FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS
1. Like all sound political conceptions, Fascism is action and it is thought; action in which doctrine is immanent, and doctrine which, arising out of a given system of historical forces, remains embedded in them and works on them from within. Therefore it has a form correlative to the contingencies of time and space; but it also has an ideal content of thought which elevates it to an expression of truth in the higher level of the history of thought. One does not act spiritually as a human will dominating the will of others in the world without a conception of the transient and particular reality under which it is necessary to act, and of the permanent and universal reality in which the first has its being and its life. In order to know men one must know man; and in order to know man one must know reality and its laws. There can be no conception of the State which is not fundamentally a conception of life: philosophy or intuition, a system of ideas developing logically or gathered within a vision or a faith, but which is always, at least virtually, an organic conception of the world.
2. Thus many of the practical expressions of Fascism such as a party organization, a system of education, and discipline, can only be understood when considered in light of its general attitude toward life. A spiritual attitude. Fascism sees in the world not only those superficial, material aspects in which man appears as an individual separated from all others, standing by himself, and governed by a natural law which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish momentary pleasure. The man of Fascism is an individual who is nation and fatherland, which is a moral law, binding together individuals and generations into a tradition and a mission, suppressing the instinct for a life closed within a brief circle of pleasure, in order to restore the duty of a higher life free from the limits of time and space: a life in which the individual, through self-denial, through sacrifice of his own private interests, through death itself, realizes that completely spiritual existence in which his value as a man lies.
3. Therefore it is a spiritual conception, arising from the general reaction of this century against the flabby and materialistic positivism of the nineteenth century. Anti-positivistic, but positive: not skeptical, nor agnostic, nor pessimistic, nor passively optimistic, as are, in general, the doctrines (all negative) which place the center of life outside man, who by his free will can and must create his own world. Fascism wants man to be active and to engage in action with all his energies; it wants him to be manfully aware of the difficulties that exist and ready to face them. It conceives of life as a struggle, considering that it behooves man to acquire for himself that life truly worthy of him, creating first of all in himself the instrument (physical, moral, intellectual) to construct it. As for the individual, so for the nation, and so for humanity. Hence the high value of culture in all its forms (artistic, religious, scientific) and the great importance of education. Hence also the essential value of work, with which man conquers nature and creates the human world (economic, political, moral, and intellectual).
4. This positive conception of life is obviously an ethical one. It invests the whole field of reality, as well as the human activities which master it. No action is exempt from moral judgment; there is nothing in the world which can be stripped of the value which belongs to everything in its relation to moral ends. Life, therefore, as conceived by the Fascist, is serious, austere, and religious; all its manifestations are poised in a world sustained by moral forces and subject to spiritual responsibilities. The Fascist disdains the "comfortable" life.
5. The Fascist conception of life is a religious one, in which man is viewed in his immanent relation to a higher law, endowed with an objective will which transcends the particular individual and raises him to conscious membership of a spiritual society. Those who see nothing but mere opportunistic considerations in the religious policy of the Fascist regime fail to realize that Fascism is not only a system of government, but also, and above all, a system of thought.
6. In the Fascist conception of history, man is what he is only in light of the spiritual process to which he contributes as a member of the family, the social group, the nation, and in function of history to which all nations bring their contribution. Hence the great value of tradition in memories, in language, in customs, in the rules of social life. Outside history man is nothing. Fascism is therefore opposed to all individualistic abstractions based on eighteenth century materialism; and it is opposed to all Jacobinistic utopias and innovations. It does not believe in the possibility of "happiness" on earth as conceived by the economic literature of the eighteenth century, and it therefore rejects the teleological notion that at some future time humanity will secure a final settlement of all its difficulties. This notion runs counter to experience which teaches that life constantly flows and changes. Politically, Fascism desires to be a realistic doctrine; practically, it aims to deal only with those problems which are the spontaneous product of historic conditions and which find or suggest their own solutions. In order to act among men, as in the natural world, it is necessary to enter into the process of reality and to take possession of the already operating forces.
7. Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception is for the State; and it is for the individual only in so far as he coincides with the State, which is the conscience and universal will of man in his historical existence. It is opposed to classical liberalism, which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State was transformed into the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the interest of the particular individual; Fascism reasserts the State as the true reality of the individual. And if liberty is to be the attribute of real men, and not of abstract puppets invented by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism is for liberty, and for the only liberty which can be real, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. Therefore, for the Fascist, everything is in the State, and outside of it nothing human or spiritual can exist, much less have value. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State—the synthesis and unity of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of the people.
8. Outside the State there can be neither individuals nor groups (political parties, associations, syndicates, classes). Therefore Fascism is opposed to Socialism, which confines the movement of history to the class struggle and ignores the unity of classes established in a single economic and moral reality in the State. Fascism is likewise opposed to classist syndicalism. But when brought within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and syndicalism, giving them purpose within the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and reconciled in the unity of the State.
9. Individuals form classes according to the similarity of their interests, they form syndicates according to differentiated economic activities within these interests; but first and foremost they form the State, which is not to be thought of numerically as the sum-total of individuals forming the majority of a people. Fascism is therefore opposed to democracy, which equates a nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of the largest number; but it is the purest form of democracy if the people are conceived, as they should be, from the point of view of quality rather than quantity, as an idea, as the most powerful idea (most powerful because most moral, most coherent, most true) which acts within the nation as the conscience and the will of a few, even of One, and as an ideal tends to become active within the conscience and the will of all; that is to say, of the whole group ethnically molded by natural and historical conditions into a nation, following the same line of development and spiritual formation as one conscience and one sole will. Not merely a race, nor a geographically determined region, but a people joined together by common blood, historically perpetuating itself, unified by an idea and imbued with the will to live, the will to power, self-consciousness, personality.
10. This higher personality is the nation in so far as it is the State. It is not the nation that generates the State, as according to the old naturalistic concept which served as the basis of the political theories of the nation-states of the nineteenth century. Rather the nation is created by the State, which gives to the people, conscious of their moral unity, a will and therefore an effective existence. The right of a nation to independence derives not from a literary and ideal consciousness of its own being, still less from a more or less unconscious and inert acceptance of a de facto situation, but from an active consciousness, from a political will in action and ready to demonstrate its own rights: that is to say from a state already coming into being. The State, in fact, as the universal ethical will, is the creator of the right to national independence.
11. A nation, as expressed in the State, is a living, ethical entity only in so far as it is progressive. Inactivity is death. Therefore the State is not only Authority which governs and confers legal form and spiritual value on individual wills, but it is also Power which makes its will felt and respected beyond its own frontiers, thus affording practical proof of the universal character of the decisions necessary to ensure its development. This implies organization and expansion, potential if not actual. Thus the State equates itself to the will of man, whose development cannot he checked by obstacles and which, by achieving self-expression, demonstrates its infinity.
12. The Fascist State, as a higher and more powerful expression of personality, is a force, but a spiritual one. It sums up all the manifestations of the moral and intellectual life of man. Its functions cannot therefore be limited to those of enforcing order and keeping the peace, as the liberal doctrine had it. It is no mere mechanical device for defining the sphere within which the individual may duly exercise his supposed rights. The Fascist State is an inwardly accepted standard and rule of conduct, a discipline of the whole person; it permeates the will no less than the intellect. It stands for a principle which becomes the central motive of man as a member of civilized society, sinking deep down into his personality; it dwells in the heart of the man of action and of the thinker, of the artist and of the man of science: soul of the soul.
13. Fascism, in short, is not only a law-giver and a founder of institutions, but an educator and a promoter of spiritual life. It wants to remake, not the forms of human life, but its content—man, his character, and his faith. And to this end it requires discipline and authority that can enter into the spirits of men and there govern unopposed. Its sign, therefore, is the Lictors' rods (fascio littorio), the symbol of unity, strength, and justice.
