Definitions of fascism

What constitutes a definition of fascism and fascist governments has been a complicated and highly disputed subject concerning the exact nature of fascism and its core tenets debated amongst historians, political scientists, and other scholars ever since Benito Mussolini first used the term in 1915. Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall".
A significant number of scholars agree that a "fascist regime" is foremost an authoritarian form of government; however, the general academic consensus also holds that not all authoritarian regimes are fascist, and more distinguishing traits are required in order for a regime to be characterized as such.
Similarly, fascism as an ideology is also hard to define. Originally, it referred to a totalitarian political movement linked with corporatism which existed in Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. Many scholars use the word "fascism" without capitalization in a more general sense to refer to an ideology (or group of ideologies) that has been influential in many countries at various times. For this purpose, they have sought to identify what Roger Griffin calls a "fascist minimum"—that is, the minimum conditions a movement must meet in order to be considered fascist.
The apocalyptic and millenarian aspects of fascism have often been subjected to study.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines fascism as a "political ideology and mass movement that dominated many parts of central, southern, and eastern Europe between 1919 and 1945 and that also had adherents in western Europe, the United States, South Africa, Japan, Latin America, and the Middle East.", adding that "Although fascist parties and movements differed significantly from one another, they had many characteristics in common, including extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a Volksgemeinschaft (German: "people's community"), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation."
The Holocaust Encyclopedia defines fascism as "a political philosophy, or theory of government, that emerged in the early twentieth century. Fascism prioritizes the nation over the individual, who exists to serve the nation." and as "an ultranationalist, authoritarian political philosophy. It combines elements of nationalism, militarism, economic self-sufficiency, and totalitarianism. It opposes communism, socialism, pluralism, individual rights and equality, and democratic government."
Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines fascism as “a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition”
Benito Mussolini, who was the first to use the term for his political party in 1915, described fascism in The Doctrine of Fascism, published in 1932, as follows:
In a speech before the Chamber of Deputies on 26 May 1927, Mussolini said:
In an interview with Henri Massis in 1938, Spanish Nationalist leader Francisco Franco described his movement in Spain as part of a wider trend and said about this trend:
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an American historian and cultural critic, described fascism as "the original phase of authoritarianism, along with early communism, when a population has undergone huge dislocations or they perceive that there's been changes in society that are very rapid, too rapid for their taste." and added that "These are moments when demagogues appeal. Mussolini was the first to come up after the war, and he promised this enticing mixture of hypernationalism and imperialism, like, 'We're gonna revive the Roman Empire.'"
In his 1995 essay "Ur-Fascism", cultural theorist Umberto Eco lists fourteen general properties of fascist ideology. He argues that it is not possible to organise these into a coherent system, but that "it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it". He uses the term "Ur-Fascism" as a generic description of different historical forms of fascism. The fourteen properties are as follows:
Italian historian of fascism Emilio Gentile described fascism in 1996 as the "sacralization of politics" through totalitarian methods and argued the following ten constituent elements:
Historian and political scientist Roger Griffin's definition of fascism focuses on the populist fascist rhetoric that argues for a "re-birth" of a conflated nation and ethnic people. According to Griffin,
Griffin writes that a broad scholarly consensus developed in English-speaking social sciences during the 1990s, around the following definition of fascism:
Griffin argues that the above definition can be condensed into one sentence: "Fascism is a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism." The word "palingenetic" in this case refers to notions of national rebirth.
In his history of Europe in the first half of the 20th century, To Hell and Back, British historian Ian Kershaw, while noting the difficulties in defining fascism, found these common factors in the extreme Right-wing movements of the late 1920s and early 1930s, whether they called themselves "fascist" or not:
Other features Kershaw found to be important, and sometimes central to specific movements, but not present in all:
Kershaw argues that the difference between fascism and other forms of right-wing authoritarianism in the Interwar period is that the latter generally aimed "to conserve the existing social order", whereas fascism was "revolutionary", seeking to change society and obtain "total commitment" from the population.
