Fascism was born in Europe as a new kind of ultra-nationalism after the massive shock of the First World War. The historian Tony Judt wrote: “Fascists don't really have concepts. They have attitudes”. Although this is surely an exaggeration, it captures an important truth about fascism as a cultural map. Namely, fascists believe politics consists of ceaseless struggle, often violent, against enemies of a nation both ethnic and ideological. Politics is not primarily about justice, but a primordial clash between what the Nazi legal jurist, Carl Schmitt, called the “friend” versus the “enemy”.

Since politics is an existential struggle for survival, fascists are sometimes willing to strategically compromise, even contradict, key beliefs in pursuit of victory. This often leads observers to misperceive fascism as incoherent. Pronouncements like those made by Umberto Eco – that fascism is “defined as irrationalism” – are not uncommon. But the truth is that fascism is far from lacking a kind of cultural coherence and sophisticated theoretical resources. However, one needs to imaginatively exit one's own map and employ a cultural approach to see how this ideology's borders, boundaries, coordinates and landmarks coalesce – something which even someone as brilliant as Eco clearly struggles to achieve.

Indeed, fascism's cartography has led intellectuals as arrestingly formidable as Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, Giovanni Gentile and many others into its shadowlands. As students of ideology, we cannot preemptively dismiss fascism's ethically magnetic and sense-making features as “irrational”. To the contrary, giving into this temptation severely underplays the allure of fascist politics. As with all ideologies, people become fascists because its interpretation of life resonates, and in doing so begins to saturate identity, orient action and inspire the building of worlds. Political life is not simply or even primarily about properly working out a rational syllogism or the arithmetic of some ideological calculus. Instead, ideology makes an appeal to the human need and quest for meaning. If the opponents of fascism fail to recognize this they will become vastly less effective in combatting its politics.