Fascism as an Ideological Form: A Critical Theory

Fascism as a Concept

Usually, political concepts such as democracy, socialism, sovereignty, and so on are not, nor should be, defined on basis of their historical origins. To take the first example in the list, we do not define ‘democracy’ exclusively on the basis of the model invented by ancient Athenians. Yet somehow ‘fascism’ is commonly defined merely by the specifications of the first occurrences of fascism. For the most part, this has crippled critical debates and analytic applications of the concept. Again, if we measured democracy by the earliest historical models in Ancient Greece, we would not be able to justifiably designate any contemporary system of governance as a democracy. In fact, ‘representative democracy’ would be an oxymoron. Just as we continue to reappropriate other political concepts, we should be able to enhance the conceptual boundaries of the term ‘fascism’, without having to always justify its use in terms of the Italian and German models that emerged during the first half of the 20th century. There is good reason to recover the term as an analytical concept rather than treating it as something from the past. That said, the main objective of this article is to argue for a critical theory of fascism as an ideology form. There are fascist ideologies and philosophies as opposed to a standard fascist ideology or philosophy. If we use ‘fascism’ as a concept to refer to a class of anti-egalitarian ideological systems that have in common a general framing regarding exclusionism, then we will be better equipped to diagnose fascist politics and movements wherever and whenever they emerge without having to deploy a conventional definition as a measuring device every time.

Ascribing a specific ideological content to fascism in order to define it as a term will inevitably amount to reductionism. To make the point clearer, it might help to consider the nature of the fallacy when committed in terms of other notions. Let us take ‘sexism’ as an example. Sexism may be used to describe a general characteristic of certain ideologies, but it does not denote a particular ideology. We can speak of sexist ideologies, as opposed to the ideology of sexism. To assume that sexism is an ideology is to confuse the subject and the predicate. It would also be false to impose a birthdate or a birthplace on sexism simply because it is a feature shared by many ideologies and worldviews. Of course, fascism could refer to more than a mere ideological feature, and it could be claimed as an ideology, for example, Italian Fascism. In this case, we could speak of both the ideological form (of fascism) and a specific ideological content determined in terms of historical and spatial particularities as well as political and societal objectives. In every other case, that is, when fascism is not claimed as the name of a particular ideology, ‘fascism’ does not denote a particular ideology or philosophy. Even in Italy, it is misleading to analyze today’s fascist movements as reoccurrences, duplications, and resurrections of Mussolini’s Fascism. We capitalize the ‘f’ when we use the word as a proper noun in reference to the brand Mussolini invented and named. In all other cases, that is, when the signified is not the ideology of the movement Mussolini founded, fascism is used as a term, and it can be conceptualized and reconceptualized like other terms. The monotheistic (idea of god) happened to also be called God, which is why we capitalize the first letter when the word is used as a proper noun. Otherwise, ‘god’ is an indefinite noun that means ‘deity’ but not any particular deity unless we use other words to qualify the word ‘god’. To insist that there is only one deity, God, is to totalize the monotheistic idea of god, which is exactly what monotheists do, situating monotheism in a direct contradiction with philosophical logic.

Without necessarily adopting Plato’s entire system of metaphysics and epistemology, it might be helpful to keep in mind the Platonic notion of ‘form’ in order to make sense of the general noun that denotes a class of entities as opposed to a particular one. In this sense, ‘fascism’ should be used as a categorical ‘form’. Only when we specify the form, for example, Japanese fascism, Aryan fascism, Iranian fascism, Christian fascism, or Islamic fascism, would we be speaking of a particular fascist ideology, of course, without implying that an identity, Japanese, Aryan, Iranian, Christian, or Islamic, is inherently fascist. Indeed, fascism is not unique to any particular region, nationalism, religion, or patriotism; rather, it (and, of course, resistance against it) could appear anywhere and among any particular population, just as sexism or racism is not unique to certain ethnic, national, or religious groups. As Enzo Traverso (2019) asserts, ‘fascism has not only been transnational or transatlantic, but also transhistorical’ (p. 20). The realization itself is crucial but not enough; we need a theoretical conceptualization of fascism that reflects its transhistoricality and transgeographicality simultaneously. A definition that is not formulated around, and does not lend itself to, such a theoretical conception will necessarily fail to account for all cases of fascism even if it appears to accurately describe multiple variations.

