What is Fascism?

‘At the end of the twentieth century, fascism remains probably the vaguest of the major political terms’ (Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-45, p.3). Writing in the 1960s, Stuart Woolf - one of Britain’s leading experts on fascism argued – ‘Perhaps the word fascism should be banned, at least temporarily, from our political vocabulary’. Thirty years later, many would see little reason for changing this judgement. In spite of (perhaps because of) the publication of a vast number of works, there has been little agreement over a series of fundamental questions. In particular, there is little consensus about the basic defining characteristics of fascism.