Studying Inter-War Fascism in Epochal and Diachronic Terms: Ideological Production,Political Experience and the Quest for ‘Consensus’

This article examines fascism’s dual nature, as both period-specific (epochal) experience and diachronic intellectual/political phenomenon, thus reflecting an ongoing, often acrimonious historiographical debate on this subject. It analyses inter-war fascism as a specific articulation of a borrowed utopia from radical nationalism that was not confined to the 1918-45 period. However, it also underlines how the ‘power of precedent’ — that is, the experience generated from the practice of specific fascist regimes — resulted in the elaboration of the doctrine and in its adoption/adaptation by a series of kindred political regimes across inter-war Europe. In this respect, while fascism as intellectual phenomenon has a clear diachronic dimension, the particular experience of inter-war fascism was indeed specific to its context and thus retains much of its specificity and individuality in analytical terms. In this sense, the article argues for a linguistic reconceptualization of the two ‘fascisms’ (one historical, the other ideal-typical) in order to avoid the current conceptual confusion without disinheriting either of the two. Although the article supports a qualified epochal perception of fascism, it also stresses the complementary nature of the two approaches in the direction of generating a genuine, viable consensus in fascist studies.