Desperately Seeking ‘Generic Fascism’: Some Discordant Thoughts on the Academic Recycling of Indigenous Categories

Abstract

This chapter addresses some of the problems faced by both social scientists and historians when they attempt to think in comparative terms about the phenomenon we habitually assemble under the heading of ‘fascism’ and, more especially, when they attempt to ‘theorize’ these phenomena.¹ The problems I will deal with here—and in the limited space of this chapter I cannot deal with all the problems—derive from two conceptions of the research process, two basic assumptions that are widespread among historians of fascisms, and indeed across the social sciences as a whole.