As early as 1921, Gramsci (1978) emphasized that it is futile to try to explain fascism as a concrete ideological platform. For instance, he wrote,

Fascism has presented itself as the anti-party; has opened its gates to all applicants; has with its promise of impunity enabled a formless multitude to cover over the savage outpouring of passions, hatreds and desires with a varnish of vague and nebulous political ideals. (Gramsci, 1978)

Ironically, even though Gramsci deduced his conclusions from Mussolini’s movement on the eve of the National Fascist Party’s reign in Italy, and he did mean Fascism with a capital letter, his account captures what conceptually characterizes fascism better than most of the accounts that followed for decades, especially after World War II. Many of the later accounts insist on formulating their definitions in light of the Fascist and Nazi programs and policies and Mussolini’s and Hitler’s personalities. In the same article, Gramsci warns against reductionist accounts as he also emphasizes the need for an approach that can best be described as a critical theory, broadly defined as a Marxian, materialist, multidisciplinary theory of society and social movements. Gramsci’s work in general anticipates the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory that started to take shape in the 1930s at the hand of a group of Marxists who were widely denounced politically and academically, at home and abroad.

Because fascist movements are discriminatory, chauvinistic, and exclusionary, we should not expect vast similarities between the contents of the ideologies of two fascist movements unless they have in common, say, the same racist agenda. Because ‘fascism’ does not designate any universal set of philosophical principles, even what is universally agreed upon as a textbook case of fascism should be considered as a particular variation of fascism specific to particular sociohistorical circumstances and geopolitical context, keeping in mind that in a drastically different set of circumstances and context, the equivalent ideology would be drastically different. In other words, every fascism, including Mussolini’s Fascism, is just a variation of fascism. Using one movement’s ideology as a standard model does not help in conceptualizing fascism. Even within the same geography, for example, Italy or Europe, just as racism has evolved its discursive means and strategies since World War II, we should not expect much resemblance between today’s varied iterations of fascism and those from the 20th century. Most fascist movements are extremely pragmatic and adaptive, so focusing exclusively on historical definitions and origins does little to help in detecting fascism as a remerging or enduring phenomenon.

In fact, even the Nazis never identified themselves as fascists, and admittedly there were significant differences between Italian fascism and German Nazism. Furthermore, if we were to apply the criteria of the definition provided by the inventors of the term, whereby totalitarianism is at the heart of fascism, ¹ Mussolini’s Italy itself should not be called fascist, for it was not a totalitarian one-party state for about three quarters of the duration of the Fascist party’s rule, which is something Hannah Arendt (1979) noted early in the debates surrounding totalitarianism and fascism (p. 257). Therefore, molding our definition on the Italian and/or German models would render the term useless as a concept. Theoretical flexibility, and, thus, potential plural instrumental uses are essential for conceptuality. If the definition of fascism is restricted by a few historical references, it can only function as an ordinary word insofar as a word has a specific meaning and sense.

Because fascism is more of a modern tribalist impulse that manifests itself according to specificities of circumstances as opposed to a set of principles induced from a universal philosophical worldview, it can best be understood as a form of modern exclusionary fanaticism, which can be secular or religious, and racist in the sense of biological or cultural racism. In fact, none other than Giovanni Gentile (2002), the first self-identified philosophizer of ‘Fascism’, makes the point that it does not denote a particular philosophy thereby easily lending itself to non-Italian, non-European, and non-interwar contexts:

The doctrine of Fascism is not a philosophy, in the ordinary sense of the term, and still less is it a religion. It is also not an explicated and definitive political doctrine, articulated in a series of formulae. The truth is that the significance of Fascism is not to be measured in the special theoretical or practical theses that it takes up at one or another time. As has been said at its very commencement, it did not arise with a precise and determinate program. (italics added, p. 21)