Kershaw writes about the essential appeal of fascism and the reasons for its success, where it was successful (primarily in Italy and Germany):
In their book Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote about fascism, in the chapter about morality:
John Lukacs, Hungarian-American historian and Holocaust survivor, argues in The Hitler of History that there is no such thing as generic fascism, claiming that National Socialism and Italian Fascism were more different than similar and that, alongside communism, they were ultimately radical forms of populism.
John R. McNeill, "distinguished university professor in the Department of History in the College and the School of Foreign Service" at Georgetown University, and past president of the American Historical Association, defined a numerical rating system for determining how fascist a person is based on a ranking across 11 categories. Within each category McNeill assigns 0 to 4 "Benitos" (4 being the most fascistic) and then tallies the results for an overall fascism score. For each category, McNeill provides a written definition and historical examples. The categories are:
In 2020, McNeill expanded his system with eight more categories:
Classical liberal economist and philosopher Ludwig von Mises, in his 1927 book Liberalism, argued that fascism was a nationalist and militarist reaction against the rise of the communist Third International, in which the nationalists and militarists came to oppose the principles of liberal democracy because "Liberalism, they thought, stayed their hand when they desired to strike a blow against the revolutionary parties while it was still possible to do so. If liberalism had not hindered them, they would, so they believe, have bloodily nipped the revolutionary movements in the bud. Revolutionary ideas had been able to take root and flourish only because of the tolerance they had been accorded by their opponents, whose will power had been enfeebled by a regard for liberal principles that, as events subsequently proved, was overscrupulous." He continues by defining fascism as follows:
Writing in The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, an academic specialist on international affairs, said about fascism:
Ernst Nolte, a German historian and Hegelian philosopher, defined fascism in 1965 as a reaction against other political movements, especially Marxism: "Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always, however, within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy." Nolte also argued that fascism functioned at three levels: in the world of politics as a form of opposition to Marxism, at the sociological level in opposition to bourgeois values, and in the "metapolitical" world as "resistance to transcendence" ("transcendence" in German can be translated as the "spirit of modernity").
Kevin Passmore, a history lecturer at Cardiff University, defines fascism in his 2002 book Fascism: A Very Short Introduction. His definition is directly descended from the view put forth by Ernesto Laclau, and is also informed by a desire to adjust for what he believes are shortcomings in Marxist, Weberian and other analyses of fascism:
Robert Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, defines fascism in his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism as:
In the same book, Paxton also argues that fascism's foundations lie in a set of "mobilizing passions" rather than an elaborated doctrine. He argues these passions can explain much of the behaviour of fascists:
Historian of fascism Stanley G. Payne created a lengthy list of characteristics to identify fascism in 1995: in summary form, there are three main strands. First, Payne's "fascist negations" refers to such typical policies as anti-communism and anti-liberalism. Second, "fascist goals" include a nationalist dictatorship and an expanded empire. Third, "fascist style", is seen in its emphasis on violence and authoritarianism, and its exultation of men above women, and young above old.
In 2020, National Public Radio interviewed Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University, regarding his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Stanley defined fascism as "a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation" and further observed that "The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors."
In his book, How Fascism Works, Stanley focuses on fascist politics in much more detail than fascist states, as he says the latter vary significantly by time and location and are only loosely characterized by “ultra nationalism of some variety (ethnic, religious, cultural), with the nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf.” However, the specific political tactics first used to attain power in a democracy are more similar and more easily characterized. These tactics are designed to divide the population into an “Us” (e.g., native-born residents) and a “Them” (e.g., immigrants) and to justify a “targeting of ideological enemies and the freeing of all restraints in combating them”.
Jason Stanley uses the United States (under Donald Trump), India (under Modi), Hungary (under Orbán), and Brazil (under Bolsonaro) to illustrate the following tactics typical of fascist politics:
Zeev Sternhell, a historian and professor of political science, described fascism as a reaction against modernity and a backlash against the changes it had caused to society, as a "rejection of the prevailing systems: liberalism and Marxism, positivism and democracy". At the same time, Sternhell argued that part of what made Fascism unique was that it wanted to retain the benefits of progress and modernism while rejecting the values and social changes that had come with it; Fascism embraced liberal market-based economics and the violent revolutionary rhetoric of Marxism, but rejected their philosophical principles.
Marxists argue that fascism represents the last attempt of a ruling class (specifically, the capitalist bourgeoisie) to preserve its grip on power in the face of an imminent proletarian revolution. Marxists believe fascist movements are not necessarily created by the ruling class, but they can only gain political power with the help of that class and with funding from big business. Once in power, the fascists serve the interests of their benefactors.
Amadeo Bordiga argued that fascism is merely another form of bourgeois rule, on the same level as bourgeois democracy or traditional monarchy, and that it is not particularly reactionary or otherwise exceptional.
German playwright Bertolt Brecht describes fascism as: "a historic phase of capitalism" and "...the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive, and most treacherous form of capitalism" (1935).
Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian Communist, was a theorist of capitalism who expanded Lenin's ideas and the work of Clara Zetkin.
Delivering an official report to the 7th World Congress of the Communist Third International in August 1935, Georgi Dimitrov cited the definition of fascism formulated with the help of Clara Zetkin at the Third Plenum as "the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital".
According to Dimitrov:
Hungarian philosopher György Lukács in his works The Destruction of Reason (Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, 1952) and Zur Kritik der faschistischen Ideologie (1989) considers the ideology of fascism as the "demagogic synthesis" of all the irrationalist trends of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as the reaction against the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the Romantic critique of capitalism (Carlyle) which after 1848 turned into "indirect apologetics" of capitalism (Nietzsche), anti-democratic or "aristocratic epistemology" (Lukács' term for philosophies that considered knowledge to be the privilege of an elite, first expressed in Schelling's concept of intellectual intuition and culminating in the metaphysical views of Henri Bergson), emphasis on myth and mysticism, the rejection of humanism, a cult of personality around the leader, the subjugation of reason to instinct, the conception of the nation and people in clearly biological terms, the glorification of war, etc.. According to Lukács, the historical significance of Hitler and Mussolini lies not in that they brought anything new to the ideological field, but in that they condensed all existing reactionary and irrationalist ideologies of the past and through their successful national and social demagogy brought them "from the scholar's study and intellectual coteries to the streets."
Essayist Luis Britto García defines fascism in his essay Fascismo, saying that economic crisis is "the mother of fascism" while outlining a series of eight characteristics:
One of Russian Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s earliest attempts at trying to define fascism was in November 1931 when he wrote a letter to a friend titled "What is Fascism". In it, Trotsky wrote, in what is as much description as analysis:
In Trotsky’s posthumously published 1944 tract, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It, he noted: "The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery."
An early study of fascism was written by Clara Zetkin for the Third Enlarged Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1923:
In the Spring 2003 issue of the secular humanist magazine Free Inquiry, Laurence W. Britt, who is described as "a retired international businessperson, writer, and commentator" published "Fascism Anyone?", which included a list of 14 defining characteristics of fascism. The list has since been widely circulated in both modified and unmodified forms. In a newspaper interview in 2004, Britt expanded and clarified the meaning of some of the points in his list, and discussed how they applied to the United States at that time.
The headers for Britt's original list, without his sometimes extensive explanations, are:
Anti-fascist author George Orwell describes fascism in economic terms in a 1941 essay, "Shopkeepers At War":
Writing for Tribune magazine in 1944, Orwell stated:
See also Orwell's comment in the "Fascist" as an insult section below.
American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who led the US into war against the fascist Axis powers, wrote about fascism:
Some have argued that the terms fascism and fascist have become hopelessly vague since the World War II period, and that today it is little more than a pejorative used by supporters of various political views to insult their opponents. The word fascist is sometimes used to denigrate people, institutions, or groups that would not describe themselves as ideologically fascist, and that may not fall within the formal definition of the word. As a political epithet, fascist has been used in an anti-authoritarian sense to emphasize the common ideology of governmental suppression of individual freedom. In this sense, the word fascist is intended to mean oppressive, intolerant, chauvinist, genocidal, dictatorial, racist, or aggressive.
George Orwell wrote in 1944:
Notes
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