Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Lecture at the conference "Other People's Fascisms", October 9, 2025
This paper proposes an approach that treats fascism as a family of ideas, with common––though often disavowed––roots, intellectual underpinnings, styles and organisations of movements, shared world-views and ideas in communication. The family shares much common ground in terms of romantic irrationalism, the concept of the intrinsic inequality of human beings of different types, or the transcendental nature of violence. A fascist repertoire of ideas does not make its appearance all at once, or together. As fascist movements develop across the world, lesser movements take on the forms of their more successful cousins, in what I call a ‘voluntary Gleichschaltung’ or ‘synchronisation’. Two further sets of distinctions are important: First, that of fascism in search of state power, at the stage of ideological proselytization and the building of a movement, and of fascism in possession of state power, at which point it is important not to confuse state capacity with fascism. The second set of distinctions concerns fascisms in their ‘core’ period, between the two world wars up to the end of the second of them, at which point their central tenets were in the process of being created and stabilised and had not yet been widely discredited; and fascisms after their core period, which made them ‘neo’-fascisms. Finally, fascist vocabularies are a part of a more or less self-conscious set of usages now, which do not easily conform to older left-right divides, in a postleft and neo-right age.
Lecture at the conference "Other People's Fascisms", October 9, 2025
This paper proposes an approach that treats fascism as a family of ideas, with common––though often disavowed––roots, intellectual underpinnings, styles and organisations of movements, shared world-views and ideas in communication. The family shares much common ground in terms of romantic irrationalism, the concept of the intrinsic inequality of human beings of different types, or the transcendental nature of violence. A fascist repertoire of ideas does not make its appearance all at once, or together. As fascist movements develop across the world, lesser movements take on the forms of their more successful cousins, in what I call a ‘voluntary Gleichschaltung’ or ‘synchronisation’. Two further sets of distinctions are important: First, that of fascism in search of state power, at the stage of ideological proselytization and the building of a movement, and of fascism in possession of state power, at which point it is important not to confuse state capacity with fascism. The second set of distinctions concerns fascisms in their ‘core’ period, between the two world wars up to the end of the second of them, at which point their central tenets were in the process of being created and stabilised and had not yet been widely discredited; and fascisms after their core period, which made them ‘neo’-fascisms. Finally, fascist vocabularies are a part of a more or less self-conscious set of usages now, which do not easily conform to older left-right divides, in a postleft and neo-right age.
