THE
PEDIGREE OF
FASCISM
A POPULAR ESSAY ON THE WESTERN
PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS
BY
ALINE LION
_Lady Margaret Hall, Oxon._
LONDON:
SHEED & WARD
31, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C. 4
TO
JOHN WALTER, ESQ.,
TO WHOSE QUESTIONS I OWE
THE FIRST IDEA OF THIS BOOK.
A. L.
_First Published_, 1927
CONTENTS
Part I
THE POLITICAL ANTECEDENTS OF FASCISM
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Is Fascism a Revolution? 3
II. Liberalism in Italy 10
III. Nationalism and Socialism 23
IV. The European War and its Effects 37
Part II
PHILOSOPHICAL ANTECEDENTS OF FASCISM
I. Philosophical Antecedents 58
II. Humanism and Renaissance 70
III. The Seventeenth Century 92
IV. The Seventeenth Century in France 114
V. Giambattista Vico 125
VI. Illuminism in England and France 137
VII. Nineteenth Century in Italy 154
VIII. Benedetto Croce 170
IX. Giovanni Gentile 189
X. Benito Mussolini 211
Index 235
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I should, perhaps, say from the first that I am neither Italian nor
Fascist. Yet, having lived in Italy from 1913 to 1927, I cannot but be
conscious of the fact that the country has undergone a deep change,
and have come to the conclusion that it is a change for the better.
My purpose in writing this book has been to bring to the knowledge of
people possessed of a fair amount of general knowledge, the conclusions
that might be formed by a specialist with regard to this change and
the value of it. Incidentally I have endeavoured to discourage both
those who would import Fascism, as it flourishes in Italy, into other
countries, and those who would hinder the spread of that philosophy
which, I hold, is its basis.
It is necessary to avoid, when possible, definitely partisan sources of
information; therefore I have turned to the works of Michele Rosi for
the history of politics and to Frederick Windelband for the history of
philosophy wherever general reading has proved inadequate or my memory
failed.
In conclusion I must offer special thanks to Sir Frank Fox for his
careful reading of my manuscript and his invaluable suggestion with
regard to it. I am also most grateful to the following whom I have
consulted as to historical or philosophical accuracy—Professor G. A.
Smith, Professor G. C. Webb, Mrs. Anne MacCormick, Miss Jamison, Miss
Mary Coate and Mr. R. G. Collingwood.
ALINE LION.
_Lady Margaret Hall,
Oxford._
Part I
THE POLITICAL ANTECEDENTS OF FASCISM
CHAPTER I
IS FASCISM A REVOLUTION?
If one may judge of the importance of a political event by the number
of articles and books printed on the subject there is no question but
that Fascism is one of the most important movements of the post-war
world. Strange to say, however, the light thrown by most of these
publications fails to illuminate the points most interesting to
foreigners. This is probably due first of all to the fact that most
of the writers have written either for or against it; moreover, this
movement, being peculiarly Italian, is difficult for a foreign mind to
grasp. In any case, it is a fact that in spite of all the good or bad
will of the journalists this revolution is far from being understood.
The lack of intelligent information regarding it is felt everywhere;
and it would be difficult to say whether the misrepresentation is
greater among those who admire it and, seeing in it a universal remedy
for all modern woes, want to introduce its method in other countries;
or among those who consider it just as a matter of incidental and local
politics. I shall try to put it in its historical setting, and I shall
consider myself fortunate if I can throw light on its relation to the
political past of Italy, and to the present political conceptions of
other countries.
The first question that invariably arises is whether Fascism is or is
not a revolution. This, however, must be answered by another: what is
a revolution? No word stands in greater need of a sound, common-sense
definition, yet a definition of it stands on the very threshold of any
impartial research on Fascism.
Is revolution merely a change of government? This is not sufficient.
If it were, the fall of Louis Philippe from the throne of France would
be a revolution; yet it is obviously by a license that one speaks of
it as the Revolution of ’48. The form of government may change without
any substantial alteration of the régime. Then does revolution imply a
change of régime? Yes, but, again, what is exactly a change of régime?
Without following any further this method of investigation let us
define Fascism as the introduction of a new conception of the relation
between State and Citizen, a new conception of political reality.
It is, therefore, a doctrine, a system, and as such is philosophy
expressing itself in history. This admitted, it is necessary to guard
against the abstract bent. of philosophical researches. The deepest
currents of speculative thought would never bring about a single change
of government by themselves; but then they do not exist by themselves.
It is only in the synthesis of history that we find them at play in the
world of historical reality, which is what it is because thoughts and
deeds are one.
