Introduction: the problem of definition

Few concepts in modern history are as indispensable, and as difficult to define, as fascism. The polemical abuse of the term has certainly complicated matters, but the difficulty lies in the historical phenomenon itself. Fascism was at once an ideology, a movement, a regime, a political style, a form of violence, a project of national regeneration, and an experiment in remaking the relationship between state, society and individual. It was born as a specifically Italian movement and regime, yet it quickly became a comparative category. It referred first to Mussolini’s Fasci di combattimento founded in 1919, and then to the Fascist regime; but already in the interwar years, and even more so after 1945, contemporaries and scholars used the term to think about a wider family of movements and regimes.

The historian who defines fascism therefore faces a double problem. A definition that remains too close to the Italian case risks making fascism a proper noun only: fascism as the history of Mussolini’s movement and regime. A definition that moves too far away from Italy risks dissolving fascism into a vague synonym for dictatorship, nationalism, violence, racism, populism or authoritarianism. The problem is to formulate a concept broad enough to allow comparison, yet precise enough to preserve historical specificity.

This tension has shaped the historiography of fascism. Some scholars have sought the ideological core of fascism; others have approached it as a form of political behaviour, a type of regime, a revolutionary movement, a political religion, or a multidimensional syndrome. The result has not been a single universally accepted definition, but a set of overlapping and competing models. Treating these models as rival answers to the same question obscures the fact that they often ask different questions. What did fascists believe? How did fascist movements organise? How did they acquire power? What kind of regime did they seek to build? What distinguished Fascism from conservatism, authoritarianism, nationalism or Nazism? What place should Italian Fascism occupy in a comparative definition?

This article offers an overview of some of the most influential approaches to the definition of fascism, with particular attention to Juan Linz, Stanley Payne, Roger Griffin, Emilio Gentile and Robert Paxton. While intended in part as a critical guide for university students approaching the historiography of fascism, the article also advances a conceptual argument of its own. Its argument is not that one of these approaches should displace the others. Rather, they illuminate different levels of the phenomenon: configuration and typology, ideology, political religion, political process and practice. The difficulty begins when accumulation substitutes for explanation. A list of ideology, violence, mobilisation, political religion, leader cult, national rebirth and regime practice still leaves open the question of why these elements cohered and reinforced one another. Building on my earlier formulation of fascism as a political form (Forlenza Reference Forlenza2025a; Reference Forlenza, Ceci, Gagliardi, Meniconi and Sorgonà2025b), the present article asks what that formulation contributes to the historiographical problem of definition.

Following Claude Lefort’s attention to the symbolic staging of power, I understand political form as the configuration through which authority becomes visible, the social body is imagined, and power is made intelligible (Lefort Reference Lefort and Thompson1986; see also Forlenza Reference Forlenza2019). The argument developed here is that fascism claimed to resolve the crisis of liberal representation, social conflict, war and democratic indeterminacy by producing a new body politic. It did so through three interlocking operations: the political production of the enemy, the mythic reordering of historical time, and the embodiment of authority in a leader whose mode of rule is better understood through the political anthropology of the trickster than through Weberian charismatic authority. At this stage these are hypotheses that orient the inquiry; their analytical meaning emerges only after the principal definitional traditions have been examined.

The article therefore proceeds from historiography to conceptual synthesis. It first examines the problem of Italian and generic fascism and the principal definitional traditions. It then develops the concept of political form, before returning to Italy as the historical laboratory in which that form became visible, and considering the limits of comparison beyond the interwar period.

From Italian Fascism to generic fascism: comparison and portability

The concept of fascism begins with Italy. The Italian case supplied the name, many of the symbols, much of the political vocabulary and part of the institutional repertoire through which fascism became recognisable: blackshirts, squads, party-militia, leader cult, political violence, sacralisation, national rebirth and the ambition to create a new national community (Gentile Reference Gentile1996; Reference Gentile2009; Albanese Reference Albanese2006; Forlenza and Thomassen Reference Forlenza and Thomassen2016a, 119–48).

Yet fascism cannot be understood only as an Italian event. Interwar movements across Europe borrowed from, adapted or competed with the Italian model, while Italian fascism itself developed claims to a wider, even universal political mission (Albanese Reference Albanese and Albanese2021). The rise of national-socialism, the Iron Guard in Romania, the Arrow Cross Party in Hungary, the Falange in Spain and other radical nationalist formations therefore posed a problem that became still more pressing after 1945: whether fascism was specifically Italian or the name of a broader political family.

