Fascism

Zibaldone 2024–2025 journal

Journal connection: Fascist aesthetics, Nazi leadership, ideological definitions, and radicalization imagery.
Source boundary: These are captured journal materials; the integration does not independently verify every clipped claim, quotation, or figure.
PDF++ pages: p. 46 (file not included in this release) · p. 132 (file not included in this release) · p. 133 (file not included in this release) · p. 134 (file not included in this release) · p. 135 (file not included in this release) · p. 136 (file not included in this release) · p. 344 (file not included in this release) · p. 376 (file not included in this release) · p. 379 (file not included in this release)
Embedded preview:
Zibaldone 2024-2025.pdf (file not included in this release)
Open the complete Zibaldone page index

⬅️ Back to Far Right & Woke Right (MOC) · Sisters: Ideology & Foundations · Violence in Politics (MOC) · Cross-folder: Political Philosophy (MOC) · Database: Fascism base (file not included in this release)

This is the single starting point for the vault’s material on fascism: definitions, historical formation, movement dynamics, regime behavior, comparison with neighboring ideologies, contemporary classification disputes, and links to every scattered mention. The readable synthesis stays here; the exhaustive mechanical inventory is in Fascism - Vault-Wide Mention Index.

Classification and evidence boundary

A link from this hub does not mean the linked person, movement, policy, or author is fascist. Some links are scholarly notes; some are course or transcript summaries; some preserve a speaker’s argument; some are raw clippings, personal reflections, or inventory-only placeholders. This hub attributes disputed claims and does not silently upgrade them to verified fact.

Working synthesis

Fascism is best treated here as a family of modern, revolutionary, anti-liberal and ultranationalist mass movements organized around a myth of collective rebirth. Historically, fascist movements subordinated the individual to an organic nation or race, attacked pluralism, cultivated leader authority and mobilizing myth, legitimized organized violence, and sought to replace rather than merely administer the constitutional order. Italian Fascism and German Nazism shared this family resemblance but were not identical: the Italian case emphasized the ethical state and corporative nation, while Nazism made biological race, antisemitism, territorial conquest, and extermination central.

Start Here

• Robert Paxton - Anatomy of Fascism — the full process-centered book note on mobilizing passions, movement stages, elite alliances, accession to power, rule, and radicalization.
• How to Make a Fascist — the largest source note: cultural and intellectual preconditions, World War I, myth, syndicalism, paramilitary violence, spectacle, and a long research bibliography.
• Roger Griffin on defining fascism and contemporary misuse — full interview analysis: three uses of the term, palingenetic ultranationalism, movement–regime distinctions, Trump classification, deliberalization, incurvation, historical corrections, and critical objections.
• When Is It Fascism? — a long source-derived lecture map of Italian Fascism, Nazism, the leader-will, corporatism, emergency legality, and the proposed “fascist minimum.”
• Fascism — Roger Griffin — book note for Fascism: A Quick Immersion. Contains the transcribed handwritten reading notes (notebook pp. 27–28): palingenetic-ultranationalism definition, sub-myths, 1919–45 periodization, interpretive camps, Gentile, four neo-fascist trends, and transcription corrections. The review template is still mostly unfilled.
• Fascism - Vault-Wide Mention Index — all 241 pre-restructure Markdown notes containing a literal case-insensitive fascis... match, grouped by vault area and labeled with match counts.

What Counts as Fascism?

There is no universally accepted one-line definition. The strongest notes converge on a cluster plus process approach: identify the movement’s positive project, organization, pathway to power, and conduct in power rather than treating one attitude or policy as decisive.

Core, Common, and Non-Unique Features

A disciplined vocabulary

Use fascistic feature for a resemblance, fascist movement for an organized project meeting a defensible threshold, fascist regime for power actually reorganized on those principles, and fascistized ally or institution for a non-fascist actor transformed through collaboration. This prevents a shared tactic from becoming an all-purpose identity label.

