Defining and Redefining Fascism

Abstract

This chapter offers an overview of the major changes undergone by antifascist ideology since the 1960s. Among the changes examined are the growing list of prejudices and forbidden words that government and other public institutions are combating, the reduction of historic fascism to Hitler and his exterminationist policies, and the association of fascism with emotions and attitudes that displease influential journalists, academics, and civic leaders. At this point, concepts become increasingly detached from long-received understandings. They depend for their meaning on what authority figures tell us. This recalls Thomas Hobbes's assertion in Leviathan that words acquire fixed meaning through a sovereign. The Hobbesian leader becomes both the source of linguistic clarity and someone who exercises political authority. In the antifascist order of things, settled meanings are no longer available.