10.1 Classical Fascism: Core Themes

So, granting that the label “fascism” denotes something meaningful, is it indeed an ideology? Classical fascists did consciously position fascism as an ideological alternative to socialism and liberalism (and to a lesser extent, conservatism). More to the point, fascism can be treated as a political ideology for reasons similar to those used to justify the inclusion of conservatism or populism in this textbook: namely, that, divergences between fascists and the absence of classic theorists notwithstanding, there are underlying shared themes that make it possible to generalize about fascist thinking. Let us turn to these before considering Nazism as a variant of fascism and, finally, the fate of fascism in our time.