Fascism
Etymology
From Italian fascio, “bundle,” and behind it the Latin fasces — a bundle of rods bound around an axe that symbolized magistrates’ authority in ancient Rome. Mussolini’s Fasci di Combattimento adopted the image of many rods bound into one to signify strength through unity, giving the movement, and then the ideology, its name in the 1920s. Historians debate its exact boundaries, and the term is often applied loosely in ordinary argument.
noun · /FASH-iz-um/
An authoritarian, ultranationalist ideology that exalts the unified nation or race, suppresses dissent, and concentrates power in a single leader or party.
What it names
A specific historical form of dictatorship fusing extreme nationalism with mass mobilization and the crushing of opposition — a benchmark against which later movements are measured.
Example
Scholars cautioned against calling every harsh government fascism, reserving the term for its specific mix of ultranationalism and one-party rule.
Related idea
Totalitarianism describes the total control a state seeks over public and private life; fascism is one ideology that can produce it, alongside certain forms of communism.