Gentile goes on to describe the opportunistic and pragmatic nature of Fascism. As a matter of fact, it is the lack, not the presence, of principles that should be considered as one of the features that characterize fascist movements. However, in their attempts to define fascism as an ideology, scholars have continued to emphasize different criteria in various orders and combinations. The field of fascism studies has been gravely limited by conventional methods that have led to the domination of reductionist accounts intermingled in repetitive scholastic cycles. Even though the conventional approaches may appear diverse, they adopt similar methods for defining fascism and diagnosing fascist movements. These methods amount to searching for and then deploying a particular set of criteria as a test kit or what can be called a fascismo-meter. When these fascismo-meters are designed retroactively and Eurocentrically, often they prove to be dysfunctional in terms of their capacity to recognize vast variations of fascist movements. Therefore, I argue for moving toward critical conceptualization and away from traditional definitions. Normal definitions are for normal terms, and as such they could be relatively rigid, lacking theoretical grounding, dialectical viability, and critical potentiality. Concepts, on the other hand, are dialectically flexible because they are constructed through continual theorization. This flexibility also becomes evident and proves to be indispensable in the process of applying the concept in critical analyses of ideologies, discourses, events, and social and political phenomena.

The orthodox rigidity and historical reductionism have implications that reach arenas far beyond academia. What is at stake is not just elusive theoretical methods. The more serious problem is the political implications in terms of comprehending the threat of fascism in contemporary societies. Today, in multiple countries around the world, despite the variations in their influence and nature of democratic institutions, democratic principles are increasingly abolished through systematic violations of everything from laws to basic norms of the public sphere. Yet, we are less and less capable of being shocked by what happens. It is absurd that many of us are alarmed only when someone somewhere carries the swastika flag. It is not that a large number of people are indifferent about the rise of fascism; rather, the majority of people are falsely assured by public opinion makers, including some liberal politicians and educators, until it is too late for civil society to stop the fascist forces. Underestimating the threat of the rise of fascism is not merely the result of theoretical fallacies. Also, it is a fallacy to assume that theoretical fallacies are themselves not socially and politically produced. What we are facing is unconscious denialism within a broader ideological hegemony, which is in turn rooted in material interests and social relations of domination. Even without all the sound arguments that refute reductionist accounts of fascism, we should be able to recognize fascist movements and detect the rise of fascism. Of course, there are also anti-fascist movements, protests, and platforms in every society, but, with more critical education, anti-fascism could be more popular and more effective. The general public should be able to recognize the signs of fascism even in cases that carry little or no resemblance with previous models or current models elsewhere.

Some Stations in Fascism Studies

The purpose of the following discussion is to contextualize my proposition that fascism should be considered as an ideological form, as opposed to an ideological system. It should be noted that most of the literature in fascism studies inevitably suffer from various forms of reductionism. For instance, rarely have Spanish, British, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, German, and Belgian colonial practices outside Europe been considered in the literature about fascism although those practices both historically and thematically predate what is normally considered the emergence of fascism. Both Aimé Césaire (2001: 3) and Frantz Fanon (1994: 166) argue that the crimes the Nazis committed in Europe are not dissimilar to the crimes European colonialism had been committing outside Europe for a long time.

Even studies that trace fascism back to the 19th century do so from the perspective of the history of ideas. To be fair, the Marxian accounts tend to stand out for their consideration of the imperialist and colonialist dimensions of fascism. Despite the anti-Marxist testimonies that became fashionable especially in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, even today the Marxist theory seems to offer more robust accounts. For example, Karl Polanyi’s (2001) The Great Transformation investigates the political economy of fascism and its connection with capitalism and capitalist crises (originally published in 1944). To Polanyi (2001), ‘it was a case of symbiosis between movements of independent origin’ (p. 250). Polanyi (2001) asserts, ‘the part played by fascism was determined by one factor: the condition of the market system’ (p. 250). He shows that fascist movements did not become strong enough to represent a serious international threat until the major crisis of the market economy took place. While I maintain that for investigating the rise of a fascist movement, the critique of political economy is indispensable, my objective here is limited, and it concerns a critical conception of the ideological aspects of fascism. That is to say, my attempt here is focused on fascism in the ideological realm, but by no means do I intend to imply that its causes are simply located in the realm of ideology. On the contrary, every fascist ideology, like any other ideological species, is a product of sociohistorical circumstances. By the same token, resisting fascism requires a holistic project to negate the material conditions of domination and dehumanization in addition to political, intellectual, and educational anti-fascist struggles.