The March on Rome did certainly mark the confluence of two streams
coming to mingle their waters between the banks of the Tiber. One was
torrential, the impulse coming from a fifty years’ accumulation of
economic and political mistakes in Italy. The other was deeper, slower,
the contribution of centuries of Italian philosophy enriched by the
intellectual thought of all Europe. The torrent is represented by the
political antecedents of Fascism: the deep stream by the philosophical
antecedents of Fascism.
To illustrate my figure a period of history presents itself as an
example. It does not correspond exactly to the present movement in
Italy, but it is at any rate familiar to one and all: the French
Revolution. We see there, also, the typical stream of philosophical
life carving a deep bed for the river to come: in the minds of
intellectuals, in the consciousness of the people, abstract theories
or works of artistic vulgarisation, prepare the bed for the river
that will become, under the impulsion of actual circumstances, an
irresistible torrent. So that this revolution whose intellectual
pedigree makes it the offspring of Descartes, and Hobbes, of Grotius,
Locke and the English political writers, besides the Encyclopædists,
Voltaire and Rousseau, has to the highest degree the qualities that
make it an element of universal life, and a fertilising principle
in the politics of all Europe. On the other hand it receives,
undoubtedly from the economic and political conditions of France, the
particular determinations that distinguish it as French, as belonging
to the eighteenth century. The form it took actually between 1790
and 1795 could not be introduced anywhere else; under that form it
was exclusively French, because—we must insist on the point—it had
received it as its actual and concrete determination from its immediate
antecedents.
Actuation, realisation, concrete life, whatever the field we move in,
whether we consider politics, artistic creation, or natural life, it
requires two elements, the one universal, the other particular. Now
history shows that the universal element spreads, notwithstanding
frontiers and the will of men. Its force of expansion is a quality
common to all ideas; but the particular is not to be imported, and
it is as impossible to introduce it in foreign lands as it is to
confine the other to any land. Hence the political applications of
the same theories in different countries differ from each other as
do the countries themselves. These differences, economic, political,
religious, intellectual, in a word the historical differences existing
between two countries determine the differences that the same theory
will undergo when it is adopted by the people of different nations.
The Italian patriots at the end of the eighteenth century were very
few, and all, without exception, intellectuals. Some belonged to
the higher or lower aristocracy, some belonged to the upper middle
class, but all were scholars, men of the widest reading. It would be
difficult to find nowadays a body of men so well informed. For one
thing, production has increased immensely and life has lost the leisure
that allowed intellectual tastes to be satisfied. The fact remains
that at the close of that century Italy could boast of men aware of
its inferior position, of its non-existence as a nation. Such men were
ready to try anything, and did try to imitate the French revolution in
so far as they could by founding the small republics that lasted one
season or two, dying away like plants of distant countries, when they
are planted in our soil. Their zeal, however, was not sterile, they
failed in their immediate purpose, because they wanted to introduce
not only ideas but the actual form in which these were expressed. A
constitution, a battle, the plan of a town, a project of economic
reform, each of these things is an expression endowed with an æsthetic
value varying with the degree of perfection attained by the man
who worked it out, and gave the idea that prompted him a suitable
realisation. But the essential quality of the æsthetic creator is to be
on a particular theme, the voice of his time and of the body of men he
represents in his act of creation. The men of the revolution were by no
means fair representatives of the people of France; but when they drew
up the constitution they certainly realised on the whole the desiderata
of most Frenchmen. Giving expression, giving form to the ideas that had
agitated the whole century, they did it in the only way that could be a
French way in those days.
Now the will of Napoleon, when he wished Italy to be politically a
copy of France, was a very empirical will, and the men who tried
to carry out his wishes because they loved Italy were not any more
transcendental. In this question they took no notice of what were
the spiritual and political conditions of their country, and yet
surely a constitution is an expression of mind. In all this however
their blunder paved the way to a better understanding of the matter.
Everybody realised that in order to have anything like an independent
government the first thing was to be a great and unified country. When
the ideas that had led in France to the Revolution and Republic were
developed in Italy, according to the mentality of the great Italians,
they blended with all that was particular to Italy and expressed
themselves in an Italian movement: the Risorgimento. It cannot be over
emphasised, for the importance of the point is great; the same ideas
that caused the Republic to become for more than a century the form of
French government, gave birth to the Kingdom of Italy.
Roughly, the same can be said of Fascism. Its ideas and doctrine
will spread whether they meet with favour or hostility, because they
are Italian just as Liberalism is English, that is to say they are
Italian in their methods of actuation and perfectly universal in their
philosophical content.