The move from Italian Fascism to generic fascism is unavoidable but hazardous. If every radical nationalism or dictatorship is called fascist, the category loses specificity; if fascism is identified too closely with Nazism, Italian Fascism appears as an incomplete German case rather than the original laboratory of fascist politics. Earlier comparative work, from Ernst Nolte onwards, already raised the problem of how to relate Italian Fascism, national-socialism and other radical nationalist movements without either collapsing them into a single model or treating them as wholly unrelated political and historical experiences (Nolte Reference Nolte1966; Payne Reference Payne1980; Griffin Reference Griffin1991; Paxton Reference Paxton2004).

The problem can be stated simply: fascism must be defined in a way that explains what Italian Fascism, Nazism and other related movements had in common, without erasing the differences among them. This requires a concept that is neither a mere checklist nor an abstract essence detached from historical practice.

A further difficulty concerns analytical portability. Recent debates oppose those who see fascism as a portable repertoire of practices to those who warn that extension beyond interwar Europe turns the term into a moral epithet (Steinmetz-Jenkins Reference Steinmetz-Jenkins2024; Traverso Reference Traverso2019; Greenberg Reference Greenberg2023; Berezin Reference Berezin2024). If fascism travels too easily, almost any anti-pluralist nationalism can be assimilated to it; if it does not travel at all, the category loses the comparative force it acquired almost from its emergence.

The task is to identify the level at which comparison becomes meaningful. Fascism cannot be detached from the conditions that produced it, but neither does comparison require the reproduction of interwar institutions, symbols or social bases. The Italian case matters because it reveals the making of a political form; portability depends on comparing configurations of authority rather than isolated resemblances.

Earlier interpretive traditions

Before the postwar definitional models associated with Linz, Payne, Griffin, Gentile and Paxton, many central problems had already been formulated by fascism’s contemporaries. Marxists, liberals, socialists and antifascists debated fascism as counter-revolution, crisis of liberalism, new mass politics and symptom of national or civilisational decay. Later historiography therefore inherited categories formed within the political struggles of the interwar years. The language of decline itself was contemporary rather than a later historiographical imposition: Spengler’s The Decline of the West turned civilisational decay into a diagnosis of the age, while Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation registered a parallel crisis discourse from the socialist left (Spengler Reference Spengler1918–1922; Webb and Webb Reference Webb and Webb1923).

Marxist interpretations, from Antonio Gramsci onward, treated fascism as counter-revolution, capitalist reaction or a violent response to socialism and working-class mobilisation. They defined it less by ideological content than by historical function: the destruction of the labour movement and preservation of class power. Whatever their limitations, such readings kept real conflicts over labour, land and revolution at the centre of explanation.

Liberal and democratic interpretations likewise had roots in contemporary antifascism. Piero Gobetti and Carlo Rosselli treated fascism as a revelation of weaknesses within Italian liberalism and of the unresolved problem of mass participation (Baldoli Reference Baldoli2026). Later accounts of fascism as an assault on constitutional government and pluralism inherited much from these diagnoses, formed within a wider European language of decadence, massification and crisis of authority.

Postwar theories of totalitarianism, from Hannah Arendt and Jacob Talmon to Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, emphasised the single party, leader cult, terror, propaganda and transformative ambition. Yet the category could flatten differences between regimes and between aspiration and achievement. In the Italian debate, Emilio Gentile (Reference Gentile2005) treats totalitarianism as constitutive of Fascism’s project. Other influential histories approached the regime through its institutional construction and political accommodations: Aquarone (Reference Aquarone1965) reconstructed the Fascist state as a structure gradually made through legal and administrative transformation, while Lyttelton (Reference Lyttelton1973) traced the seizure and consolidation of power through violence, elite accommodation and the subversion of the liberal order. Bosworth (Reference Bosworth1998) later stressed more strongly the discrepancy between totalitarian claims and the regime’s compromises and uneven social reach. These perspectives do not negate Gentile’s emphasis on totalitarian ambition; they caution against treating project, institutional form and social achievement as identical.

Social and political historians shifted attention toward war, veterans’ mobilisation, class conflict, institutional weakness and local violence. Studies of squadrismo and violence under dictatorship show in particular that coercion was not merely a prelude to regime consolidation but helped constitute Fascist political and social relations (Franzinelli Reference Franzinelli2003; Reichardt Reference Reichardt2009; Millan Reference Millan2014; Ebner Reference Ebner2011). Such approaches illuminate emergence and practice even when they do not offer generic definitions.

Renzo De Felice, meanwhile, insisted on Fascism’s historical specificity, revolutionary and modernising ambitions, and the distinction between movement and regime (De Felice Reference De Felice1966–1968; Reference De Felice and Ledeen1975; Reference De Felice2005). One need not accept all his conclusions to recognise how decisively he changed the debate. Recent syntheses still move among these inherited interpretive problems (Baldoli Reference Baldoli2023); the later definitional literature sought to specify more precisely the morphology that made fascism recognisable.

