The Pedigree of Fascism: A Popular Essay on the Western Philosophy of Politics

If one may judge of the importance of a political event by the number of articles and books printed on the subject there is no question but that Fascism is one of the most important movements of the post-war world. Strange to say, however, the light thrown by most of these publications fails to illuminate the points most interesting to foreigners. This is probably due first of all to the fact that most of the writers have written either for or against it; moreover, this movement, being peculiarly Italian, is difficult for a foreign mind to grasp. In any case, it is a fact that in spite of all the good or bad will of the journalists this revolution is far from being understood. The lack of intelligent information regarding it is felt everywhere; and it would be difficult to say whether the misrepresentation is greater among those who admire it and, seeing in it a universal remedy for all modern woes, want to introduce its method in other countries; or among those who consider it just as a matter of incidental and local politics. I shall try to put it in its historical setting, and I shall consider myself fortunate if I can throw light on its relation to the political past of Italy, and to the present political conceptions of other countries.

The first question that invariably arises is whether Fascism is or is not a revolution. This, however, must be answered by another: what is a revolution? No word stands in greater need of a sound, common-sense definition, yet a definition of it stands on the very threshold of any impartial research on Fascism.

Is revolution merely a change of government? This is not sufficient. If it were, the fall of Louis Philippe from the throne of France would be a revolution; yet it is obviously by a license that one speaks of it as the Revolution of ’48. The form of government may change without any substantial alteration of the régime. Then does revolution imply a change of régime? Yes, but, again, what is exactly a change of régime?

Without following any further this method of investigation let us define Fascism as the introduction of a new conception of the relation between State and Citizen, a new conception of political reality. It is, therefore, a doctrine, a system, and as such is philosophy expressing itself in history. This admitted, it is necessary to guard against the abstract bent. of philosophical researches. The deepest currents of speculative thought would never bring about a single change of government by themselves; but then they do not exist by themselves. It is only in the synthesis of history that we find them at play in the world of historical reality, which is what it is because thoughts and deeds are one.

The March on Rome did certainly mark the confluence of two streams coming to mingle their waters between the banks of the Tiber. One was torrential, the impulse coming from a fifty years’ accumulation of economic and political mistakes in Italy. The other was deeper, slower, the contribution of centuries of Italian philosophy enriched by the intellectual thought of all Europe. The torrent is represented by the political antecedents of Fascism: the deep stream by the philosophical antecedents of Fascism.

To illustrate my figure a period of history presents itself as an example. It does not correspond exactly to the present movement in Italy, but it is at any rate familiar to one and all: the French Revolution. We see there, also, the typical stream of philosophical life carving a deep bed for the river to come: in the minds of intellectuals, in the consciousness of the people, abstract theories or works of artistic vulgarisation, prepare the bed for the river that will become, under the impulsion of actual circumstances, an irresistible torrent. So that this revolution whose intellectual pedigree makes it the offspring of Descartes, and Hobbes, of Grotius, Locke and the English political writers, besides the Encyclopædists, Voltaire and Rousseau, has to the highest degree the qualities that make it an element of universal life, and a fertilising principle in the politics of all Europe. On the other hand it receives, undoubtedly from the economic and political conditions of France, the particular determinations that distinguish it as French, as belonging to the eighteenth century. The form it took actually between 1790 and 1795 could not be introduced anywhere else; under that form it was exclusively French, because—we must insist on the point—it had received it as its actual and concrete determination from its immediate antecedents.

Actuation, realisation, concrete life, whatever the field we move in, whether we consider politics, artistic creation, or natural life, it requires two elements, the one universal, the other particular. Now history shows that the universal element spreads, notwithstanding frontiers and the will of men. Its force of expansion is a quality common to all ideas; but the particular is not to be imported, and it is as impossible to introduce it in foreign lands as it is to confine the other to any land. Hence the political applications of the same theories in different countries differ from each other as do the countries themselves. These differences, economic, political, religious, intellectual, in a word the historical differences existing between two countries determine the differences that the same theory will undergo when it is adopted by the people of different nations.