Considering that the term itself comes from his movement, the "Fasces of Revolutionary Action", and that he coined the word fascism personally in 1919 (after the word "fascio"), I think at the very least he gets to be attributed the lions' share of it.
Newton can be credited as being substantially the inventor of Newtonian Physics. That doesn't make alchemy a sub-field of Newtonian Physics, despite the fact that Newton wrote numerous treatises on alchemy.
He literally coined the term when talking about his movement. If anyone has claim to what the definition was, it's him.
But history is written by the winners and I'm sure modern day fascists would like to distance themselves from that history as much as possible...and thus the term gets narrowed and redefined.
So then why not take Mussolini's own words on what fascism is and isn't? His definition required it to be totalitarian: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".
> Considering that the term itself comes from his movement, the "Fasces of Revolutionary Action", and that he coined the word fascism personally in 1919 (after the word "fascio"), I think at the very least he gets to be attributed the lions' share of it.
Sure, but that doesn't mean any one aspect of what he did, in isolation from the rest, is "the definition of fascism". (And the understanding of the genericized term is at least as much shaped by Naziism as Italian fascism, anyhow; this might annoy Mussolini if he was around to be annoyed -- frankly, that Nazis are taken as an example of "fascism" would probably annoy Hitler, too -- but, you know, that's just the way language evolves; if we're talking about Mussolini's movement in Italy specifically, we generally say "Italian fascism", not just "fascism" unless there is context to indicate that we are specifically talking about Italy.)
