Benito
Mussolini (1883-1945) started his political life as a socialist and
in 1912, was appointed editor of Avanti, a leading socialist newspaper.
During the Great War, Mussolini was expelled from the Socialist Party
for advocating Italy’s entrance into battle. He organized the
Fascist Party immediately following the war. By exploiting general fears
of labor unrest and communism, Mussolini gained his followers among
war veterans and the middle class. Mussolini organized his March on
Rome in 1922 in order to bring down the government. King Victor Emmanuel,
fearful of a civil war, appointed Benito Mussolini prime minister.
The following selection is an excerpt from an article on Fascism which
Mussolini wrote (with the help of Giovanni Gentile) for the Enciclopedia
Italiana in 1932. Following this selection I have included two versions
of the Fascist Decalogue (1934 and 1938) and brief passage on myth from
one of Mussolini's speeches of 1922.
(i)
Fundamental Ideas
1. Like
every sound political conception, Fascism is both practice and thought;
action in which a doctrine is immanent, and a doctrine which, arising
out of a given system of historical forces, remains embedded in them
and works there from within. . . . THERE IS no concept of the State
which is not fundamentally a concept of life: philosophy or intuition,
a system of ideas which develops logically or is gathered up into a
vision or into a faith, but which is always, at least virtually, an
organic conception of the world.
2. Thus
fascism could not be understood in many of its practical manifestations
as a party organization, as a system of education, as a discipline,
if it were not always looked at in the light of its whole way of conceiving
life, a spiritualized way. The world seen through Fascism is not this
material world which appears on the surface, in which man is an individual
separated from all others and standing by himself, and in which he is
governed by a natural law that makes him instinctively live a life of
selfish and momentary pleasure. The man of Fascism is an individual
who is nation and fatherland, which is a moral law, binding together
individuals and the generations into a tradition and a mission, suppressing
the instinct for a life enclosed within the brief round of pleasure
in order to restore within duty a higher life free from the limits of
time and space: a life in which the individual, through the denial of
himself, through the 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 spiritualized conception, itself the result of the general reaction
of modem times against the flabby materialistic positivism of the nineteenth
century. Anti-positivistic, but positive: not skeptical, nor agnostic,
nor pessimistic, nor passively optimistic, as arc, in general, the doctrines
(all negative) that put the centric of life outside man, who with his
free will can and must create his own world. Fascism desires an active
man, one engaged in activity with all his energies: it desires a man
virilely conscious of the difficulties that exist in action and ready
to face them. It conceives of life as a struggle, considering that it
behooves man to conquer for himself that life truly worthy of him, creating
first of all in himself the instrument (physical, moral, intellectual)
in order to construct it. Thus for the single individual, thus for the
nation, thus for humanity. Hence the high value of culture in all its
forms (art, religion, science), and the enormous importance of education.
Hence also the essential value of work, with which man conquers nature
and creates the human world (economic, political, moral, intellectual).
4. This
positive conception of life is clearly an ethical conception. It covers
the whole of reality, not merely the human activity which controls it.
No action can be divorced from moral judgment; there is nothing in the
world which can be deprived of the value which belongs to everything
in its relation to moral ends. Life, therefore, as conceived by the
Fascist, is serious, austere, religious: the whole of it is poised in
a world supported by the moral and responsible forces of the spirit.
The Fascist disdains the “comfortable” life.
5. Fascism
is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship
with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular
individual and raises him to conscious membership of a spiritual society.
Whoever has seen in the religious politics of the Fascist regime nothing
but mere opportunism has not understood that Fascism besides being a
system of government is also, and above all, a system of thought.
6. Fascism
is an historical conception in which man is what he is only in so far
as he works with the spiritual process in which he finds himself, in
the family or social group, in the nation and in the history in which
all nations collaborate. From this follows the great value of tradition,
in memories, in language, in customs, in the standards of social life.
