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Theorizing Fascism: Cases, Comparison and Consensus

The literature on fascism is vast. Before his death in 1996, Renzo de Felice compiled a list of more than 12,000 sources just on the Italian variety. Today, it remains a major focus of interest for historians, sociologists, political theorists and others, with numerous fresh studies emerging each year. Broadly, the range is from those concentrating on individual country studies, to comparisons of two of more historical cases and then on to wide-reaching conceptual commentaries on what fascism means and how it might be distinguished from other political movements/ ideologies. Very generally, historians tend to focus at the former end of this spectrum, but, in the spirit of adventure, I have selected three texts that might be placed nearer the latter end. Each, in other words, contains an effort to get beyond necessarily unique national characteristics in order to search for commonalities at a greater level of abstraction. For Pinto and Kallis, this effort is an attempt to connect what they see as ‘a crucial degree of historical affinity’ between the German and Italian exemplars and the ‘not quite fascist’ regimes of inter-war Austria, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Hungary and Romania (2–3). Wodak and Richardson are likewise concerned with fascism’s trans-national qualities, but rather than offering a synchronic comparison