How Fascist Movements Form and Take Power

The vault’s strongest integrated causal model is a sequence with multiple gates:

1. Dislocation and legitimacy crisis. Rapid modernization, war, defeat, inflation or depression, class conflict, institutional paralysis, and social uprooting can make ordinary politics look incapable of restoring order. These conditions are neither necessary nor sufficient by themselves.
2. Humiliation and decline become a story. A movement redescribes complexity as national victimhood, betrayal, decadence, contamination, or dispossession.
3. A rebirth myth identifies a people and an enemy. The promised future is not merely recovery but purification and regeneration of an organic community.
4. Action outranks deliberation. Ritual, spectacle, uniforms, youth, sacrifice, street power, and redemptive violence turn an idea into belonging and discipline.
5. A mass movement and militant vanguard grow together. Fascism is not just a dictator’s private ideology; parties, squads, associations, media, and crowds make coercion socially effective.
6. Gatekeepers choose collaboration. Conservative politicians, state officials, military figures, property owners, or traditional institutions may enable fascists against a feared left, disorder, or democratic deadlock while believing the radicals can be controlled.
7. A constitutional rupture converts access into rule. Emergency powers, intimidation, decrees, manipulated votes, and nominally legal acts hollow out the old order and establish a new source of authority.
8. Party and state interpenetrate. Independent unions, parties, media, civic associations, and regional power are coordinated, suppressed, or replaced; overlapping institutions make the leader the final arbiter.
9. Radicalization or entropy follows. A regime may escalate toward cleansing, expansion, total war, and genocide, or lose revolutionary dynamism and settle into a less mobilized authoritarian order.

This sequence synthesizes Robert Paxton - Anatomy of Fascism, How to Make a Fascist, When Is It Fascism?, and The Rise of the Nazis.

Intellectual and Cultural Formation

Long-Run Ingredients

• Organic nationalism: the nation is treated as a living moral unity rather than an instrument serving persons.
• Palingenesis: the present is decadent or dying; struggle will produce a reborn people and new civilization.
• Anti-liberalism and anti-pluralism: bargaining, rights, parliaments, and autonomous associations appear weak, artificial, or divisive.
• Myth and political religion: ritual and sacred history make sacrifice meaningful and bind the living to ancestors and posterity.
• Vitalism, action, and heroic violence: energy, will, danger, masculinity, and combat are elevated above comfort and deliberation.
• Mass politics and crowd psychology: modern media, rallies, symbols, and charismatic performance transform spectators into a people.
• Social Darwinist and racial frames: competition is naturalized as struggle among groups; in Nazism, this becomes biological hierarchy and exterminatory antisemitism.
• Syndicalist and socialist mutations: revolutionary organization, anti-bourgeois rhetoric, class-mobilizing techniques, and the ideal of total transformation are redirected from international class to nation.
• Modern technology in anti-modern politics: fascist movements can reject liberal modernity while enthusiastically using radio, aviation, industrial organization, propaganda, and weapons.

Genealogy Is Not Causation

The notes name Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche, Darwin, Sorel, Pareto, Bismarck, Jünger, Gentile, Schmitt, Evola, Futurism, syndicalism, völkisch thought, and many others. These connections have very different statuses: direct adoption, selective borrowing, family resemblance, hostile reaction, or later interpretation. A thinker sharing hierarchy, collectivism, anti-rationalism, nationalism, or contempt for democracy is not thereby a fascist, and fascism did not follow logically from any one philosopher.

Use How to Make a Fascist for the broad cultural genealogy, Julius Evola and Carl Schmitt for distinct radical-right thinkers, Alexander Dugin and The Philosophy of Politics, Part 2 for Dugin’s explicit attempted rehabilitation, and Anti-Enlightenment for the adjacent anti-liberal tradition. Keep influence claims source-specific.

