The contours of the beast. Current state of the debates regarding the characterization of fascism

Abstract

The recent irruption of new far-right tendencies and organizations all over the world has rekindled old debates about the nature of fascism. In the past, most of the relevant academic interventions on this debate came from two well-defined theoretical approaches: Marxist ones on one side, liberal or empathic ones on the other. With this essay, I aim to explore what is being said in these debates today, and how healthy each of those theoretical approaches really is nowadays. To that end, I review five recent books, three showing a Marxist stance, and two a liberal one. I establish a dialogue between those five works, looking for tools useful for answering the question of: what is fascism? In addition, by walking down that road we bump into concepts and ideas useful for thinking the new reactionary authoritarianisms —whether we call them fascists or not.