Juan Linz and multidimensional definitions

Juan Linz resists the reduction of fascism to a single essence and treats fascism as a multidimensional phenomenon, a configuration of ideological, organisational, social and stylistic elements. In his view, fascist movements were ‘latecomers on the political scene, at the time when, in most countries, the party system had already been crystallized’. Consequently, fascism was forced into an anti-system position and unfolded as an anti-ideology. He writes:

The passage is useful less as a doctrinal formula than as a map of interrelated features. By a ‘multidimensional syndrome’, Linz does not mean a medical diagnosis, but a recurrent configuration whose ideological, organisational, social and stylistic dimensions acquire meaning in combination. Rather than defining fascism by one doctrine, he identifies a cluster of characteristics that, taken together, distinguish fascist movements from other forms of authoritarian or nationalist politics. Fascism, in this perspective, is more than a regime type; nor is it reducible to a coherent philosophical doctrine. It is a political configuration of negations, aspirations, organisational forms and modes of action.

The strength of this approach lies in its flexibility. It allows historians to compare movements without requiring that each case reproduce exactly the Italian or German model. It recognises that fascist movements developed within different national contexts and therefore varied in ideology, social composition, religious orientation, relationship to monarchy or army, and degree of radicalisation.

Linz’s approach is also valuable because it captures the liminal quality of fascism. Fascist movements stood between revolution and reaction, mass politics and hierarchy, modern activism and mythic restoration, party and militia, state and movement. They borrowed from socialism while destroying the socialist movement; they allied with conservative elites while denouncing conservative weakness; they used modern propaganda while invoking archaic symbols of blood, sacrifice and destiny. A multidimensional definition can accommodate this hybrid character better than definitions that begin with a single ideological principle.

The limitation is the opposite side of the same strength. A multidimensional definition can identify recurring traits, but it may struggle to say which are essential and which are contingent. If fascism is defined by a cluster of features, how many must be present? Which features carry more weight? Is violence essential, or simply frequent? Is palingenetic nationalism central, or merely one component? Linz’s approach remains valuable precisely because it frames these questions rather than closing them down. It invites the historian to think of fascism as a configuration, but it does not fully explain the logic through which the configuration cohered.

Stanley Payne and typological clarity

Stanley Payne offered one of the most systematic typological definitions of fascism. For him, fascism may be defined as a

His approach organises fascism around three broad categories: its negations, its ideology and goals, and its style and organisation (Payne Reference Payne1980).

Payne’s first category concerns fascism’s negations: anti-liberalism, anti-communism and hostility to traditional conservatism. Fascism rejected liberal democracy as weak, divisive, materialistic and decadent, and Marxism as internationalist and destructive of national unity. Its relation to conservatism was more complicated. Fascists often allied with conservative elites, monarchists, industrialists, landowners, officers and religious authorities, yet their politics was activist, mobilising and revolutionary in ambition rather than simply preservative. They sought to create actively a new national order rather than defend existing hierarchies.

The second category concerns positive goals: national rebirth, authoritarian state-building, a new political elite, corporatist integration, militarism, imperial expansion and the overcoming of class conflict through national solidarity. Fascism claimed to offer a third way beyond liberalism and socialism: unity where liberalism produced division, authority where democracy produced weakness, action where parliament produced talk, and national destiny where modern society appeared fragmented.

The third concerns style and organisation: mass mobilisation, paramilitary violence, leader principle, youth, vitality, spectacle, discipline, uniforms, symbols and the celebration of action. Such theatricality was substantive. Rituals, marches, funerals, salutes, songs and uniforms were means of producing belonging and obedience, transforming politics into an experience of faith, combat and collective identity rather than serving as a decoration for an ideological programme.

Payne’s contribution is a comparative morphology capacious enough to include variation while excluding mere authoritarianism or nationalism. Its limit is that recurring traits can become a checklist: the typology identifies what appears together more readily than why those elements reinforce one another.

Roger Griffin and the ideological core

Roger Griffin’s definition of fascism as ‘palingenetic ultranationalism’ is perhaps the most influential attempt to identify fascism’s ideological minimum. In his view

The phrase is deliberately concise. ‘Palingenesis’ refers to rebirth, regeneration or renewal; ‘ultranationalism’ refers to an extreme, mobilising and often exclusionary nationalism. For Griffin, fascism is defined by the myth that the nation, conceived as an organic community, has fallen into decadence and must be reborn through revolutionary transformation.

This definition has several advantages. First, it identifies the revolutionary dimension of fascism. Fascism cannot be reduced to a defence of the old order. It often borrowed from conservative language and formed alliances with conservative forces, but its self-understanding was regenerative and transformative. It sought a new order, a new state, a new elite, and often a new human type. Secondly, Griffin’s definition explains the centrality of crisis in fascist discourse. Fascism imagines the present as a moment of decline, humiliation, corruption or dissolution. Liberalism, socialism, materialism, individualism, feminism, cosmopolitanism and parliamentary compromise are presented as symptoms of national decay. Thirdly, the definition explains fascism’s orientation toward violence. Violence acquires a regenerative meaning, becoming a means of purification, renewal and heroic action.