Pinker’s Chapter 5 supplement — a mechanism map, not a settled fascist genealogy

Pinker’s account overlaps with this note’s “long-run ingredients”: romantic nationalism makes the ethnic people, soil, and destiny sacred; romantic militarism treats danger, sacrifice, masculinity, and combat as morally regenerative; totalizing ideology subordinates individual lives to an allegedly inevitable future; and racial pseudoscience turns expansion and elimination into historical duties. He uses that combination to connect Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany without claiming that modern administration or technology alone caused them.

His most provocative move is to call Napoleonic France “the first implementation of fascism,” citing its coup, destruction of constitutional government, restoration of slavery, glorification of war, religious restoration, dynastic appointments, and territorial aggrandizement. That is Pinker’s retrospective and nonstandard classification, not a settled scholarly taxonomy. It can sharpen comparison, but it should not collapse revolutionary dictatorship, Bonapartism, interwar fascism, and Nazism into one category—or turn a family resemblance to nationalism, hierarchy, collectivism, or anti-rationalism into a causal indictment of every precursor. Chapter 5 synthesis · Nationalism and the counter-Enlightenment, PDF pp. 339–343 (file not included in this release) · Pinker’s Napoleonic-France classification, PDF pp. 341–342 (file not included in this release) · Militarized nationalism and totalizing ideology, PDF pp. 348–349 (file not included in this release)

Historical Cases

Italian Fascism

• Mussolini’s break with socialist internationalism over World War I is presented in the course and video notes as a crucial transition toward national syndicalism.
• The postwar “mutilated victory,” social conflict, fear of Bolshevism, veteran culture, and weak parliamentary legitimacy supplied opportunities, not an automatic outcome.
• Fascist squads used raids, humiliation, arson, beatings, and intimidation to destroy socialist and union organization and demonstrate an alternative source of order.
• The March on Rome mattered because the monarchy and conservative gatekeepers admitted Mussolini to office; it was not simply a military conquest of the state.
• Fascist theory elevated the ethical state, corporative unity, duty, sacrifice, and the leader’s claimed embodiment of the nation over individual rights and autonomous interests.
• The movement changed positions and accommodated monarchy, church, property, and conservative elites while retaining a revolutionary ambition to transform political life.

Primary vault routes: How to Make a Fascist · Robert Paxton - Anatomy of Fascism · Griffin: movement-to-regime periodization · When Is It Fascism? · The Philosophy of Politics, Part I.

German Nazism

• Nazism belongs within the broader fascist family in most comparative scholarship, but it cannot be reduced to Italian Fascism with different symbols.
• Völkisch nationalism, biological race, antisemitism, “blood and soil,” territorial expansion, and a racial state were constitutive rather than incidental.
• World War I defeat, the stab-in-the-back myth, paramilitary politics, Weimar institutional weakness, depression, and elite constitutional maneuvering interacted; no monocausal account is adequate.
• Hitler’s appointment, the Reichstag Fire Decree, the Enabling Act, Gleichschaltung, and parallel party/security structures show how formally legal mechanisms and organized terror can destroy a constitutional order from within.
• War radicalized the regime’s expansionary and exterminatory logic into genocide. Genocide is not required before a movement can be recognized as fascist, but the Nazi case cannot be understood without it.

Primary vault routes: The Rise of the Nazis · Hitler · 60.13.2 World War II · Hitler's Anti-Semitism · How to Make a Fascist · When Is It Fascism?.

Borderline and Fascistized Regimes

Francoist Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, conservative military dictatorships, and radical-right populisms raise a recurring classification problem: a regime can borrow fascist personnel, style, organizations, or mobilization without retaining fascism’s revolutionary rebirth project and autonomous mass-party dynamism. Record the competing classification and the criterion being used rather than forcing every authoritarian case into one bucket.

Fascism, Conservatism, Socialism, and Capitalism

Fascism and Conservatism

Fascists and traditional conservatives often shared enemies and formed alliances, but Paxton’s account rejects fascism as merely “muscular conservatism.” Fascists sought a new political civilization, mass mobilization, a transformed citizen, and extensive subordination of private life; established conservatives typically wanted order, hierarchy, property, church, monarchy, or inherited authority preserved. Their alliance can be causally decisive without making the two ideologies identical.

Fascism and Socialism

Mussolini’s socialist origins, syndicalist influences, collectivist language, anti-bourgeois rhetoric, corporative schemes, and the name “National Socialism” generate real historical questions. They do not settle classification by etymology. Fascist regimes rejected Marxist internationalism and class sovereignty, destroyed independent socialist and labor organizations, replaced class conflict with national or racial unity, and maintained hierarchy. The Dugin course material is especially important as an actor’s attempted left/socialist redefinition of fascism, not a neutral consensus taxonomy.

Fascism and Capitalism

The notes support a two-sided conclusion:

• Fascist movements were not simply inventions or obedient instruments of “capital.” They possessed autonomous mass appeal, ideology, racial and imperial goals, factional dynamics, and a capacity to subordinate or destroy private interests.
• Property-owning and conservative elites could still materially enable fascists because they feared socialism, unions, expropriation, disorder, or parliamentary paralysis. Fascist regimes generally preserved private title while crushing independent labor and directing production toward state, racial, and military ends.

The strongest internal treatment is the Alex argument map's enabling-coalition analysis, read alongside Robert Paxton - Anatomy of Fascism.

Comparison With Neighboring Categories

Cross-vault comparisons: Hazony–Brook dispute over where collectivist danger begins · Christian-nationalism classification dispute · Lindsay's attributed "rival Gnostic" model · capitalism-course use of fascism as an economic category.

Contemporary Classification Protocol

Before calling a current person or movement fascist, answer these separately:

1. Object: Are you classifying a person, rhetoric, faction, movement, coalition, government, or regime?
2. Definition: Which explicit definition is being used—Griffin, Paxton, Payne, Gentile, Stanley, a Marxist theory, or an ordinary-language insult?
3. Positive project: Is there a myth of national or racial rebirth and a proposed new order, or only grievance and policy illiberalism?
4. Constitutional aim: Does the actor seek to govern within, hollow out, or replace the constitutional order?
5. Organization: Is there a mass party, militant vanguard, paramilitary or street force, and disciplined leader-centered network?
6. Enemies and membership: Who counts as the authentic people, and what civil or human status is assigned to out-groups and opponents?
7. Violence: Is violence incidental, denounced, tolerated, outsourced, or presented as cleansing, redemptive, and politically creative?
8. Elite pathway: Which institutions or gatekeepers provide money, legitimacy, enforcement, or access to state power?
9. Practice in power: What has actually happened to elections, courts, legislatures, media, unions, civil society, federalism, and legal equality?
10. Best rival label: Would authoritarian populism, ethnonationalism, personalism, theocracy, military dictatorship, competitive authoritarianism, or ordinary democratic illiberalism explain the evidence better?
11. Disconfirmation: What observable evidence would make the fascism classification too broad or wrong?

Reporting rule

Separate verified act, institutional effect, speaker’s analogy, scholarly classification, and moral judgment. Do not let the historical charge carried by the word do the evidentiary work.

Griffin Interview: Five Diagnostic Separations

The January 2026 Griffin interview adds five durable distinctions to this protocol:

Griffin’s positive minimum can be rendered as a causal structure:

perceived decadence or humiliation → myth of national/racial rebirth → mobilized ultranationalist community → revolutionary new-order project → attempted constitutional transformation

His broader concept of incurvation describes a different, non-uniquely-fascist danger: complexity and fear drive a community inward, simple myths identify an enemy, the moral circle contracts, and exclusion or coercion becomes easier to tolerate. Its value is to connect epistemic closure with moral exclusion; its limitation is breadth. Without measurable thresholds and institutional variables, it can describe almost any intense tribalism.