Horkheimer (2005) conducted a great deal of ideology critique in relation to fascist phenomena, but he also stated, ‘whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism’ (p. 226). The Frankfurt critical theorists were faithful to Marxist materialism throughout. In their co-authored book, Horkheimer and Adorno point to the systematic generalization of patterns of sameness as something directly related to the mind-numbing standardization within the capitalist modes of material production. They write, ‘the more superfluous physical labor is made by the development of technology, the more enthusiastically it is set up as a model for mental work’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 167). Then, they add,

If, even within the field of logic, the concept stands opposed to the particular as something merely external, anything which stands for difference within society itself must indeed tremble. Everyone is labeled friend or foe. The disregard for the subject makes things easy for the administration. Ethnic groups are transported to different latitudes; Individuals labeled ‘Jew’ are dispatched to the gas chambers. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 167)

In 1976, Terry Eagleton (1976) published an article titled ‘What is Fascism?’ and it opens by stating that ‘Only a few years ago, an article with a title such as this would have seemed of merely historical interest’ (p. 100). Fascism, Eagleton (1976) maintains,

signifies a massive offensive by the bourgeoisie at a time when the working class is disorganised and defensive, betrayed by a reformist leadership, lacking a revolutionary alternative. The ingredients of fascism, then, are multiple: economic and political crisis, proletarian defeat, failure of social democracy, absence or impotence of revolutionary leadership. (p. 102)

Most importantly, Eagleton (1976) realizes that ‘What is common to all fascist formations, however, is the markedly high degree of “relative autonomy which the formation grants to the ideological region”’ (p. 106). He concludes his paper by stating,

if the notoriously loose and emotive use of the term ‘fascist’ common to some sectors of the left is a dangerous political imprecision, it can at least serve to remind us that fascism is never far beneath the surface of bourgeois democracy. (Eagleton, 1976: 108)

Eagleton’s own statement can also serve to remind us that things have worsened so much that his own paper would most likely not find a home in today’s world of peer-reviewed research thanks to the gentrification, if not outright rejection, of Marxist phraseology.

In the 1970s, the totalitarianism theory that had been widely adopted in the West for two decades started to become less and less defendable. Henry Ashby Turner (1972) proposed that fascism should be defined as a reaction to modernization. In terms of his wording, Turner was careful not to sound too confident about what his thesis could accomplish; nonetheless, that thesis soon became the new theory of choice, especially for scholars who were not prepared to entertain the idea of reconsidering their stance on the Marxist theory. Turner’s definition also became the subject of criticism even within the anti-Marxist camp. For instance, through reference to some of the primary sources of the Italian fascists, James Gregor (1974) argues that the modernization theory would not be applicable to Italian Fascism. Gilbert Allardyce, who along with Henry Ashby Turner, James Gregor, and Ernst Nolte comes from the anti-Marxist camp, argues that the Nazis would not be considered fascist according to the modernization theory because they were very enthusiastic about industrialization (Allardyce, 1979: 373). However, Turner (1972) himself shows that a generic definition could not hold up to this kind of analysis because even the two supposedly fundamental models of fascism could not be grouped under the term fascism.

One of Gilbert Allardyce’s (1979) main grievances is that fascism had not been taken seriously and that researchers have not listened to fascists themselves (p. 368). To Allardyce (1979), there is nothing close to a set of common criteria to determine how or why cases other than the Italian and German models should be considered versions of fascism (p. 371). However, his observations could be used to arrive at the exact opposite of the conclusion he puts forward. Namely, precisely because ‘fascism’ cannot be soundly defined as a universal ideology or international movement, fascism should not be attributed exclusively to the interwar period in Europe. Because the position that argues for a historical definition has never lost its appeal in the field, those who argue for a generic definition sound unorthodox in comparison. As I will argue, however, we need to go a step further and leave behind this binary of historical versus generic definitions, which should be considered an orthodox binary despite the critical significance of some of the projects. Instead of the search for a shared ideology called ‘fascism’, as I will conclude, we should think of fascism as a set of characteristics of ideologies that otherwise might have very little in common. Such an approach would provide a way out of what seems to be a deadlock created by the endless, and to a great deal repetitive, debate around historical versus generic definitions of fascism.

