Fascism
Ideology · 1919 to 1945, Italy and Germany, with later imitators · Politics, stage 2: Map the ideologies
Fascism is included here as a historical object of study rather than as a live option in the sense the other entries are. It took shape in interwar Europe as a set of movements asserting the primacy of a unified nation or race over individuals and classes, organised around a single party and a leader claimed to embody the popular will, hostile to liberalism, parliamentary government and Marxism alike, and committed to militarised mass mobilisation. Because these movements produced little systematic theory and a great deal of propaganda, scholars characterise fascism largely from its practice, and they disagree over how far Italian Fascism, German National Socialism and later movements answer to a single definition. In power the regimes suppressed opposition parties, independent courts, trade unions and the press, and the German case carried the doctrine to the industrialised murder of millions. Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism remains the most widely read analysis. The standard reason to study it is that it arose inside functioning parliamentary states, which makes the conditions of its rise a question for anyone interested in how such states fail.
What it claims
- The nation or race is the primary political unit, and individual and class interests are subordinate to it.
- A single party and leader can express the will of a people more directly than parliaments and elections.
- Struggle and war are sources of national vitality rather than failures of politics.
Key ideas
Sources
- Fascism Wikipedia
- Definitions of fascism WikipediaSets out why scholars have not converged on one definition, and what the competing ones cover.
- Hannah Arendt Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyHer account of totalitarian movements, written from inside the period.
