What does “fascism” mean at the beginning of the twenty-first century? The word conjures a dark interwar landscape of violence, dictatorship, and genocide. Such images spontaneously return to our thoughts as we again see the rise of the radical right on a global scale, from Europe to the US and Brazil. Yet, fascism has changed its skin. It ostentatiously exhibits typical fascist features – authoritarian and charismatic leadership, hatred of democracy, contempt for law, derision of human rights, open racism (notably against Blacks, Latinos, and Muslims), misogynism, homophobia – but the old fascist rhetoric has been abandoned: the post-fascist movements depict themselves as defenders of national identities threatened by globalization, mass immigration, and Islamic fundamentalism. A hybrid phenomenon, this “post-fascism” is neither the reproduction of the old fascism nor something wholly new; it remains in suspension between an unknown future and a haunting past.

Enzo Traverso is Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. He was born in Italy. He studied history at the university of Genoa, Italy, and obtained his PhD at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Institue for Sociales Sciences), Paris, France. He taught political science for many years in France and was visiting professor in many European and Latin American countries. His books include Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-1945 (Verso, 2016), Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory (Columbia University Press, 2016), Revolution: An Intellectual History (Verso, 2021), and Singular Pasts; The “I” in Historiography (Columbia University Press, 2022).

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