guerillas: the Republic had to be destroyed because it empowered the lascivious Red woman, while it failed to protect the White woman's sexual purity.

Among the most interesting features of Mr. Theweleit's analysis is his examination of two distinctive elements in the fascist imagination: liquidity and dirt. He argues that aquatic and other liquid metaphors were associated in the minds of these soldiers with the loss of a firm sense of identity. Much of their literature speaks of Communism as a flood, a stream, or a kind of boiling or exploding of the earth - images he shows to be associated traditionally with sexuality.

In similar fashion, he argues that the idea of dirt terrified the Freikorps soldiers precisely because it also was linked in their minds to the loss of self and to bodily pleasure. The connection is perhaps clearest when the metaphors of liquidity and filth are combined, as in such notions as mire, morass, slime and excrement. Again, Mr. Theweleit shows how the anti-Communist rhetoric of the Freikorps soldiers was systematically informed by such metaphors, and he makes a plausible case for linking this political sentiment to their fear of sexuality. The member of the Freikorps, he writes, was hostile to ''all of the hybrid substances that were produced by the body and flowed on, in, over, and out of the body: the floods and stickiness of sucking kisses; the swamps of the vagina, with their slime and mire; the pap and slime of male semen; the film of sweat . . . the warmth that dissolves physical boundaries.'' As this passage suggests, much of the power of Mr. Theweleit's book depends on his own rhetoric, which is luxuriant and fearless.

The principal weakness of ''Male Fantasies'' is its inability to demonstrate that the attitudes it explores were in any way limited to, or even characteristic of, the men who joined the Freikorps movement. Even if we are persuaded by the emotional connections he charts (and I am myself persuaded only in part), they would appear to be the common psychic property of bourgeois males - and perhaps of nonbourgeois males as well - in Western society since the French Revolution. In other words, there seems to be no reason to limit them to Germans, fascists or members of the Freikorps. Mr. Theweleit attributes the fantasies of his ''soldier males'' to problems they encountered in the first year of life (in particular to an abrupt termination of the mother-child ''symbiosis''), but he presents not a shred of evidence to suggest that their childhood experiences differed from those of anyone else. Since he can't establish their distinctiveness, in the end he asks us to believe that their hatred of women and fear of sexuality were merely an exaggerated version of what all men feel, or have felt for the past two centuries. The claim, I hardly need say, is a grand one, yet I find it difficult to dismiss out of hand. Mr. Theweleit is one of those intellectual mavericks, who, while he does not always respect the conventions of scholarship, may have captured a glimpse of our souls.