Outside history man is nothing. consequently Fascism is opposed to all
the individualistic abstractions of a materialistic nature like those
of the eighteenth century; and it is opposed to all Jacobin utopias
and innovations. It does not consider that “happiness” is
possible upon earth, as it appeared to be in the desire of the economic
literature of the eighteenth century, and hence it rejects all teleological
theories according to which mankind would reach a definitive stabilized
condition at a certain period in history. This implies putting oneself
outside history and life, which is a continual change and coming to
be. Politically, Fascism wishes to be a realistic doctrine; practically,
it aspires to solve only the problems which arise historically of themselves
and that of themselves find or suggest their own solution. To act among
men, as to act in the natural world, it is necessary to enter into the
process of reality and to master the already operating forces.
7. Against
individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; and it is for
the individual 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 from the necessity of
reacting against absolutism, and which brought its historical purpose
to an end when the State was transformed into the conscience and will
of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular
individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual.
And if liberty is to be the attribute of the real man, and not of that
abstract puppet envisaged by individualistic Liberalism, Fascism is
for liberty. And for the only liberty which can be a real thing, the
liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. Therefore,
for the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual
exists, much less has value,-outside the State. In this sense Fascism
is totalitarian, and the Fascist State, the synthesis and unity of all
values, interprets, develops and gives strength to 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 within the class struggle
and ignores the unity of classes established in one economic and moral
reality in 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 they form first, and above all, the State, which is not
to be thought of numerically as the sum-total of individuals forming
the majority of a nation. And consequently Fascism is opposed to Democracy,
which equates the nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of
that majority; nevertheless it is the purest form of democracy if the
nation is conceived, as it should be, qualitatively and not quantitatively,
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, which ideal tends to become active within the
conscience and the will of all — that is to say, of all those
who rightly constitute a nation by reason of nature, history or race,
and have set out upon the same line of development and spiritual formation
as one conscience and one sole will. Not a race, nor a geographically
determined region, but as a community historically perpetuating itself
a multitude unified by a single idea, which is the will to existence
and to power: consciousness of itself, personality.
10. This
higher personality is truly the nation in so far as it is the State.
It k 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 national States of the nineteenth century. Rather the nation
is created by the State, which gives to the people, conscious of its
own 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 right.
1 l. The
nation as the State is an ethical reality which exists and lives in
so far as it develops. To arrest its development is to kill it. Therefore
the State is not only the authority which governs and gives the form
of laws and the value of spiritual life to the wills of individuals,
but it is also a power that makes its will felt abroad, making it known
and respected, in other words demonstrating the fact of its universality
in all the necessary directions of its development. It is consequently
organization and expansion, at least virtually. Thus it can be likened
to the human will which knows no limits to its development and realizes
itself in testing its own limitlessness.
12. The
Fascist State, the highest and most powerful form of personality, is
a force, but a spiritual force, which takes over all the forms of the
moral and intellectual life of man. It cannot therefore confine itself
simply to the functions of order and supervision as Liberalism desired.
It is not simply a mechanism which limits the sphere of the supposed
liberties of the individual. It is the form, the inner standard and
the discipline of the whole person; it saturates the will as well as
the intelligence. Its principle, the central inspiration of the human
personality living in the civil community, pierces into the depths and
makes its home in the heart of the man of action as well as of the thinker,
of the artist as well as of the scientist: it is the soul of the soul.
13. Fascism,
in short, is not only the giver of laws and the founder of institutions,
but the educator and promoter of spiritual life. It wants to remake,
not the forms of human life, but its content, man, character, 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, the symbol of unity, of strength and justice.
(ii)
Political and Social Doctrine
1. When
in the now distant March of 1919 I summoned to Milan, through the columns
of the Popolo d' Italia, my surviving supporters who had followed me
since the constitution of the Fasces of Revolutionary Action, founded
in January 1915, there was no specific doctrinal plan in my mind. I
had known and lived through only one doctrine, that of the Socialism
of 1903-4 up to the winter of 1914, almost ten years. My experience
in this had been that of a follower and of a leader, but not that of
a theoretician. My doctrine, even in that period, had been a doctrine
of action. An unequivocal Socialism, universally accepted, did not exist
after 1905, when the Revisionist Movement began in Germany under Bernstein
and there was formed in opposition to that, in the see-saw of tendencies,
an extreme revolutionary movement, which in Italy never emerged from
the condition of mere words, whilst in Russian Socialism it was the
prelude to Bolshevism. Reform, Revolution, Centralization-even the echoes
of the terminology are now spent; whilst in the great river of Fascism
are to be found the streams which had their source in Sorel, Peguy,
in the Lagardelle of the Mouvement Socialiste and the groups of Italian
Syndicalists, who between 1904 and 1914 brought a note of novelty into
Italian Socialism, which by that time had been devitalized and drugged
by fornication with Giolitti, in Pagine Libere of Olivetti, La Lupa
of Orano and Divenire Sociale of Enrico Leone.
In 1919,
at the end of the War, Socialism as a doctrine was already dead: it
existed only as hatred, it had still only one possibility, especially
in Italy, that of revenge against those who had wished for the War and
who should be made to expiate it. The Popolo d' Italia expressed it
in its subtitle-"The Newspaper of Combatants and Producers."
The word "producers" was already the expression of a tendency.
Fascism was not given out to the wet nurse of a doctrine elaborated
beforehand round a table: it was born of the need for action; it was
not a party, but in its first two years it was a movement against all
parties. The name which I gave to the organization defined its characteristics.
Nevertheless, whoever rereads, in the now crumpled pages of the time,
the account of the constituent assembly of the Fasci italiani di Combattimento
will not find a doctrine, but a series of suggestions, of anticipations,
of admonitions, which when freed from the inevitable vein of contingency,
were destined later, after a few years, to develop into a series of
doctrinal attitudes which made of Fascism a self-sufficient political
doctrine able to face all others, both past and present. "If the
bourgeoisie," I said at that time, "thinks to find in us a
lightning-conductor, it is mistaken. We must go forward in opposition
to Labour .... We want to accustom the working classes to being under
a leader, to convince them also that it is not easy to direct an ndustry
or a commercial undertaking successfully .... We shall fight against
technical and spiritual retrogression .... The successors of the present
regime still being undecided, we must not be unwilling to fight for
it. We must hasten; when the present regime is superseded, we must be
the ones to take its place. The right of succession belongs to us because
we pushed the country into the War and we led it to victory. The present
method of political representation cannot be sufficient for us, we wish
for a direct representation of individual interests. ... It might be
said against this programme that it is a return to the corporations.
It doesn't matter! ... I should like, nevertheless, the Assembly to
accept the claims of national syndicalism from the point of view of
economics ...."
Is it
not surprising that from the first day in the Piazza San Sepolcro there
should resound the word "Corporation" which was destined in
the course of the revolution to signify one of the legislative and social
creations at the base of the regime?
2. The
years preceding the March on Rome were years during which the necessity
of action did not tolerate enquiries or complete elaborations of doctrine.
Battles were being fought in the cities and villages. There were discussions,
but-and this is more sacred and important-here were deaths. People knew
how to die. The doctrine-beautiful, well-formed, divided into chapters
and paragraphs and surrounded by a commentary-might be missing; but
there was present something more decisive to supplant it-Faith. Nevertheless,
he who recalls the past with the aid of books, articles, votes in Parliament,
the major and the minor speeches, he who knows how to investigate and
weigh evidence, will find that the foundations of the doctrine were
laid while the battle was raging. It was precisely in these years that
Fascist thought armed itself, refined itself, moving towards one organization
of its own. The problems of the individual and the State; the problems
authority and liberty; political and social problems and those more
specifically national; the struggle against liberal, democratic, socialist,
Masonic, demagogic doctrines was carried on at the same time as the
"punitive expeditions." But since the "system" was
lacking, adversaries ingenuously denied that Fascism had any power to
make a doctrine of its own, while the doctrine rose up, even though
tumultuously, at first under the aspect of a violent and dogmatic negation,
as happens to all ideas that break new ground, then under the positive
aspect of a constructive policy which, during the years 1926, 1927,
1928, was realized in the laws and institutions of the regime.
