In the narrowest sense, fascism was a political ideology and mass movement introduced in Italy by the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista) under the leadership of a former socialist radical journalist, Benito Mussolini (1883-1945). Mussolini took the name of his party from the Latin word fasces, a symbol of authority--specifically, penal authority--in ancient Rome. The Roman fasces was a bundle of elm or birch rods tied securely around an axe. The meaning conveyed by the symbol is one of unity (the bound individual rods) and the strength of unity (bound together, the rods are far stronger than any individual stick of wood) as well as punitive authority.

Mussolini rose meteorically in 1922, when he was elevated to the office of prime minister with virtually dictatorial powers. His ascension was the product of his own histrionically virile magnetism, the intimidation wrought by his legion of blackshirted followers, who used violent rhetoric and outright thuggery to suppress all opposition, and the intense ideological appeal of his message. All three components of the rise of Mussolini and the concomitant rise of fascism were equally important. Fascism was founded on a cult of personality, namely the strongman leader who offers himself as the hypermasculine savior of the nation. Intimidation and violence were also inseparable from fascism, which was rooted in an atavistic will to power and which fully sanctioned the forcible molding of public opinion, culture, and government. Like many other nations after World War I, Italy seemed afflicted by moral drift and economic malaise. The violence of fascism promised to sweep this away.

Finally, there was the ideology of fascism. In contrast to the political ideology most directly opposed to fascism, communism, which had an elaborately articulated theoretical structure initially established by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, fascism never developed a truly cohesive intellectual framework. It is most telling that during his long tenure as Italy's leader, Mussolini employed in vain a small army of historians, lawyers, political scientists, and other scholars who were charged with expressing the ideology of fascism in a great Fascist Encyclopedia. This work of many years was never completed. Indeed, it may be argued that fascism never had a genuine ideological core because it was nothing more or less than a means of acquiring and maintaining power. Beyond these two objectives, fascism simply melted as a political philosophy, dissolving into ad hoc assumptions, assertions, and actions all intended to preserve ruling authority. Nevertheless, fascism was characterized by certain ideological or at least quasi-ideological principles. . .

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