Why in the world should a historian of Japan write about “fascism”?
Monday, February 24, 20251:00 PM
306 Royce Hall
Historians of Japan have an advantage to address the question whether the term “fascism” can function as a generic concept that legitimately and authoritatively collects under the same rubrics regimes that have sociohistorically distinct geneses, on the assumption that they share some essential common characteristics. The question whether Japan in the 1930s descended into fascism or not rests essentially in the the capacity of this term to operate as a principium individuationis subsuming within its genericity a heterogeneity of social, political, cultural, and intellectual phenomena. This lecture sets up the conditions to answer this epistemological question historically, by mapping the multiplication of the meanings, usages, and referents of “fascism” from its coining in 1919 to the present, by way of its movements around the world, across languages, social groups, and political interests and through various intertextual and intersemiotic networks. The question whether “fascism” is a heuristically advantageous term to understand people's voluntary abdication of the modern emancipatory ideals of freedom, equality, and solidarity starts from the reconstruction of how different historical actors (Mussolini, Fascist activists, antifascist agitators, as well as postwar historians, social and political scientists, artists, philosophers, etc.) have contributed to produce different semantic markers of “fascism” and how these meaning-making acts have consolidated into different interpretive habits.
Federico Marcon, professor of East Asian Studies and History and Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, is a historian of ideas. Trained in the intellectual history of early modern and modern Japan, Marcon is broadly interested in the interaction of social, intellectual, institutional, and politico-economic dynamics in knowledge production in the early-modern and modern periods, with a particular concern for semiotics and historiography. His first book, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), is a social and intellectual history of the creation, developments, institutionalization and eventual disappearance of a field of nature studies in Tokugawa Japan. His second monograph, Fascism: The History of a Word (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2025), is a history of the word “fascism” and of its changing political and heuristic agency.
Sponsor(s): Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies