Umberto Eco wasn’t just the author of The Name of the Rose—he was a medievalist who turned his deep knowledge of the past into a sharp warning about the present. His writings reveal how the symbols and rhetoric of the Middle Ages can be twisted to serve modern fascist ideologies.
By Richard Utz
Umberto Eco (1932–2016) is widely known as a public medievalist, one of those rare cases of an academic who managed to write a scholarly book about the role of aesthetics in the works of Thomas Aquinas as well as a wildly successful medievalist detective novel, The Name of the Rose (1980). In the United States, the English translation of Eco’s Italian novel sold more than one million hardcopies between 1983 and 1987. The paperback version sold 800,000 copies in the first three months after its release in 1984.
At the time of Eco’s death in 2016, The Name of the Rose had been translated into more than 40 languages and was claimed to have sold approximately 50 million copies, which emulates the success of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), and J.D. Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye (1951).
Medievalists will also know the 1986 film version of The Name of the Rose, starring Sean Connery; the 2019 TV miniseries starring John Turturro; and his 2000 novel, Baudolino, set in the 12th century. And those interested in medievalism view Eco as one of their foundational influences because of his essays “Living in the New Middle Ages” and “Dreaming of the Middle Ages,” most easily accessible in his 1990 collection, Travels in Hyperreality.
Eco’s public-facing writings express clear political positions. Readers of The Name of the Rose and Baudolino have found in the novels numerous thinly veiled parallels with (and entire allegories of) contemporary Italian and European politics, asking questions about authoritarianism, power struggles between imperial secular and religious potentates, nationalist appropriations of the past, and the fragility of historical fact.
In his 1995 essay for La rivista dei libri, “Il fascismo eterno,” published in the same year in English translation under the title “Ur-Fascism” in The New York Review of Books, Eco explains the origins of his anti-fascist political convictions:
In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.
Eco goes on to tell the story of his intellectual growth and understanding of rhetoric as a tool that can be used by fascists as well as communists, his first contact with “the wonders of Dick Tracy” and chewing gum via African American soldiers during the liberation of Italy at the end of World War II, and the gradual recognition of Mussolini’s success as a mélange of charisma, corporativism, abuse of certain ideas of the past, inflammatory nationalism, the rejection of parliamentary democracy, and anti-Semitism. As an attentive student of the various continuities of the past in his own present, he then distills the common elements of twentieth-century fascism from Italy, Spain, and Germany into what he calls “Ur-Fascism.” This list will remind medievalists of his list for identifying “Ten Little Middle Ages” (in “Dreaming of the Middle Ages”) a few years earlier. In what follows, I summarize Eco’s explanations, and add some comments and associations:
1. A syncretistic cult of tradition
Fascism can utilize various and often contradictory strands of tradition into a common message, creating an allegory of misinformation within which all these contradictions refer to the same original truth. With such an original truth, no advancement of learning is necessary or even possible. “Nazi gnosis fed on traditionalist, syncretic, and occult elements. The most important theorist of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, mixed the Grail with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and alchemy with the Holy Roman Empire. … If you browse through the New Age sections of American bookshops, you will even find Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not a Fascist. But putting together Saint Augustine and Stonehenge, now that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.” He brings the same charge against syncretism in section 9 of “Ten Little Middle Ages,” where he links the widespread use of medieval traditions (“swarming with Knights Templars, Rosicrucians, alchemists, Masonic initiates, neo-Kabbalists, drunk on reactionary poisons sipped from the Grail”) to fascism.
2. Rejection of modernism
Although fascists often worship technology, they reject the modern world, including the spirit of 1789 (and of 1776) and abhor the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason as the beginnings of “modern depravity.” “Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.” It is easy to see how Eco’s suspicions against many forms of (Romantic and nostalgic) medievalism have their foundation in medievalism’s common rejection of Enlightenment rationalism and fascism’s embrace of affective (irrational) movements. Revisiting one’s “infancy,” as he states in “Ten Little Middle Ages,” should be done with caution, or at least a sense of irony.
3. Action for action’s sake
For fascists, “action is beautiful in itself, and therefore must be implemented before any form of reflection.” Intellectuals and their habitats (universities), with their demands for time-consuming deliberation, are therefore enemies of fascism and are accused of elitism and of abandoning traditional values.
4. Dissent equals treason
Criticism, science, and learning in general create dissent and betray the fascist project. One might remember here that Mussolini appointed nine ministers of education over 21 years. Only five of them had any teaching experience. All but one (who quit after six months) were party loyalists who never questioned Mussolini’s directives.
5. Fear of difference
“Fascism grows and seeks a consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a Fascist or prematurely Fascist movement is a call against intruders.”
