Eco Homo

Thoughts on Umberto Eco's "Ur-Fascism"

Part II of a Project on Authoritarian Thought.

So let’s talk about Umberto Eco and his famous essay, “Ur-Fascism,” published in 1995 in the New York Review of Books. (The article is behind a paywall, but it’s available here too.)

This essay is justly celebrated as a clear statement and distillation of the key themes that lie beneath Fascism and its related movements—ideas that are not specific to time and place but crop up in different countries in different decades and speak a similar intellectual language with different accents.

Eco actually begins with an important and often-overlooked caveat. He is not seeking to define Fascism. He is seeking to identify the ideational layers one step beneath Fascism in what the tech bros would now call “the stack.”

Fascism, after all, was a particular political movement, the parameters of which are well-defined. It involved a single leader, a particular relationship between party and state, a militarized party apparatus, and imperial aspirations. It was not simple authoritarianism. And it did not coexist, however uneasily, with parliamentary or presidential democracy the way contemporary European right-wing parties (including the current ruling party in Italy) and the Trumpist movement here do.

Eco writes:

If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.