Most of the problems from the 1960s to the 1970s have persisted in fascism studies, and somehow the criticisms of the earlier approaches did not lead to an end to the traditional search for a definition. For the last three decades, Roger Griffin’s (1991) work has been widely quoted especially in works that avoid Marxist analysis. Griffin (2018) claims to offer a solution for the problem of definitions, and he situates himself in a supposedly non-orthodox position, admitting that fascism could take new shapes (p. 1). He offers what he calls a ‘palingenetic’ account of fascism based on a ‘definitional minimum’ (Griffin, 1991: 13, 50), but his work does not leave behind the reductionist/idealist approaches. Ultimately, Griffin offers yet another typical definition, and if anything, it is a narrow one. In his supposedly minimalist definition of fascism, revolutionism is included. Here is precisely where the anti-communist strategy surfaces in Griffin’s work as well. Namely, it is the strategy of pairing communism and fascism as belonging to the ‘revolutionary’ species. This strategy continues to provide scholars who tend to sound critical of conservatism but are nonetheless deeply revisionist and anti-Marxist with a convenient discursive avenue to come across, albeit falsely, as unorthodox, or at times even as critical, theorists.

Outside the scholarship that got into propagandist and revisionist habit of pairing fascism with communism, Robert Paxton’s work has been among the influential ones. To Paxton, fascism is a ‘function’, recognizable and traceable political practice. Rejecting the common convention that assumes the existence of particular texts behind every (Western) political movement or phenomenon (Paxton, 1998: 4–5), he maintains that ‘feelings propel fascism more than thought does’ (Paxton, 1998: 6). Fascist movements adamantly impede prospects of both justice and freedom, which speaks to the anti-revolutionary feature at the heart of fascism. Also, fascists’ grievance is that the bourgeoisie is not exploitive enough (Paxton, 1998: 7). Despite the indisputability of these two points, that is, the anti-revolutionary and anti-egalitarian features of fascism, not to mention the continual historical antagonism between fascists and communists across regions and countries, there have been overwhelming attempts to group fascism and communism together. It should go without saying that pairing fascism and communism has been one of the widely adopted strategies of the Cold War era, so the pairing itself does not say anything about fascism, but rather it uses fascism to target communism.

Among recent books written on fascism in the West is Jason Stanley’s (2018) How Fascism Works, which warns the American public about the resemblance between Trumpism and 20th century Fascism and Nazism. Stanley’s arguments for the comparison are both strong and timely. However, the book does not break free from the reductionist problems of the liberal approaches. Of course, he is justified to associate the rise of the new far right with Italian Fascism and German Nazism to draw the general public’s attention to the ensuing threat. That said, this approach makes it easy for others to form counterarguments based on pointing to dissimilarities between today’s fascist movements and the fascist movements of the interwar period of Europe.

What may be recognizable in fascist doctrines is their relationships with the world. For instance, whether religious or secular, Pan-European or Pan-Slavic, Islamist or Hindutva, they are exclusionary, anti-egalitarian, retroactive, and semi-tribalist in terms of a sharp division between the perceived in-group versus out-group. There were substantial differences even between Italian Fascism and German Nazism in terms of their ideological worldviews, as has been explained repeatedly by historians. The rise of movements that have empowered Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, Trump in the United States, and Bolsonaro in Brazil points to the presence of global conditions that have to do with the current phase of capitalism. Therefore, approaches that tend to ignore the political economy of fascism on both regional and global levels will only continue to distort the real threats of fascism and the fascist dimensions of the existing reality.

Fascism as Ideology Form

A critical theory of fascism necessitates a philosophical conceptualization of analysis. As a sociopolitical phenomenon with vague but potentially detectable features, fascism cannot be comprehended as a specific set of philosophical claims. A philosophy may be fascist, but there is not a universal philosophy of fascism. Like ‘totalitarianism’, ‘fascism’ does not denote a particular ideology or philosophy. Also, like ‘totalitarianism’, ‘fascism’ has commonly been reduced to something less than a useful theoretical concept precisely because most of the political theoreticians failed to break free from the discursive authority of state politicians (Ahmed, 2019: 5). The definitional frame of totalitarianism was drawn mainly to mirror the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) policies, thanks to Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book published in 1956, and to a lesser degree Hannah Arendt’s classic published in 1951. Thus, ‘totalitarianism’ was born dead. From the beginning, the referential rigidity was built into the definition rendering it conceptually and analytically useless although it has been serving effectively as an anti-communist propaganda tool. The similarity in the lives of these two terms is that they were deprived of conceptual flexibility from the outset.