6. Appeal to the frustrated middle classes
Ur-fascism always “springs from individual or social frustration.” The middle classes, “disquieted by some economic crisis or political humiliation, and frightened by social pressure from below,” will unite to create a majority for fascist rule.
7. Nationalism and conspiracy theories
Fascism unites a population by “their most common privilege,” that of being born in the same country. This is why anything that reeks of the inter/national will be linked with conspiracies, thus creating xenophobia. Jews are often “the best target” because “they offer the advantage of being at once both inside and outside.” In “Ten Little Middle Ages”, Eco sees the nineteenth century as the time when “the medieval period was taken as a political utopia, a celebration of past grandeur, to be opposed to the miseries of national enslavement and foreign domination.”
8. Demonizing enemies as “at once too strong and too weak”
Disciples of fascism are made to feel superior to their enemies (we can defeat them) and at the same time feel humiliated by them (“Jews are wealthy and help one another through a secret network.”).
9. Life as permanent warfare
Fascism considers all pacifism as a form of “collusion with the enemy.” It operates on an “Armageddon complex.” “Since the enemy can and must be defeated, there must be a last battle, after which the movement will rule the world.” The celestial peace after that last battle contradicts permanent Armageddon, but who cares?
10. Scorn for the weak
Fascist movements are constructed on the notion of a “mass elite.” All members of the nation are superior to all external to the nation; all party members are superior to all non-party members; each level of fascist hierarchy (organized military style) retains power based on the alleged inferiority of those below their respective leader.
11. Cult of death
“In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in the Ur-Fascist ideology heroism is the norm.” The Ur-Fascist hero aspires to death and is even impatient to die. “In his impatience, … he usually manages to make others die in his place.”
12. Machismo
Eternal war and heroism are sublimated into “contempt for women and an intolerant condemnation of nonconformist sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality,” and by playing with weapons, an “ersatz penis.”
13. Qualitative populism
Fascism does not allow for individuals’ rights but believes in the “common will” of the national population, which is understood perfectly and executed by the fascist leader. Eco diagnoses “TV populism” and foresees “Internet populism,” in which “the emotional response of a select group of citizens can be presented and accepted as ‘the voice of the people.’” Andrew Elliott and others have since extended Eco’s warnings by demonstrating how electronic media use medievalia for populist agendas.
14. Orwellian Newspeak
“All Nazi and Fascist scholastic texts were based on poor vocabulary and elementary syntax, the aim being to limit the instruments available to complex and critical reasoning.” This is a tenet typical among twentieth-century literati, visible for example in Eric Orsenna’s 2004 novel, Les chevaliers du subjonctif (The Knights of the Subjunctive). In the novel, teenagers previously forbidden by dictatorial authorities to use certain grammatical structures, escape to a Utopian island of freedom lovers, on which the use of the subjunctive, the grammatical feature allowing for the expression of uncertainty, subjectivity, and imagination, is prized. — Of course, Orsenna’s reference for his fictional teenage resistance fighters is that of medieval knighthood!
Umberto Eco is an example of a public intellectual whose academic work, fiction, and journalism are united by an openly expressed political positionality. His deep distrust, expressed in “Ten Little Middle Ages,” for being coopted, “perhaps without realizing,” by fascism while “simply practicing a more or less honest form of divertissement” is rooted in his own childhood and can be better understood by his essay on “Ur-Fascism.” The subtitle to the English translation of that essay in The New York Review of Books reads: “Freedom and liberation are an unending task.”
It bears mentioning that Eco’s hermeneutics of suspicion, both as a medievalist and a semiotician, also extends to noise and (mis)information overload. In his 2009 lecture “Censorship and Silence” he offers a recipe for shutting off “the great need for noise” that is “like a drug.” Quoting the monkish St. Augustine (redi in interiorem hominem), he recommends a “return to silence” and the closer study of the function of silence. Eco deems silence “a semiotics of reticence” and explains:
It is in silence alone that the truly powerful means of information becomes effective – word of mouth. All people, even when they are oppressed by the most censorious tyrants, have been able to find out all that is going on in the world through popular word of mouth. … In losing the condition of silence, we lose the possibility of hearing what other people are saying, which is the only basic and reliable means of communication.
NB: All English translations from Eco’s essays on “Ur-Fascism” and “Censorship and Silence” quoted in this piece are from Umberto Eco, How to Spot a Fascist. Translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon and Alastair McEwen. London: Harvill Secker, 2020.
Richard Utz is Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Professor of Medievalism Studies at Georgia Tech. His recent article on Eco, “Authenticity, Neo-Liberalism, and Socialism: The Name of the Rose,” appeared in Cinema Medievalia: New Essays on the Reel Middle Ages, ed. by K.J. Harty & S. Manning (McFarland, 2024), pp. 270-87.