Best synthesis

Use Griffin to ask what future the movement imagines and Paxton to ask how it develops the organization, alliances, violence, and access to power needed to realize it. Neither a word-level checklist nor a wait-for-dictatorship rule is adequate.

Trump and American-Fascism Disputes

The vault preserves at least two serious but non-identical frames:

• In the January 2026 Griffin interview, Griffin classifies Trump as a radical-right populist or illiberal democrat rather than fascist under his revolutionary-new-order criterion. He recognizes fascistic rally dynamics and calls January 6 a “fascist temptation,” but argues that Trump has not installed or clearly articulated a replacement constitutional order. He treats dehumanization, megalomania, and executive abuse as grave but non-unique. This is Griffin’s dated judgment in that source, not a vault-wide verdict. The expanded note also challenges his claim that Trump simply “stepped back” on January 6 and distinguishes failure of an attempted rupture from absence of anti-constitutional intent. See The age of American Fascism?.
• The Alex argument map concludes that Trumpism displays substantial fascistic features while expressly distinguishing a feature-based or analogical claim from a fully established fascist-regime classification. See the attributed Trumpism claim.

The disagreement is partly empirical and partly taxonomic. A charitable reconstruction of Griffin sets the movement threshold at a palingenetic ultranationalist project and the regime threshold at revolutionary replacement of constitutional authority. The interview sometimes runs these together, while a feature-based approach may apply the adjective earlier. Track the object, date, threshold, intent, attempt, and outcome explicitly.

Thematic Routes Through the Vault

Definition and Historiography

• Robert Paxton - Anatomy of Fascism — behavior and stages; the full chapter note is verified against the supplied book PDF, with the earlier LonerBox-derived outline preserved and labeled for provenance.
• Roger Griffin interview — academic taxonomy, constitutional replacement, right-wing populism, and “incurvation.”
• Griffin's definition and sub-myths · four neo-fascist trends — from the book’s handwritten reading notes.
• When Is It Fascism? — long lecture summary; useful as a map, but its claims retain transcript-summary status.
• Political Ideologies course section — concise class notes on organism, leadership, militarism, state power, minority rights, Nazism, Mussolini, and neo-fascism.
• Why Can't Anyone Define Fascism? — inventory only; no captured transcript or fact-check yet.

Violence, Mobilization, and Democratic Breakdown

• How to Make a Fascist — violence as culture and political formation.
• Robert Paxton - Anatomy of Fascism — alliance, accession, rule, radicalization.
• Permission Structure for Political Violence · Violent Political Rhetoric · Political Violence Polling & Statistics — broader mechanisms that must not automatically be labeled fascist.
• The Rise of the Nazis — mass support, electoral strength, coalition bargaining, constitutional maneuver, and competing historiographies.

Intellectual Genealogies and Radical-Right Thought

• Anti-Enlightenment · Carl Schmitt · Julius Evola · Alexander Dugin.
• It's Not All Hegel, But It's a Lot Hegel — a claimed genealogy that must be separated into direct influence, conceptual resemblance, and causal overreach.
• James Lindsay's Woke Right Canon · Woke Right · The Dissident Right and its Discontents.

Left Analyses and Political Economy

• Alex argument map — attributed claims plus independent counter-evidence and source trails.
• Hovagim genealogy: systemic decline and fascist opening — ties a speaker’s narrative to Zetkin, Gramsci, Polanyi, Reich, Frankfurt School, Poulantzas, and Hall while warning against overbroad usage.
• The Nature of Capitalism course — presents an economic-definition argument; treat it as the lecturer’s framework and compare it with movement-centered definitions.