Fascism is an orientation characteristic of ideologies that might have nothing in common other than their form. This is exactly why two fascist movements could be fatally opposing each other in their politics. As a matter of fact, it is more likely for fascist ideologies from different geographical contexts to contradict each other and fascist movements from different societies to be aggressively antagonistic toward each other, simply because each side desperately needs an enemy and qualifies to serve as an enemy simultaneously, for instance, Neo-Nazis versus fundamentalist Islamists, or Arianism versus Baathism. What makes the two opposing sides fascist is what they have in common in terms of the nature of their fanaticism, compulsivity, irrationality, intolerance, essentialism, and power-cultism, all of which are ideological characteristics as opposed to ideological specifications.

Therefore, critically examining the form of an ideology is sufficient to determine whether the ideology is fascist or not, regardless of the content of the ideology in terms of its particular similarities or dissimilarities, agreement or disagreement, with the doctrines of any other fascist ideology, including Italian Fascism and German Nazism. Of course, examining the ways in which the content operates can also be useful, but it should not be considered decisive in the diagnosis. For instance, whether the ideology demonizes the Other on the basis of perceived ‘race’, faith, culture, nationality, or gender should be considered as specific qualifications of a particular ideology rather than determining whether the ideology is fascist or not. By the same token, whether the essentialized Other in the ideology is Jew, Arab, Muslim, black, Catholic, Asian, white, Chinese, or some sort of combination such as Native American women, Somali men, or Latin American immigrants, matters only insofar as we study the particularity of a specific case of fascism.

A typological discussion focused on the logic of classification and conceptualization is essential to make my distinction between an ideological form and an ideological system clear. I use ‘form’ in the sense of the compositional frame of a category, that is, the general configuration of entries (with corresponding entities). Each entry that is classified under a particular category/form should be more distinct as a sub-category, and, moving down, the divisions continue from the general to the specific. As the number of specifications increases, the ideological systems become more tangible.

A group of ideologies might be classified in terms of nationalism, but ultimately each nationalist ideology aims for a definitive content in terms of, say, the perceived identity of the ‘national self’ or its other. Also, historically, each nationalist ideology could break into multiple, and conflicting, nationalist ideologies diverging from the original ideology in several ways and to various degrees. At the base level of the categorical divisions, the entries are necessarily different and distinct from each other. If A and B are identical, they should be signified through one signifier/entry. However, what makes a number of entries members of the same group of ideologies is what they have in common. Moving upward in the classification system should structurally correspond to a decrease in content commonalities and an increase in form commonalities.

The higher we look in the vertical classification system, the broader each ‘ism’ is and thus the lower its rate of specifications. That is to say the more we zoom out, the better our perception of the general frames at the expense of the detailed particularities. By the same token, the more we zoom in, the more tangible the identities, the signifiers, become. If we keep zooming in, we will enter a micro-level of resolution discovering that there are other endless units within each entity’s unit and so on. Therefore, classification is meant to be a logical process of composition. The plausibility of any particular system of classification depends on its grasp of the actual compositions of the classified.

This proposition is conceptually straightforward and logically clear but essential to avoid orbiting in endless cycles of debates that are often doomed to endlessly bounce back and forth between semantics and observations, with the former often restricting the latter, thereby prolonging the lifespan of the dominant frame of reference. Often our political debates orbit within this kind of sphere, so awareness of the ways in which concepts are created philosophically is indispensable for both critical analysis and theoretical problematization. A term such as democracy, egalitarianism, or fascism should not be used as if it necessarily denoted one ideology. That would substantially restrict our theoretical abilities and analytic capacities and fatally limit progress in the relevant fields of inquiry. When we describe a system or an ideology as being democratic, we make a specific claim within a relatively general proposition. The system or ideology in question could, for instance, be a liberal democracy, a nationalist democracy, a socialist democracy, a direct democracy, and so on.