Fascism
is to-day clearly defined not only as a regime but as a doctrine. And
I mean by this that Fascism to-day, self-critical as well as critical
of other movements, has an unequivocal point of view of its own, a criterion,
and hence an aim, in face of all the material and intellectual problems
which oppress the people of the world.
3. Above
all, Fascism, in so far as it considers and observes the future and
the development of humanity quite apart from the political considerations
of the moment believes neither in the possibility nor in the utility
of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism-born
of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in the face
of sacrifice. War alone brings up to their highest tension all human
energies and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the
courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes which never really
put a man in front of himself in the alternative of life and death.
A doctrine, therefore, which begins with a prejudice in favour of peace
is foreign to Fascism; as are foreign to the spirit of Fascism, even
though acceptable by reason of the utility which they might have in
given political situations, all internationalistic and socialistic systems
which, as history proves, can be blown to the winds when emotional,
idealistic and practical movements storm the hearts of peoples. Fascism
carries over this anti-pacifist spirit even into the lives of individuals.
The proud motto of the Squadrista, "Me ne frego," written
on the bandages of a wound is an act of philosophy which is not only
stoical, it is the epitome of a doctrine that is not only political:
it is education for combat, the acceptance of the risks which it brings;
it is a new way of life for Italy. Thus the Fascist accepts and loves
life, he knows nothing of suicide and despises it; he looks on life
as duty, ascent, conquest: life which must be noble and full: lived
for oneself, but above all for those others near and far away, present
and future.
4. The
"demographic" policy of the regime follows from these premises.
Even the Fascist does in fact love his neighbour, but this "neighbour"
is not for him a vague and ill-defined concept; love for one's neighbour
does not exclude necessary educational severities, and still less differentiations
and distances. Fascism rejects universal concord, and, since it lives
in the community of civilized peoples, it keeps them vigilantly and
suspiciously before its eyes, it follows their states of mind and the
changes in their interests and its does not let itself be deceived by
temporary and fallacious appearances.
5. Such
a conception of life makes Fascism the precise negation of that doctrine
which formed the basis of the so-called Scientific or Marxian Socialism:
the doctrine of historical Materialism according to which the history
of human civilizations can be explained only as the struggle of interest
between the different social groups and as arising out of change in
the means and instruments of production. That economic improvements
-discoveries of raw materials, new methods of work, scientific inventions-should
have an importance of their own, no one denies, but that they should
suffice to explain human history to the exclusion of all other factors
is absurd: Fascism believes, now and always, in holiness and in heroism,
that is in acts in which no economic motive-remote or immediate-plays
a part. With this negation of historical materialism, according to which
men would be only by-products of history, who appear and disappear on
the surface of the waves while in the depths the real directive forces
are at work, there is also denied the immutable and irreparable "class
struggle" which is the natural product of this economic conception
of history, and above all it is denied that the class struggle can be
the primary agent of social changes. Socialism, being thus wounded in
these two primary tenets of its doctrine, nothing of it is left save
the sentimental aspiration-old as humanity-towards a social order in
which the sufferings and the pains of the humblest folk could be alleviated.
But here Fascism rejects the concept of an economic "happiness"
which would be realized socialistically and almost automatically at
a given moment of economic evolution by assuring to all a maximum prosperity.
Fascism denies the possibility of the materialistic conception of "happiness"
and leaves it to the economists of the first half of the eighteenth
century; it denies, that is, the equation of prosperity with happiness,
which would transform men into animals with one sole preoccupation:
that of being well-fed and fat, degraded in consequence to a merely
physical existence.
6. After
Socialism, Fascism attacks the whole complex of democratic ideologies
and rejects them both in their theoretical premises and in their applications
or practical manifestations. Fascism denies that the majority, through
the mere fact of being a majority, can rule human societies; it denies
that this majority can govern by means of a periodical consultation;
it affirms the irremediable, fruitful and beneficent inequality of men,
who cannot be levelled by such a mechanical and extrinsic fact as universal
suffrage. By democratic regimes we mean those in which from time to
time the people is given the illusion of being sovereign, while true
effective sovereignty lies in other, perhaps irresponsible and secret,
forces. Democracy is a regime without a king, but with very many kings,
perhaps more exclusive, tyrannical and violent than one king even though
a tyrant. This explains why Fascism, although before 1922 for reasons
of expediency it made a gesture of republicanism, renounced it before
the March on Rome, convinced that the question of the political forms
of a State is not preeminent to-day, and that studying past and present
monarchies, past and present Republics it becomes clear that monarchy
and republic are not to be judged sub specie aeternitatis, but represent
forms in which the political evolution, the history, the tradition,
the psychology of a given country are manifested. Now Fascism overcomes
the antithesis between monarchy and republic which retarded the movements
of democracy, burdening the former with every defect and defending the
latter as the regime of perfection. Now it has been seen that there
are inherently reactionary and absolutistic republics, and monarchies
that welcome the most daring political and social innovations.
7. "Reason,
Science," said Renan (who was inspired before Fascism existed)
in one of his philosophical Meditations, "are products of humanity,
but to expect reason directly from the people and through the people
is a chimera. It is not necessary for the existence of reason that everybody
should know it. In any case, if such an initiation should be made, it
would not be made by means of base democracy, which apparently must
lead to the extinction of every difficult culture, and every higher
discipline. The principle that society exists only for the prosperity
and the liberty of the individuals who compose it does not seem to conform
with the plans of nature, plans in which the species alone is taken
into consideration and the individual seems to be sacrificed. It is
strongly to be feared lest the last word of democracy thus understood
(I hasten to say that it can also be understood in other ways) would
be a social state in which a degenerate mass would have no other care
than to enjoy the ignoble pleasures of vulgar men."
Thus far
Renan. Fascism rejects in democracy the absurd conventional lie of political
equalitarianism clothed in the dress of collective irresponsibility
and the myth of happiness and indefinite progress. But if democracy
can be understood in other ways, that is, if democracy means not to
relegate the people to the periphery of the State, then Fascism could
be defined as an "organized, centralized, authoritarian democracy."
8. In face
of Liberal doctrines, Fascism takes up an attitude of absolute opposition
both in the field of politics and in that of economics It is not necessary
to exaggerate-merely for the purpose of present controversies -the importance
of Liberalism in the past century, and to make of that which as one
of the numerous doctrines sketched in that century a religion of humanity
for all times, present and future. Liberalism flourished for no more
than some fifteen years. It was born in 1830, as a reaction against
the Holy Alliance that wished to drag Europe back to what it had been
before 1789, and it had its year of splendour in 1848 when even Pius
IX was a Liberal. Immediately afterwards the decay set in. If 1848 was
a year of light and of poetry, 1849 was a year of darkness and of tragedy.
The Republic of Rome was destroyed by another Republic, that of France.
In the same year Marx launched the gospel of the religion of Socialism
with the famous Communist Manifesto. In 1851 Napoleon III carried out
his unliberal coup d'etat and ruled over France until 1870, when he
was dethroned by a popular revolt, but as a consequence of a military
defeat which ranks among the most resounding that history can relate.
The victor was Bismarck, who never knew the home of the religion of
liberty or who were its prophets. It is symptomatic that a people of
high culture like the Germans should have been completely ignorant of
the religion of liberty during the whole of the nineteenth century.
It was, there, no more than a parenthesis, represented by what has been
called the "ridiculous Parliament of Frankfort" which lasted
only a season. Germany has achieved her national unity outside the doctrines
of Liberalism, against Liberalism, a doctrine which seems foreign to
the German soul, a soul essentially monarchical, whilst Liberalism is
the historical and logical beginning of anarchism. The stages of German
unity are the three wars of 1864, 1866 and 1870, conducted by "Liberals"
like Moltke and Bismarck. As for Italian unity, Liberalism has had in
it a part absolutely inferior to the share of Mazzini and of Garibaldi,
who were not Liberals. Without the intervention of the unliberal Napoleon
we should not have gained Lombardy, and without the help of the unliberal
Bismarck at Sadowa and Sedan, very probably we should not have gained
Venice in 1866; and in 1870 we should not have entered Rome. From 1870-1915
there occurs the period in which the very priests of the new creed had
to confess the twilight of their religion: defeated as it was by decadence
in literature, by activism in practice. Activism: that is to say, Nationalism,
Futurism, Fascism. The "Liberal" century, after having accumulated
an infinity of Gordian knots, tried to untie them by the hecatomb of
the World War. Never before has any religion imposed such a cruel sacrifice.
Were the gods of Liberalism thirsty for blood? Now Liberalism is about
to close the doors of its deserted temples because the peoples feel
that its agnosticism in economics, its indifferentism in politics and
in morals, would lead, as they have led, the States to certain ruin.
In this way one can understand why all the political experiences of
the contemporary world are anti-Liberal, and it is supremely ridiculous
to wish on that account to class them outside of history; as if history
were a hunting ground reserved to Liberalism and its professors, as
if Liberalism were the definitive and no longer surpassable message
of civilization.
9. But
the Fascist repudiations of Socialism, Democracy, Liberalism must not
make one think that Fascism wishes to make the world return to what
it was before 1789, the year which has been indicated as the year of
the beginning of the liberal-democratic age. One does not go backwards.
The Fascist doctrine has not chosen De Maistre as its prophet. Monarchical
absolutism is a thing of the past and so also is every theocracy. So
also feudal privileges and division into impenetrable and isolated castes
have had their day. The theory of Fascist authority has nothing to with
the police State. A party that governs a nation in a totalitarian way
is a new fact in history. References and comparisons are not possible.
Fascism takes over from the ruins of Liberal Socialistic democratic
doctrines those elements which still have a living value. It preserves
those that can be called the established facts of history, it rejects
all the rest, that is to say the idea of a doctrine which holds good
for all times and all peoples. If it is admitted that the nineteenth
century has been the century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy,
it does not follow that the twentieth must also be the century of Liberalism,
Socialism and Democracy. Political doctrines pass; peoples remain. It
is to be expected that this century may be that of authority, a century
of the "Right," a Fascist century. If the nineteenth was the
century of the individual (Liberalism means individualism) it may be
expected that this one may be the century of "collectivism"
and therefore the century of the State. That a new doctrine should use
the still vital elements of other doctrines is perfectly logical. No
doctrine is born quite new, shining, never before seen. No doctrine
can boast of an absolute "originality." It is bound, even
if only historically, to other doctrines that have been, and to develop
into other doctrines that will be. Thus the scientific socialism of
Marx is bound to the Utopian Socialism of the Fouriers, the Owens and
the Saint-Simons; thus the Liberalism of the nineteenth century is connected
with the whole "Enlightenment" of the eighteenth century.
Thus the doctrines of democracy are bound to the Encyclopédie.
Every doctrine tends to direct the activity of men towards a determined
objective; but the activity of man reacts upon the doctrine, transforms
it, adapts it to new necessities or transcends it. The doctrine itself,
therefore, must be, not words, but an act of life. Hence, the pragmatic
veins in Fascism, its will to power, its will to be, its attitude in
the face of the fact of "violence" and of its own courage.
10. The
keystone of Fascist doctrine is the conception of the State, of its
essence, of its tasks, of its ends. For Fascism the State is an absolute
before which individuals and groups are relative. Individuals and groups
are "thinkable" in so far as they are within the State. The
Liberal State does not direct the interplay and the material and spiritual
development of the groups, but limits itself to registering the results;
the Fascist State has a consciousness of its own, a will of its own,
on this account it is called an "ethical" State. In 1929,
at the first quinquennial assembly of the regime, I said:
For Fascism,
the State is not the nightwatchman who is concerned only with the
personal security of the citizens; nor is it an organization for purely
material ends, such as that of guaranteeing a certain degree of prosperity
and a relatively peaceful social order, to achieve which a council
of administration would be sufficient, nor is it a creation of mere
politics with no contact with the material and complex reality of
the lives of individuals and the life of peoples. The State, as conceived
by Fascism and as it acts, is a spiritual and moral fact because it
makes concrete the political, juridical, economic organization of
the nation and such an organization is, in its origin and in its development,
a manifestation of the spirit. The State is the guarantor of internal
and external security, but it is also the guardian and the transmitter
of the spirit of the people as it has been elaborated through the
centuries in language, custom, faith. The State is not only present,
it is also past, and above all future. It is the State which, transcending
the brief limit of individual lives, represents the immanent conscience
of the nation. The forms in which States express themselves change,
but the necessity of the State remains. It is the State which educates
citizens for civic virtue, makes them conscious of their mission,
calls them to unity; harmonizes their interests in justice; hands
on the achievements of thought in the sciences, the arts, in law,
in human solidarity; it carries men from the elementary life of the
tribe to the highest human expression of power which is Empire; it
entrusts to the ages the names of those who died for its integrity
or in obedience to its laws; it puts forward as an example and recommends
to the generations that are to come the leaders who increased its
territory and the men of genius who gave it glory. When the sense
of the State declines and the disintegrating and centrifugal tendencies
of individuals and groups prevail, national societies move to their
decline.