Griffin’s approach is powerful because it identifies a generative myth behind many fascist practices. The cult of youth, the leader, the new man, the paramilitary squad, the glorification of sacrifice, the contempt for parliamentary politics, and the promise to overcome class conflict all become intelligible as expressions of a myth of national rebirth. Rather than a reaction, against modernity, Fascism was a form of alternative modernity, a project that sought to use modern techniques of mobilisation, propaganda, organisation and state power to overcome what fascists perceived as the decadence of liberal modern civilisation (Griffin Reference Griffin2007; see also Forlenza and Thomassen Reference Forlenza and Thomassen2016a, 137–141).

Yet Griffin’s definition also requires expansion. Palingenesis was not only an ideological myth. It was also a temporal practice. Fascism proclaimed the rebirth of the nation and reorganised historical experience so that rebirth appeared necessary. The Great War became the crucible of national renewal. The March on Rome became the beginning of a new era. Ancient Rome became not a distant past but a living archetype. Liberal Italy became a period of decadence awaiting Fascist fulfilment. Through calendars, exhibitions, rituals, architecture, archaeology and pedagogy, Fascism sought to master the disorientation produced by war and postwar crisis by reorganising the relation between past, present and future (Fogu Reference Fogu2003; Clark Reference Clark2019, 194–198; Forlenza and Thomassen Reference Forlenza and Thomassen2017, 300–301). Germinario has recently pushed this temporal dimension further, interpreting Fascist political culture through activism and a discontinuous, accelerated conception of revolution and history, distinct from both liberal gradualism and socialist teleology and indebted in important ways to the fascist appropriation of the French political theorist Georges Sorel (Germinario Reference Germinario2023).

The limitation of Griffin’s definition is therefore not that it is wrong, but that it operates primarily at the level of ideological core. It identifies the mythic centre of fascism with great precision, but gives less attention to the practices through which a myth of rebirth reorganised historical experience and became a source of authority. How did rebirth become embodied in ritual, space, violence, law, spectacle and leadership? How did fascism make contingency appear as destiny without ever bringing revolutionary time to rest? These questions require a shift from ideology alone toward political form.

Emilio Gentile: political religion and the totalitarian experiment

Emilio Gentile’s work is indispensable for any definition of fascism, not least because it restores Italian Fascism to the centre of the debate. Against interpretations that reduce Mussolini’s regime to opportunism, rhetoric or theatrical dictatorship, Gentile insists on the ideological seriousness and transformative ambition of Fascism. Italian Fascism, in his interpretation, was a revolutionary nationalist movement that sought to sacralise politics, create a new political civilisation, and transform Italians into fascist subjects (Gentile Reference Gentile1996; Reference Gentile2003; Reference Gentile2005; Reference Gentile2009). As the culmination of a long scholarly journey, and explicitly adopting a multidimensional approach, he defines fascism as a

Gentile’s concept of political religion is especially important. Fascism did not use symbols instrumentally; it invested the nation, state, party, leader and martyrs with sacred meaning. Ceremonies, calendars, myths, songs, architecture, uniforms and rites became instruments for producing faith, devotion and belonging rather than decorative additions to power. Fascist politics sought to occupy an emotional and symbolic space conventionally associated with religion, even while coexisting and competing with established religious institutions.

Gentile also makes the party-militia central. Fascism was born in violence, and the squadrist experience shaped its identity, its understanding of politics as combat and its claim to represent the true nation against internal enemies. The party-militia fused activism, discipline, faith and coercion in an organisation that was neither traditional party nor regular army.

Equally central is Fascism as a totalitarian experiment: not the achievement of total control, but an ambition and political project. It sought to subordinate individual and collective life to the state, fascistise institutions, reshape culture, education, leisure and youth, and create a new Italian. The regime’s compromises and unevenness therefore qualify the extent of the project without cancelling its transformative ambition or allowing aspiration and achievement to be treated as the same thing.

Gentile thus connects ideology, ritual, organisation and regime-building, showing how the myth of national regeneration became political religion and a project of anthropological transformation. In this sense his work extends an ideological definition such as Griffin’s by demonstrating how rebirth was translated into organisations, rites, institutions and forms of subjectivity.

Yet Gentile’s concept of political religion can be pushed further by stressing that sacralisation operated not only through positive rites of communion, but also through negative rites of separation. Fascism did not create the sacred community only by celebrating unity, martyrs, rituals and faith. It also created that community by identifying enemies, staging their exclusion, and representing their removal as the restoration of moral and political health. The enemy was not an afterthought. It was constitutive of the fascist social body.

