Nation and redemption: new methodological contributions to the study of classical fascism from conceptual history

Abstract

This work analyses the ideological conformation of Italian Fascism from a historico-conceptual perspective. The origins of that transformation are previous, in a synthesis between Georges Sorel’s political theory of the myth and the nineteenth-century processes of «mass nationalization». The work is divided in two parts. The methodological bases of the study are exposed in the first, based on a fusion of Koselleck’s conceptual history and generic fascism’s historiography. The second analyses the ideological-conceptual structure of Fascism formed around the Nation-State-Leader triad, as well as the features (democratization, politicization, ideologization, temporalization, internationalization, and emotionalization) of the myth of the Nation’s semantic field. It concludes that the myth of the Nation constitutes a fundamental historical concept of Interwar’s authoritarian right, making a palingenetic lecture of Modernity as the redemption of the Nation after a period of decadence.