Fascism

Abstract

As Michael Ledeen remarks in his recently published interview with De Felice, the study of fascism in the Western academic world has long acknowledged the movement-regime distinction in its attempt to come to grips with this rather difficult area in political science. Thus the multitude of fascist and quasi-fascist movements, often little more than sects, may be separated from the two successful examples in Italy and Germany. As regimes, they are themselves usually the subject of separate studies, by historians at least, and in these studies only occasionally is the one used in fleeting comparative reference to throw further light upon the other. In most cases this illumination is produced by means of contrast, e.g. in contrasting the leading role of anti-Semitism as a world-view in the Nazi movement and regime with its failure to appear in indigenous Fascism until the regime imported it from Germany in the late thirties. Contrast and comparison will play an important part in this thesis, especially so in the latter half, but in the context of an even-handed approach which sees the Nazi and Fascist regimes as the only examples of generic fascist regimes and as such entitled to equal, if still often separate, treatment.