The same goes for egalitarian/ism. Vastly different ideologies can be classified under egalitarianism, and it would be false to deduce that those ideologies are identical in terms of their contents. Their similarity is on the class level; it is a similarity of the general form. They all give substantial weight to ‘equality’, each in a different way and to a different degree. A number of egalitarian ideologies could, at the same time, be classified under democratic ideologies, and vice versa. It is possible to designate or soundly argue for recognizing certain socialist ideologies also as democratic ideologies. There have been ideologies and systems described, whether rightly or wrongly, as socialist, but we cannot construct a universal scale of socialism based on socialist ideologies exclusively from a particular geography and history. Socialism continues to be conceptualized and reconceptualized within a large number of worldviews. No historical example of socialism can be seen as an authentic and definitive model.

Similarly, ‘fascism’ can and should be conceived as a class name, a form of ideology, as opposed to a particular ideology or even a relatively small group of ideologies. Of course, the conceptualization concerns the size of the class. As in any other area of political philosophy, the concept-creation and theorization are strongly intertwined. There are many fascist ideologies, and there is an infinite number of other potential fascist ideologies, movements, forces, and systems that could emerge under other circumstances. Therefore, my theorization of fascism will include describing some specific ideological features, but they should be understood in terms of a description of the general ideological frame that contains fascist ideologies. That is to say, in addition to my arguments for ideology form, I will start advancing an account for what might distinguish fascism as an ideological form. The point then is not what fascist ideologies contain (that would be an impossible task), but what general features they have in common. What I aim to do here is to address the ideological manifestation of ‘fascism’, not its origins or circumstances of growth, which would require adequate investigations in multiple fields. Methods that are based on the assumption that the origins of fascism and the reasons of its growth could be found in the so-called history of ideas could not be more misleading because they commit the typical idealist fallacy. Therefore, just to reiterate, this article is not meant to address ‘why’ fascism emerges; instead, it is concerned with the ideological guises of fascism.

Diagnosing Fascism

Conclusion

If we classify ideologies according to their forms, as opposed to contents, fascism would be a form of ideologies indicating some that go back to even before Mussolini, some that are contemporary, and potential ones that could emerge in the future. Two fascist ideologies could be completely opposing each other in terms of their political conflicts, nationalist and religious discourses, and any number of other specifications. Some fascist movements are Aryanists, others are not. Some identify themselves as Christian, Islamist, Hinduist, Buddhist, or Shamanist while others proclaim secularism. Some fascist movements have antagonistic relations with each other while others have both ideological kinship and strategic shared interests. However, none of today’s fascist movements that are worth noting in terms of their relative popularity identify as ‘fascist’. Then, the immediate question that arises is whether there are any good reasons to use the term ‘fascism’ to refer to the particular phenomenon we intend to designate.

‘Fascism’, as a concept, is needed for the purpose of naming and problematizing a phenomenon that is global but has local variations. Because chauvinism is a characteristic aspect of these movements, each one of them necessarily adheres to its own distinct ideology, with particular specifications such as the image of a perceived enemy. Chauvinism necessarily imposes bold particularities on each fascist movement, and in this sense, fascist movements have more differences than similarities. However, what they have in common is precisely their exclusionary, xenophobic, absolutist, and irrational way of perception, which result in various forms of violent discourse, politics, policies, and platforms. The rise of such movements is indeed a global phenomenon. ‘Fascism’ captures the form of this class of ideologies better than any other attempted term including populism, authoritarianism, or extremism, each of which is either too narrow or too broad. Fascist movements are tribalist anti-communist, modern anti-modernist, instrumental-rationalist irrational, and totalitarian automatist. Whenever possible, they make use of democratic means pragmatically to attract the maximum number of people to reach state power, and once in power, they have little regard for democratic institutions and practices.

The formation of an international/ist anti-fascist front is long overdue. The new internationalist force can be inspired by the formulas invented by resistant movements who have been struggling against multiple forms of oppression without falling into a nativist, chauvinist, nationalist, fundamentalist, or capitalist trap. It is simply not true that the age of movements that are at the same time cosmopolitan, egalitarian, and inclusive is over. The social inequalities and political crises that gave rise to the communist and anti-fascist movement about a century ago have only intensified, so it is only rational to expect the persistence of such a movement but of course with new strategies and in other places. What the international left needs to do is to pay closer attention to the margins of the margins to recognize, stand with, and be inspired by such creative movements. ³