11. From
1929 up to the present day these doctrinal positions have been strengthened
by the whole economico-political evolution of the world. It is the State
alone that grows in size, in power. It is the State alone that can solve
the dramatic contradictions of capitalism. What is called the crisis
cannot be overcome except by the State, within the State. Where are
the shades of the Jules Simons who, at the dawn of Liberalism, proclaimed
that "the State must strive to render itself unnecessary and to
prepare for its demise"; of the MacCullochs who, in the second
half of the last century, affirmed that the State must abstain from
too much governing? And faced with the continual necessary and inevitable
interventions of the State in economic affairs what would the Englishman
Bentham now say, according to whom industry should have asked of the
State only to be left in peace? Or the German Humboldt, according to
whom the "idle" State must be considered the best? It is true
that the second generation of Liberal economists was less extremist
than the first, and already Smith himself opened, even though cautiously,
the door to State intervention in economics. But when one says Liberalism,
one says the individual; when one says Fascism, one says the State.
But the Fascist State is unique; it is an original creation. It is not
reactionary, but revolutionary in that it anticipates the solutions
of certain universal problems. These problems are no longer seen in
the same light: in the sphere of politics they are removed from party
rivalries, from the supreme power of parliament, from the irresponsibility
of assemblies; in the sphere of economics they are removed from the
sphere of the syndicates' activities-activities that were ever widening
their scope and increasing their power both on the workers' side and
on the employers'-removed from their struggles and their designs; in
the moral sphere they are divorced from ideas of the need for order,
discipline and obedience, and lifted into the plane of the moral commandments
of the fatherland. Fascism desires the State to be strong, organic and
at the same time founded on a wide popular basis. The Fascist State
has also claimed for itself the field of economics and, through the
corporative, social and educational institutions which it has
created, the meaning of the State reaches out to and includes the farthest
off-shoots; and within the State, framed in their respective organizations,
there revolve all the political, economic and spiritual forces of the
nation. A State founded on millions of individuals who recognize it,
feel it, are ready to serve it, is not the tyrannical State of the medieval
lord. It has nothing in common with the absolutist States that existed
either before or after 1789. In the Fascist State the individual is
not suppressed, but rather multiplied, just as in a regiment a soldier
is not weakened but multiplied by the number of his comrades. The Fascist
State organizes the nation, but it leaves sufficient scope to individuals;
it has limited useless or harmful liberties and has preserved those
that are essential. It cannot be the individual who decides in this
matter, but only the State.
12. The
Fascist State does not remain indifferent to the fact of religion in
general and to that particular positive religion which is Italian Catholicism.
The State has no theology, but it has an ethic. In the Fascist State
religion is looked upon as one of the deepest manifestations of the
spirit; it is, therefore, not only respected, but defended and protected.
The Fascist State does not create a "God" of its own, as Robespierre
once, at the height of the Convention's foolishness, wished to do; nor
does it vainly seek, like Bolshevism, to expel religion from the minds
of men; Fascism respects the God of the ascetics, of the saints, of
the heroes, and also God as seen and prayed to by the simple and primitive
heart of the People.