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DOCTRINE
1. When in the now distant March of 1919, speaking through the columns of the Popolo d'Italia I summoned to Milan the surviving interventionists who had intervened, and who had followed me ever since the foundation of the Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria in January 1915, I had in mind no specific doctrinal program. The only doctrine of which I had practical experience was that of socialism, from until the winter of 1914—nearly a decade. My experience was that both of a follower and a leader but it was not doctrinal experience. My doctrine during that period had been the doctrine of action. A uniform, universally accepted doctrine of Socialism had not existed since 1905, when the revisionist movement, headed by Bernstein, arose in Germany, countered by the formation, in the see-saw of tendencies, of a left revolutionary movement which in Italy never quitted the field of phrases, whereas, in the case of Russian socialism, it became the prelude to Bolshevism.
Reformism, revolutionism, centrism, the very echo of that terminology is dead, while in the great river of Fascism one can trace currents which had their source in Sorel, Peguy, Lagardelle of the Mouvement Socialiste, and in the cohort of Italian syndicalists who from 1904 to 1914 brought a new note into the Italian socialist environment—previously emasculated and chloroformed by fornicating with Giolitti's party—a note sounded in Olivetti's Pagine Libere, Orano's Lupa, Enrico Leone's Divenire Sociale.
When the war ended in 1919 Socialism, as a doctrine, was already dead; it continued to exist only as a grudge, especially in Italy where its only chance lay in inciting to reprisals against the men who had willed the war and who were to be made to pay for it.
The Popolo d'Italia described itself in its subtitle as the daily organ of fighters and producers. The word producer was already the expression of a mental trend. Fascism was not the nursling of a doctrine previously drafted at a desk; it was born of the need of action, and was action; it was not a party but, in the first two years, an anti-party and a movement. The name I gave the organization fixed its character.
Yet if anyone cares to reread the now crumpled sheets of those days giving an account of the meeting at which the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento were founded, he will find not a doctrine but a series of pointers, forecasts, hints which, when freed from the inevitable matrix of contingencies, were to develop in a few years time into a series of doctrinal positions entitling Fascism to rank as a political doctrine differing from all others, past or present.
"If the bourgeoisie"—I then said—"believe that they have found in us their lightening-conductors, they are mistaken. We must go towards the people... We wish the working classes to accustom themselves to the responsibilities of management so that they may realize that it is no easy matter to run a business... We will fight both technical and spiritual rear-guardism... Now that the succession of the regime is open we must not be fainthearted. We must rush forward; if the present regime is to be superseded we must take its place. The right of succession is ours, for we urged the country to enter the war and we led it to victory... The existing forms of political representation cannot satisfy us; we want direst representation of the several interests... It may be objected that this program implies a return to the guilds. No matter! I therefore hope this assembly will accept the economic claims advanced by national syndicalism…"Is it not strange that from the very first day, at Piazza San Sepolcro, the word 'guild' (corporazione) was pronounced, a word which, as the Revolution developed, was to express one of the basic legislative and social creations of the regime?
2. The years preceding the March on Rome cover a period during which the need of action forbade delay and careful doctrinal elaborations. Fighting was going on in the towns and villages. There were discussions but there was something more sacred and more important:—death. Fascists knew how to die. A doctrine—fully elaborated, divided up into chapters and paragraphs with annotations, may have been lacking, but it was replaced by something far more decisive,—by a faith. All the same, if with the help of books, articles, resolutions passed at congresses, major and minor speeches, anyone should care to revive the memory of those days, he will find, provided he knows how to seek and select, that the doctrinal foundations were laid while the battle was still raging. Indeed, it was during those years that Fascist thought armed, refined itself, and proceeded ahead with its organization. The problems of the individual and the State; the problems of authority and liberty; political, social, and more especially national problems were discussed; the conflict with liberal, democratic, socialistic, Masonic doctrines and with those of the Partito Popolare, was carried on at the same time as the "punitive expeditions". Nevertheless, the lack of a formal system was used by disingenuous adversaries as an argument for proclaiming Fascism incapable of elaborating a doctrine at the very time when that doctrine was being formulated—no matter how tumultuously,—first, as is the case with all new ideas, in the guise of violent dogmatic negations; then in the more positive guise of constructive theories, subsequently incorporated, in 1926, 1927, and 1928, in the laws and institutions of the regime.