The nation was imagined not simply as a cultural community promised from the Risorgimento, nor as a juridical association of citizens, but as an organism whose unity had to be made, defended and continually purified. Socialists, communists, anarchists, Slovenes and Croats in the borderlands, Jews after the racial laws of 1938, and other figures of alterity were not merely opponents of the regime. They were represented as contaminants. Through squad violence, juridical ritual, the Special Tribunal, confino (internal exile), and the cult of fascist martyrs, the regime made the boundaries of the political community visible as a drama of purity and pollution, sacrifice and incorporation (Forlenza and Thomassen Reference Forlenza and Thomassen2025).

Robert Paxton: fascism as a process and a practice

Robert Paxton’s approach begins from a different concern. He is sceptical of definitions that rely too heavily on doctrine, because fascist doctrine was often fluid, contradictory and opportunistic. Fascist movements adapted their language according to circumstance; they made alliances with forces they had previously denounced; they radicalised, compromised and improvised. For him, fascism is best understood through political behaviour and historical process. He writes:

His famous five-stage model traces fascism from the emergence of the movement to its rooting in political systems, to the seizure of power, the exercise of power, and finally radicalisation or entropy (Paxton Reference Paxton1998). This approach shifts the question from ‘What did fascists say?’ to ‘What did fascists do, and under what conditions did they succeed?’ It also prevents scholars from treating fascist victory as inevitable. Fascist movements did not come to power simply because their myths were persuasive or their leaders charismatic. They required crisis, institutional weakness, elite collaboration, fear of socialism, the normalisation of violence, and the failure or refusal of existing political actors to defend liberal democracy.

Paxton’s definition emphasises mobilising passions: fear of decline, humiliation, victimhood, the need for authority, the supremacy of the group, the legitimacy of violence, and the belief that the nation must be purified or strengthened through struggle. For Paxton, fascism is a form of political practice that mobilises emotions, creates enemies, and transforms resentment into action.

The great strength of Paxton’s approach is that it distinguishes between fascist movements and fascist regimes, a distinction that, for the Italian case, recalls Renzo De Felice’s insistence on the difference between fascism as movement and fascism as regime (De Felice Reference De Felice and Ledeen1975). Many movements displayed fascist characteristics; fewer became rooted in political systems; fewer still came to power; and only some exercised power in ways that radicalised the fascist project. This distinction is essential because fascism changes as it moves from marginal activism to mass politics, from street violence to coalition building, from opposition to government, and from government to war.

Paxton is also important because he places contingency at the centre of analysis. Fascism did not triumph because of an irresistible logic. It came to power where certain conditions converged: mass politics after war, fear of revolution, delegitimation of liberal elites, elite collaboration, institutional weakness, and the availability of political violence. The history of fascism is therefore not only a history of fascists. It is also a history of those who tolerated, enabled, normalised, financed or underestimated them.

The limitation of Paxton’s approach is that, in correcting for overly ideological definitions, it may understate the internal coherence of fascist myth. Fascist movements were indeed opportunistic, but their opportunism operated within a recognisable imaginary of national rebirth, struggle, authority and purification. Nor did the transition from movement to regime simply replace violent mobilisation with orderly administration: violence persisted in more ordinary, institutional and dispersed forms under the dictatorship (Ebner Reference Ebner2011). Paxton shows how fascism worked and changed through stages; Griffin and Gentile help explain why its practices possessed meaning for those who enacted and supported them.

Paxton’s processual analysis therefore needs to be connected to a theory of authority. Fascist practice produced a world in which violence appeared regenerative, enemies appeared necessary, compromise could be represented as decision, and political contradictions could be embodied in the leader.

What definitions reveal and conceal

The major definitions of fascism are best understood not as mutually exclusive alternatives but as analyses conducted at different levels. Their disagreements are real, but they often become exaggerated when ideology, typology, political religion and process are treated as if they were competing answers to precisely the same question.

Griffin captures the myth of national rebirth without which fascism becomes difficult to distinguish from authoritarian nationalism. Yet ideological core alone cannot explain how fascist projects became organised practices of domination or why they succeeded politically in some contexts and failed in others.

Linz and Payne provide comparative clarity by identifying recurrent combinations of anti-liberalism, anti-socialism, militarism, mass mobilisation, paramilitary organisation and national regeneration. Their strength is morphological; their risk is that configuration becomes inventory unless we can explain what makes the elements mutually reinforcing.

Gentile shows how myth was translated into political religion, organisation, ritual and totalitarian ambition. His approach is particularly powerful for the Italian case, but sacralisation also has to be connected to coercion, exclusion and the production of enemies if the sacred community is not to appear detached from domination.

