ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the emerging emphases in discussions of fascism. Radical nominalism easily follows, and there is precious little agreement as to whether fascism even exists as a general phenomenon. In the longer term the intensive reworking of the empirical circumstances of the fascist victories, on the basis of exceptionally elaborate primary research, often sophisticated methodologies and ‘middle-level generalizations’, promises to reconstruct our theoretical understanding of fascism. Fascism stands for activism and popular mobilization, embracing everything from para-military display, street-fighting and straightforward terror, to more conventional forms of political activity, new propagandist forms and a general invasion of the cultural sphere. The ‘pre-industrial traditions’ are given a privileged place in the causal repertoire in a way which specifically displaces certain other approaches, those which begin with the interior dynamics of the immediate fascism-producing crisis. Older attempts to take the relationship between fascism and capitalism as the primary causal nexus were indeed inadequate.