Top Image: Umberto Eco – photo by Rob Bogaerts / Anefo / Wikimedia Commons
Umberto Eco wasn’t just the author of The Name of the Rose—he was a medievalist who turned his deep knowledge of the past into a sharp warning about the present. His writings reveal how the symbols and rhetoric of the Middle Ages can be twisted to serve modern fascist ideologies.
By Richard Utz
Umberto Eco (1932–2016) is widely known as a public medievalist, one of those rare cases of an academic who managed to write a scholarly book about the role of aesthetics in the works of Thomas Aquinas as well as a wildly successful medievalist detective novel, The Name of the Rose (1980). In the United States, the English translation of Eco’s Italian novel sold more than one million hardcopies between 1983 and 1987. The paperback version sold 800,000 copies in the first three months after its release in 1984.
At the time of Eco’s death in 2016, The Name of the Rose had been translated into more than 40 languages and was claimed to have sold approximately 50 million copies, which emulates the success of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), and J.D. Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye (1951).
Medievalists will also know the 1986 film version of The Name of the Rose, starring Sean Connery; the 2019 TV miniseries starring John Turturro; and his 2000 novel, Baudolino, set in the 12th century. And those interested in medievalism view Eco as one of their foundational influences because of his essays “Living in the New Middle Ages” and “Dreaming of the Middle Ages,” most easily accessible in his 1990 collection, Travels in Hyperreality.
Eco’s public-facing writings express clear political positions. Readers of The Name of the Rose and Baudolino have found in the novels numerous thinly veiled parallels with (and entire allegories of) contemporary Italian and European politics, asking questions about authoritarianism, power struggles between imperial secular and religious potentates, nationalist appropriations of the past, and the fragility of historical fact.
In his 1995 essay for La rivista dei libri, “Il fascismo eterno,” published in the same year in English translation under the title “Ur-Fascism” in The New York Review of Books, Eco explains the origins of his anti-fascist political convictions:
In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.
Eco goes on to tell the story of his intellectual growth and understanding of rhetoric as a tool that can be used by fascists as well as communists, his first contact with “the wonders of Dick Tracy” and chewing gum via African American soldiers during the liberation of Italy at the end of World War II, and the gradual recognition of Mussolini’s success as a mélange of charisma, corporativism, abuse of certain ideas of the past, inflammatory nationalism, the rejection of parliamentary democracy, and anti-Semitism. As an attentive student of the various continuities of the past in his own present, he then distills the common elements of twentieth-century fascism from Italy, Spain, and Germany into what he calls “Ur-Fascism.” This list will remind medievalists of his list for identifying “Ten Little Middle Ages” (in “Dreaming of the Middle Ages”) a few years earlier. In what follows, I summarize Eco’s explanations, and add some comments and associations:
1. A syncretistic cult of tradition
Fascism can utilize various and often contradictory strands of tradition into a common message, creating an allegory of misinformation within which all these contradictions refer to the same original truth. With such an original truth, no advancement of learning is necessary or even possible. “Nazi gnosis fed on traditionalist, syncretic, and occult elements. The most important theorist of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, mixed the Grail with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and alchemy with the Holy Roman Empire. … If you browse through the New Age sections of American bookshops, you will even find Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not a Fascist. But putting together Saint Augustine and Stonehenge, now that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.” He brings the same charge against syncretism in section 9 of “Ten Little Middle Ages,” where he links the widespread use of medieval traditions (“swarming with Knights Templars, Rosicrucians, alchemists, Masonic initiates, neo-Kabbalists, drunk on reactionary poisons sipped from the Grail”) to fascism.
2. Rejection of modernism
Although fascists often worship technology, they reject the modern world, including the spirit of 1789 (and of 1776) and abhor the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason as the beginnings of “modern depravity.” “Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.” It is easy to see how Eco’s suspicions against many forms of (Romantic and nostalgic) medievalism have their foundation in medievalism’s common rejection of Enlightenment rationalism and fascism’s embrace of affective (irrational) movements. Revisiting one’s “infancy,” as he states in “Ten Little Middle Ages,” should be done with caution, or at least a sense of irony.
3. Action for action’s sake
For fascists, “action is beautiful in itself, and therefore must be implemented before any form of reflection.” Intellectuals and their habitats (universities), with their demands for time-consuming deliberation, are therefore enemies of fascism and are accused of elitism and of abandoning traditional values.
4. Dissent equals treason
Criticism, science, and learning in general create dissent and betray the fascist project. One might remember here that Mussolini appointed nine ministers of education over 21 years. Only five of them had any teaching experience. All but one (who quit after six months) were party loyalists who never questioned Mussolini’s directives.
5. Fear of difference
“Fascism grows and seeks a consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a Fascist or prematurely Fascist movement is a call against intruders.”
