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“These features cannot be organised into a system; many of them contradict each other and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is

“These features cannot be organised into a system; many of them contradict each other and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.” Umberto Eco is a smart guy but that essay is pretty silly. Fascism: anywhere, everywhere, and you can tell it's coming by any number of contradictory and non-definite phenomena.

6502nerdface 10y ago
No, if you read Eco's essay he takes pains to clarify that he's not saying "you can see it coming" -- he's describing the seeds of fascism that are present in many, perhaps all societies, which fascism can potentially latch onto and grow from... the aspects of our socieites that are usually checked, but have the potential to germinate into something worse.
- snrplfth 10y ago
  I've read it, thanks. I read it a decade ago and a few times since, back when I was in a semiotics degree program and Eco was a prominently featured thinker. I respect him, but I don't really agree with him on this one. Sure, he's describing major features of the category of political thinking that he calls fascism - but with the purpose of seeing it coming and doing something about it. He says: "Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world." His article is a rubric for identifying its features. Yet to say that fascism may have any of the enumerated features, in almost any combination, with drastically varying applications and manifestations, is to construct a category so broad that it is practically useless. It's a recipe for calling, and perceiving, almost everything as being nascently fascistic. We need to make better distinctions than this, I feel.
danharaj 10y ago
It is a feature, not a bug, of fascism that it tolerates contradiction and does not care about constructing a coherent picture of the world. Truth is irrelevant and aesthetics are fungible. Fascism is unlike more sophisticated totalitarian ideologies like Marxism-Leninism. Umberto Eco's points are a summary of nucleation points for fascism: tendencies in society that can be the starting point for the process of fascist development. I think this is the best you can do in such a short essay. Eco's comparison to Wittgenstein's game is apt. "You know it when you see it". If I were to try to grasp fascism from a different angle and how it relates to other totalitarian tendencies I would characterize it by the social class that puts it into power. The middle class has been the historical base of power for fascism. The points Eco makes are quite resonant amongst middle class people in many countries in particular the downwardly mobile middle class who feel like they are being cheated out of something they are entitled to. That is the mechanism by which fascism takes hold. In contrast, Marxism-Leninism is primarily concerned with the proletariat and intelligentsia. Maoism is primarily concerned with the peasantry. Really, you can identify a political ideology without looking too closely at its details by examining how it goes about class struggle: its implementation as an actual political movement and not an abstract set of ideas.
- snrplfth 10y ago
  Well, I take issue with the "know it when you see it" characteristic of the piece. Eco accuses fascists, rightly I think, of making no clear distinctions, of thinking in impressions. That's why I'm annoyed that he seems to give up on distinctions himself in characterizing fascism. I find the "social class" analysis just as unsatisfactory. You might usefully characterze these different tendencies by their rhetoric, but if you insist on looking at them as an "actual implementation", I tend to find that they're just the same side of the same coin - a small state political class enormously empowered, and all other "classes" being simply categories measuring the loyalty and proximity to the state class.

6502nerdface 10y ago

No, if you read Eco's essay he takes pains to clarify that he's not saying "you can see it coming" -- he's describing the seeds of fascism that are present in many, perhaps all societies, which fascism can potentially latch onto and grow from... the aspects of our socieites that are usually checked, but have the potential to germinate into something worse.

snrplfth 10y ago
I've read it, thanks. I read it a decade ago and a few times since, back when I was in a semiotics degree program and Eco was a prominently featured thinker. I respect him, but I don't really agree with him on this one. Sure, he's describing major features of the category of political thinking that he calls fascism - but with the purpose of seeing it coming and doing something about it. He says: "Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world." His article is a rubric for identifying its features. Yet to say that fascism may have any of the enumerated features, in almost any combination, with drastically varying applications and manifestations, is to construct a category so broad that it is practically useless. It's a recipe for calling, and perceiving, almost everything as being nascently fascistic. We need to make better distinctions than this, I feel.

danharaj 10y ago

It is a feature, not a bug, of fascism that it tolerates contradiction and does not care about constructing a coherent picture of the world. Truth is irrelevant and aesthetics are fungible. Fascism is unlike more sophisticated totalitarian ideologies like Marxism-Leninism. Umberto Eco's points are a summary of nucleation points for fascism: tendencies in society that can be the starting point for the process of fascist development. I think this is the best you can do in such a short essay. Eco's comparison to Wittgenstein's game is apt. "You know it when you see it". If I were to try to grasp fascism from a different angle and how it relates to other totalitarian tendencies I would characterize it by the social class that puts it into power. The middle class has been the historical base of power for fascism. The points Eco makes are quite resonant amongst middle class people in many countries in particular the downwardly mobile middle class who feel like they are being cheated out of something they are entitled to. That is the mechanism by which fascism takes hold. In contrast, Marxism-Leninism is primarily concerned with the proletariat and intelligentsia. Maoism is primarily concerned with the peasantry. Really, you can identify a political ideology without looking too closely at its details by examining how it goes about class struggle: its implementation as an actual political movement and not an abstract set of ideas.

snrplfth 10y ago
Well, I take issue with the "know it when you see it" characteristic of the piece. Eco accuses fascists, rightly I think, of making no clear distinctions, of thinking in impressions. That's why I'm annoyed that he seems to give up on distinctions himself in characterizing fascism. I find the "social class" analysis just as unsatisfactory. You might usefully characterze these different tendencies by their rhetoric, but if you insist on looking at them as an "actual implementation", I tend to find that they're just the same side of the same coin - a small state political class enormously empowered, and all other "classes" being simply categories measuring the loyalty and proximity to the state class.