Definitions of Fascism - Roger Griffin

Roger Griffin

With Griffin the emphasis is placed upon the aspect of populist fascist rhetoric that argues for a "re-birth" of a conflated nation and ethnic people. According to Griffin:

ascism is best defined as a revolutionary form of nationalism, one that sets out to be a political, social and ethical revolution, welding the ‘people’ into a dynamic national community under new elites infused with heroic values. The core myth that inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement of purifying, cathartic national rebirth (palingenesis) can stem the tide of decadence

Also according to Griffin, a broad area of scholarly consensus developed in the social sciences within the English-speaking world during the 1990s, centered around the following definition of fascism:

a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led "armed party" which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation's imminent rebirth from decadence.

Finally, Griffin claims that the above definition can be condensed into one sentence:

The word "palingenetic" refers to notions of rebirth (in this case, national rebirth), and carries a similar meaning as the words "apocalyptic" and "millennarian", but without religious connotations.