Professor Federico Marcon Unpacks the History of the Word Fascism

The book: History professor Federico Marcon examines the evolution of the term “fascism” in different contexts throughout history. Marcon traces the rise of authoritarianism around the world with the heuristic use of "fascism" — employed today when describing everything from Mussolini’s Italy to Orban's takeover in Hungary. Fascism (Chicago Press) takes a semiotic approach to history, and argues that the accurate identification of current events, leaders, and systems as fascist should be important to all those invested in the future of liberal democracy.

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The author: Federico Marcon is a Princeton professor of East Asian studies and history who joined the faculty in 2011. His research primarily focuses on the history of early modern and modern Japan. He is the author of Fascism: The History of a Word and The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Japan.

Excerpt:

Preface

I enjoyed calling this book "my bad idea:' After seven years of intensive reading, travel, archival research, discussion, thinking, doubt, writing, erasing, and rewriting, I have not changed my mind a bit: it is a bad idea that breaches every gatekeeping disciplinary rule in academia. But a scorching "fire in the belly;' as my former mentor calls it, compelled me to persevere.

This is a history of one word, "fascism;' and of its changing political and heuristic agency. It reconstructs and maps the multiplication of its meanings, usages, and referents from its coining in 1919 to the present, by way of its movements around the world, across languages, social groups, and political interests, and through intricate intertextual and intersemiotic networks. It does not just dissect the complex semantic palimpsest of the term, as if the meaning of words were something they naturally contain, simply awaiting conceptual historians' excavation of its orderly structure. Rather, it reconstructs the production of the key semantic markers of "fascism'' by different historical actors (Mussolini, Fascist authors, antifascist activists, postwar historians, social and political scientists, artists, philosophers, et al.) and the interpretive habits that these meaning-making acts elicited.

Five wagers led me to embark on this project. The first stemmed from my conviction that a critical analysis of the heuristic affordances of "fascism" — that is, its epistemological efficacy as an analytical category in understanding or classifying movements, ideologies, regimes, attitudes, aesthetics, and so on other than Italian Fascism-must begin from a historical investigation of its meanings. The second implies that this oblique perspective reveals aspects of the counterrevolutionary authoritarianisms of 1919-45 that contribute to the existing scholarship. The third derives from my professional expertise in Japanese history. The history of Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s does not just test the heuristic soundness of "fascism''; it is also a reminder of the global reach of reactionary authoritarianism in the interwar period and its connection to imperialism. Fourth, this study can be read as an investigation into the effects of historians' analytical categories on the cognitive claims that they advance about the past. The nonindexical attribution of the qualifier "fascist" to regimes or ideologies is an operation of inferential labor that historians should account for but rarely do. An analysis of the heuristic legitimacy of "fascism'' hence provides us with an opportunity to reflect on historians' practice of knowledge production through the lenses of this case study. The fifth wager stems from my interest in interpretive semiotics-in particular, in its process-based understanding of meaning-making (semiosis) derived from the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and further developed by Roman Jakobson, Juri Lotman, and Umberto Eco-and its application in research of intellectual and conceptual history.

It appears to be quite a timely project. Authoritarianism has become once again a seemingly attractive form of political organization even within traditional democracies in the thoroughly neoliberalized 21st century. It would be preposterous to ignore the fact that this project developed in historical circumstances marked by the rise of many extreme right-wing (if not openly fascist) movements and parties around the world. And yet, I programmatically pursued this project in the most untimely fashion. I did not write this book with the purpose of analyzing the present, hypothesizing the causes of today's resurgence of authoritarian ideals; neither is it a practical handbook on how to recognize the early signs of an impending fascist takeover. In presenting Mussolini's rise to power, I had no intention of suggesting to readers that they interpret this volume as an allegorical admonition. But neither can I prohibit readers, who have the sacrosanct right to misread a text as they please insofar as they take responsibility for their interpretations, to adopt it for their presentist agendas. Against the urgency behind so many scholarly efforts today, this book embraces the aversion of William of Baskerville, the detective-monk in Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose, to "haste;' as quoted in the second epigraph of the book, and advocates taking time for reflection and analysis. And rigorous analysis — what in another passage of the novel Brother William defines simply as "looking more closely" — here takes the form of a reflection on how historians read the historical archives.

