In 1963, historian George L. Mosse brought a group of interdisciplinary scholars together at Stanford University to grapple with a vital question: What is fascism? Nearly two decades after the Second World War, scholarship on fascism remained siloed into national historiographies, and no consensus had emerged. With the Stanford seminar, Mosse set out to analyze Italian Fascism and Nazism side-by-side, and the discussions at Stanford helped to define the early debates about the nature and definition of fascism. To mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Stanford seminar in 2025, the George L. Mosse Program in History organized a four-day conference in Rome from January 9-13th to assess where the questions raised by Mosse and his colleagues have led the field, and where the study of fascism is headed in light of the rising tide of illiberal, anti-democratic, and authoritarian ideologies that define our current moment. Titled “60 Years: Fascism Seminar Revisited,” the conference highlighted the range of new approaches that historians are adopting to understand fascism and its appeal and move beyond the definitional debates that have often dominated discussions of the topic.
Nearly all of the conference panels were organized around a speaker and two respondents, and the conference began with a series of sessions that sought to reassess some of the major debates that have shaped the study of fascism since Mosse’s era. Alessandra Tarquini (Sapienza Università di Roma) opened with a provocative reappraisal of the concept of ‘totalitarianism,’ arguing that it should be taken not as a typology of governance (as scholars did in the 1960s) but rather as an organizing principle of fascist ideology. Anson Rabinbach (Princeton University) offered a rebuttal that stressed the protean and “promiscuous” nature of the concept by tracing its shifting usage since the 1930s. Olivier Forlin (Université Pierre Mendès France) suggested that the concept’s utility broke down along historiographical lines, between cultural and social historians on one side and economic and political historians on the other.
A second panel aimed to historicize the evolution of the field beginning with Mosse’s interventions. Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci (Université Paris 8) argued that the real innovation of scholars like Mosse and Renzo de Felice was taking fascism seriously as a political ideology and a revolutionary mode of politics. Neither, she explained, was particularly concerned with the debates over what defined fascism that would later consume the field, and thus this generation of scholarship can again prove useful as historians adopt transnational approaches to move beyond the definitional debate. Aristotle Kallis (Keele University) likewise pushed attendees to focus on the protean nature and popular appeal of fascism, how it changed as it circulated, and how it sometimes generated alternative authoritarianisms in response. Brian J. Griffith (California State University-Fresno) offered a practical path away from circular debates about ‘generic’ fascism by pointing to new methodologies animating the field: transnational approaches, a focus on visual culture, and new research tools like text mining and social network analysis that reveal broader patterns in historical sources.
The panels that followed offered ample and productive evidence of these approaches and others. One major theme that emerged across the second and third days of the conference was a focus on the affective appeal of fascism. In a panel on the ‘New Fascist Body,’ Dagmar Herzog (City University of New York) posed a compelling question: what do we miss about Nazism’s emotional work if we leave out sex? The answer, she argued, was the close link between a sexual permissiveness on the one hand, and a castigation of disability and Jewishness on the other. This link not only reconfigured social mores along racial lines, but helped render the regime attractive as a source of romantic and sexual fulfillment. Lorenzo Benadusi (Università Roma Tre) argued that poor living standards in interwar Germany pushed Germans towards a biopolitics of elimination and extermination as a means of fending off hardship. Darcy Buerkle (Smith College) built on Herzog’s insights about the affective links between desire and murder through a close examination of Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche’s 1920 Permission to Annihilate Life Unworthy of Life, arguing that the appeal of fascism lies in part in the sense of revulsion that it cultivates.
Eric Kurlander (Stetson University) reiterated the question of appeal in a panel on nationalism by exploring how a tradition of romantic nationalism rooted in the nineteenth century helped to forge the cognitive frameworks that allowed fascism to emerge. For Kurlander, German Romanticism was not inevitably fascist, but its tendency toward esoterism and mysticism helped lead Germans toward illiberal models of nationalism amidst the interwar crisis. Donatello Aramini (Sapienza Università di Roma) argued that these insights might be extended by comparing fascism with the radical nationalisms that emerged alongside and interacted with it: Italian Fascists saw the nation as a psychological act, rather than a historical fact, and in fact it was this radical conception, not the fascist alternative, that has resurfaced in contemporary politics. Mercedes Peñalba-Sotorrío (Manchester Metropolitan University) pointed to Spanish falangists’ fixation on restoring historical grandeur, rather than territory, to stress the need to attend to differences between the romantic concepts of the nation at the center of fascist movements. As all three emphasized in the discussion, fascization was a process, and historians must attend to how fascist mobilizing myths crystalized in moments of historical crisis.
