What Is Fascism? A historian parses the origins of an ideology.

• Date: 01 October 2022
• Author: Hatheway, Jay
• Published date: 01 October 2022
• Author: Hatheway, Jay

Political discourse in the United States today includes many references to fascism, a term that is frequently misunderstood. This essay is a brief introduction to what was meant historically, in contrast to the ways the term is being used today. While there are similarities, the differences are stark enough.

Fascism is a closed ideological system that places the state and the nation at the center of all human life. Classical fascism was developed in the early 1920s in Italy, by Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini, in the aftermath of World War One. But the origins of fascism can be traced back to a negative reception of the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Enlightenment began as a philosophical movement in Great Britain and France, in response to the rise of a new capitalist class of merchants who challenged the power of the crown and demanded the "right of the individual" to economic and political self-determination. The movement, however, was rejected by a number of Europeans who believed the new order was destructive to a Western culture then based upon Christianity and hierarchy. The followers of German philosopher Karl Marx, beginning in the mid-1800s, also rejected this novel social order, as did those who espoused an extreme form of...