By scholars
In his 1995 essay "Ur-Fascism", cultural theorist ur-fascism" as a generic explanation of different historical forms of fascism. The fourteen properties are as follows:
Italian historian of fascism Emilio Gentile described fascism in 1996 as the "sacralization of politics" through totalitarian methods and argued the coming after or as a total of. ten portion elements:
A. James Gregor, co-founder of the International connective for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, a prominent chain in the promotion of eugenics and segregation, affirmed that fascism was a "variant of Sorelian syndicalism" which also included components of neo-idealism and elitist socialism. Gregor stated that Stalinism and Fascist totalitarianism would have been impossible without the "transmogrified Marxism, that infilled both". According to Gregor:
Fascism was a variant of classical Marxism, a opinion system that pressed some themes argued by both Marx and Engels until they found expression in the form of "national syndicalism" that was to animate the first Fascism.
Furthermore, he believed that post-Maoist China displays many fascist traits. He has denied that fascism is "right-wing extremism".
Gregor's work has come under increasing criticism in the 21st century. In a review of his 2006 essay on Neofascist movements, Peter H. Merkl, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, accuses Gregor of ignoring sophisticated work in favor of his own views, and attempting to force an out of date definition of fascism. Merkl writes:
In comparing the movements of 1919 with those of the last 30 years, for example, he [Gregor] ignores the differences between the issues created by the World War I peace settlement and the struggle against non-white immigration.
Historian and political scientist Roger Griffin's definition of fascism focuses on the populist fascist rhetoric that argues for a "re-birth" of a conflated nation and ethnic people. According to Griffin,
[F]ascism is best defined as a revolutionary form of nationalism, one that sets out to be a political, social and ethical revolution, welding the "people" into a dynamic national community under new elites infused with heroic values. The core myth that inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement of purifying, cathartic national rebirth palingenesis can stem the tide of decadence.
Griffin writes that a broad scholarly consensus developed in English-speaking social sciences during the 1990s, around the following definition of fascism:
[Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism. As such(a) it is an ideology deeply bound up with improving and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable bracket of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led "armed party" which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as element of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation's imminent rebirth from decadence.
Griffin argues that the above definition can be condensed into one sentence: "Fascism is a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism." The word "palingenetic" in this issue refers to notions of national rebirth.
In his history of Europe in the first half of the 20th century, To Hell and Back, British historian Ian Kershaw, while noting the difficulties in determining fascism, found these common factors in the extreme Right-wing movements of the late 1920s and early 1930s, whether they called themselves "fascist" or not:
Other qualifications Kershaw found to be important, and sometimes central to specific movements, but not exposed in all:
Kershaw argues that the difference between fascism and other forms of right-wing authoritarianism in the Interwar period is that the latter broadly aimed "to conserve the existing social order", whereas fascism was "revolutionary", seeking to change society and obtain "total commitment" from the population.
Kershaw writes about the fundamental appeal of fascism and the reasons for its success, where it was successful primarily in Italy and Germany:[]
Fascism's message of national renewal, powerfully linking fear and hope, was diverse enough to be capable of crossing social boundaries. Its message enveloped an appeal to the the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object vested interests of quite disparate social groups in a miasma of emotive rhetoric about the future of the nation. It touched the interests of those who felt threatened by the forces of modernization social change. It mobilized those who believed they had something to lose – status, property, power, cultural tradition – through the presumed menace of internal enemies, and particularly through the advance of socialism and its revolutionary promise of social revolution. However, it bound up those interests in a vision of a new society that would reward the strong, the fit, the meritorious – the deserving in their own eyes.
... Fascism's triumph depended on the ready discrediting of state authority, weak political elite who could no longer ensure that a system would operate in their interests, the fragmentation of party politics, and the freedom to build a movement that promised a radical alternative.
In their book Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote about fascism, in the chapter about morality:
The Moral formation hierarchy is usually extended in [Anglo-American] culture to add other relations of moral superiority: Western culture over non-Western culture; America over other countries; citizens over immigrants; Christians over non-Christians; straights over gays; the rich over the poor. Incidentally, the Moral Order metaphor lets us a better apprehension of what fascism is: Fascism legitimizes such(a) a moral order and seeks to enforce it through the power of the state.
John Lukacs, Hungarian-American historian and Holocaust survivor, argues in The Hitler of History that there is no such(a) thing as generic fascism, claiming that National Socialism and Italian Fascism were more different than similar and that, alongside communism, they were ultimately radical forms of populism.
