Over three decades ago, the British historian Tim Mason sounded the alarm. He spoke of a “disappearance of theories or articulated concepts of fascism from research and writing.” Examining the relationship between Italian Fascism and German Nazism, Mason urged scholars to identify these regimes’ “specific” similarities and their contrasts, while maintaining “a strict agnosticism” about the radical uniqueness of either of them. At first glance, such debates may seem remote from today’s political climate, when discussion of fascism seems ever present. Yet the questions Mason raised resonate powerfully also today.
As the far right advances, from Latin America to India and from the United States to Russia and across Europe, there is an urgent need to analyze this resurgence with intellectual rigor and historical depth. Beyond the initial shock at the rise of such forces lies an urgent question: How to respond? How to alert and mobilize the social forces needed to counter their agenda? Understanding the roots of this apparent “return of fascism” is anything but straightforward. And is this even the right term? The use of “fascism” to describe today’s political currents remains fiercely contested. For some, the label is crucial, offering a framework for predicting what comes next. Yet if history surely can illuminate the present, it can’t foretell the future.
The growing inflation of variations on the word “fascism” continues to produce debate. Late fascism, preventive fascism, end-times fascism, fossilized fascism, Trumpist fascism — alongside “neo-,” “post-,” “para-,” “semi-,” “micro-,” and even “techno-fascism” — there is no shortage of labels to describe an enemy seen as relentlessly advancing. But this avalanche of terminology barely conceals the deeper struggle in grasping a reality that, while echoing the darkest chapters of the twentieth century, remains in many ways radically new.
As historian Eric…
Auteur: Stefanie Prezioso