This attentiveness to change was also on full display in a panel on antisemitism and racism. Paul Hanebrink (Rutgers University.) argued compellingly that while both were entangled in fascist ideology, the relationship between them was unstable and shifted over time. Judeo-Bolshevism, Hanebrink emphasized, was a truly transnational stereotype that allowed a range of actors on the interwar Right to find common ground, even if they differed starkly in their ideas about race. Likewise, it was precisely this instability that allowed elements of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth to reemerge shorn of overt references to Jews. Manuela Consonni (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) traced the ways that anti-Jewish prejudice progressively converged with anthropological thinking to make race, rather than religion, into the defining characteristic of the nation in European thought. Atina Grossmann (The Cooper Union) brought the discussion to the present day by pointing to the way that a new imagined ‘Islamo-gauchiste’ threat has both displaced and come to exist side-by-side with older iterations of antisemitism.
A second major theme to emerge from the conference was the importance of empire—and particularly the crisis of empire issuing from the Great War—in shaping the fascist project. Leading a panel dedicated to the topic, Pamela Ballinger (University of Michigan) warned that historians must remain skeptical of fascist claims to difference in empire. To highlight the dialogic relationship between fascist and liberal forms of empire, Ballinger examined fascist empire as one of ‘excess’: excess in that fascist imperial projects sought to capture the leftovers of liberal empire; excess in that they sought to create the abundance needed for an autarkic territory; and excess in that they sought to supersede a liberal order based on empire. Pointing to the interwar intersection of antifascism and anticolonialism, Giuliana Chamedes (University of Wisconsin-Madison) argued that we can see across fascist imperial projects a bid to normalize and justify empire-making at a moment when the legitimacy of colonial rule fell into question. Roberta Pergher (Indiana University) pointed to the specific temporality of fascist empire as well. What was distinctive was not so much what fascists did, Pergher argued, but when they did it: in an interwar moment when liberal empires looked for new ways to define and legitimize themselves. As the discussion made clear, a transnational approach has many insights yet to bear.
This focus on the specific temporality of interwar fascism found echo in a panel on wartime violence. As Annette Becker (Université Paris-Nanterre) made clear, the forms of violence that defined fascism took shape not only on the front lines of the Great War, but in domestic spaces as well, as continental empires fractured, refugee populations were painted in increasingly threatening and racialized terms, and practices like deportation, internment in camps, and even pogroms became common. Sven Reichardt (Universität Konstanz) reiterated this point, arguing that if colonial genealogies defined some forms of Nazi violence, the emphasis on a total mobilization of society emerged from war planning focused on the European continent. Omer Bartov (Brown University) in turn stressed that it was imperative for historians to attend to the common socioeconomic conditions that produced fascism. The mechanized, industrial killing of World War One forged the techniques and sensibilities for mass murder, but it was defeat that catalyzed them into the Nazi genocidal project.
Other panels made it clear how new approaches have begun to expand the temporal and conceptual boundaries of the field. Austin Clements (Stanford University) made a clear case that despite their commonalities, the key divergence between the twentieth century American Far Right and European interwar fascisms lay in the American movements’ fixation on manifesting a millenialist, ethereal Kingdom of God, rather than a mythical national community. Robert Corban (University of Mississippi) argued that expanding the cast of historical actors—in this case, to include lesser-known Italian parliamentarians—can help historians to detect continuities in policymaking that bridged the fascist period. Amy King (University of Bristol) explored how popular memory has become a battlefield for Italian neofascists who have displaced any direct performance of fascist liturgies onto a commemoration of the victims of street violence during the Years of Lead.
This focus on the popular memory and inheritance of ‘classic’ fascism constituted the final thematic thread that wove its way through the conference. Enzo Traverso (Cornell University) opened the debate on day one by articulating a concept of ‘post-fascism’ that he argued shares many of the features of fascism while differing in substantive ways. For Traverso, post-fascism has abandoned fascism’s revolutionary purpose and accepted liberal democracy, but it has retained the populist division between producers and parasites. Renato Moro (Università Roma Tre) offered a rebuttal, arguing for much greater continuity, but also for a recognition that the political threat to liberal democracy today comes primarily from the populist right’s willingness to resuscitate elements of fascism as part of a new form of ‘illiberal democracy.’ Elissa Mailänder (Sciences Po) reminded participants that Nazi political values were always heterogenous and that continuities might be easier to detect if historians look to the ways that people perform fascism in everyday life. She pointed in particular to ways that fascist aesthetics persist in popular representation, or how female far right leaders like Giorgia Meloni or Alice Weidel deploy ostensibly ‘feminist’ language to reiterate essentialist notions about race, gender, and disability.