“Equality, fraternity, liberty,” was the eighteenth century cry, and
it might be the cry of the Fascists. Their revolutionary contribution
to the history of politics is the denial of natural rights, natural
rights being understood as something the determination of which is
anterior to the birth of man, as the quality of a cabbage or a rose
tree is anterior to its birth. Right is so narrowly linked to duty that
for this school of thought it cannot be anterior to consciousness.
Therefore man must be considered and rated in the State only according
to spiritual value and actual economic or intellectual interest.
The natural rights of man are denied. The spiritual value, entitling
man to citizenship, cannot be acquired by him once for all and enjoyed
without effort. He must daily and continuously be working for the
vindication of the rights he has won, and for the conquest of those
he seeks. Citizenship is not a chattel lying in a man’s possession:
its only reality is bound to the performing of the duties correlative
of rights. There Fascism meets with all our religious communities;
in all Israelite and Christian Communities or Churches the new-born
child is admitted on the pledge, taken for him by sponsors, that he
will discharge his duties and accept the law of the community of which
he becomes a member. Such a pledge he has to confirm on his coming to
adult state.
Citizenship becomes, finally, with the whole of political reality, a
moral, spiritual and Christian reality, and the only real equality of
men can be attained in a State in which each man is rated according
to actual value. For citizenship, taken as a birthright of man, is a
remains of Pagan times, when it was the lot of some to be born slaves
and of some to be born citizens.
CHAPTER II
LIBERALISM IN ITALY
For the foreigner interested in the political affairs of Italy a study
of the pedigree of the two elements of Fascism is essential in order
to distinguish what is exclusively Italian from what is to become
universal. It is therefore necessary to trace, or at least attempt to
trace, this pedigree in spite of the difficulty of the task.
Fascism presents itself at first as being essentially the expression of
the national consciousness of Italy. So it is; but it must be stated
at once that it is the national consciousness recently acquired by the
people of Italy, which, like an uncontrollable force, has worked itself
out, taking Fascism as its expression. Without this distinction the
student is induced by its nationalist character to see in the present
movement the last act of the long drama of wars and agitations that
led to the independence and unification of the country. The truth is,
that though it is practically the epilogue of that drama, Fascism
cannot be identified with the Risorgimento. The spirit which animated
the men of the days of Cavour and Garibaldi is totally and essentially
different from that which impels the followers of Mussolini to act as
they do. The wars of independence were due to the initiative of an
aristocratic minority; whose aristocratic and intellectual qualities
distinguished them and perhaps ensured their success. The leaders
of the Risorgimento were not hampered by anything like a popular
following; and their eventual agreement as to what was best for their
cause was always made certain by this intellectual selectness. All were
able, like Garibaldi and Mazzini, to see things as they were and to act
accordingly, not only to the extent of sacrificing their lives but of
sacrificing their dearest ideals as well. Republicans, they accepted
monarchy; ministers, of their own free will they relinquished power to
place it in hands they thought more fit than their own to realise their
dream; staunch Catholics, during their life they fought the Church
in its temporal politics, in an age when the best educated priests
would not admit and could not even see the possibility of distinction
between temporal and spiritual power. Only religious and idealistic men
can realise by how much such sacrifices surpassed for them the gift
of money, liberty, or even life. There is one English word that sums
up what these Italian liberators were, whether noblemen, solicitors,
writers, professors, officers, doctors: they were _gentlemen_ of good
classical education and wide reading who had assimilated what was best
in Europe. The common people, one cannot insist too much upon the
fact, remained indifferent at best, and that only as long as their
interests were not affected; the lower middle class were hostile, that
is to say the shop people and all the multitude of small functionaries
who saw their daily bread dependent on the existing state of things,
were openly against any change. How could such people feel the need or
see the possibility of building up a nation, one nation, out of the
harlequin coat presented by the map of Italy?
Thus a free hand was guaranteed to the small number of Italian
gentlemen then endowed with heroic souls. They had nobody to consult,
they were a State in themselves, a State without a lower class.
Perhaps for the last time in the history of the world we see there
realised the classical republic without a political plebs. No wonder
that they worked a miracle; they belonged politically to different
states, and yet by the force of their ideal they attained that oneness
of conscience which gives personality and reality to a nation. The
spirit of the nation existed before its material realisation; there
is no better illustration of the new notion that Fascism is bringing
to the fore in the world of concrete history, that of the nation as
a spiritual reality, independent of geographical and ethnographical
determinations. Never in history has this notion received a more
complete and actual realisation than in this first dawn of the national
life in Italy. The reality of the nation had its first affirmation in
the sacrifice of these men, for it is obvious that no sober man would
give up life, liberty, wealth, for something unreal; and, in fact, the
reality of Italy as a nation ceased to be questioned then and there.
