Abstract
Liberals and even most of those who consider themselves Marxists are guilty of using the word fascist very loosely today. They fling it around as an epithet or political swearword against right-wing figures whom they particularly despise, or against reactionaries in general. (Lavan Weissman, 1969)
The lament comes from George Lavan Weissman, the Secretary, in the 1960s, of the Communist Party of America. In his 1969 introduction to Trotsky's anthology Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It, he pointed out that many figures in contemporary American politics, from McCarthy to Reagan, had been identified with the fascist label. “Now, were all these fascists, or just some?,” Weissman asked, warning that indiscriminate use of the word reflects a troubling vagueness about its meaning (Lavan Weissman, 1969). Half a century later, the word fascism has become a catch-all label for any perceived authoritarian threat. What do we lose when we call something—indeed, everything—fascist? Federico Marcon's new book, Fascism: The History of a Word, sets out to answer that question by tracing the evolution of this fraught political term.
The book sets out not to recount the history of fascist regimes but to chart the history of the word fascism itself—how its meanings, usages, and symbolic power have changed from its coinage in 1919 to the present. It does not amount to an anti-fascist manifesto, nor it is a polemical warning about current strongmen: it is the critical archaeology of a signifier. Marcon reconstructs how overuse has made “fascism” an analytical blur—a “fuzzy” term that too often serves as a mere boo-word, rather than a precise tool for understanding reactionary movements. While wielding the label “fascist” may carry emotional punch, it can also obscure important differences between distinct authoritarian phenomena. Marcon urges us to distinguish between Fascism (capital-F, the historical movement led by Mussolini) and “fascism” in the generic sense that developed later. Words, like political forces, have agency: they act, mutate, and shape reality. To understand fascism, then, we must examine how the word's changing meanings both reflected and influenced the political realities of each era.
Fascism: The History of a Word begins at the beginning: the turbulent world of Italy after the First World War, where the term fascismo was born. In 1919, Benito Mussolini co-opted a humble word—fascio, meaning a bundle or group—that had been used by various Italian political associations (from socialist clubs to nationalist leagues) but had no fixed ideological content. When Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in March 1919, the word fascism still lacked a clear definition. It was more a rallying cry for action than a coherent doctrine. The early Fascists were a motley alliance of war veterans, nationalist agitators, Futurist poets, and former socialists-turned-syndicalists. What held them together was not a consistent ideology but a shared willingness to use anti-socialist rhetoric—and violence—in the name of national rejuvenation.
Fascism in its early years was defined by what it did, not what it thought. In the chaotic “two red years” of 1919–1920, when socialist-led strikes and land occupations swept Italy, Mussolini's Blackshirt squads garnered support from industrialists and landowners terrified of Bolshevik revolution. “Fascism” quickly came to signify the ruthless repression of leftist uprisings. Before it ever denoted a structured political theory, the word meant a practice—a brutal, expedient method of counterrevolution. Fascist gangs beat and killed with impunity, attacking union halls and socialist newspaper offices to crush the left. Observers and newspapers began using the term “fascism” to describe this new phenomenon of organized vigilante violence on behalf of the social order.
By 1921, “fascism” had crystallized into a recognizable political label in Italy, even as its content remained inchoate. That year, Mussolini transformed his movement into the National Fascist Party (PNF), entering parliament and giving fascism a veneer of constitutional respectability. Yet, as Marcon notes, Mussolini himself offered ever-shifting definitions of what fascism stood for: he variously called it a “movement,” a “mentality,” and a radical revision of all prior political values.
By the early 1920s, then, fascism had completed its first transformation: from a generic term for “league” or group action into the name of a new reactionary political force. Marcon concludes Part I (“The Invention of ‘Fascism’”) by observing that in semiotic terms “fascism” became a floating signifier during this period—an empty vessel that Mussolini filled with whatever slogans or symbols suited his quest for power. The word absorbed contradictions (revolutionary rhetoric vs pro-establishment violence, modernist styles vs nostalgic nationalism) without ever solidifying into a single doctrine. This ambiguity, ironically, became a source of fascism's strength: it allowed the movement to be many things to many people, to wrap itself in the language of national rebirth and social order all at once. The inventors of the word “fascism” were, in effect, making it up as they went along.
