Definitions of fascism

Wikipedia article

Umberto Eco

Fourteen General Properties of Fascist Ideology

Matthew Lyons

“Fascism is a form of far-right ideology that glorifies the nation or race as an organic community that transcends all other loyalties. It emphasizes a myth of national or racial rebirth after a period of decline and disintegration. To this end, fascism calls for a ‘spiritual revolution’ against signs of moral decay such as individualism and materialism, and aims to purify the organic community of ‘other’ forces and groups that threaten it. Fascism tends to glorify masculinity, youth, mystical unity, and the regenerative power of violence. It often—but not always—supports doctrines of racial superiority, ethnic persecution, imperialist expansion, and genocide. Fascism may simultaneously adopt a form of internationalism based on either racial or ideological solidarity across national borders. Fascism is usually committed to overt male dominance, although it can sometimes support female solidarity and new opportunities for women of a privileged nation or race.” 1

Robert Paxton

Robert Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, defines fascism in his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism2 as:[27]

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.

Mobilizing Passions

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:

  • a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
  • the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;
  • the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
  • dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
  • the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
  • the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;
  • the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;
  • the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;
  • the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.
  1. Matthew N. Lyons: What is fascism? Originally published in 1997. ↩︎
  2. Paxton, Robert O. (2004). The Anatomy of Fascism (1st ed.). Alfred A. Knopf. ↩︎