What is fascism? Where the word comes from and what it means

Fascism is a far-right political ideology and form of rule built on extreme nationalism, a single all-powerful leader, the suppression of all opposition, and the glorification of violence and war. The word comes from the movement Benito Mussolini founded in Italy in 1919, which took power in 1922. Nazi Germany, from 1933, became its most destructive example. Historians agree on those cases and on the main features, and still argue over a precise definition.

In short

• Fascism began as Mussolini's movement in Italy, and the name comes from the fasces, a Roman bundle of rods and an axe that stood for authority.
• Its regimes abolished free elections, banned rival parties, used paramilitary violence, and demanded that the individual serve the nation and its leader.
• Scholars agree on the core cases, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and disagree on where the label's edges lie.

Where does the word fascism come from?

In Latin, fasces were bundles of wooden rods tied around an axe, carried before magistrates in ancient Rome as a sign of their power to punish. In Italian, fascio came to mean a bundle, and by extension a group or league of people bound together. On 23 March 1919, in Milan, Mussolini, a former socialist journalist and war veteran, founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, the Italian Fasci of Combat. Its members, and the ideology, took the name fascist.

The movement fed on the turmoil after World War I: inflation, strikes, fear of a socialist revolution, and anger that Italy had gained less than it hoped from the peace. Its armed squads, the Blackshirts, beat and killed socialists and trade unionists and burned their offices, often with the tolerance of police and landowners.

How did fascism take power in Italy?

The timeline below draws on the Treccani encyclopedia, Italy's national reference work. It shows how a movement that never won a free majority came to rule.

Date	What happened
23 March 1919	Mussolini founds the Fasci of Combat in Milan
1921	The movement becomes the National Fascist Party
28 October 1922	The March on Rome: fascist squads converge on the capital
End of October 1922	King Victor Emmanuel III, declining to use the army against them, appoints Mussolini prime minister
10 June 1924	Fascists murder the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, who had denounced electoral violence
3 January 1925	Mussolini takes responsibility for the violence in a speech to parliament; the one-party dictatorship follows
25 July 1943	After military defeats, the Fascist Grand Council and the king remove Mussolini
April 1945	Mussolini is captured and killed by Italian partisans

In Germany, the National Socialists followed a similar path, with their own racial ideology at its center. They won 37% of the vote in July 1932, the largest share of any party, and on 30 January 1933 President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor, as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum records. Within weeks, an emergency decree suspended civil liberties, and the Enabling Act of 23 March 1933 let Hitler's government make laws without parliament. The note on how Hitler came to power follows those steps in detail.

In neither country did fascists seize power by a coup alone; in both, existing leaders handed it to them, believing they could control them.

What features do historians identify in fascism?

Definitions differ, but most historians' lists overlap. The features below are the ones that recur in the core cases.

• Ultranationalism and a myth of rebirth. The nation is the highest value, said to be in decline or humiliated and destined to be reborn in greatness.
• A cult of the leader. One man, the Duce or the Führer, embodies the nation's will and stands above the law.
• One party and no opposition. Rival parties, free elections, independent unions and a free press are abolished.
• Glorified violence and war. Paramilitary squads, militarism and expansion abroad are treated as signs of national vitality.
• Enemies within. Groups cast as alien or disloyal are blamed for the nation's troubles and persecuted; in Nazi Germany, this led to the Holocaust.
• Mass mobilization. Rallies, uniforms, youth organizations and propaganda seek to make the whole population take part, not merely obey.
• Rejection of both liberalism and Marxism. Fascists rejected individual rights and parliamentary democracy, and also the class struggle and international solidarity of the socialist left, while leaving most private property in place under state direction.

Mussolini's own slogan, from a 1925 speech, captured the totalitarian aim: everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.

How is fascism different from communism and from ordinary dictatorship?

Fascism is often confused with other forms of authoritarian rule. Both fascist and communist states were one-party dictatorships, but they started from opposite ideas.

	Fascism	Communism, as in the Soviet Union	Traditional authoritarian rule
Central idea	The nation, or race, above all	Class struggle toward a classless society	Order and the preservation of existing elites
Attitude to the masses	Mobilize them in rallies and movements	Mobilize them through the party	Keep them passive
Economy	Private ownership under state direction	State or collective ownership	Usually left to existing owners
Internationalism	Rejects it; nation versus nation	Claims it; workers of the world	Not central
Typical examples	Italy 1922–1943, Germany 1933–1945	The Soviet Union, Mao's China	Many military regimes and monarchies

The difference between fascism and communism mattered greatly at the time: the two movements were bitter enemies. Some scholars group both under the heading of totalitarianism, because of what their regimes did, while others argue that the gap in their aims makes that grouping misleading. Fascists also borrowed language from socialism, as the word National Socialism shows, while crushing socialist parties.

Still argued

Scholars have never agreed on one definition. Roger Griffin, in The Nature of Fascism (1991), defined it by its core myth, as a "palingenetic", meaning rebirth-centered, form of populist ultranationalism. Robert Paxton, in "The Five Stages of Fascism" (1998) and later books, argued that fascism is better defined by what fascists did than by what they said, and traced its stages from movement to seizure of power to rule. Umberto Eco, in his 1995 essay "Ur-Fascism", listed 14 typical features and called fascism "a fuzzy totalitarianism". Historians also argue about the edges: whether Franco's Spain, Vichy France or imperial Japan were fascist or a different kind of authoritarian state. Some, such as Zeev Sternhell, traced fascism's ideas to a revolt against both liberalism and Marxism before 1914; others place it squarely on the radical right. This note describes the historical cases and the scholarly debate; it doesn't apply the term to present-day politics.

Why is the word used so loosely?

After 1945, fascism became the worst thing one could call an opponent, and the word spread far beyond its historical meaning. George Orwell complained of this in a 1944 newspaper column, and two years later, in "Politics and the English Language", he wrote that "the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable'".

The loose use has a cost: if every opponent is a fascist, the word stops helping anyone recognize the real thing. The historians' features above give a sharper test, and the history of the 1920s and 1930s shows why the test matters. Fascist movements grew inside democracies, used elections and parliaments to reach power, and then dismantled them.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: name four features historians commonly find in fascist movements and regimes.
• How did Mussolini and Hitler each come to power, and what did the two paths have in common?
• Why do scholars disagree about whether some 20th-century dictatorships were fascist?

Sources

• Fascismo — Treccani, Enciclopedia Italiana
• The Nazi rise to power — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
• Ur-Fascism — Umberto Eco, The New York Review of Books, 1995
• The Five Stages of Fascism — Robert O. Paxton, The Journal of Modern History, 1998
• Politics and the English Language — George Orwell, The Orwell Foundation, 1946