Fascism and the History of Pre-War Japan: The Failure of a Concept

Old paradigms never die; they just fade away, though often not soon enough. Historians and political scientists have managed to abandon a number of misleading descriptive or analytical concepts they had once used in talking about pre-war Japanese politics—“liberalism” and “democracy,” for example. But the metaphor of fascism persists, which is surprising, given the conceptual and empirical difficulties involved.