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Milza and Bernstein (1992: 7) argue that “No universally accepted definition of the fascist phenomenon exists, no consensus, however slight, as to its range, its ideological origins, or the modalities of action which characterise it”. Indeed, since it emerged, there has always been variability and disagreement about how to classify or define fascism. These disagreements have themselves shifted, so the arguments of the 1930s were different to those of the 1960s, different again to the debates now, and shaped in part by the histories, debates and current political realities in different national contexts. Nevertheless, a sense remains that there must be an ideological core—or collection of essential (fascist) political or ideological traits—that allows us to recognise and identify fascism as fascism. Or, at minimum, there must be a group of “definitional characteristics of the genus fascism, of which each variety is a different manifestation” (Griffin 1998: 2). Accordingly, since the 1970s there have been repeated academic attempts to codify the plurality of what fascism ‘really’ was—and perhaps is—and what the aims and characteristics of a fascist political movement are.

Central to these discussions were a number of debates which have yet to be resolved: is fascism an ideology or a system of rule? Was fascism limited to a period between 1919 and 1945—a mini-epoch? Or is it a praxis, or an ideology, that has survived the end of the Second World War? Is fascism modernising or conservative? Is fascism reactionary, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary? To what extent was fascism a generic phenomenon, with various permutations within one unified ideological family; or were different regimes the product of different socio-political conditions and historical traditions? Should we regard fascism as an aberration? A psycho-social pathology? As a product of crisis and disease in society (Gregor 1974: 28), of “blackest, unfathomable despair” (Drucker 1939: 271), or a reflection of the prejudiced authoritarian personality of fascist leaders and their supporters (Adorno et al 1950)? Within work advancing historical and socio-economic frames of reference, fascism has been given a bewildering variety of contradictory classifications, and placed at almost all points on the ideological spectrum: as a counter-revolutionary movement of the extreme right (Renton 1999), as the extremism of the centre (Lipset 1960), as a synthesis of both left and right offering a combination of “organic nationalism and anti-Marxist socialism” (Sternhell 1986: 9), or as a particular form of totalitarian government, which shares key features with the Communist left (Friedrich, summarised in Kitchen 1976: 27).

There is, in short, an almost insuperable volume of quite contradictory work on fascist ideology and fascist movements. De Felice (1991), for example, lists 12,208 books and articles in a bibliography devoted to Italian Fascism, generic fascism and the history of the Second World War; Rees’ (1979) annotated bibliography on fascism in Britain lists 608 publications on British fascism by that date alone, and a further 270 written by fascists themselves. Given this outpouring, and the ways that such theorisation has, in part at least, reflected broad trends in Western geopolitics (particularly post-WWII), it should come as little surprise that one’s definition of fascism (or indeed Fascism3) is as much a reflection of the political commitments of the writer—and specifically, their perception of the function of scholarship on fascism—as it is a reflection of the material or historical ‘facts on the ground’. On the one side of the argument we find the challenging polemics of Renton (1999: 18), demanding “how can a historian, in all conscience, approach the study of fascism with neutrality? […] One cannot be balanced when writing about fascism, there is nothing positive to be said of it.” On the other, there is Griffin (1998), who argues that historians should “treat fascism like any other ideology” (p.15); in other words, it should be approached and defined “as an ideology inferable from the claims made by its own protagonists” (p.238).

Since the end of the 1960s, a body of work has developed whose primary focus is on fascist ideology, and aims to extract the ideological core of “generic fascism that may account for significant and unique similarities between the various permutations of fascism whilst convincingly accommodating deviations as either nationally or historically specific phenomena” (Kallis 2009: 41). This work on generic fascism has sometimes formulated lists of such “significant and unique similarities”, aiming to distil the “various permutations of fascism” down to a minimum number of necessary and sufficient characteristics: the so-called ‘fascist minimum’. Ernst Nolte (1968) developed the first of these, wherein he argued that fascism was characterised by three antagonistic ideological elements—anti-communism; anti-liberalism; anti-conservatism—and three political arrangements: the Führerprinzip; a party army; and the aim of totalitarian control. Nolte’s objective (though not his theoretical approach) was then developed in novel and fruitful ways by others—amongst them Juan Linz, Stanley Payne, Roger Eatwell and Walter Laqueur. Such work reaches its apotheosis in the work of Roger Griffin, whose one-sentence definition of fascism—“Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” (Griffin 1993: 26), or “formulated in three words: ‘palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism’” (1998: 13)—is, truly, a minimal fascist minimum. Indeed, the extreme brevity of his definition drew withering comment from Paxton (2005: 221), who suggests Griffin’s “zeal to reduce fascism to one pithy sentence seems to me more likely to inhibit than to stimulate analysis of how and with whom it worked.”

There is no doubting, however, the significant influence that Griffin’s approach has had, particularly on American and British scholars. Some praise his scholarship and the heuristic value of his definition, and include themselves within his claimed ‘new consensus’ on fascism studies; others are far more circumspect about its politics and the degree of convergence that Griffin claims between his work and that of others. For example, Woodley (2010: 1) has argued that the ‘new consensus’ in fascism studies developed by “revisionist historians” such as Griffin, “is founded less on scholarly agreement than a conscious rejection of historical materialism as a valid methodological framework.” Baker (2006b: 286) goes as far as to accuse Griffin of “methodological colonialism” in his attempts to argue that (seemingly all!) writers share his definition of a fascist minimum, and the notion of palingenesis in particular. It is towards Griffin’s definition that this chapter now turns.