ABSTRACT
The words “fascist” and “fascism” are often invoked more in an emotional than in a cognitively meaningful way. Here we try to avoid the former and make use of the latter. The fi rst thing to note about fascism-or perhaps we should say fascisms, in the plural-is that it (or they) is self-consciously and proudly “totalitarian.” Historians may well remember the twentieth century as the age of world wars, nuclear weapons, and a new kind of political regime-totalitarianism. All of these developments are connected to political ideologies in one way or another, but to none more closely than totalitarianism. For totalitarianism is the attempt to take complete control of a society-not just its government but all of its social, cultural, and economic institutions-in order to fulfi ll an ideological vision of how society ought to be organized and life ought to be lived. This is what happened in the Soviet Union when Stalin imposed his version of Marxist socialism on that country. It is also what happened in Italy and Germany when Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler introduced varieties of a new and openly totalitarian ideology called fascism.