Paxton, finally, makes contingency and political process central: fascism emerges, allies, governs and radicalises rather than unfolding from an ideological blueprint. Yet process still requires a criterion of specifically fascist coherence if it is to remain distinct from authoritarian or nationalist trajectories more generally.

The strongest approach is therefore cumulative, but its value lies in explaining how the dimensions relate, not in adding them together. Fascism was simultaneously ideology, movement, practice, violence, political religion and regime. The remaining question is how these dimensions cohered as a particular mode of producing authority. It is at this point – after rather than before the major definitions have been reconstructed – that the concept of political form becomes analytically useful.

Fascism as a political form

The definitions examined so far clarify different dimensions of fascism: Linz and Payne its configuration, Griffin its regenerative myth, Gentile its sacralising and totalitarian ambitions, Paxton its process and contingency. Political form does not replace these approaches. It asks what ordering logic allowed ideology, violence, ritual, historical myth and leadership to become mutually reinforcing forms of authority.

By political form I mean the symbolic and practical configuration through which power becomes visible, the social body is imagined and authority made intelligible. Here Lefort is load-bearing. Democracy leaves the place of power symbolically empty and recognises social division and indeterminacy; totalitarianism seeks to abolish that indeterminacy by imagining society as a body unified with itself and embodying power in party and leader (Lefort Reference Lefort and Thompson1986). Fascism can be read historically as an attempt to perform such closure under conditions of war, social conflict and liberal crisis.

A checklist cannot explain how violence became regenerative, exclusion restorative, contingency destiny, or contradiction a source of authority. Political form directs attention to the logic through which these elements were made to cohere.

Italian Fascism made three interlocking operations particularly visible: the political production of the enemy, the mythic reordering of historical time, and the embodiment of authority in Mussolini. The enemy bounded the community; mythic time made rule appear necessary; the leader translated conflict and rupture into sovereign decision.

The first operation was the political production of the enemy. ‘Production’ does not mean inventing adversaries who did not exist: the conflicts of postwar Italy and their protagonists were real. Fascism recoded those conflicts as an existential division between the healthy nation and forces represented as alien, contaminated or treacherous. The enemy became a figure through whose exclusion national unity was made visible. This connects political religion to coercion. Enemy and martyr belonged to the same sacrificial logic: one was expelled as contamination, the other incorporated as sacred continuity. Violence, funerals, juridical ritual and confino produced the people-as-one through exclusion and incorporation (Forlenza and Thomassen Reference Forlenza and Thomassen2025).

The second operation was the mythic reordering of historical time. The Great War became the crucible of rebirth, the March on Rome the beginning of a new era, ancient Rome a living archetype and liberal Italy an interval of decadence. Fascist novelty presented itself as resurrection: a future authorised by an origin the regime claimed to recover and complete. Griffin’s palingenesis is indispensable, but political form asks how it was enacted through calendars, exhibitions, archaeology, architecture, education and ritual. Germinario’s account of activism and discontinuous historical time further shows a politics of renewed beginnings rather than movement toward a settled end (Germinario Reference Germinario2023). Fascism promised to overcome disorientation while repeatedly reproducing rupture.

The third operation was the embodiment of authority in Mussolini. Much of the historiography has described Mussolini as a charismatic leader, most explicitly Gentile (Reference Gentile1998; see also Gundle, Duggan and Pieri Reference Gundle, Duggan and Pieri2013), while more recent work has approached charisma through the emotional and revolutionary dynamics that bound political leaders and followers (Manfredi and Papadia Reference Manfredi and Papadia2021). These studies have considerably enriched the analysis of fascist leadership by moving beyond a simple notion of personality cult. Nevertheless, the application of charismatic authority to Mussolini, and more broadly to twentieth-century dictators (Costa Pinto, Eatwell and Larsen Reference Costa Pinto, Eatwell and Larsen2013; Kershaw Reference Kershaw2022), is analytically misleading and fundamentally wrong. In a thin descriptive sense, ‘charismatic’ can register the fact that followers attributed extraordinary qualities to the Duce and invested him with intense affective devotion. But that observation names an effect of fascist politics more readily than it explains the particular logic through which Mussolini fashioned and exercised authority. Weberian charisma centres on recognition of an extraordinary personal quality and mission, the suspension of ordinary rules, and eventually the problem of routinisation. Those features do not adequately capture the characteristic instability of Mussolini’s political persona or his systematic capacity to blur the distinctions on which ordinary political judgement depends.

