What Is Fascism? Definition, History and Key Features

A short definition

Britannica describes fascism as a political ideology and mass movement that dominated much of central, southern and eastern Europe between 1919 and 1945. It was born in Italy under Benito Mussolini and reached its most extreme form in Nazi Germany.

In plain terms, fascism is a movement that:

• Treats the nation, often defined by ethnicity or race, as the highest value, above the individual and above any class
• Rejects liberal democracy, parliaments and political pluralism as weak and divisive
• Rejects Marxism and class struggle, which it sees as splitting the nation
• Puts a single, charismatic leader at the top of a mass party
• Glorifies action, discipline, youth, strength and often war
• Uses propaganda, paramilitary violence and, once in power, a police state

The name comes from the Italian fascio, a bundle or group, and from the Latin fasces, a bundle of rods around an axe carried before magistrates in ancient Rome as a symbol of authority. The image was meant to suggest strength through unity.

Origins in Mussolini's Italy

Fascism grew out of the chaos that followed World War I. Italy had been on the winning side but felt cheated by the peace settlement. Strikes, factory occupations and fear of a socialist revolution swept the country in 1919 and 1920.

Mussolini was a former socialist. He had edited Avanti!, the Socialist Party's newspaper, but was expelled from the party in 1914 after he called for Italy to join the war. In March 1919 he founded the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan. Britannica describes the group's first program as a mix of radical nationalist ideas with strong doses of anticlericalism and republicanism.

The movement soon shifted. Armed squads known as Blackshirts attacked socialists, unions and peasant leagues, often with the support of landowners and industrialists who feared the left. In October 1922, after the March on Rome, King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini prime minister. By 1925 and 1926 he had banned opposition parties, ended a free press and made himself dictator. Among those imprisoned was the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, who wrote his famous Prison Notebooks in a fascist jail.

In The Doctrine of Fascism (1932), published under Mussolini's name, the regime described itself as "totalitarian" and said that "for the Fascist, everything is in the State." The text rejected both liberalism, which it said "denied the State in the interests of the particular individual," and socialism, which "confines the movement of history within the class struggle."

How historians define fascism

Fascism produced fewer systematic texts than liberalism or Marxism, so scholars have argued for decades about how to define it. Four approaches are widely cited.

Robert Paxton: what fascists did

American historian Robert Paxton, in The Anatomy of Fascism (2004), focused on behavior rather than doctrine. He described fascism as political behavior marked by an obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, carried out by a mass party of nationalist militants working with traditional elites. Paxton argued that fascism runs more on "mobilizing passions" than on a consistent philosophy.

Roger Griffin: the myth of rebirth

British historian Roger Griffin, in The Nature of Fascism (1991), defined it as a political ideology whose mythic core is "a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism." Palingenesis means rebirth. In this view, the heart of fascism is the promise that a decadent nation will rise again, purified and renewed.

Stanley Payne: a checklist of traits

American historian Stanley Payne, in A History of Fascism, 1914 to 1945 (1995), built a typology. It starts with the "fascist negations," opposition to liberalism, to communism and, at least in principle, to conservatism, and adds goals and styles such as an authoritarian nationalist state, mass mobilization, a cult of violence and a charismatic leader.

Umberto Eco: family resemblances

Italian novelist and scholar Umberto Eco, who grew up under Mussolini, wrote "Ur-Fascism" in 1995. He listed 14 recurring features, beginning with "the cult of tradition" and including the rejection of modernism, the cult of "action for action's sake," and treating disagreement as treason. Eco argued that no single regime had all of them and that "fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features." He also warned that it "can come back under the most innocent of disguises."

Fascism and Nazism

German National Socialism shared most of fascism's features: ultranationalism, a single leader, a mass party, paramilitary violence and hostility to democracy and Marxism. Adolf Hitler admired Mussolini and modeled parts of his movement on Italian Fascism. He was appointed chancellor in January 1933 and turned Germany into a one-party state within months.