Fascism is now clearly defined not only as a regime but as a doctrine. This means that Fascism, exercising its critical faculties on itself and on others, has studied from its own special standpoint and judged by its own standards all the problems affecting the material and intellectual interests now causing such grave anxiety to the nations of the world, and is ready to deal with them by its own policies.
3. First of all, as regards the future development of mankind, and quite apart from all present political considerations, Fascism does not, generally speaking, believe in the possibility or utility of perpetual peace. It therefore discards pacifism as a cloak for cowardly supine renunciation in contradistinction to self-sacrifice. War alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and sets the seal of nobility on those peoples who have the courage to face it. All other tests are substitutes which never place a man face to face with himself before the alternative of life or death. Therefore all doctrines which postulate peace at all costs are incompatible with Fascism. Equally foreign to the spirit of Fascism, even if accepted as useful in meeting special political situations—are all internationalistic or League superstructures which, as history shows, crumble to the ground whenever the heart of nations is deeply stirred by sentimental, idealistic or practical considerations. Fascism carries this anti-pacifistic attitude into the life of the individual. "I do not care" (me ne frego)—the proud motto of the fighting squads scrawled by a wounded man on his bandages, is not only an act of philosophic stoicism, it sums up a doctrine which is not merely political: it is evidence of a fighting spirit which accepts all risks. It signifies new style of Italian life. The Fascist accepts and loves life; he rejects and despises suicide as cowardly. Life as he understands it means duty, elevation, conquest; life must be lofty and full, it must be lived for oneself but above all for others, both near bye and far off, present and future.
4. The population policy of the regime is the consequence of these premises. The Fascist loves his neighbour, but the word 'neighbour' does not stand for some vague and unseizable conception. Love of one's neighbour does not exclude necessary educational severity; still less does it exclude differentiation and rank. Fascism will have nothing to do with universal embraces; as a member of the community of nations it looks other peoples straight in the eyes; it is vigilant and on its guard; it follows others in all their manifestations and notes any changes in their interests; and it does not allow itself to be deceived by mutable and fallacious appearances.
5. Such a conception of life makes Fascism the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism, the doctrine of historic materialism which would explain the history of mankind in terms of the class struggle and by changes in the processes and instruments of production, to the exclusion of all else.
That the vicissitudes of economic life—discoveries of raw materials, new technical processes, and scientific inventions—have their importance, no one denies; but that they suffice to explain human history to the exclusion of other factors is absurd. Fascism believes now and always in sanctity and heroism, that is to say in acts in which no economic motive—remote or immediate—is at work. Having denied historic materialism, which sees in men mere puppets on the surface of history, appearing and disappearing on the crest of the waves while in the depths the real directing forces move and work, Fascism also denies the immutable and irreparable character of the class struggle which is the natural outcome of this economic conception of history; above all it denies that the class struggle is the preponderating agent in social transformations. Having thus struck a blow at socialism in the two main points of its doctrine, all that remains of it is the sentimental aspiration—old as humanity itself—toward social relations in which the sufferings and sorrows of the humbler folk will be alleviated. But here again Fascism rejects the economic interpretation of felicity as something to be secured socialistically, almost automatically, at a given stage of economic evolution when all will be assured a maximum of material comfort. Fascism denies the materialistic conception of happiness as a possibility, and abandons it to the economists of the mid-eighteenth century. This means that Fascism denies the equation: well-being = happiness, which sees in men mere animals, content when they can feed and fatten, thus reducing them to a vegetative existence pure and simple.
6. After socialism, Fascism trains its guns on the whole block of democratic ideologies, and rejects both their premises and their practical applications and implements. Fascism denies that numbers, as such, can be the determining factor in human society; it denies the right of numbers to govern by means of periodical consultations; it asserts the irremediable and fertile and beneficent inequality of men who cannot be leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage. Democratic regimes may be described as those under which the people are, from time to time, deluded into the belief that they exercise sovereignty, while all the time real sovereignty resides in and is exercised by other and sometimes irresponsible and secret forces. Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusive, tyrannical, and destructive than one, even if he be a tyrant. This explains why Fascism—although, for contingent reasons, it was republican in tendency prior to 1922—abandoned that stand before the March on Rome, convinced that the political form of the State is no longer a matter of preeminent importance, and because the study of past and present monarchies and past and present republics shows that neither monarchy nor republic can be judged sub specie aeternitatis, but are forms in which is expressed the political evolution, the history, the traditions, and the psychology of a given country.
