Fascism

• 1. Introduction

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  Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology that rose to prominence in early-twentieth-century Europe. Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that trying to define it is "like trying to nail jelly to the wall." That difficulty is not a footnote. It sits at the center of everything scholars have argued about for a century. The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I before spreading to Germany and beyond. Yet no two groups called fascist look quite alike, and each carries some element the others lack. So how did a word borrowed from a bundle of sticks come to name dictatorship, total war, and genocide? Why do thinkers who agree on almost nothing keep circling the same handful of traits? And how did an ideology largely disgraced in 1945 keep finding new vocabulary, from neo-fascist to post-fascist, to describe its echoes today?

• 2. A Bundle Of Sticks

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  The Italian term fascismo comes from fascio, meaning bundle of sticks, ultimately from the Latin fasces. The image carried a precise lesson. A single rod snaps easily. A bound bundle resists. That symbolism of strength through unity gave the movement its emblem and its name. The fasci themselves were political organizations in Italy, groups resembling guilds or syndicates. Benito Mussolini said the Fasces of Revolutionary Action were founded in Italy in 1915. In 1919 he founded the Italian Fasces of Combat in Milan, which became the National Fascist Party two years later. The fascists linked the term to the ancient Roman fascio littorio, a bundle of rods tied around an axe, an old symbol of a civic magistrate's authority carried by his lictors. The irony is that before 1914 the fasces belonged mostly to the other side. Various left-wing, liberal, or republican movements used it freely. Robert Paxton notes that Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic, was often shown in the nineteenth century carrying the fasces to represent Republican solidarity against aristocratic and clerical enemies. The motif appears in architecture too, on the Sheldonian Theater at Oxford University and on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. A symbol of republican unity was thus turned to the service of dictatorship.

• 3. Nailing The Jelly

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  Stanley G. Payne, Roger Griffin, and Roger Eatwell built what they called the "new consensus" around a single idea: the myth of national rebirth, which they named palingenesis. Payne's definition rests on three concepts. There are fascist negations, meaning anti-liberalism, anti-communism, and anti-conservatism. There are fascist goals, the building of a nationalist dictatorship and the expansion of the nation into an empire. And there is fascist style, a political aesthetic of romantic symbolism, mass mobilization, and charismatic authoritarian leadership. Griffin distilled the core to a "palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism," the rebirth myth joined to a myth of decadence. Walter Laqueur saw the core tenets as self-evident: nationalism, social Darwinism, racialism, the need for leadership and obedience, and the negation of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Robert Paxton offered a darker portrait, describing an obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood, soothed by cults of unity, energy, and purity. Critics fired back at the new consensus. They argued it treated fascism as a static ideal type, ignoring its dynamic and contradictory nature. They pointed out that fascism preserved anti-communism while taking power through alliance with conservatives. Umberto Eco listed fourteen features of what he called "Ur-Fascism," or eternal fascism, noting that many of them contradict each other. Historian John Lukacs went further and argued that there is no such thing as generic fascism at all.

• 4. Born From Total War

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  World War I, in the fascist imagination, was not a catastrophe but a revolution. The advent of total war and mass mobilization erased the distinction between civilian and combatant. Civilians had become essential to economic production for the war effort, and so a "military citizenship" arose in which all citizens were tied to the military in some manner. The war produced a powerful state capable of mobilizing millions to serve on the front lines or supply those who did. It claimed unprecedented authority to intervene in the lives of citizens. Fascists read this as the dawn of a new era fusing state power with mass politics, technology, and a mobilizing myth. At the outbreak of war in August 1914, the Italian political left split badly. The Italian Socialist Party opposed the war, but some revolutionary syndicalists backed war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Mussolini, expelled as chief editor of the Socialist newspaper Avanti! for his anti-German stance, joined the interventionist cause. The term "fascism" was first used in 1915 by members of his Fasces of Revolutionary Action. Their first meeting fell on the 24th of January 1915. Similar ideas surfaced in Germany. The sociologist Johann Plenge spoke of a "National Socialism" within the "ideas of 1914," German values of duty, discipline, and order set against the "ideas of 1789." The October Revolution of 1917 sharpened everything. Mussolini first praised it, then dismissed Lenin as merely a new version of Tsar Nicholas II.

