history paper summary

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Mussolini: Doctrine of Fascism (1932)

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 the general fear of labor unrest and a Bolshevik-style revolution, Mussolini gained a large number of followers among the war veterans, the middle class, and the peasantry. 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 the Doctrine of Fascism which Mussolini wrote in 1932.

REJECTION OF PACIFISM

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 internationalist 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 don't

give a damn” - 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.

The population policy of the regime is the consequence of these premises. The Fascist loves his

neighbor, but the word neighbor does not stand for some vague and muddled conception. Love

of one’s neighbor 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 people 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.

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REJECTION OF MARXISM

Such a conception of life makes Fascism the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying

Marxian socialism, the doctrine of the so-called scientific and historic materialism which would

explain the history of mankind in terms of 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.

REJECTION OF PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY AS A SHAM AND A FRAUD

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 form of government 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 that each stands for a form of government expressing the political evolution, the history, the

traditions, and the psychology of a given country.

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Fascism has outgrown the dilemma: monarchy v. republic, over which democratic regimes too

long dallied, attributing all insufficiencies to the former and proving 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.

In one of his philosophic meditations, Renan - who had prefascist 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 society 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.”

REJECTION OF EGALITARIANISM

In rejecting democracy, Fascism rejects the absurd conventional lie of political equalitarianism,

the habit of collective irresponsibility, the myth of felicity and indefinite progress.

DEFINITION OF FASCISM AS REAL DEMOCRACY

But if democracy be understood as a regime in which the masses are not driven back to the

margin of the State, and then the writer of these pages has already defined Fascism as an

organized, centralized, authoritarian democracy.

REJECTION OF ECONOMIC LIBERALISM - ADMIRATION OF BISMARCK

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 19 th

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 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’état 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 19 th

century the religion of liberalism was completely

unknown to so highly civilized a people as the Germans but for one parenthesis which has been

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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 anteroom 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 building of Italian unity, 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.

THE FASCIST VISION OF THE FUTURE

The Fascist negation 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 Maître as its prophet. Monarchical absolutism

is of the past, and so is ecclesiolatry. 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 19 th

century was the century of

socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the 20 th

century must also be the

century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free

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to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the " right ", a Fascist century.

If the 19 th

century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies 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, it 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 19 th

century traces its

origin back to the illuministic movement of the 18 th

century and the doctrines of democracy to

those of the Encyclopaedists. 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.

THE ABSOLUTE PRIMACY OF THE STATE

The keystone 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 admissible in so far as they come 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.”

[…] 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 may 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 tribal life to that highest manifestation of human power, imperial rule.

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.

Since 1929, economic and political developments have everywhere emphasized these truths. The

importance of the State is rapidly growing. The so-called crisis can only be settled by State

action and within the orbit of the State. If liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells

government.

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The Fascist State is, however, a unique and original creation. It is not reactionary but

revolutionary, for 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 labor; in the ethical field by the need felt for

order, discipline, obedience to the moral dictates of patriotism.

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 mediaeval 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. 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 has not

got 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 revolutionary

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 ingenuous and primitive heart of the people, the God to whom their prayers are raised.

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 commercial; 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 rearise 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.

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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 20 th

century Italy

by agitating outgrown ideologies of the 19 th

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 universally which belongs to all doctrines

which by achieving self-expression represent a moment in the history of human thought.

Carl Cohen ed., Communism, Fascism and Democracy: The Theoretical Foundations (New York 1972) pp. 328-339.