There has been much talk of a revival of fascism in recent years, and with good reason. Whether the term is uttered in relation to the growing violence, militarisation, and power of the police in many nations across the globe, the suspension of liberal–democratic rights under myriads of legislation, the growth of online neofascist subcultures or street militias, or to the exercise of calculated industrial violence at borders, colonies, and reservations, in prisons and in care homes, it is clear that an ill wind is blowing. A growing reaction stands poised to enact unfathomable violence.

Here, however, all clarity ends, swept into a whirlpool of confusion. What is driving these forces, or even if they may be called fascist, are questions mired in ambiguity, multitudes of special theorised mobilised in pursuit of an answer. Some argue that we are arguing into a global police state. Others, that particular forces represent something akin to Italy’s fasci or Germany’s Nazis. Others still, that fascism has always been with us. A grisly line of continuity etched in history’s sands, from the first blood let my Europe’s imperial conquerors. Whilst each of these ‘theories’ may illuminate elements of the reaction which confronts us when in the grasp of an able hand, they fail to offer a full account of the phenomenon.

In many respects, this is to be expected. Despite the pages and pages devoted to particularly Nazism’s atrocities, there are few clear accounts of historical fascism’s fundamental significance. The popular imagination conjures an aberration or a constant, unshakeable behemoth, both approaches belie history…