Federico Marcon is a professor of East Asian studies and history and chair of the Department of East Asian Studies. His latest book “Fascism: The History of a Word” was published in June 2025 by the University of Chicago Press.
How did you get the idea for this project?
The initial idea for this book started floating in my mind as a simple temptation during my sabbatical year at the Institute for Advanced Studies in 2016-17. That year “fascism” was at the center of a new, little Historikerskreit among scholars debating whether the term could be applied to new illiberal-democratic and authoritarian regimes such as those of Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, and Trump in the U.S. For me, it was also a way to confront the heuristic felicity of this category to describe the political trajectory of Japan in the late 1930s.
How did the project develop or change throughout the research and writing process?
As I started researching and then writing this book, though, the aims of this project changed a bit. Of course, my interest in understanding the processes of how new authoritarian forms of political organization took hold within liberal democracies around the world in the interwar period never vanquished. But my theoretical attention now focused on how to explain the history of words—how their meanings change, through which social processes their semantic markers become conventionalized (albeit often in contradictory fashion), and how these words, once turned, like “fascism,” into heuristic categories, affect our understanding of the past and the present. It became, like all my other works, an investigation in knowledge production. The fact that I pursued that research on the term “fascism” acquired then the added meaning of a defense of scholarly inquiry against any form of instrumental pressures or urgency. While the book never negates the seriousness of today’s political predicament, it ruthlessly pursues its investigation of the semantic meanings of “fascism” and its heuristic affordances “without haste,” as I put it in the opening quote of the book.
What questions for future investigation has the project sparked?
For me this book is the beginning of a serious rethinking, at once theoretical and methodological, of the practice of intellectual and conceptual history. In particular, I want my future works to cement the adoption of interpretive semiotics for the study of ideas. Concretely, this will become the scope of my book on the history of money in Tokugawa Japan, which investigates how the monetary structures of early modern Japan constituted and operated as a semiotic system that affected the ideas, conceptions, forms of sociation, and actions of the Japanese of that period.
Why should people read this book?
Once published, a book (or an article) lives its own life. I believe authors have no rights to control how their work is understood or used. I can only hope that my book can offer two main contributions. First, I hope it can help people understand that the counterrevolutionary authoritarian regimes of the interwar period that the term “fascism” is mobilized to collectively name were not foreign “pathogens” that perverted the society they invaded, but rather neoplastic diseases that grew within those societies. I mean, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism were regimes and ideologies that grew within and lived parasitically of preexisting institutions, structures, and ideas of liberal capitalism. I am afraid that using “fascism” as a generic political ideal-type based on those historical regimes to make sense of today’s new forms of authoritarianisms may be a distraction. New authoritarianisms may in fact now assume different forms, strategies, ideals, and myths to erode the liberal democratic institutions they parasitize.
Second, I hope that by making explicit how I investigated the changing semantic functioning of words like “fascism” my book may help sensitize the readers on how the means of linguistic production are (must be) collectively own: every speech act has the potential of affecting the way language regulate society and the world. Language is not just a means: it is the very condition of our existence as individuals in society and in the world.
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