13. The
Fascist State is a will to power and to government. In it the tradition
of Rome is an idea that has force. In the doctrine of Fascism Empire
is not only a territorial, military or mercantile expression, but spiritual
or moral. One can think of an empire, that is to say a nation that directly
or indirectly leads other nations, without needing to conquer a single
square kilometre of territory. For Fascism the tendency to Empire, that
is to say, to the expansion of nations, is a manifestation of vitality;
its opposite, staying at home, is a sign of decadence: peoples who rise
or re-rise are imperialist, peoples who die are renunciatory. Fascism
is the doctrine that is most fitted to represent the aims, the states
of mind, of a people, like the Italian people, rising again after many
centuries of abandonment or slavery to foreigners. But Empire calls
for discipline, co-ordination of forces, duty and sacrifice; this explains
many aspects of the practical working of the regime and the direction
of many of the forces of the State and the necessary severity shown
to those who would wish to oppose this spontaneous and destined impulse
of the Italy of the twentieth century, to oppose it in the name of the
superseded ideologies of the nineteenth, repudiated wherever great experiments
of political and social transformation have been courageously attempted:
especially where, as now, peoples thirst for authority, for leadership,
for order. If every age has its own doctrine, it is apparent from a
thousand signs that the doctrine of the present age is Fascism. That
it is a doctrine of life is shown by the fact that it has resuscitated
a faith. That this faith has conquered minds is proved by the fact that
Fascism has had its dead and its martyrs.
Fascism
henceforward has in the world the universality of all those doctrines
which, by fulfilling themselves, have significance in the history of
the human spirit.
[Source:
Michael Oakeshott, The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary
Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), in Carl Cohen,
ed., Communism, Fascism and Democracy: The Theoretical Foundations 2nd.
ed. (New York: Random House, 1972), pp.328-339.]
The
Ten Commandments of the Italian solider under Mussolini provide the
essence of the philosophy of fascism. The following two versions of
these commandments constitute one of the best examples of the way in
which a political philosophy may be translated into maxims of individual
conduct.
The Fascist Decalogue
(i)
1. Know that the Fascist and in particular the soldier, must not believe
in perpetual peace.
2. Days of imprisonment are always deserved.
3. The nation serves even as a sentinel over a can of petrol.
4. A companion must be a brother, first, because he lives with you,
and secondly because he thinks like you.
5. The rifle and the cartridge belt, and the rest, are confided to you
not to rust in leisure, but to be preserved in war.
6. Do not ever say "The Government will pay . . . " because
it is you who pay; and the Government is that which you willed to have,
and for which you put on a uniform.
7. Discipline is the soul of armies; without it there are no soldiers,
only confusion and defeat.
8. Mussolini is always right.
9. For a volunteer there are no extenuating circumstances when he is
disobedient.
10. One thing must be dear to you above all: the life of the Duce.
(1934)
(ii)
1. Remember that those who fell for the revolution and for the empire
march at the head of your columns.
2. Your comrade is your brother. He lives with you, thinks with you,
and is at your side in the battle.
3. Service to Italy can be rendered at all times, in all places, and
by every means. It can be paid with toil and also with blood.
4. The enemy of Fascism is your enemy. Give him no quarter.
5. Discipline is the sunshine of armies. It prepares and illuminates
the victory.
6. He who advances to the attack with decision has victory already in
his grasp.
7. Conscious and complete obedience is the virtue of the Legionary.
8. There do not exist things important and things unimportant. There
is only duty.
9. The Fascist revolution has depended in the past and still depends
on the bayonets of its Legionaries.
10. Mussolini is always right.
(1938)
Benito Mussolini On Myth
We have
created our myth. The myth is a faith, it is passion. It is not necessary
that it shall be a reality. It is a reality by the fact that it is a
good, a hope, a faith, that it is courage. Our myth is the Nation, our
myth is the greatness of the Nation! And to this myth, to this grandeur,
that we wish to translate into a complete reality, we subordinate all
the rest.
[Source:
From Herman Finer, Mussolini's Italy (1935), p. 218; quoted in Franklin
Le Van Baumer, ed., Main Currents of Western Thought (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1978), p.748.]