In Part II, “Antifascists’ ‘Fascism’”, Marcon turns from the self-definition of fascists to the reinvention of the term by their opponents. Between the mid-1920s and the end of the Second World War, the word “fascism” leapt from its Italian roots and became a generic label for a host of right-wing authoritarian movements across Europe and beyond. This was the doing of anti-fascists—liberal, socialist, and communist critics who needed a language to confront the new menace. In their hands, “fascism” underwent a significant semantic expansion. It ceased to be a proper noun tied solely to Mussolini's regime, and became a common noun, a universal political category signifying the extreme antithesis of democracy and freedom.
Marcon reconstructs how this broadened concept of fascism emerged through polemical discourse. Leading Italian liberals, like Benedetto Croce and Piero Gobetti, characterized fascism as a pathology afflicting Italian society—an irrational moral disease within modern civilization, or, as Gobetti put it, the autobiography of a nation with a stunted liberal spirit. In their view, fascism was less a coherent program and more a symptom of democratic decay or cultural failure. Their use of the term was diagnostic and admonitory: fascism was a warning of what could happen when liberal values collapsed.
Meanwhile, Marxist and leftist thinkers pushed this generic concept even further. In 1935, Georgi Dimitrov of the Communist International famously described fascism as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary elements of finance capital, casting it as a final stage of capitalism in crisis. Trotsky likewise argued that fascism was not an ideology at all but a class weapon of last resort—a mass of enraged petty-bourgeois militants unleashed by a panicked bourgeoisie to crush workers’ organizations and save capitalism through terror. The Marxist framework helped to make fascism a portable concept: not uniquely Italian, but a recurring product of modern class conflict that could in theory appear in any country where capitalism was under siege.
By using “fascism” to describe everything from Mussolini's Blackshirts to Hitler's Brownshirts to Franco's phalangists, anti-fascists created a transnational language of resistance. This universalization of the word was immensely powerful: it united disparate struggles into one grand narrative of democracy versus fascism. But as Marcon points out, such semantic broadening came at a cost. By lumping heterogeneous regimes and movements under one banner, both liberal and Marxist critics flattened important distinctions. Franco's clerical authoritarianism in Spain, Hitler's racial-genocidal Nazism, Mussolini's nationalist corporatism, imperial Japan's militarism—all were branded “fascist.” The word became a shorthand for modern political evil: a metonym for dictatorship, reaction, and mass violence writ large. By 1945, when the world lay in ruins and the Axis powers had been defeated, “fascism” carried a nearly mythic connotation. It no longer referred only to Mussolini's corporate state or Hitler's Reich; it had become a kind of universal bogeyman—anything fundamentally opposed to freedom, reason, and human dignity.
Marcon acknowledges the paradox here. The broad use of the word “fascism” helped to galvanize a global anti-fascist consensus in the mid-20th century; it gave people a simple rallying cry against a complex array of threats. Yet the very success of “fascism” as a catch-all label introduced enduring ambiguities into our political vocabulary. The antifascist “invention” of fascism meant that we inherited a term at once potent and vague. We still live with that legacy: when we call a contemporary movement or leader “fascist,” we draw on a reservoir of historical emotion, but we may also be borrowing a concept so general that it obscures what is novel (or not) about the present.
After the Second World War, the meaning of “fascism” did not snap into clarity—in fact, the debate only intensified, now in the cold light of hindsight. Part III of Marcon's book (“‘Fascism’ since 1945”) chronicles the post-1945 intellectual quest to make sense of fascism, a project complicated by the onset of the Cold War. With Nazi atrocities and the Holocaust seared into global memory, fascism in popular discourse became virtually synonymous with absolute political evil. In the early Cold War, political discourse often replaced talk of fascism with the broader concept of “totalitarianism,” which lumped Nazi and communist dictatorships together as similar evils. Fascism—once a rallying cry of the anti-Nazi resistance—was now subsumed into a generic category of despotism serving the West's anti-Communist narrative. In this reframing, the word “fascism” lost some of its distinct meaning, becoming one label among others for the enemies of freedom.
Not everyone was satisfied with this flattening equivalence. Beginning in the 1960s, a new generation of historians sought to extract fascism from the shadow of totalitarian theory and to redefine it on its own terms. They wanted to identify what Ernst Nolte (1963) called a “fascist minimum”—the core features that all fascist movements shared, distinguishing them from other forms of tyranny. Ernst Nolte's influential 1963 book Three Faces of Fascism offered a bold thesis: fascism, he argued, was essentially anti-Marxism—a counterrevolution that mimicked the methods of its hated enemy (mass mobilization, revolutionary zeal) to destroy Marxism and achieve a national rebirth. Provocatively, Nolte implied that Nazi terror was a reaction to Bolshevik terror, a symmetry that I personally find morally unsettling. While this comparative approach spurred important scholarship, it also blurred distinctions and relativized Nazi crimes.