Trickster politics identifies a different logic of extraordinary leadership. The concept is not new and is not introduced here as such; it draws on a wider anthropological genealogy, from Radin’s classic study and Hyde’s account of the trickster to Szakolczai’s analysis of permanent trickster liminality, and has also been applied to modern politics (Radin Reference Radin1956; Hyde Reference Hyde1998; Szakolczai Reference Szakolczai2017; Horvath Reference Horvath2013; Armbrust Reference Armbrust2013; Forlenza and Thomassen Reference Forlenza and Thomassen2016b; Forlenza Reference Forlenza2021, 524–525). Charisma and trickster politics may both become possible under conditions of crisis and liminality, but crisis is the condition of their emergence, not what defines their distinctive political logic. The trickster inhabits the in-between: he crosses boundaries, shifts positions, manipulates distinctions between truth and falsehood, order and disorder, legality and violence, outsider and establishment. Rather than resolving liminality, trickster authority can reproduce and intensify it, presenting the leader as the only actor capable of mastering the confusion on which his own authority increasingly depends.

This is also why trickster politics cannot be reduced to opportunism. Political opportunism describes the instrumental adjustment of positions to changing circumstances. Mussolini certainly did that, but the relevant pattern goes further. His political trajectory repeatedly traversed boundaries that ordinary political classification treated as incompatible: socialist and nationalist, neutralist and interventionist, anticlerical agitator and architect of the Lateran settlement, republican adversary of monarchy and head of government under the king, revolutionary leader and guarantor of state order. The point is not the reversals taken one by one; it is the recurrent conversion of boundary-crossing itself into a claim to mastery. Mussolini did not finally resolve the contradictions among revolution, monarchy, Church, violence and state legality. He occupied them, and his capacity to move across them could be represented as proof that only the Duce was sufficiently unconstrained to decide where ordinary politics remained paralysed.

Taken together, these three operations yield the following definition:

This formulation retains Linz’s configuration, Payne’s morphology, Griffin’s rebirth, Gentile’s sacralisation and Paxton’s contingency, but asks how they became a coherent form of authority rather than coexisting traits. Nor does political form detach fascism from the interwar world. It was produced under specific conditions of war, mass mobilisation, fear, elite complicity and liberal breakdown. More than just the first example of a generic phenomenon, Italy served as the definitive laboratory where this configuration first became visible.

This argument builds on my earlier account of fascism as a political form (Forlenza Reference Forlenza2025a) but asks a different question. Rather than how the form might outlive the regime, the issue here is how it reorganises the historiographical problem of definition. The contribution lies not in claiming novelty for the trickster concept, but in bringing enemy production, temporal reordering and trickster sovereignty together as an account of fascist authority.

The Italian laboratory and the comparative problem

The Italian case is foundational yet often displaced. In much Anglo-American understanding, Nazism becomes the implicit paradigm because of the Second World War and Holocaust, the ‘moral narrative’ of the twentieth century (Maier Reference Maier2000, 826). The result is a conceptual inversion in which Italian fascism appears a less radical German case, although historically it was the original model and laboratory – Italy’s gift to the world, as Mussolini liked to see it. Postwar Italian memory, with its contrast between the ‘bad German’ and ‘good Italian’, further obscured that sequence (Focardi Reference Focardi2013; see also Forlenza Reference Forlenza2012).

Italian fascism established many elements later associated with generic fascism – party-militia, leader cult, political violence, national rebirth, sacralisation, corporatism and the ambition to create a new civilisation – while also projecting universalising claims beyond Italy. Its importance lies not only in chronological priority but in the density with which the political form became visible there.

The regime’s compromises with monarchy, Church, army, economic elites and bureaucracy are especially revealing. De Felice’s movement/regime distinction captures the tension between revolutionary ambition and institutional accommodation (De Felice Reference De Felice and Ledeen1975). These compromises limited the regime’s transformative capacity, but they did not make fascism merely conservative or opportunistic; rather, they expose the distance between ideological aspiration and institutional reality that marked fascism in power. At the level of leadership, the same tension illuminates trickster politics: Mussolini could be revolutionary and restorer of order, republican in origin and prime minister of the king, former anticlerical and the statesman of the Lateran settlement. Such contradictions became part of a performance in which the Duce appeared able to move between constraints binding ordinary actors.

Fascist violence likewise cannot be reduced to movement origins or wartime radicalisation. It marked the destruction of socialist and Catholic organisations, squadrist occupations, colonial conquest and racial-imperial policies, and persisted under dictatorship in administrative, policing and everyday forms (Franzinelli Reference Franzinelli2003; Millan Reference Millan2014; Reichardt Reference Reichardt2009). Violence was at once instrumental and symbolic: it destroyed opponents, but also created fascist identity, occupied and marked political space, and taught militants and supporters to imagine politics as combat and the nation as a community forged through struggle.

The Great War supplied the experiential grammar. Fascists represented the trenches as the ordeal in which liberal divisions had been overcome by sacrifice and the birthplace of a new trincerocrazia (rule of the trenches). Caporetto could likewise become a threshold of national regeneration, joining the external enemy at the front to the internal enemy at home in a single moral geography (Gibelli Reference Gibelli2007; Wilcox Reference Wilcox and MacLeod2008; Gerwarth Reference Gerwarth2016).

