ABSTRACT
"Perhaps the word fascism should be banned, at least temporarily, from our political vocabulary," S. J. Woolf wrote in 1968. Although some scholars attempted from the start to restrict the use of the term fascism to Mussolini 's movement in Italy, most have joined in a process of proliferation that began as early as the 1920s. After Mussolini 's success, observers thought they recognized men and organizations of the same type arising in other nations. Edward R. Tannenbaum has observed that the study of fascism appears in scholars a particular compulsion for reductive logic, a tendency to relate the phenomenon to a single and central significance. Between 1933 and 1936, when Rome and Berlin competed for influence over organizations in other countries and when Mussolini stood guard at the Brenner Pass to prevent Nazi expansion into Austria, the popular image of fascism remained largely bipolar.