Every advantage, of course, has its disadvantage. As the pioneers of
the Risorgimento did not need the people, they overlooked all the
problems that the necessity of obtaining popular collaboration would
have compelled them to face. All economic and social questions were
overlooked except by a very few; the spiritual education of the lower
class was not even suggested in their programme of action. Their aims
were the independence and the political unity of Italy, and to that
goal they directed their hearts and minds indifferent to the needs of
practical life, and to all the obstacles that seemed to make their
dream a theme for the lyrical effusions of poets. In fact they were
poets, all of them, for they created a reality out of an ideal vision
that was more an intuition than an intellectual conception. The very
manner in which they carried out their revolution was æsthetic more
than practical; they shut their eyes to all that was in contradiction
to their dream, exactly as the artist does who strives to express an
intuition through material realisation, and in order not to let the
objective world crowd his mind deliberately shuts his eyes to it, to
everything that is not his present ideal.
The economic and social questions could not in any case have been
faced, still less dealt with, as long as the nation was not a political
reality. Any attempt would have been sterile and perhaps even harmful.
First, it would have led the people to believe that under the then
present conditions the economic organisation of each little state
might have been so planned as to ensure the material well-being of
the population, that they could receive a greater share of political
importance and therefore of administrative attention from the local
governments and thus be better off in the harlequin coat than under
the flag of a united Italy. It was, moreover, expedient to hold to the
singleness of purpose that was more likely to make action coherent all
through the peninsula; only such singleness of aim made it possible to
men of so different temperament and breeding as professional men and
noblemen, Tuscans and Sicilians, Freemasons and ardent Catholics, to
think and therefore to act in positive harmony.
When a bullet has hit the bull’s-eye it has fulfilled its purpose, and
stays there in helpless immobility or falls to the ground a useless
thing. It was meant for that shot, and is bound to be purposeless when
it has made its mark. The generations of Carlo Alberto and Mazzini, of
Vittorio Emmanuele and Cavour, had certainly hit the mark when Rome had
become the capital of Italy. Was it to be expected that men who had
identified themselves with the goal should be able to take another goal
and fit themselves to a new task? Or could it be that the realisation
of the new State should bring, as its immediate consequence, a
ready-made generation of statesmen? Indeed, if there is one thing that
cannot be produced by a magic wand, it is a body of able and trained
political men.
When the days of heroic deeds were over the makers of Italy turned
to the government of the new realm and found themselves faced by all
the problems of national life. Inspiration and idealism proved out of
place, and although theirs was, what would have been called in England
or in France, a Conservative government, they had to rely on a very
strange electoral body. While they did not extend the vote at once,
they found in the middle class a set of Arrivists with an imperative
egoism that was to prove the curse of political life in Italy. It
is difficult for an English, French, or American citizen to realise
the kind of problems with which these men were beset. Above all it
is difficult to an Englishman; England has had five or six centuries
of political experience, a length of time sufficient to produce
electors and mandatories able to realise what are the duties of the
executive as well as of the legislature. In Italy, on the other hand,
the nineteenth century has seen all stage of political development
succeeding one another in a hurly-burly that has a good deal in common
with the succession of the events of a man’s life on a cinema film.
He passes from childhood to youth, and on to manhood, maturity and old
age in a couple of hours. If he actually could crowd all experience
into a couple of years the proportion would be better; but he would
have no fairer notion of reality and of his own rights and duties at
any stage of his life than the Italians could be expected to have when
they had to pass in less than fifty years through the political stages
successively experienced by the people of other countries in several
centuries.
Now no student of the history of politics, or even of art, ignores the
fact that when a nation has reached a political or artistic form it
is in the process of getting a mastery of that form that criticisms
arise, and that out of criticism comes the idea, confused at first,
then clearer and clearer, of the form that is to supersede it. This is,
in fact, the process of dialectic: it is the dialectic of history; and
in spite of the wish to avoid any special terminology, it is better to
call the process by its own name. At first people struggle to reach a
certain form of government, and that moment of dialectic ends when the
form is reached; they then apply it more and more fully and, during
its application, discover its limitations; this second moment ends in
criticism of the whole theory; finally they set themselves to remedy
its shortcomings. This last moment coincides in the people with the
free consciousness of dissatisfaction, and in the leaders with a clear
understanding of the new tendencies to be satisfied, so that it is
not theoretical to say that the people learn to use a new form whilst
they are using, then discarding, the one that came before it. In Italy
nothing of the sort happened. The international culture of its scholars
put them in contact with all that was best or worst in the politics
of Europe. They would have been ashamed to be behindhand in what was
considered social progress.
