>>17968569
Italian Fascism was not really a coherent ideology, as overstated by A. James Gregor and Sternhell, but a movement. It included various elements, that agreed on common short term aspects (authoritarian state, that had to educate and integrate the masses, corporatism, nationalist geopolitical revisionism, industrial development, a degree of philosophical anti-materialism, praise of military-like virtues), but disagreed on long term goals and practice, and was led in a highly personalist way by Mussolini. This was combined with high prevalence of remaining conservative elites and interest groups in the state after the Fascist takeover. Giovanni Gentile also wasn't the "ideologue of Fascism" (he didn't even join the movement until it was in power), but a prominent academic philosopher, who gave a largely metaphysical justification for Fascism that wasn't universally accepted within the party.

In generic sense, there's pretty much a consensus now in the field of study of "fascism", that it refers to interwar, mainly European, phenomena of radical nationalist movements, which sought a national regeneration through a creation of a new authoritarian or totalitarian state, based around vitalistic, militarist and idealist culture, development of "new man" and highly regulated economy of class collaboration with certain social reforms. Particular manifestations of fascism were quite different between countries and usually ideologically eclectic.