Read on for a Q&A with the author about his research, the process of this project, and what’s coming next.

---

How did you wind up in your field, and what do you love about it?

This seemingly simple question requires a complex answer. In fact, I ended up tailoring my own field, or, more clearly put, I curtailed and refurbished a section of the larger field of intellectual history to fit the kind of history of ideas more semiotico I have been practicing, more or less explicitly, since the beginning. This is in part the effect of my own history and in part the result of my own theoretical and methodological search. I started my academic training in Italy, where I pursued a degree in East Asian Languages and Literatures, specializing in the history of ideas in Japan, while taking at least half of my coursework in the Philosophy department, taking classes on the philosophy of language, semiotics, and epistemology. When I started my PhD at Columbia, I had to reframe my work on the history of ideas to fit the structure of a US history program. After that, my published works and the classes I teach increasingly assumed the distinct character of a history of ideas more semiotico. What are the distinguishing characteristics of this approach? Words and the ideas and conceptions they signify are the central “agents” of my historical reconstructions, which study how they structure people’s actions, volitions, affects, relations with the world and with others, and so on, at the same time that their own semantic structure is the result of historical processes of consolidation of their uses and interpretive habits of people within a particular sociohistorical contexts. Being conceived of as structured and structuring structures (this is an expression I refunction from Pierre Bourdieu), the semantic function of words and concepts result from their own history, without the necessity of assuming any metaphysically suspicious postulate (primitives, universals, referential naturalism, cognitive neurobiology, etc.).

Of course, this methodology in part depends on and follows analytical strategies of traditional forms of intellectual, conceptual, cultural, and social history. But unlike intellectual history, it does not put at the center of its analyses the production of an individual or a school of thought; unlike conceptual history, it does not just assume that terms consists of structured ensembles of semantic markers, but retraces the historical processes of formation, consolidation, modification, and fossilization of different denotative and connotative markers; and unlike cultural history, it does not assume “culture” as the ground that determines semantic spectrum of terms, but the end result of the semblance of stability of a culture’s encyclopedia.

In short, Fascism: The History of A Word does not just aim at clarifying the heuristic affordances and advantages of the word “fascism” and the regimes it was used to identify, but it also proposes a new historiographical methodology.

While you were working on this project, what did you learn that surprised you the most?

The initial idea for this book started floating in my mind as a simple temptation during my sabbatical year at the Institute for Advanced Studies in 2016-17. That year “fascism” was at the center of a new Historikerskreit among scholars debating whether the term could be applied to new illiberal-democratic and authoritarian regimes such as those of Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, and Trump in the U.S. For me, it was also a way to confront the heuristic felicity of this category to describe the political trajectory of Japan in the late 1930s. As I started researching and then writing this book, though, the aims of this project changed a bit. Of course, my interest in understanding the processes of how new authoritarian forms of political organization and ideology took hold within liberal democracies around the world in the interwar period never vanquished. But my theoretical attention now focused on how to explain the history of words—how their meanings change, through which social processes their semantic markers become conventionalized (albeit often in contradictory fashion), and how these words, once turned, like “fascism,” into heuristic categories, affect our understanding of the past and the present. It became, like all my other works, an investigation in knowledge production.

The fact that I pursued that research on the term “fascism” acquired then the added meaning of a defense of scholarly inquiry against any form of instrumental pressures or urgency. While the book never negates the seriousness of today’s political predicament, it ruthlessly pursues its investigation of the semantic meanings of “fascism” and its heuristic affordances “without haste,” as I put it in the opening quote of the book.

What do you most hope readers will take away from your book?

In the Preface of the book I write that readers “have the sacrosanct right to misread a text as they please insofar as they take responsibility for their interpretations” (p. xii). This is an important lesson I learned from Umberto Eco, who once sustained, in commenting the various interpretations of his first novel, The Name of the Rose, that “the author should die once he has finished writing, so as not to trouble the path of the text.” Indeed, this is a parody of Robespierre’s famous claim that “The King must die so as France can live.” Accordingly, I am reluctant to say anything about what readers should take away from my book.

It is clearly not a simple book, as it loads its historical reconstructions with theoretical and methodological reflection. That said, I do hope that its stylistic untimeliness—that is, the fact that it refuses to surrender to the urgency of our political predicament; that it withholds to take a promotional stance and thus turning the readers into proselytes of my own antifascist views; and that it subjects its topic, “fascism” as the proper or improper name of counterrevolutionary authoritarianism, to thorough theoretical self-reflections—may turned out to be, at least in the long run, timely… I suspect, in fact, that much of today’s debate on fascism is simply a distraction that prevents us to clearly see how new forms of authoritarianism today are forming and taking their nourishment from the preexisting institutions of liberal democracy and the capitalist mode of economic organization.

Where will your research and writing take you next?

I will continue to refine the methodology and theoretical foundations of my own history of ideas more semiotico on different historical subjects. I am currently working on two book projects. The first, provisionally titled Money Talks: A Semiotic History of Monetary Structures in Early Modern Japan, 1601-1852, reconstructs how money affected Tokugawa society and the ideas that sustained it. As means of exchange, representation of value, measurable expression of social relations, and vehicle of social power through debit/credit relations, money was one of the leading engines of change in Tokugawa society. This will not be an economic history, but rather aims at showing how Tokugawa monetary system constituted a semiotic apparatus that mediated people’s understanding of themselves as well as of their place in society and in the world.

The second, Monsters We Live By: Semiotic Perspectives on the Logic of Cultures, is a historical and comparative analysis of the figure of the monster conceived of as a semiotic device, a meaning-making machine operating within a variety of texts (folktales, religious myths and images, rituals, novels, films, graphic novels, video games, etc.). The book studies how different cultures have imagined and classified monsters and analyzes how these representations changed over time to perform different social functions. As negative objectifications of the most fundamental but often invisible social structures, conceptions, and anxieties, monsters offer a unique key to understand the culture that engendered them. Rather than understanding monsters as cultural universals or psychoanalytical archetypes, the book introduces monsters in their specific sociohistorical context. In fact, the semiotic function of monsters can be understood only within the specific context that produced them. As “meaning-making machines” representing and disseminating society’s innermost desires, fears, fantasies, and nationalist projects, monsters are at the same time useful keys to understanding the logic of cultures. Monsters appear in the historical development of different cultures as symbols regulating what is assumed to be normal and abnormal. They express, in negative, the identity of a cultural community, actual or imagined; and the abjection and fear that they generate have the function of policing and protecting that identity. Monsters are the negation of what a society conceives of as natural and proper. The semiotics of monsters, thus, reveals the ways in which society constructs the Other, the deviant, the enemy, and the repressed, in different modes and in different historical contexts, contributing to unveil how societies manufacture and justify discrimination, marginalization, and extermination.

What’s the best book you’ve read lately?

I’ll give you three: Morten Høi Jensen’s The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain (Yale, 2025), a rich reconstruction of the generation process of Mann’s masterpiece, one of the books I love and reread the most; and Anna Maria Lorusso’s Il senso della realtà. Dalla TV all’intelligenza artificiale (Nave di Teseo, 2025), a semiotic analysis of today’s predicament of information overload, cognitive impasse, and authoritarian ideology. I hope this last one will be soon translated into English. And, of course, Umberto Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics (1976), which I have been regularly rereading since my undergraduate years in the 1990s.

---

Federico Marcon is professor of East Asian studies and history at Princeton University. He is the author of The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Fascism: The History of a Word is available now from our website . Use the code UCPNEW to take 30% off when you order from us directly.