The question of aesthetic continuity stood front and center in a panel on ‘Images of Fascism.’ Art historian Raffaele Bedarida (Sapienza Università di Roma) surveyed four major exhibitions that shaped public consciousness about fascist art in Italy, arguing that curators’ insistence on presenting that art in purportedly neutral terms has led to its depoliticization and aestheticization. Many of the conference participants observed this phenomenon firsthand at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, where an exhibition on Futurism currently presents notably fascist pieces like Renato Bertelli’s Continuous Profile bust of Mussolini with scant historical context. Mary Louise Roberts (University of Wisconsin-Madison) offered a contrast through the treatment of Nazi art, which has remained taboo and subject to much public debate in Germany. Ofer Ashkenazi (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) suggested that fascist aesthetics did not, in fact, differ substantively from the broader aesthetics of the period. Instead, he suggested that the historical framing of these aesthetics plays a critical role in creating (or diminishing) fascist meaning.
Jennifer Evans (Carleton University) offered a more pessimistic appraisal on the closing day of the conference in a paper that drew together this focus on aesthetics with the questions about desire, deviancy, and the appeal of fascism raised by others. For Evans, the illiberal tendencies of modernity lie in part in the contest around normalcy and deviation, and debates over transgressive sexuality have become a means to propagate fascist practices within the liberal center of democracies. Mary Nolan (New York University) built on this point to highlight how the transphobic rhetoric of the contemporary far right exposes the central role of anxieties about sexuality, masculinity, and the family in driving the appeal of fascism. Jonathon Catlin (University of Rochester) pointed to the emergence of new forms of homo-nationalist politics articulated by politicians like Alice Weidel in Germany that normalize homosexuality by demonizing other forms of queerness. This politics, he noted, is not regressive, but generative in its own right; perpetuating forms of fascist incitement within the framework of liberal democracy rather than outside of it.
The conference’s final panel explored the ‘afterlives’ of fascism. Federico Finchelstein (The New School) opened with a criticism of the recent fascism debate, arguing that the comparisons drawn between contemporary populism and historical fascism have missed how postwar populism emerged from fascists’ and fellow travelers’ efforts to formulate a postwar politics in Latin America. António Costa Pinto (U. Lisbon) likewise pushed back on the recent ‘classification mania’ by pointing to a much broader electoral revolt against liberal democracies. Diana Garvin (University of Oregon) productively shifted the conversation back to the realm of material and visual culture, arguing that we must take both seriously as sources to understand the appeal of fascism. Through a discussion of ‘tradwives’ and ‘tech bros,’ Garvin argued that aesthetics matter because they embody political values in ways that build affinities and can be broadly consumed. These aesthetics saturate social media—and by extension, everyday life—with fascist values and allow them broader purchase within society.
If a singular thread wove itself throughout the entire conference, it was the clear sense that this reassessment of fascism matters not only because the historiography has matured tremendously since Mosse’s 1963 Stanford seminar, but because fascism has become once again a pressing problem. As multiple speakers noted, the 1963 Stanford seminar confronted a phenomenon whose memory was still raw, but which belonged to the past. That past has returned to haunt our present in unexpected ways. It bears mention that the conference in Rome was sandwiched between a mass commemoration by neofascists of the Acca Larentia killings in the same city on January 7th and billionaire Elon Musk’s apparent Nazi salute onstage at a Trump rally on January 20th. As the conference made clear, the endless debates on how to ‘properly’ define fascism or how to define whether a particular politics can be qualified as ‘fascist’ no longer do effective historiographical or political work. Rather, a new focus on the transnational circulation of fascist ideas and practices, on the affective and emotional contexts that allow them to take purchase, and on the protean forms they often adopt promises to bring critical insights to both the field of fascist studies and to observers hoping to understand the illiberal, anti-democratic, authoritarian impulses of our current moment. As George L. Mosse long contended, historians are lousy prophets but good diagnosticians. If the conference in Rome is any indicator, historians of fascism have fashioned an array of new and innovative diagnostic tools that may prove vital in our current moment.
Terrence Peterson is Associate Professor of History at Florida International University, where he teaches on modern Europe and European empires with a focus on decolonization, migration, and warfare. His first book, Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency, examines how French officers sought to counter demands for Algerian independence from France by transforming war into an exercise in armed social reform. Supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Award, his current research examines the nearly seventy-year history of the Rivesaltes Camp in southern France to understand why migrant detention camps emerged as a quintessential tool of modern governance.