6. Appeal to the frustrated middle classes
Ur-fascism always “springs from individual or social frustration.” The middle classes, “disquieted by some economic crisis or political humiliation, and frightened by social pressure from below,” will unite to create a majority for fascist rule.
7. Nationalism and conspiracy theories
Fascism unites a population by “their most common privilege,” that of being born in the same country. This is why anything that reeks of the inter/national will be linked with conspiracies, thus creating xenophobia. Jews are often “the best target” because “they offer the advantage of being at once both inside and outside.” In “Ten Little Middle Ages”, Eco sees the nineteenth century as the time when “the medieval period was taken as a political utopia, a celebration of past grandeur, to be opposed to the miseries of national enslavement and foreign domination.”
8. Demonizing enemies as “at once too strong and too weak”
Disciples of fascism are made to feel superior to their enemies (we can defeat them) and at the same time feel humiliated by them (“Jews are wealthy and help one another through a secret network.”).
9. Life as permanent warfare
Fascism considers all pacifism as a form of “collusion with the enemy.” It operates on an “Armageddon complex.” “Since the enemy can and must be defeated, there must be a last battle, after which the movement will rule the world.” The celestial peace after that last battle contradicts permanent Armageddon, but who cares?
10. Scorn for the weak
Fascist movements are constructed on the notion of a “mass elite.” All members of the nation are superior to all external to the nation; all party members are superior to all non-party members; each level of fascist hierarchy (organized military style) retains power based on the alleged inferiority of those below their respective leader.
11. Cult of death
“In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in the Ur-Fascist ideology heroism is the norm.” The Ur-Fascist hero aspires to death and is even impatient to die. “In his impatience, … he usually manages to make others die in his place.”
12. Machismo
Eternal war and heroism are sublimated into “contempt for women and an intolerant condemnation of nonconformist sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality,” and by playing with weapons, an “ersatz penis.”
13. Qualitative populism
Fascism does not allow for individuals’ rights but believes in the “common will” of the national population, which is understood perfectly and executed by the fascist leader. Eco diagnoses “TV populism” and foresees “Internet populism,” in which “the emotional response of a select group of citizens can be presented and accepted as ‘the voice of the people.’” Andrew Elliott and others have since extended Eco’s warnings by demonstrating how electronic media use medievalia for populist agendas.
14. Orwellian Newspeak
“All Nazi and Fascist scholastic texts were based on poor vocabulary and elementary syntax, the aim being to limit the instruments available to complex and critical reasoning.” This is a tenet typical among twentieth-century literati, visible for example in Eric Orsenna’s 2004 novel, Les chevaliers du subjonctif (The Knights of the Subjunctive). In the novel, teenagers previously forbidden by dictatorial authorities to use certain grammatical structures, escape to a Utopian island of freedom lovers, on which the use of the subjunctive, the grammatical feature allowing for the expression of uncertainty, subjectivity, and imagination, is prized. — Of course, Orsenna’s reference for his fictional teenage resistance fighters is that of medieval knighthood!
Umberto Eco is an example of a public intellectual whose academic work, fiction, and journalism are united by an openly expressed political positionality. His deep distrust, expressed in “Ten Little Middle Ages,” for being coopted, “perhaps without realizing,” by fascism while “simply practicing a more or less honest form of divertissement” is rooted in his own childhood and can be better understood by his essay on “Ur-Fascism.” The subtitle to the English translation of that essay in The New York Review of Books reads: “Freedom and liberation are an unending task.”
It bears mentioning that Eco’s hermeneutics of suspicion, both as a medievalist and a semiotician, also extends to noise and (mis)information overload. In his 2009 lecture “Censorship and Silence” he offers a recipe for shutting off “the great need for noise” that is “like a drug.” Quoting the monkish St. Augustine (redi in interiorem hominem), he recommends a “return to silence” and the closer study of the function of silence. Eco deems silence “a semiotics of reticence” and explains:
It is in silence alone that the truly powerful means of information becomes effective – word of mouth. All people, even when they are oppressed by the most censorious tyrants, have been able to find out all that is going on in the world through popular word of mouth. … In losing the condition of silence, we lose the possibility of hearing what other people are saying, which is the only basic and reliable means of communication.
NB: All English translations from Eco’s essays on “Ur-Fascism” and “Censorship and Silence” quoted in this piece are from Umberto Eco, How to Spot a Fascist. Translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon and Alastair McEwen. London: Harvill Secker, 2020.
Richard Utz is Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Professor of Medievalism Studies at Georgia Tech. His recent article on Eco, “Authenticity, Neo-Liberalism, and Socialism: The Name of the Rose,” appeared in Cinema Medievalia: New Essays on the Reel Middle Ages, ed. by K.J. Harty & S. Manning (McFarland, 2024), pp. 270-87.
Top Image: Umberto Eco – photo by Rob Bogaerts / Anefo / Wikimedia Commons
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