My attention to the agency of words is not just a refutation of the naive realism that conceives of historical knowledge as a process of unmediated access to an objectively retrievable past. It is a defense of the idea that the interpretive labor of historians becomes epistemologically more authoritative when its theoretical foundations are explicitly stated and argued for. This is not a capitulation to post-truth or postmodern relativism. Claiming that knowledge is a creative and metabolic process, to borrow some of Freire's words from the epigraph of this preface, does not undermine its truth procedures. It just includes and accounts for the interpretive nature of knowledge itself, and thus of its falsifiability, transiency, contradictoriness, and sociohistorical situatedness, as well as for the coexistence of equally authoritative but divergent truths.

Finally, speaking of the agency of words seems egregiously untimely in a period when many humanistic studies are (rightly) committed to giving agency to the dispossessed and the marginalized, sometimes at the cost of falsifying the sociohistorical conditions that prevented them from having, de facto, any agency at all. Competence in language, the dominant semiotic system (but not the only one) regulating our individual and social lives, contributes to determine the richness or poverty of our ability to make sense of the world we live in, which in turn translates into greater or lesser social agency and greater or lesser chance of emancipation and autonomy. The utopian aspiration at the core of this book is therefore to offer readers some instruments through which they can reflect on how the semiotic environment that sustains our individual and social life works, in order to prevent that environment's being used — as it still is — to create and reproduce inequality and dispossession.

This is why I avoid the rhetoric of persuasion. I do not want to turn readers into proselytes of my own, committedly antifascist views-to the idea that "fascism'' refers to a form of counterrevolutionary "democratic" authoritarianism parasitical of the preexisting institutions of capitalist liberalism, and that the term's use as a generic heuristic category should follow a methodological restraint guided by interpretive convenience. Rather, it conceives of the question of the heuristic affordances of "fascism'' in terms of interpretive "advantages" and "disadvantages;' as well as interpretive "pertinence" and "parsimony;' so that the readers can employ this term with a clear and informed understanding of its semiosic capacity, limits, and unintended effects: that is, its agency.

The pedagogic goal that this study pursues is to exorcise the persistent myth that conceives of the meaning of words and of the processes of signification as natural or based on universals.  It offers readers some instruments that can help them understand the social conditions leading to the formation and consolidation of the meaning of terms such as "fascism;' in an effort to offer a better grasp of ( and thus a claim to) the shared ownership of the means of linguistic production. What might appear to be technical questions for initiates are in truth phenomena of meaning-making that we encounter every day and that define every aspect of our daily life. The technical jargon is therefore not a strategy for protecting disciplinary boundaries and social distinction; rather, it is a useful tool kit for enabling the reader to understand how language (semiotic systems in general), society, and the world constantly create one another.

In a sense, the fight against fascism really begins with our emancipation from the spell of its language. If the meanings of words (signs) are not naturally embedded in their signifying vehicles and are not reducible to their referents, neither are they necessarily determined by the will of individuals. The meanings of words are not fixed; they change over time, they have a history: the significance, legitimacy, and fungibility of the words we use in specific historical circumstances to make sense of the world ( or to give sense to it) derive from the total sum of the collective interventions in communicative acts (monologues, diaries, conversations, drawings, discussions, lectures, articles, books, tweets, symbols, gestures, etc.). In this light, I do not believe that one scholar can impose restrictions, limits, or legitimation on the way we use words. I cannot prescribe ( or proscribe) the correct ( or incorrect) uses of "fascism'' in historical and political analyses. The best I can do is to suggest the heuristic advantages and disadvantages as well as the political consequences of its use.

Excerpted from Fascism: The History of a Word by Federico Marcon. © 2025 and published by The University of Chicago Press. Printed with permission of the author.

Reviews:

“Marcon’s semiotic history offers a necessary corrective and long-overdue complement to a country’s worth of efforts to contour fascism as a generic category. Thorough and incisive, it will prove an indispensable companion for scholars of 20th century political discourse and critical reading for anyone invested in the fate of liberal democracy today.” — Alexander Bigman, author of Pictures and the Past.

“Timely and comprehensive, this book’s detailed analysis is unprecedented and promises to provide the scholarly community with valuable insights. Marcon offers a compelling new perspective through which both the interpretation and the definition of fascism can be considered.” — Giulia Albanese, editor of Rethinking the History of Italian Fascism