Religion, Nation, and Postliberalism

• Christian Nationalism: the fascism/authoritarianism dispute — debate claims and counters, not an adjudicated equivalence.
• JD Vance Communion - Faith Political Economy and the Postliberal Right — boundaries among postliberalism, corporatism, nationalism, and fascism.
• Andrew Wilson vs. Dave Smith · Andrew Wilson ideology analysis — explicit non-equivalence tests and argument mapping.
• Dominion — moral-memory comparison between fascism and communism.

Art, Memory, War, and Literature

• History of Art — modernism, Futurism, propaganda, and fascist aesthetics.
• World history, literature, and philosophy timeline — fascism in the early-twentieth-century chronology.
• Slaughterhouse-Five · 60.13.2 World War II · Blueprint for Armageddon.

Personal Working Material and Study Systems

• Political Worldview Comparison Tables — comparative schema.
• Political Philosophy Anki index — existing atomic recall cards.
• Reading task: Fascism — A Quick Immersion · Reading Lists/Reading List 2026 · Reading Lists/Reading List 2027.
• Personal journals and Zibaldone entries are included in the private-working-material inventory but are not treated as scholarly evidence here.

Source-Status Ladder

Reading and Research Queue

The existing notes point repeatedly to the following ladder:

1. Definition and comparison: Roger Griffin; Robert Paxton; Stanley Payne; Kevin Passmore.
2. Italy and movement power: Emilio Gentile; R. J. B. Bosworth; Christopher Duggan; material on D’Annunzio and squadrismo.
3. Germany and Nazism: Richard J. Evans; Ian Kershaw; George L. Mosse; the broader World War II and Holocaust notes.
4. War, myth, and political religion: Robert Gerwarth; Mosse; Modris Eksteins; Ernst Jünger as a source on war experience rather than a simple fascist label.
5. Intellectual formation: Zeev Sternhell; Georges Sorel; Futurism; Gentile; Schmitt; Evola, each with influence boundaries.
6. Broader totalitarian comparison: Hannah Arendt and comparative communist-regime notes, while keeping totalitarianism distinct from fascism.

The detailed list and “pick based on the question” routes are already preserved in How to Make a Fascist → Books for Research.

Open Questions

• Which definition should govern different tasks: historical classification, early-warning analysis, or ordinary political rhetoric?
• How should analysts prevent a test for completed fascist rule from becoming an outcome-biased test for whether a pre-power movement is fascist?
• How much weight should revolutionary intent receive when a movement hollows out institutions incrementally?
• Which elite decisions are causally pivotal across Italy and Germany, and which analogies fail outside interwar Europe?
• When does radical-right populism become a fascist movement rather than an illiberal electoral project?
• How should fascistization be measured when old institutions survive as shells?
• Which intellectual-lineage claims in the current course/video notes are direct, and which are only similarities?
• How should economic control, private property, labor repression, and business autonomy be compared across movement, consolidation, and wartime stages?
• Which entries in the 241-note mention inventory contain original analysis worth extracting into standalone atomic notes?

Full Vault Map

The full appendix is deliberately separate so the conceptual note remains readable:

• Fascism - Vault-Wide Mention Index — exhaustive literal-mention inventory, grouped by vault branch.
• Fascism base (file not included in this release) — live view of notes whose up or related properties point to this hub.
• Far Right & Woke Right (MOC) — parent dashboard.
• Ideology & Foundations — cross-cutting ideology dashboard.
• Political Philosophy (MOC) — philosophical cross-folder route.

Definitions Preserved from the Original Note

Legacy source boundary

The following material is preserved from the original 2024 Fascism.md so consolidation does not erase content. Its only listed reference was Wikipedia, and several intellectual-lineage claims are contestable. Treat it as legacy research material pending source-by-source verification, not as newly verified by this reorganization.

• Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote, “Trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.” Each group described as “fascist” has at least some unique elements, and frequently definitions of “fascism” have been criticized as either too broad or too narrow. According to many scholars, fascists—especially when they are in power—have historically attacked communism, socialism, conservatism, and parliamentary liberalism, attracting support primarily from the far-right.
• Historian Stanley G. Payne’s definition is frequently cited as standard by such scholars as Roger Griffin, Bo Rothstein, Aristotle Kallis, and Stephen D. Shenfield. His definition of fascism focuses on three concepts:
  1. “Fascist negations” – anti-liberalism, anti-communism, and anti-conservatism.
  2. “Fascist goals” – the creation of a nationalist dictatorship to regulate economic structure and to transform social relations within a modern, self-determined culture, and the expansion of the nation into an empire.
  3. “Fascist style” – a political aesthetic of romantic symbolism, mass mobilization, a positive view of violence, and promotion of masculinity, youth, and charismatic authoritarian leadership.
• In his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018), Jason Stanley defined fascism thusly: 

  [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 ... The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.
  

• Robert Paxton says: 

  [Fascism is] a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
  

• Historian Emilio Gentile has defined fascism thusly:

  [A] modern political phenomenon, revolutionary, anti-liberal, and anti-Marxist, organized in a militia party with a totalitarian conception of politics and the state, an activist and anti-theoretical ideology, with a mythical, virilistic and anti-hedonistic foundation, sacralized as a secular religion, which affirms the absolute primacy of the nation, understood as an ethnically homogeneous organic community, hierarchically organized in a corporate state, with a bellicose vocation to the politics of greatness, power, and conquest aimed at creating a new order and a new civilization.
  

• Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism (1932), partly ghostwritten by philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who Mussolini described as “the philosopher of Fascism”, states: “The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.”

