How not to Think about Fascism and Ideology, Intellectual Antecedents and Historical Meaning

Abstract

This article centres on a critique of Zeev Sternhell's influential account of the intellectual antecedents of Italian fascism in The Birth of Fascist Ideology, published in English translation in 1994. Although he shows the import of that ideology and pinpoints the key antecedents, Sternhell does not convincingly explain the emergence of fascist ideas, nor does he take advantage of his evidence to illuminate the peculiar dynamic of the fascist experiment, with its disastrous outcome. Probing the inadequacies of Sternhell's approach not only points the way to a more fruitful alternative, but also helps us understand the very different limits in a recent body of scholarship that, while taking Italian fascism seriously anew, plays down ideology and articulated ideas in favour of spectacle, ritual, rhetoric and the body.