Fascism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology (generally tied to a mass movement) that considers individual and other societal interests subordinate to the needs of the state, and seeks to forge a type of national unity, usually based on ethnic, cultural, or racial attributes. Various scholars attribute different characteristics to fascism, but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: nationalism, authoritarianism, militarism, totalitarianism, anti-communism and opposition to economic and political liberalism.
The governments most often considered to have been fascist include the Mussolini government in Italy, which invented the word; Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, but other similar movements existed across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.
See also
In fiction
Further reading
- The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) by Wilhelm Reich
- The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt
- Fascinating Fascism (1975), an essay by Susan Sontag
- Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism (2002) by Catherine Laura Frost
- The Seduction of Unreason (2004) by Richard Wolin
