What Was Fascism?

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by Robert O. Paxton

Knopf, 321 pp., $26.00

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Why is fascism such an elusive object of inquiry? As Robert Paxton notes at the outset of his study, the image of fascism has a deceptive clarity:

Everyone is sure they know what fascism is. The most self-consciously visual of all political forms, fascism presents itself to us in vivid primary images: a chauvinist demagogue haranguing an ecstatic crowd; disciplined ranks of marching youths, colored-shirted militants beating up members of some demonized minority….

But it has proved uncommonly hard to define the nature of fascism, to determine how widely the notion can usefully be applied, or what differentiates it from other political movements and regimes. Historians are mostly in agreement that fascism was a phenomenon of pan-European significance. One of the first important comparative studies of fascism, Ernst Nolte’s Three Faces of Fascism, wrote of interwar Europe as the “epoch of fascism.”

¹ But attempts to define fascism have led to such confusions, contradictions, and overlooking of obvious differences that some historians have given up the attempt in disgust.

² Even grouping together the two major regimes commonly described as “fascist,” Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, is far from uncontroversial.

The late Renzo De Felice, the author of a monumental biography of Mussolini and the most influential historian of Italian fascism, denied that national socialism could legitimately be classed as a type of fascism.

³ Although Hannah Arendt refused to consider Italian fascism as a form of totalitarianism, De Felice pointed out that “the totalitarian state” was a central feature of the Italian regime’s definition of itself. But he was skeptical of any general concept of totalitarianism applied to the Italian case. Mussolini’s “totalitarian state” was sui generis. It is understandable that Italians should wish to distance themselves from the horrors of national socialism, but the amount of killing and terror is not an altogether satisfactory basis for classifying regimes. We can describe Kadar’s Hungary as “communist” without implying that it was similar to Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China.

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Adrian Lyttelton

Adrian Lyttelton is a Fellow of the Johns Hopkins University Center in Bologna and the author of The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929.  (December 2019)

This Issue

October 21, 2004

1
Translated by Leila Vennewitz (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), originally published in German as Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Munich: Piper, 1963). ↩
2
See Gilbert Allardyce, “What Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept,” American Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 2 (April 1979). ↩
3
See his Interpretations of Fascism (Harvard University Press, 1977). ↩
4
For “party” here, one should, I think, read “movement.” The National Socialist Party (NSDAP) as an institution did not play a dominant role in the Third Reich. ↩
5
Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation, 1933–1939 (Wellingborough, 1985). ↩
6
Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity (Praeger, 2003), p. 124. ↩
7
See Marla Susan Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 83–84. ↩
8
See Paul Preston, Franco (Basic Books, 1993), pp. 350–353. ↩
9
See Alan S. Milward, “Fascism and the Economy,” in Fascism: A Reader’s Guide, edited by Walter Laqueur (University of California, 1976), and Charles S. Maier, “The Economics of Fascism and Nazism,” in In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1987) for the best analyses of the arguments for the existence of a distinctive fascist economic system. ↩
10
T. Raychaudhuri, “Shadows of the Swastika: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Hindu Communalism,” in Perceptions, Emotions, Sensibilities: Essays on India’s Colonial and Post-Colonial Experiences (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 212–213. The essay was written in 1993, but has a postscript added in 1999. ↩
11
See J. Heller, “The Failure of Fascism in Jewish Palestine, 1925–1948,” in Fascism Outside Europe, edited by Stein Ugelvik Larsen (Columbia University Press, 2001). Abba Achimeir, the leader of the Maximalist faction, which won a relative majority in the Revisionist congress of 1932, called for “iron discipline; cult of the leader (on the model of the fascists); dictatorship.” In March 1933, he expressed his belief that while “the anti-Semitic wrapping” of Hitler’s movement should be discarded, the “anti-Marxist core” was sound. Avraham Stern, the founder of the Stern gang, had studied in fascist Italy, and in 1940 he believed that “cooperation is possible between the new Germany and the revitalized Hebrew national movement,” which should aim to create a Jewish state on “nationalist and totalitarian foundations.” ↩
12
“We represent the Arab spirit against soulless Communism” (1943); see Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear (University of California Press, 1989), pp. 196, 223. ↩
13
It may be thought that my characterization of Saddam’s regime as fascist and totalitarian is intended as a justification of the present war in Iraq. It is not. ↩