ABSTRACT
2During the past decade there has been a renewed interest in the interpretation of fascism. Historians, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and journalists have all tried their hand at providing some kind of “understanding” of the complex of phenomena we loosely identify with “fascism.” For all the enterprise, for all the time and critical intelligence devoted to the undertaking, we really have little purchase on “understanding” “fascism.” Why this should be the case is very difficult to say—but certainly our inability to specify what “understanding” is supposed to mean, or how we might come to competently “understand” something as complicated as “fascism,” constitutes a good part of the problem. More than that, even if we were prepared to lay claim to some kind of “understanding,” we are not all agreed upon what might constitute its compelling public evidence. Even if such issues did not trouble us, we would still face a major difficulty: there is no consensus among social scientists and/or historians as to the meaning of the term “fascist.” Professionals have not even agreed upon the question of whether Hitler’s National Socialism should be included as a member of the class of “fascisms.”
