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Fascism is an authoritarian or totalitarian nationalist ideology. It is primarily concerned with solving the perceived problems of national decline or decadence, by achieving a millenarian national rebirth, exalting the nation or race above all else, and promoting cults of unity, strength and purity. Fascists typically seek to form a mass movement of militants who are willing to engage in violence against their perceived enemies. Fascism opposes communism, conservatism, democracy, individualism, international socialism, liberalism, materialism, pacifism, laissez faire capitalism and political pluralism. Some fascists see themselves as advocating a third position alternative to both capitalism and communism.
Various scholars attribute different characteristics to fascism, but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: nationalism (including collectivism and populism based on nationalist values); third positionism (including class collaboration, corporatism, economic planning, mixed economy, national socialism, national syndicalism, protectionism,); authoritarianism and totalitarianism (including dictatorship, indoctrination, major social interventionism, and statism); and militarism.
Some authors reject broad usage of the term or exclude certain parties and regimes. Following the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II, there have been few self-proclaimed fascist groups and individuals. In contemporary political discourse, the term fascist is often used by adherents of some ideologies as a pejorative description of their opponents.
Etymology
The term fascismo was brought into popular usage by the Italian founders of Fascism, Benito Mussolini and the Neo-Hegelian philosopher Giovanni Gentile. It is derived from the Italian word fascio , which means "bundle" or "union", and from the Latin word fasces . The fasces, which consisted of a bundle of rods often tied around an axe, were an ancient Roman symbol of the authority of the civic magistrates; they were carried by his Lictors and could be used for corporal and capital punishment at his command. Furthermore, the symbolism of the fasces suggested strength through unity : a single rod is easily broken, while the bundle is difficult to break. This is a familiar theme throughout different forms of fascism; for example the Falange symbol is a bunch of arrows joined together by a yoke. In 1919 Fasci italiani di combattimento was founded and the Fascist manifesto was published, outlining Italian fascism, which was the original meaning of the term.
Definitions
The popular presentation of fascism in the publications of the Western World have been radically different in the period during and after World War II than in the period 1919—1939, when Mussolini and the Italian fascists were widely acclaimed. As fascism was associated with the Axis powers who fought and lost the war, and the Western World were mostly among the victorious Allied powers, it was difficult for many years to provide a neutral view of the topic. English-speaking (and other) historians, political scientists, and other scholars have engaged in long and furious debates concerning the exact nature of fascism. However since the 1990s, scholars like Stanley Payne, Roger Eatwell, Roger Griffin and Robert O. Paxton have begun to gather a rough consensus on the system's core tenets.
While various attempts to define fascism have been made, the problem scholars often run into is that each form of fascism is different from any other, leaving many definitions as too wide or too narrow. Below are two examples of attempts to define fascism:
a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led "armed party" which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation's imminent rebirth from decadence. – Roger Griffin, The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology
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. – Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism .
Political spectrum
There is no clear consensus on where fascism is on the political spectrum. The most common view is that fascism is far right or that it is outside the conventional left-right spectrum. However, some authors have argued that it is extreme centrist, and a few have claimed that it belongs on the political left.
Fascism rejects the idea of class conflict in favor of class collaboration, and internationalism in favor of statist nationalism. In 1932, Italian fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile described fascism as a collectivist and statist right-wing ideology:
Granted that the 19th century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the 20th century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the "right", a Fascist century. If the 19th century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the State."
Walter Laqueur says that historical fascism "did not belong to the extreme Left, yet defining it as part of the extreme Right is not very illuminating either", but that it "was always a coalition between radical, populist ('fascist') elements and others gravitating toward the extreme Right". Some authors, such as Roger Griffin argue that since the end of World War II, fascist movements have become intertwined with the radical right, describing certain groups as part of a "fascist radical right". Stanley Payne notes the alliances and sometimes fusion between fascists and right-wing authoritarians, but stresses the important differences between the two. Eugen Weber also addressed this point, saying about fascists that "...their most common allies lay on the right, particularly on the radical authoritarian right, and Italian Fascism as a semi-coherent entity was partly defined by its merger with one of the most radical of all right authoritarian movements in Europe, the Italian Nationalist Association (ANI)."
On the other hand, A. James Gregor argues that the most "uninspired effort to understand fascism" is to simply place it on the right-wing, or the radical right. The founders of fascism in Italy included people who were previously socialists, syndicalists, military men or anarchists — who had become angered at the international left's opposition to patriotism. Benito Mussolini, Michele Bianchi and Dino Grandi were all previously socialists. The Fascist Manifesto's initial promises included nationalization of property and class conflict, but some their promises were moderated or abolished later. A few advocates of laissez faire capitalism, such as Ludwig von Mises, define socialism as any ideology that advocates a society in which the means of production are socialized, and argue that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were socialist countries according to this definition. Zeev Sternhell sees fascism as an anti-Marxist form of socialism.
Fascists described themselves a "third force" that was outside the traditional political spectrum altogether. Many scholars accept fascism as a search for a third way between capitalism and communism. Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, described his position as "hard centre" in the political spectrum. Lipset sees fascism as "extremism of the center".
Fascism as epithet
Following World War II, the word fascist has become a slur throughout the political spectrum, and since the end of the war, it has been uncommon for political groups to call themselves fascist. In contemporary political discourse, adherents of some political ideologies tend to associate fas
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