Other scholars emphasized different facets: George Mosse underscored fascism's cultural rituals and cult of virility, Emilio Gentile and Stanley Payne compiled multi-criteria checklists to pin down the fascist model. In the 1990s, Roger Griffin (1998) proposed what became a widely cited formula: fascism as “palingenetic ultranationalism”—a revolutionary drive to rebirth the nation. By focusing on fascism's myth of national resurrection, Griffin's definition aimed to capture its ideological driving force. Across these efforts, the postwar decades saw an outpouring of scholarship trying to nail down fascism as an analytical category rather than just a polemical epithet.
Marcon surveys this rich intellectual history with an eye to its ironies. He observes that even as historians and social scientists strove for precision—debating whether fascism was primarily about ultranationalist ideology, about a style of mass politics, or about socio-economic function—the term remained a semiotic battlefield. Different ideological agendas pulled the definition in different directions: the Frankfurt School viewed fascism as the dark culmination of Enlightenment rationality and capitalist mass society—a pathology inherent in modern culture (note here the difference in scale with Croce's understanding of the phenomenon, essentially the same but confined within the national context). This “moralization” of fascism as a kind of permanent psychological threat clashed with more neutral, typological approaches by comparative historians. The quest for a neat fascist minimum is forever shadowed by the term's schizophrenic baggage: at once a historical signifier tied to specific events, and a moral-political term loaded with the fears of what modern society could become.
By the end of the 20th century, the term “fascism” (much like the term “pornography”: it could have something to do with the return of the repressed) had a shifting semantic field yet everyone using it knew exactly what they were talking about. The concept involved extreme ultranationalism, a cult of unity and purity, a populist enthusiasm for a strong leader, hatred of liberalism and leftism, and a readiness to use violence and authoritarian measures in pursuit of a mythic national rebirth.
The final part of Marcon's book brings the story into the 21st century, where “fascism” has experienced something of a renaissance in public discourse—albeit often divorced from its historical roots. After the Cold War ended, the ideological landscape shifted, and so did the uses of the F-word. With communism no longer the central foil, Western political language revived “fascism” as the ultimate label for new anxieties. Marcon illustrates how, by the 2000s, commentators and activists increasingly reached for analogies to the 1930s to warn of emergent dangers. For instance, in 2003 an essay popularized a list of “14 characteristics of fascism,” pointing out uncomfortable echoes in contemporary governments (Britt, 2003). This checklist approach—ticking off traits like hyper-nationalism, suppression of dissent, and militarism—exemplified a broader trend: “fascism” became a kind of diagnostic tool or early-warning index for liberal democracies. The subtext was clear: if enough fascism boxes are checked, we might be on the road to something truly nightmarish.
Marcon does not dismiss these concerns, but he critiques the way fascism has been invoked in recent times as an all-purpose alarm bell. The election of Donald Trump in 2016, and a surge of right-wing populism in Europe, led to an outpouring of alarmed commentary declaring a “new fascism” on the rise. Academics and public intellectuals joined the fray, drawing direct lines between contemporary populist-authoritarians and the fascists of old. As Marcon notes, this inflation of the term—applying “fascist” to a wide gamut of illiberal phenomena—repeats a pattern seen before. Just as in Weissman's time people were calling Barry Goldwater or Richard Nixon fascists, now figures like Trump, Orbán, or other leaders are routinely branded with the scarlet F. The word retains its punch as the strongest pejorative in political vocabulary, but when everything becomes fascism, the concept risks being stretched thin.
Marcon's book does not offer a neat formula for when it is appropriate to cry “fascism!”—indeed, he shows that the term's meaning will always be contested. But it does offer a much-needed historical perspective. By seeing how “fascism” evolved from Mussolini's propaganda tool to a global ideological category to a vague synonym for evil, we become more conscious of what we mean (or don’t mean) when we deploy the word today. Marcon implies that we must not purge the word from our vocabulary—there are real movements and leaders that deserve the name “fascist”—but we must historicize it. That is, we should remember that calling something fascist is not a neutral description; it 's an act laden with decades of political baggage, fear, and symbolism. Perhaps the ultimate lesson of Marcon's study is one of vigilant discrimination: to be alert to genuinely fascistic tendencies in the present without succumbing to conceptual inflation.
