Umberto Eco

Eco's 1995 essay lists: cult of tradition; rejection of modernism; cult of action for action's sake; disagreement as treason; fear of difference; appeal to frustrated middle classes; obsession with conspiracy; enemies portrayed as simultaneously strong and weak; pacifism as trafficking with the enemy; elitism; heroism as the norm; machismo; selective populism; and Newspeak. Crucially, Eco insists these features cannot be assembled into a coherent system—many contradict each other—but the presence of even one can signal a fascist 'nebulosa' forming. The list is diagnostic, not definitional .

Eco used the German prefix 'Ur-' to signal something primordial and recurring, like an archetype or eternal form. He was not writing a historical definition of Mussolini's regime or Hitler's Germany. Instead, he argued that 'fascism' had become a floating signifier—applicable to many movements across different eras and contexts precisely because it lacks a fixed doctrinal core. Ur-Fascism names the underlying psychological and rhetorical structure that can reappear in new guises. He warned that it 'can come back under the most innocent of disguises' .

Griffin offers a positive definition centered on one core myth—palingenetic ultranationalism, or national rebirth. Eco refuses a positive definition entirely. Where Griffin says fascism is fundamentally about a rebirth narrative, Eco says it is a family resemblance concept with no single essence. Griffin's framework is analytic and comparative; Eco's is diagnostic and warning-oriented. The two are often cited together but pull in opposite directions: one seeks precision, the other seeks recognition of patterns across surface differences .

The most serious critique is that several features—cult of the leader, elitism, militarism, suppression of dissent—describe authoritarian and totalitarian movements broadly, including communist regimes. If Marxist-Leninist states can satisfy enough of Eco's criteria to qualify as Ur-Fascist, the framework loses analytical specificity. Critics also note that Eco's list is impressionistic rather than empirically derived, and that its emotional origin in his wartime childhood makes it a moral denunciation as much as a scholarly tool. Eco himself never claimed it was a formal definition .

Eco is an outsider to the academic subfield. He was a semiotician and novelist, not a historian of fascism, and Ur-Fascism was written as a public essay for The New York Review of Books, not a peer-reviewed article. Yet its influence on how ordinary readers and journalists identify fascist rhetoric has been enormous—arguably greater than any academic definition. Within fascism studies proper, his contribution is treated more as a provocation than a methodology, useful for teaching and recognition but not for comparative research design .

Eco's academic work centered on how signs produce meaning and how readers interpret texts within codes and contexts. In Ur-Fascism, this semiotic training shows in his attention to language: 'Newspeak' as a feature, the way fascist rhetoric exploits vague signifiers, the 'nebulosa' of overlapping features rather than a fixed essence. His broader argument was that fascism functions as a semiotic system—a set of empty signifiers that can be filled by different historical contents. The Name of the Rose similarly explores how signs and texts can be manipulated for power, with its medieval murder plot driven by a forbidden book .