Fascism has outgrown the dilemma: monarchy vs. republic, over which democratic regimes too long dallied, attributing all insufficiencies to the former and praising the latter as a regime of perfection, whereas experience teaches that some republics are inherently reactionary and absolutist while some monarchies accept the most daring political and social experiments.
7. In one of his philosophic Meditations, Renan—who had pre-fascist intuitions—remarks, "Reason and science are the products of mankind, but it is chimerical to seek reason directly for the people and through the people. It is not essential to the existence of reason that all should be familiar with it; and even if all had to be initiated, this could not be achieved through democracy which seems fated to lead to the extinction of all arduous forms of culture and all highest forms of learning. The maxim that exists only for the well-being and freedom of the individuals composing it does not seem to be in conformity with nature's plans, which care only for the species and seem ready to sacrifice the individual. It is much to be feared that the last word of democracy thus understood (and let me hasten to add that it is susceptible of a different interpretation) would be a form of society in which a degenerate mass would have no thought beyond that of enjoying the ignoble pleasures of the vulgar."
In rejecting democracy Fascism rejects the absurd conventional lie of political equalitarianism, the habit of collective irresponsibility, the myth of felicity and indefinite progress. But if democracy be understood as meaning a regime in which the masses are not driven back to the margin of the State, then the writer of these pages has already defined Fascism as an "organized, centralized, authoritarian democracy".
8. Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and the economic sphere. The importance of liberalism in the 19th century should not be exaggerated for present day polemical purposes, nor should we make of one of the many doctrines which flourished in that century a religion for mankind for the present and for all time to come. Liberalism really flourished for fifteen years only. It arose in 1830 as a reaction to the Holy Alliance which tried to force Europe to recede further back than 1789; it touched its zenith in 1848 when even Pope Pius IX was a liberal. Its decline began immediately after that year. If 1848 was a year of light and poetry, 1849 was a year of darkness and tragedy. The Roman Republic was killed by a sister republic, that of France. In that same year Marx, in his famous Communist Manifesto, launched the gospel of socialism.
In 1851 Napoleon III made his illiberal coup d'etat and ruled France until 1870 when he was turned out by a popular rising following one of the severest military defeats known to history. The victor was Bismarck who never even knew the whereabouts of liberalism and its prophets. It is symptomatic that throughout the 19th century the religion of liberalism was completely unknown to so highly civilized a people as the Germans but for one parenthesis which has been described as the "ridiculous parliament of Frankfort" which lasted just one season. Germany attained her national unity outside liberalism and in opposition to liberalism, a doctrine which seems foreign to the German temperament, essentially monarchical, whereas liberalism is the historic and logical path to anarchy. The three stages in the making of German unity were the three wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870, led by such "liberals" as Moltke and Bismarck. And in the upbuilding of Italian Unification liberalism played a very minor part when compared to the contribution made by Mazzini and Garibaldi who were not liberals. But for the intervention of the illiberal Napoleon III we should not have had Lombardy, and without that of the illiberal Bismarck at Sadowa and at Sedan very probably we should not have had Venetia in 1866 and in 1870 we should not have entered Rome. The years going from 1870 to 1915 cover a period which marked, even in the opinion of the high priests of the new creed, the twilight of their religion, attacked by decadentism in literature and by activism in practice. Activism: that is to say nationalism, futurism, fascism.
The liberal century, after piling up innumerable Gordian Knots, tried to cut them with the sword of the world war. Never has any religion claimed so cruel a sacrifice. Were the gods of liberalism thirsting for blood?
Now liberalism is preparing to close the doors of its temples, deserted by the peoples who feel that the agnosticism it professed in the sphere of economics and the indifferentism of which it has given proof in the sphere of politics and morals, would lead the world to ruin in the future as they have done in the past.