History Preserved from the Original Note

• Early influences that shaped the ideology of fascism have been dated back to ancient Greece. Mussolini had a strong attachment to the works of the Greek philosopher Plato.
  • Plato supported many similar political positions to fascism. In his work Republic (c. 380 BC), he emphasized the need for a philosopher king in an ideal state. He believed the ideal state would be ruled by an elite class of rulers known as “Guardians” and rejected the idea of social equality. He believed in an authoritarian state. He held Athenian democracy in contempt by saying: “The laws of democracy remain a dead letter, its freedom is anarchy, its equality the equality of unequals”. Like fascism, he emphasized that individuals must adhere to laws and perform duties while declining to grant individuals rights to limit or reject state interference in their lives. He claimed that an ideal state would have education that was designed to promote able rulers and warriors. However, there are also significant differences between Plato’s ideals and fascism. Unlike fascism, he never promoted expansionism and he was opposed to offensive war.
• Georges Valois, founder of the first non-Italian fascist party Faisceau, claimed the roots of fascism stemmed from the late 18th century Jacobin movement, seeing in its totalitarian nature a foreshadowing of the fascist state. Historian George Mosse similarly analyzed fascism as an inheritor of the mass ideology and civil religion of the French Revolution, as well as a result of the brutalization of societies in 1914–1918.
• Historians such as Irene Collins and Howard C. Payne see Napoleon III, who ran a ‘police state’ and suppressed the media, as a forerunner of fascism. According to David Thomson, the Italian Risorgimento of 1871 led to the ‘nemesis of fascism’. William L Shirer sees a continuity from the views of Fichte and Hegel, through Bismarck, to Hitler; Robert Gerwarth speaks of a ‘direct line’ from Bismarck to Hitler. Julian Dierkes sees fascism as a ‘particularly violent form of imperialism’.
• The historian Zeev Sternhell has traced the ideological roots of fascism back to the 1880s and in particular to the fin de siècle theme of that time. The theme was based on a revolt against materialism, rationalism, positivism, bourgeois society, and democracy. The fin-de-siècle generation supported emotionalism, irrationalism, subjectivism, and vitalism. They regarded civilization as being in crisis, and as requiring a massive and total solution. Their intellectual school considered the individual as only one part of the larger collectivity, which should not be viewed as a numerical sum of atomized individuals. They condemned the rationalistic, liberal individualism of society and the dissolution of social links in bourgeois society.
  • The fin-de-siècle outlook was influenced by various intellectual developments, including Darwinian biology, Gesamtkunstwerk, Arthur de Gobineau’s racialism, Gustave Le Bon’s psychology, and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Henri Bergson. Social Darwinism, which gained widespread acceptance, made no distinction between physical and social life, and viewed the human condition as an unceasing struggle to achieve the survival of the fittest. It challenged positivism’s claim of deliberate and rational choice as the determining behaviour of humans, with social Darwinism focusing on heredity, race, and environment. Its emphasis on biogroup identity and the role of organic relations within societies fostered the legitimacy and appeal of nationalism. New theories of social and political psychology rejected the notion of human behaviour being governed by rational choice and instead claimed that emotion was more influential in political issues than reason. Nietzsche’s argument that “God is dead”, coinciding with his attack on the “herd mentality” of Christianity, on democracy, and on modern collectivism, his concept of the Übermensch, and his advocacy of the will to power as a primordial instinct, were major influences upon many of the fin-de-siècle generation. Bergson’s claim of the existence of an élan vital, or vital instinct, centred upon free choice and rejected the processes of materialism and determinism; this challenged Marxism.
• Benito Mussolini upon being expelled from his position as chief editor of the PSI’s newspaper Avanti! for his anti-German stance, joined the interventionist cause in a separate fascio.
  • Fascio (Italian: [ˈfaʃʃo]; pl.: fasci) is an Italian word literally meaning ‘bundle’ or ‘sheaf’, and figuratively ‘league’, and which was used in the late 19th century to refer to political groups of many different (and sometimes opposing) orientations. A number of nationalist fasci later evolved into the 20th century Fasci movement, which became known as fascism.
• The term “fascism” was first used in 1915 by members of Mussolini’s movement, the Fasces of Revolutionary Action.
• Similar political ideas arose in Germany after the outbreak of the war. German sociologist Johann Plenge spoke of the rise of a “National Socialism” in Germany within what he termed the “ideas of 1914” that were a declaration of war against the “ideas of 1789” (the French Revolution). According to Plenge, the “ideas of 1789”—such as the rights of man, democracy, individualism and liberalism—were being rejected in favor of “the ideas of 1914” that included “German values” of duty, discipline, law and order.
• Fascism sought to accommodate Italian conservatives by making major alterations to its political agenda—abandoning its previous populism, republicanism and anticlericalism, adopting policies in support of free enterprise and accepting the Catholic Church and the monarchy as institutions in Italy. To appeal to Italian conservatives, fascism adopted policies such as promoting family values, including policies designed to reduce the number of women in the workforce—limiting the woman’s role to that of a mother. The fascists banned literature on birth control and increased penalties for abortion in 1926, declaring both crimes against the state.

Tenets Preserved from the Original Note

Robert Paxton finds that even though fascism “maintained the existing regime of property and social hierarchy”, it cannot be considered “simply a more muscular form of conservatism” because “fascism in power did carry out some changes profound enough to be called ‘revolutionary.’” These transformations “often set fascists into conflict with conservatives rooted in families, churches, social rank, and property.” Paxton argues:

fascism redrew the frontiers between private and public, sharply diminishing what had once been untouchably private. It changed the practice of citizenship from the enjoyment of constitutional rights and duties to participation in mass ceremonies of affirmation and conformity. It reconfigured relations between the individual and the collectivity, so that an individual had no rights outside community interest. It expanded the powers of the executive—party and state—in a bid for total control. Finally, it unleashed aggressive emotions hitherto known in Europe only during war or social revolution.

Legacy Reference

• Wikipedia, “Fascism” — the sole reference listed in the original note; retain for provenance, not as sufficient support for every preserved claim.

Auto-Index

Linked notes

Fascism.base (file not included in this release)