The New Faces of Fascism Quotes

“First of all, we should not forget that the concept of fascism has frequently been used even after World War II, and not only in order to define the military dictatorships of Latin America. In 1959, Theodor Adorno wrote that ‘the survival of National Socialism within democracy’ was potentially more dangerous than ‘the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy’.2 In 1974, Pier Paolo Pasolini depicted the anthropological models of neoliberal capitalism as a ‘new fascism’ compared to which the regime of Mussolini appeared irremediably archaic, as a kind of ‘paleofascism’.3 And in even more recent decades, many historians seeking to provide interpretations of Berlusconi’s Italy recognized its intimacy—if not its filiation—with classical fascism”
― Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right

“This small digression shows that fascism has not only been transnational or transatlantic,5 but also transhistorical. Collective memory establishes a link between a concept and its public use, which usually exceeds its purely historiographical dimension. In this perspective, fascism (much like other concepts in our political lexicon) could be seen as a transhistorical concept able to transcend the age that engendered it.”
― Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right

“The world had not experienced a similar growth of the radical right since the 1930s, a development which inevitably awakens the memory of fascism. Its ghost has reappeared in contemporary debates and reopens the old question of the relationship between historiography and the public use of the past. As Reinhart Koselleck reminded us, there is a tension between historical facts and their linguistic transcription1: concepts are indispensable for thinking about historical experience, but they can also be used to grasp new experiences, which are connected to the past through a web of temporal continuity.”
― Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right