The Nature of Fascism Revisited

The comparative study of European Fascism, whether as a movement or as a form of political regime, has undergone a remarkable empirical development, albeit with important conceptual limitations. Today we have at our disposal a significant number of monographs and comparative studies on interwar fascist movements, even although the fluidity of the radical right during that period has at times lead to the appearance of a classificatory 'essentialism' that is only interesting when operationalised.

The number of dictatorships has expanded so much since the Second World War that it is perhaps time to update our analytical tools in the light of the great variety of regimes and their 'universals'. In fact, it may be tune to use the comparative method seriously, leading to the methodological normalisation of these phenomena. 'This series of essays by Antonio Costa pinto are symbol of a new institutionalist' turn in the study of fascism, reassessing its previously neglected dimensions, such as decision-making, or nominally democratic institutions, such as legislatures and parties, which are typically integral to a dictatorial regime.

Ant=nio Costa Pinto professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. He holds a doctorate from the European University Institute, Florence. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University (1993) and Georgetown University (2004), and a senior visiting fellow at Princeton University (1996) and at the University of California Berkeley (2010).