Defining Fascism: historiography, authority and political form

Abstract This article examines the problem of defining fascism by placing some of the most influential conceptual models in dialogue with the Italian case. It surveys major approaches associated with Juan Linz, Stanley Payne, Roger Griffin, Emilio Gentile and Robert Paxton, arguing that they are best understood not as mutually exclusive alternatives but as analyses conducted at different levels. Building on an earlier formulation of fascism as a political form, the article asks how ideology, violence, political religion, historical process and leadership cohered as a distinctive form of authority. It argues that Italian Fascism made this form visible through three interlocking operations: the political production of the enemy; the mythic reordering of historical time; and the embodiment of sovereign authority in Mussolini, understood not as a Weberian charismatic authority but as a political trickster. The Italian case is therefore more than the first example of generic fascism: it is the historical laboratory in which fascism’s political form first became visible and operative.