Italian fascism should therefore not be treated as preliminary or incomplete fascism. It was the first historical realisation of a politics combining enemy production, sacralised violence, reordered time and embodied sovereign performance. Italy matters to generic fascism because it allows those operations to be reconstructed historically rather than inferred from an abstract checklist.

Borderlines: fascism, authoritarianism, populism, nationalism

A definition of fascism must clarify neighbouring phenomena. Fascism shared languages and practices with conservatism, authoritarianism, military dictatorship, populism and nationalism and overlapped historically with Nazism, but cannot be collapsed into any of them without losing what made it distinctive.

Its relationship with conservatism was ambiguous. Fascists allied with conservative forces and defended hierarchy, property and nation, yet attacked traditional elites as weak and parliamentary. Conservatives generally sought order and demobilisation; fascists claimed to regenerate the nation through mobilisation, violence and a new political order.

The distinction from authoritarianism is similar. Many authoritarian regimes seek obedience, demobilisation and stability; fascism sought mass mobilisation, belief and anthropological transformation. Its aim was not political demobilisation but the remaking of citizens as organised masses, militants and believers. Its domination was therefore not only repressive but pedagogical, ritualised and transformative, even when participation was orchestrated from above.

Fascism also differed from military dictatorship, even if it glorified war and hierarchy. Its characteristic organisation was the party-militia, fusing paramilitary violence, ideological mobilisation, spectacle and leader cult rather than ruling primarily through the institutional authority of the army.

Populism captures only part of the repertoire. Fascists could oppose a virtuous people to corrupt elites, but fascism added a more specific project: palingenesis, sacralised violence, paramilitary organisation, destruction of pluralism and the ambition to create a new state and human type. Where populist language may moralise the division between people and elite, fascism radicalises political antagonism into a struggle over national regeneration, purification and destiny.

All fascisms are nationalist, but not all nationalisms are fascist. Fascist nationalism is palingenetic, anti-liberal, anti-socialist, mobilising and exclusionary: it represents the nation as wounded or contaminated and seeks regeneration through struggle and purification.

Fascism cannot be equated with Nazism, although Nazism belongs within the fascist family. National-socialism radicalised biological racism, antisemitism, genocidal imperialism and the racial state in historically distinctive ways. A generic definition must include Nazism without allowing the German case to define the entire phenomenon.

These distinctions raise the threshold for comparison. Authoritarianism, nationalism, racism, violence or leader cult do not individually make a movement fascist. What matters is not the presence of isolated traits but their convergence and political relationship: whether they become mutually reinforcing elements of a mode of authority that produces organic community through enemy-making, temporal closure and embodied sovereign performance. This is precisely why a political-form approach is more demanding than analogy by resemblance.

The same applies to the presentist debate. A contemporary movement need not reproduce interwar institutions to be comparable, but resemblance alone is insufficient. The question is whether, under different historical conditions, a comparable configuration of political operations is being reactivated. Political form therefore makes portability possible while making it more demanding.

Conclusion: definition as historical judgment

Defining fascism is not an exercise in abstraction alone. It is a form of historical judgment. The term must be precise enough to distinguish fascism from authoritarianism, nationalism, conservatism, populism and dictatorship, but flexible enough to account for variation across cases and for change over time. The historiographical models examined here remain indispensable because they identify different dimensions of the phenomenon rather than supplying mutually exclusive answers.

The contribution of political form is to explain their coherence. Fascism sought to transform the openness of modern mass politics into an ordered body politic by converting conflict into enemyhood, historical contingency into mythic necessity, and political instability into embodied sovereign authority. These operations were historically specific to the crises from which fascism emerged, yet their configuration helps explain why the category acquired comparative force beyond Italy almost immediately.

The Mussolini problem is central to this definition. The language of charisma records the devotion invested in the Duce but, I have argued, obscures the particular logic of his authority. Trickster politics directs attention instead to boundary-crossing, ambivalence, manipulation and the perpetuation of liminality. Mussolini did not resolve the contradictions of fascism; he occupied them and converted his mobility across them into a claim to sovereign decision. That is not a decorative metaphor for opportunism, but one element of the political form through which fascism made instability governable while continually reproducing it.

To define fascism, then, is to reconstruct the historical logic connecting myth, violence, organisation, time and power. The Italian case remains indispensable because it was the first laboratory in which this configuration of authority became visible. Historical specificity is therefore not the obstacle to comparison. It is what makes disciplined comparison possible – and what prevents ‘fascism’ from becoming either a museum label confined to 1922–1945 or an all-purpose name for political evil.