The purpose of this book is to clarify the concept of fascism, whose “semantic abuse” consists in applying it indiscriminately to any kind of dictatorships or authoritarian regimes. In Gottfrtied’s eyes, fascism should be historically circumscribed to Europe between the two world wars and, ultimately, to Mussolini’s Italy. Of course, many fascist currents appeared in the 1930s, but a fascist movement and regime, in the most rigorous meaning of the word, only existed in the Mediterranean peninsula between 1922 and 1943. Franco’s Spain, Dolfuss’s Austria, and Salazar’s Portugal, Gottfried explains, were Catholic, authoritarian regimes, much more conservative than fascist. As for German National Socialism, it certainly shared some general features with fascism—radical nationalism, the rejection of democracy and liberalism, anticommunism, and the cult of violence—but it belonged to a different political family: it was “a highly eclectic totalitarian operation, which borrowed from fascism as well as Stalinism and, perhaps most of all, from Hitler’s feverish imagination” (p. 14). Fascism had an enormous impact on interwar Europe, where it had many admirers and became an ideological and political model for intellectuals and politicians, but we should not confuse the original with the copies, mostly bad or spurious imitations. In the 1920s and 1930s, a new form of literary fascist modernism spread in almost all countries of the old continent, where it was embodied by significant writers as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Ernst Jünger, Louis Ferdinand Céline, Robert Brasillach, José Ramiro Ledesma, Oswald Mosley, and others, but only in Italy they became the representatives of a fascist regime.

Having delimited the notion of fascism, the author engages an interesting dialogue with the scholars whose works he considers particularly relevant or more relevant than others. With the exception of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, extensively quoted in a chapter devoted to the psychoanalytic interpretations of fascism, all his interlocutors are conservative historians. For instance, Gottfried almost completely ignores some among the most important historians of fascism like George L. Mosse and Robert O. Paxton, quickly comes to terms with Zeev Sternhell and Emilio Gentile, but devotes great attention to both Ernst Nolte and James A. Gregor, two prolific authors well known respectively for Three Faces of Fascism (1969) and Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century (2004).

According to Gottfried, Nolte was an original thinker, especially when he defined fascism as an attempt to “escape from transcendence,” i.e. a movement that opposed to Marxism and communism a kind of conservative counter-utopia. But emphasizing the “reactive” character of fascism, Nolte did not grasp its revolutionary dimension: fascism did not wish to restore an aristocratic, traditional order; its ambition was to establish a new civilization; it looked toward the future. As for Gregor, he clearly recognizes the revolutionary character of fascism, but assimilates it to Marxism and communism, gathering them into a common form of left totalitarianism. This approach simply erases the ideological discrepancies that radically separate their ideologies and political projects: The Right and the Left are not interchangeable, insofar as they have “essentialist meanings” (p. 152).

On the one hand, fascism is not reducible to barely negative definitions like “escape from transcendence” (Nolte), “anti-Enlightenment” (Sternhell) or “destruction of Reason” (Lukács); on the other hand, its nature cannot be grasped by formulas that unilaterally stress its “revolutionary” character (Gregor) or its modernism, according to an interpretation spread by historians like Roger Griffin and Rainer Zitelmann or even by philosophers like Augusto Del Noce, for whom fascism was the ultimate product of secularization. So, what was fascism? It was a Latin, revolutionary Right, Gottfried answers, which expressed its most original features during its first step, as a movement, and partially blurred its identity when it transformed into a political regime. Since fascism was “a situational rather than a theoretical movement” (p. 136), it would be difficult to distinguish more precise treats or sketch a more restrictive model (what scholars call “generic fascism”). At the end of a book born from the wish to criticize the “semantic abuse” of fascism, such a definition appears quite vague. Gottfried does not offer convincing arguments against the widespread tendency among historians to gather fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal and several other military regimes of the 1930s and 1940s, including Vichy France, into a same fascist “magnetic field” (Philippe Burrin), which obviously did not exclude genetic, ideological, and even political discrepancies. Many of them reasonably think that the differences between Mussolini, Hitler and Franco were probably less fundamental and profound that those that separated Hitler from Stalin, and Nazism from Bolshevism. But Gottfried simply wishes to preserve the authenticity of fascism; he does not seem disturbed by the extensive use—or “semantic abuse”—of the concept of totalitarianism. His refusal to include Franco’s Spain into the category of fascism is all the more debatable that he simply ignores the works of Spanish and Portuguese scholars like Ismael Saz, Julian Casanova, or Antonio Costa Pinto. On the other hand, his denial of the existence of non-European fascisms, notably the military dictatorships of Latin America in the 1970s, is affirmed a priori rather than explained through solid arguments. In his book, the recent, important works of Federico Finchelstein (notably Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–1945, 2010 and The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina, 2014) are not even mentioned. Similarly, he does not pay attention to other controversial but interesting and widely discussed concepts like “conservative revolution” and “reactionary modernism,” which try to analyze the syncretic conflation in fascism of many contradictory elements: revolution and counterrevolution, conservatism and modernism, anti-democracy and mass mobilization, counter-Enlightenment and the search for a third way between capitalism and communism. This debate exists since the 1930s, but Gottfried tends to reduce it to a generic idea of “antimodern modernism,” a variant of Gregor’s interpretation of fascism. Actually, these concepts wish neither to assimilate fascism to the Left nor to present it as a Right imitation of Bolshevism. They try to grasp fascism as a peculiar synthesis between a whole of values inherited from conservatism (authority, hierarchy, order, discipline, obedience, romanticism, tradition, mythical past, etc.) and modernity (industrialism as national strength, militarism as powerful technology, nationalism as biological racism). Fascism was a form of radical nationalism; it conceived the nation as a homogeneous, monolithic and ethnically closed community, embodied by a charismatic leader; its existential philosophy was a form of irrationalism and anti-humanism; it opposed both liberalism and communism, perceiving the latter as a radical version of Enlightenment; its nationalism was militaristic and expansionist; it wished to “re-enchant” the world, as a modern, “steel romanticism” diffused through radio, cinema and mass meetings: from this point of view, the similarities between fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were probably larger than Gottfried would admit. His conservative plea for a rigorous use of the concept of fascism is not very convincing; it provides many stimulating ideas, but it does not resolve the historiographical aporias it points out.