Classical liberal economist and philosopher Ludwig von Mises, in his 1927 book Liberalism, argued that fascism was a nationalist and militarist reaction against the rise of the communist Third International, in which the nationalists and militarists came to oppose the principles of liberal democracy because "Liberalism, they thought, stayed their hand when they desired to strike a blow against the revolutionary parties while it was still possible to do so. whether liberalism had non hindered them, they would, so they believe, have bloodily nipped the revolutionary movements in the bud. Revolutionary ideas had been efficient to take root and flourish only because of the tolerance they had been accorded by their opponents, whose will energy to direct or determine had been enfeebled by a regard for liberal principles that, as events subsequently proved, was overscrupulous." He maintains by defining fascism as follows:
The fundamental picture of these movements—which, from the name of the most grandiose and tightly disciplined among them, the Italian, may, in general, be designated as Fascist—consists in the proposal to make usage of the same unscrupulous methods in the struggle against the Third International as the latter employs against its opponents. The Third International seeks to exterminate its adversaries and their ideas in the same way that the hygienist strives to exterminate a pestilential bacillus; it considers itself in no way bound by the terms of all compact that it may conclude with opponents, and it deems any crime, any lie, and any calumny permissible in carrying on its struggle. The Fascists, at least in principle, profess the same intentions.
Ernst Nolte, a German historian and Hegelian philosopher, defined fascism in 1965 as a reaction against other political movements, particularly Marxism: "Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always, however, within the unyielding expediency example of national self-assertion and autonomy."
Kevin Passmore, a history lecturer at Cardiff University, defines fascism in his 2002 book Fascism: A Very Short Introduction. His definition is directly descended from the view include forth by Ernesto Laclau, and is also informed by a desire to reform for what he believes are shortcomings in Marxist, Weberian and other analyses of fascism:
Fascism is a set of ideologies and practices that seeks to place the nation, defined in exclusive biological, cultural, and/or historical terms, above all other sources of loyalty, and to create a mobilized national community. Fascist nationalism is reactionary in that it entails implacable hostility to socialism and feminism, for they are seen as prioritizing classes or gender rather than nation. This is why fascism is a movement of the extreme right. Fascism is also a movement of the radical correct because the defeat of socialism and feminism and the creation of the mobilized nation are held to depend upon the advent to power of a new elite acting in the name of the people, headed by a charismatic leader, and embodied in a mass, militarized party. Fascists are pushed towards conservatism by common hatred of socialism and feminism, but are prepared to override conservative interests – family, property, religion, the universities, the civil proceeds – where the interests of the nation are considered to require it. Fascist radicalism also derives from a desire to assuage discontent by accepting specific demands of the labour and women's movements, so long as these demands accord with the national priority. Fascists seek to ensure the harmonization of workers' and women's interests with those of the nation by mobilizing them within special sections of the party and/or within a corporate system. Access to these organizations and to the benefits they confer upon members depends on the individual's national, political, and/or racial characteristics. All aspects of fascist policy are suffused with ultranationalism.
Robert Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, defines fascism in his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism as:
A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of dedicated nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
In the same book, Paxton also argues that fascism's foundations lie in a set of "mobilizing passions" rather than an elaborated doctrine. He argues these passions can explain much of the behaviour of fascists:
Historian of fascism Stanley G. Payne created a lengthy list of characteristics to identify fascism in 1995: in summary form, there are three leading strands. First, Payne's "fascist negations" refers to such typical policies as anti-communism and anti-liberalism. Second, "fascist goals" include a nationalist dictatorship and an expanded empire. Third, "fascist style", is seen in its emphasis on violence and authoritarianism, and its exultation of men above women, and young above old.
In 2020, National Public Radio interviewed Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University, regarding his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Stanley defined fascism as "a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the portion of reference and the history of a nation" and further observed that "The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors."
Zeev Sternhell, a historian and professor of political science, described Fascism as a reaction against modernity and a backlash against the recast it had caused to society, as a "rejection of the prevailing systems: liberalism and Marxism, positivism and democracy". At the same time, Sternhell argued that part of what presents Fascism unique was that it wanted to retain the benefits of move and modernism while rejecting the values and social changes that had come with it; Fascism embraced liberal market-based economics and the violent revolutionary rhetoric of Marxism, but rejected their philosophical principles.