Fascism

Fascism is the revolutionary ultranationalism that seized Italy in 1922 and, in its German variant, drove the world into war: a politics of the total state, the irreplaceable leader, and the mobilized mass. Conservatives study it as an enemy rather than an ancestor — a movement that burned through every institution conservatism exists to defend.

Because “fascist” long ago became an all-purpose insult, an encyclopedia entry has to begin by recovering the word’s content: what Mussolini actually built, how scholars define it, and where it stands in relation to conservatism properly so called.

Key Takeaways

• Benito Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Milan on 23 March 1919 and took power after the March on Rome in October 1922.
• Scholars identify fascism by revolutionary nationalism, a leader cult, mass mobilization, paramilitary violence, and the subordination of every institution to the state.
• Conservatives argue that fascism is collectivist and revolutionary — hostile to inherited institutions, churches, property rights, and constitutional limits.
• Historians record that fascists reached office through the collaboration of conservative elites who believed they could manage them, a warning conservatives have had to absorb.

History And Context

Benito Mussolini, a former editor of the Socialist Party daily Avanti!, broke with socialism over Italian entry into the First World War and founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento at a meeting in Milan’s Piazza San Sepolcro on 23 March 1919. Squadrist violence against socialist councils and unions carried the movement across northern Italy, and when roughly 25,000 Blackshirts converged on the capital in the March on Rome of 27–29 October 1922, King Victor Emmanuel III declined to sign the martial-law decree and instead appointed Mussolini prime minister on 31 October 1922. The murder of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 stripped away constitutional pretence, and Mussolini assumed open dictatorship on 3 January 1925.

“The Doctrine of Fascism,” drafted with the philosopher Giovanni Gentile for the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana, compressed the creed into its famous formula: everything within the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state. Adolf Hitler reached the German chancellorship on 30 January 1933 through the machinations of conservative politicians around Franz von Papen, who assured President Hindenburg that the Nazi leader could be contained. The experiment ended in the ruin of 1945; Mussolini was shot by partisans on 28 April of that year. Post-war scholarship converged on definitions of the phenomenon: Stanley Payne’s typological description,¹ and Roger Griffin’s compact formula of palingenetic ultranationalism — a revolutionary politics of national rebirth.²

The Conservative Position

Conservatives place fascism among the revolutionary collectivisms of the twentieth century, not on their own family tree. Fascism worshipped the future, the state, and the leader; conservatism defends the inherited, the limited, and the dispersed. The total state is the direct negation of Burke’s little platoons and of the constitutional tradition running from Montesquieu through the American founding, which treats concentrated power as the standing danger. Friedrich Hayek argued in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that national socialism and communism shared a collectivist root: once economic life is centrally directed, individual liberty is forfeit whatever flag flies over the ministry.³

The record bears on each conservative commitment in turn. Property under fascism was held on sufferance, with strikes banned, markets directed, and industry conscripted into corporatist syndicates. The independent judiciary, the free press, and the autonomous university were dismantled within a few years of each seizure of power. And Gentile’s philosophy made the state the source of moral value itself — a claim no conservatism grounded in religion or natural law can accept. Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton alike distinguished the conservative disposition, which cherishes what it inherits, from radical politics of either direction, which sacrifice the living present to an imagined destiny. On the conservative reading, fascism is what happens when politics is unbound from precisely those restraints.

Differing Positions

The scholarly mainstream classifies fascism as a phenomenon of the radical right and treats the Hayekian genealogy as at best partial. Fascists destroyed socialists and communists first and drew their electoral strength from constituencies frightened of the left; Robert Paxton’s study emphasizes that fascism reached power nowhere by revolution, but through bargains with conservative establishments — the Italian crown, the German nationalists around Papen and Hindenburg — who expected to domesticate it and were consumed instead.⁴ Marxist historiography goes further, reading fascism as capitalism’s emergency brake, the weapon of property against revolution. Between these poles stands a sober middle claim: whatever fascism’s differences from conservatism in doctrine, the practical border between them is maintained by conduct — by conservatives refusing the bargain Papen accepted — and not by definitional fiat alone.

References

1. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).
2. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991).
3. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 1944).
4. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).