• 5. The Manifesto And Its Betrayal

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  The Manifesto of the Italian Fasces of Combat was presented on the 6th of June 1919 in the fascist newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia, written by Alceste De Ambris and the futurist leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Its demands read almost like a program of the left. It supported universal suffrage, including votes for women. It called for an eight-hour work day, a minimum wage, and worker representation in industrial management. It demanded a strong progressive tax on capital, confiscation of the property of religious institutions, and revision of military contracts so the government could seize 85 percent of profits. It even sought to cut the retirement age from 65 to 55. Then came the great reversal. In 1920 militant strikes by industrial workers peaked in Italy, the years 1919 and 1920 remembered as the "Red Year," the Biennio Rosso. Mussolini allied with industrial businesses and attacked workers and peasants in the name of order. To win over conservatives, fascism abandoned its earlier populism, republicanism, and anticlericalism. It adopted policies favoring free enterprise and accepted the Catholic Church and the monarchy. It promoted family values and worked to push women out of the workforce. It banned literature on birth control and increased penalties for abortion in 1926, declaring both crimes against the state. The payoff was numerical. Before these accommodations the movement was small and urban, with about a thousand members. After them, membership soared to roughly 250,000 by 1921.

• 6. The March And The Dictatorship

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  On the 24th of October 1922, the Fascist Party held its congress in Naples, and Mussolini ordered Blackshirts to seize public buildings and converge on three points around Rome. The Italian government, a left-wing coalition, was internally divided and could not respond. King Victor Emmanuel III judged the risk of bloodshed in Rome too high. He appointed Mussolini as Prime Minister, and Mussolini arrived on the 30th of October to accept. Fascist propaganda inflated this "March on Rome" into a heroic seizure of power. Power did not yet mean dictatorship. Mussolini led a coalition, and his liberal finance minister Alberto De Stefani balanced the budget through deep cuts to the civil service. The turn came with the Acerbo Law, which handed a majority of parliamentary seats to any list winning a quarter of the vote. Through fascist violence and intimidation, the list won. Then Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by a Fascist, and opposition deputies walked out in the Aventine Secession. On the 3rd of January 1925, Mussolini told parliament he was personally responsible for what had happened, yet insisted he had done nothing wrong. He proclaimed himself dictator. A decree in December 1925 made him answerable only to the King. Adolf Hitler was watching. Less than a month after the March on Rome he had begun modeling himself and the Nazi Party on Mussolini. His own attempt, a "March on Berlin," failed as the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in November 1923.

• 7. The State Owns The Nation

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  Mussolini's The Doctrine of Fascism, published in 1932 and partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, declared the Fascist conception of the state to be all-embracing, a totalitarian synthesis outside which no human or spiritual values could exist. In 1925 the regime built a corporatist economy through the Palazzo Vidoni Pact, in which the employers' association Confindustria and fascist trade unions recognized each other as sole representatives, shutting out non-fascist unions. A Ministry of Corporations organized the economy into 22 sectoral corporations, banned strikes and lock-outs, and in 1927 issued the Charter of Labour. In practice these corporations had little independence and were largely controlled by the regime. Economists still dispute whether a distinctly fascist economy existed at all. Gerald Feldman and Timothy Mason argue fascism lacked any coherent economic ideology. What is documented is the scale of state control. Mussolini created the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction, a giant state holding company that funded failing private firms and was made permanent in 1937. In 1934 he claimed three-fourths of the Italian economy lay in the hands of the state. The IRI reported holding 48.5 percent of the share capital of Italy. Martin Blinkhorn estimated Italy's public sector was second only to that of Stalin's Russia. Abroad, the regime pursued empire. Claiming Italians were a superior race, it sought to settle 10 to 15 million Italians in Libya. The Pacification of Libya brought mass killings, concentration camps, and forced starvation, and Italian authorities expelled 100,000 Bedouin Cyrenaicans, half the population of Cyrenaica.

• 8. Disgrace And Its Afterlife

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  On the 28th of April 1945, Mussolini was captured and executed by Italian communist partisans. Two days later, on the 30th of April, Hitler died by suicide, and Germany soon surrendered. From November 1945 through 1949, an International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg tried and convicted Nazi political, military, and economic leaders of war crimes, with many of the worst offenders sentenced to death. Since 1945 fascism has been largely disgraced, and few parties have openly claimed the name. The word survived mainly as an insult. George Orwell observed in 1944 that almost any English person would accept "bully" as a synonym for fascist, and in 1946 wrote that the term had lost all meaning except as a marker of something not desirable. It has been hurled at Marxist-Leninist regimes in Cuba and Vietnam, traded between Chinese and Soviet Marxists during the Sino-Soviet split, and applied to the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Yet real heirs persisted. Francisco Franco's Falangist one-party state in Spain endured until his death in 1975. In Italy, the Italian Social Movement evolved into the post-fascist National Alliance, and later a group split from The People of Freedom to refound a party as Brothers of Italy. After the 2008 financial crisis, Greece's Golden Dawn rose from obscurity into parliament, and on the 7th of October 2020 an Athens Appeals Court found its leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos and six others guilty of running a criminal organization. The argument over the word now reaches Russia, where Timothy Snyder has called Putin's regime "the world center of fascism," while Roger Griffin counters that Putin is a reactionary trying to recreate a modified Soviet Union rather than a revolutionary remaking society.