What is Fascism?
The third lecture in my new course, "Hitler and Stalin today."
For about twenty years, fascism seemed like the future for millions of people. It was a way of appealing to the past that was mystical and inspiring; it was a way of seizing the future by taking technology and pushing it towards dreams of rapid military conquest. Fascism reacted to and in some ways admired Bolshevism: it borrowed the idea of the one-party state and of a revolution based not so much on interests and history as on will and conjuncture. Fascism was a way of seeing the world that denied reason—preferring conspiratorial thinking and the arbitrary choice of enemies—and so is hard to define precisely; but what cannot be denied is that this way of seeing the world is gaining followers now.
Welcome to the third lecture of my new lecture series, “Hitler and Stalin Today.”
This lecture is titled “What is Fascism” and is taught by my colleague, Marci Shore.
Below are the readings that go along with this week.
Thank you for engaging with these lectures. I hope you enjoy them.
Below are some more of my works if you’d be interested in reading:
Many definitions are possible.
Mine is a system of governance that interprets the state's legal monopoly as violence as a legal means.
Concepts like due process, precedent, fairness become irrelevant and the use or threat of violence, not as a last resort, but as primary tool of policy, is the defining feature. Sometimes this is initially cloaked in a legal veneer, but this inexorably changes from "for what crimes should we sanction violence" to "what crimes can we create to justify violence".
We do better to understand fascism as a product of a particular time and place. Understanding it in its historical context will better empower us to deal with the authoritarianism that threatens us today.