The key difference is race. Italian Fascism centered on the state and the nation. Nazism centered on a racial worldview. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum explains that the Nazis "viewed the world as being divided up into competing inferior and superior races," each struggling for survival and dominance, and that "Nazi racism produced murder on an unprecedented scale," including the genocide of European Jews in the Holocaust.

Scholars disagree on how to group the two. Some, including Griffin, see Italian Fascism and Nazism as the two full examples of a single fascist family. Others stress Nazism's unique racial core. The political theorist Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), grouped Nazism with Stalin's Soviet Union as the two great totalitarian systems, and treated Mussolini's Italy as a less complete case.

Other movements of the era are often discussed alongside these two, including Romania's Iron Guard and Hungary's Arrow Cross. Historians debate whether regimes such as Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal were truly fascist or conservative authoritarian dictatorships that borrowed some fascist styles.

Where fascism sits on the spectrum

Most historians, political scientists and reference works classify fascism as far right. The usual reasons:

• It was intensely nationalist and, in Nazism, racist.
• It fought Marxists, socialists and unions, often violently.
• It defended hierarchy, private property and traditional ideas of family and gender.
• It came to power in both Italy and Germany with the help of conservative elites who saw it as a bulwark against the left.

A minority view emphasizes other features. Fascists called themselves revolutionaries, rejected old conservative elites in their rhetoric, and drew some early leaders from socialism and national syndicalism. Fascist states also directed the economy heavily through corporatist bodies. The historian Zeev Sternhell argued that fascism grew partly from a revision of Marxism and described it as "neither right nor left." Friedrich Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom (1944), argued that fascism and socialism shared a common root in central planning. Critics of these arguments reply that fascism kept capitalism and private ownership, crushed the labor movement, and was anti-Marxist at its core.

Two-axis maps add another angle. On a model like the one in our political compass explainer, fascism sits in the strongly authoritarian, right-leaning corner. For more on that vertical axis, see authoritarian vs libertarian. The idea that the far left and far right resemble each other is explored in our guide to horseshoe theory.

Why the word is used as an insult

After 1945, "fascist" became one of the most damning words in politics. That made it tempting to use against any opponent.

The problem is old. In a 1944 column for the British newspaper Tribune, George Orwell asked "What is Fascism?" and complained that, as used, the word was "almost entirely meaningless." He listed people and things that had been called fascist, from farmers to astrology, and urged writers to use it with care rather than degrade it to a swearword.

People across the spectrum have used the label loosely. Some on the left have called a wide range of conservatives fascist. Some on the right have called socialists and progressives fascist, pointing to the word "socialist" in the Nazi party's name. Scholars on both sides often push back, arguing that the term loses its value when it describes any authoritarian, nationalist or simply disliked position. Others argue that a clear definition is exactly what makes it possible to spot fascist traits when they do appear.

A useful test is to compare a movement with the definitions above. Ordinary nationalism, conservatism or strong government is not fascism on its own. Historians usually look for the combination: a myth of national rebirth, a cult of the leader, a mass movement, the rejection of democracy and pluralism, and the use or celebration of political violence. See nationalism and civic nationalism vs nationalism for how ordinary national loyalty differs.

Neofascism after 1945

Fascism was discredited by defeat and by the Holocaust, but some groups kept its ideas alive. In Italy, the Italian Social Movement was founded in 1946 by veterans of Mussolini's regime. Neo-Nazi groups appeared in Germany and elsewhere, and many countries, including Germany, ban Nazi symbols and organizations. Scholars use "neofascism" for postwar movements that openly draw on interwar fascism, and debate whether newer far-right movements belong in the same family or represent something different.

Find where you fit

Studying fascism is a way to understand the twentieth century and the limits of the left to right line. Placing your own views is a separate question, and it works best with a careful measure rather than a label.

Take the Political Compass Test to see where you sit on the economic and authority axes. The Political Values Test gives separate scores for economics, civil liberties, society and diplomacy, including how you weigh nationalism against internationalism. For a quick read, try the Political Spectrum Quiz, or compare traditions in our guide to socialism vs communism and left vs right politics.