This explains why all the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal, and it is supremely ridiculous to endeavor on this account to put them outside the pale of history, as though history were a preserve set aside for liberalism and its adepts; as though liberalism were the last word in civilization beyond which no one can go.
9. The Fascist repudiations of socialism, democracy, liberalism, should not, however, be interpreted as implying a desire to drive the world backwards to positions occupied prior to 1789, a year commonly referred to as that which opened the demo-liberal century. History does not travel backwards. The Fascist doctrine has not taken De Maistre as its prophet. Monarchical absolutism is of the past, and so is theocracy (ecclesiolatria). Dead and done for are feudal privileges and the division of society into closed, uncommunicating castes. Neither has the Fascist conception of authority anything in common with that of a police ridden State.
A party governing a nation “totalitarianly" is a new departure in history. There are no points of reference nor of comparison. From beneath the ruins of liberal, socialist, and democratic doctrines, Fascism extracts those elements which are still vital. It preserves what may be described as "the acquired facts" of history; it rejects all else. That is to say, it rejects the idea of a doctrine suited to all times and to all people. Granted that the 19th century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the 20th century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the "right", a Fascist century. If the 19th century was the century of the individual (liberalism means individualism) we are free to believe that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the State. It is quite logical for a new doctrine to make use of the still vital elements of other doctrines. No doctrine was ever born quite new and bright and unheard of. No doctrine can boast absolute originality. It is always connected, if only historically, with those which preceded it and those which will follow it. Thus the scientific socialism of Marx links up to the utopian socialism of the Fouriers, the Owens, the Saint-Simons; thus the liberalism of the 19th century traces its origin back to the illuministic movement of the 18th century, and the doctrines of democracy to those of the Encyclopedistes. All doctrines aim at directing the activities of men towards a given objective; but these activities in their turn react on the doctrine, modifying and adjusting it to new needs, or outstripping it. A doctrine must therefore be a vital act and not a verbal display. Hence the pragmatic strain in Fascism, it's will to power, its will to live, its attitude toward violence, and its value.
10. The cornerstone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative. Individuals and groups are "conceivable" in so far as they are within the State. Instead of directing the game and guiding the material and moral progress of the community, the liberal State restricts its activities to recording results. The Fascist State is wide awake and has a will of its own. For this reason it can be described as "ethical".
At the first quinquennial assembly of the regime, in 1929, I said:
"The Fascist State is not a night watchman, solicitous only of the personal safety of the citizens; nor is it organized exclusively for the purpose of guarantying a certain degree of material prosperity and relatively peaceful conditions of life, a board of directors would do as much. Neither is it exclusively political, divorced from practical realities and holding itself aloof from the multifarious activities of the citizens and the nation. The State, as conceived and realized by Fascism, is a spiritual and ethical entity for securing the political, juridical, and economic organization of the nation, an organization which in its origin and growth is a manifestation of the spirit. The State guarantees the internal and external safety of the country, but it also safeguards and transmits the spirit of the people, elaborated down the ages in its language, its customs, its faith. The State is not only the present; it is also the past and above all the future. Transcending the individual's brief spell of life, the State stands for the immanent conscience of the nation. The forms in which it finds expression change, but the need for it remains. The State educates the citizens to civism, makes them aware of their mission, urges them to unity; its justice harmonizes their divergent interests; it transmits to future generations the conquests of the mind in the fields of science, art, law, human solidarity; it leads men up from primitive life of the tribe to that highest manifestation of human power, Empire. The State hands down to future generations the memory of those who laid down their lives to ensure its safety or to obey its laws; it sets up as examples and records for future ages the names of the captains who enlarged its territory and of the men of genius who have made it famous. Whenever respect for the State declines and the disintegrating and centrifugal tendencies of individuals and groups prevail, nations are headed for decay."11. From 1929 until today, political and economic development has everywhere gone to prove the validity of these doctrinal premises. Of such gigantic importance is the State. It is the State alone that can solve the dramatic contradictions of capitalism. The state of affairs that is called the crisis cannot be solved except by the State, within the State. Where is the shade of Jules Simon, who in the dawn of Liberalism proclaimed that, "The State must labour to make itself unnecessary, and prepare the way for its own dismissal"? Or of McCulloch, who in the second half of the last century argued that the State must guard against the danger of too much government? What would the Englishman, Bentham, say today to the continual and inevitable intervention of the State in the sphere of economics, when according to his theories industry should ask no more of the State than to be left in peace? Or the German Humboldt, according to whom the “lazy” State should be considered the best? It is true that the second wave of Liberal economists were less extreme than the first, and Adam Smith himself opened the door—if only very cautiously—to State intervention in the economy.
If liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells State. The Fascist State is, however, a unique and original creation. It is not reactionary but revolutionary, in that it anticipates the solution of certain universal problems which have been raised elsewhere; in the political field by the splitting up of parties, the usurpation of power by parliaments, the irresponsibility of assemblies; in the economic field by the increasingly numerous and important functions discharged by trade unions and trade associations with their disputes and ententes, affecting both capital and labour; in the ethical field by the need felt for order, discipline, obedience to the moral dictates of the fatherland.
Fascism desires the State to be strong and organic, based on broad foundations of popular support. The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporative, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organized in their respective associations, circulate within the State. A State based on millions of individuals who recognize its authority, feel its action, and are ready to serve its ends is not the tyrannical state of a medieval lordling. It has nothing in common with the despotic States existing prior to or subsequent to 1789. Far from crushing the individual, the Fascist State multiplies his energies, just as in a regiment a soldier is not diminished but multiplied by the number of his fellow soldiers.
The Fascist State organizes the nation, but it leaves the individual adequate elbow room. It has curtailed useless or harmful liberties while preserving those which are essential. In such matters the individual cannot be the judge, but the State only.
12. The Fascist State is not indifferent to religious phenomena in general nor does it maintain an attitude of indifference to Roman Catholicism, the special, positive religion of Italians. The State does not have a theology but it has a moral code. The Fascist State sees in religion one of the deepest of spiritual manifestations and for this reason it not only respects religion but defends and protects it. The Fascist State does not attempt, as did Robespierre at the height of the extreme delirium of the Convention, to set up a "god" of its own; nor does it vainly seek, as does Bolshevism, to efface God from the soul of man. Fascism respects the God of ascetics, saints, and heroes, and it also respects God as conceived by the innocent and primitive heart of the simple people, the God to whom their prayers are raised.
13. The Fascist State expresses the will to exercise power and to command. Here the Roman tradition is embodied in a conception of strength. Imperial power, as understood by the Fascist doctrine, is not only territorial, or military, or mercantile; it is also spiritual and ethical. An imperial nation, that is to say a nation a which directly or indirectly is a leader of others, can exist without the need of conquering a single square mile of territory. Fascism sees in the imperialistic spirit—i.e. in the tendency of nations to expand—a manifestation of their vitality. In the opposite tendency, which would limit their interests to the home country, it sees a symptom of decadence. Peoples who rise or re-arise are imperialistic; renunciation is characteristic of dying peoples. The Fascist doctrine is that best suited to the tendencies and feelings of a people which, like the Italian, after lying fallow during centuries of foreign servitude, are now reasserting itself in the world.
But imperialism implies discipline, the coordination of efforts, a deep sense of duty and a spirit of self-sacrifice. This explains many aspects of the practical activity of the regime, and the direction taken by many of the forces of the State, as also the severity which has to be exercised towards those who would oppose this spontaneous and inevitable movement of 20th century Italy by agitating outgrown ideologies of the 19th century, ideologies rejected wherever great experiments in political and social transformations are being dared.
Never before have the peoples thirsted for authority, direction, order, as they do now. If each age has its doctrine, then innumerable symptoms indicate that the doctrine of our age is the Fascist. That it is vital is shown by the fact that it has aroused a faith; that this faith has conquered souls is shown by the fact that Fascism can point to its fallen heroes and its martyrs.
Fascism has now acquired throughout the world that universality which belongs to all doctrines which by achieving self-expression represent a moment in the history of human thought.