Then two uncommon factors came into play after 1870. To make Italy, it
had been necessary to trample upon a good deal of historical tradition.
Not all the local governments were as bad during the eighteenth
century as they were said to be. Moreover, paramount had been the
prestige of the Popes. Against all the Conservative forces the men of
the Risorgimento had appeared as a lot of Jacobins; they had to fight
the Church in its temporal power, and although this power was not
essential to religion it had behind it a tradition of ten centuries.
With the government of the Popes the whole Italian civilisation was
closely connected; indeed, the best brains of Italy have always
realised that, whatever the faults of the Church, Italy is first of
all a Catholic country. Anti-clericals in their political activity,
men like de Sanctis, would not have printed a word against the Church
as historians. Indeed, the greatest thinkers of the time, Gioberti and
Rosmini, tried very hard to be good Catholics and great philosophers at
the same time.
Yet since they could not doubt that Italy must have Rome for its
capital as the seal of its political unity, the Popes had to be
deprived of their temporal sovereignty. The feeling about Rome was one
of historical mysticism, and seldom, if ever, have men found themselves
thrown into an irreligious attitude by a sentiment of that kind. No
contradiction could have been more profound, for it brought these
ardent lovers of their remotest past to make use of forces that were
antagonistic to the one institution that linked their present to this
same past. However, there was no alternative; adopting Illuminism as
one of the chief currents animating modern life, they had as their most
precious support the anti-Catholic movement, to which, as a matter
of fact, a great many of them belonged. Anti-Catholicism had a great
weakness in that it was not a national product, but had been introduced
into political life as a necessary stimulant to rouse the people from
their slumbers, as will be seen later on; now that they were awake it
divided the nation and prevented the welding of the new tradition to
its history of twenty centuries.
The statesmen of this epoch had no experience of the administration and
government of a big State: they were not conscious of the problems of
international relations; they knew nothing of the economic and social
exigencies of a population exceeding thirty millions of souls.
The people had no political education whatsoever. On the other hand,
the leaders would not be retrograde and became more and more liberal,
at a rate that did not allow the people to be prepared by experience
for successive steps in popular government. The sequence of reforms was
not historical, was not dialectical: it did not correspond with the
spiritual and economic development of the people, but was introduced to
make up for lost time and bring Italy up to the Western European level
as fast as possible.
With no tradition to make up ballast, the so-called “Right” could not
be termed Conservative because it originated in a revolution, and
it kept its old ideal as a target after it had been realised, and
therefore had ceased to be a principle of action.
What was to be expected under such conditions? The wonder is that the
nation did not go to pieces, and that the work of two generations of
constructive men was not destroyed by their incapacity to husband what
they had created. In the face of such facts one cannot help thinking of
Vico and his identification of divine Providence with the rationality
of history. This people was politically at the nursery stage; it had
no modern political science of its own, and therefore none of its
legislative acts were based on actual and practical understanding of
what were the national necessities. They were inspired by the example
of foreign governments and, consequently, could not meet Italy’s
peculiar necessities. What did for the others could not do for Italy.
Yet it was impossible to keep back a people so well informed of modern
progress.
The Italian Liberals, it must be said for their immortal fame, had the
clear-sightedness necessary to attain their aims, inasmuch as they
had reduced them to a formula that could be accepted by all the other
patriots. “Italy, one and free,” was their aim, and to this aim nobody
could object. The flaw of such an aim is that it is too simple to
correspond to actual reality. It sounds like an algebraical axiom, and,
indeed, is just as abstract in its basis as any mathematical formula.
For the Liberals the nation was exclusively constituted by its
territorial expansion and by the unification of the people of the
different states therein included. They could not change their aim,
and when they had to administer the new realm their eagerness and
singleness of purpose often blinded them to reality. As the unity
they had reached was formal, if one can term it so, their legislation
purposely ignored the differences between Sicilians and Tuscans; and
in their haste to unify internally what was already externally one,
they imposed what could at best be formal and artificial unity. Every
annexation had been preceded by a local struggle, and success was not
sufficient to cause equanimity in the triumphant party. All that had
existed under the old régime was an object of hatred to the Liberals;
and their ministers, even when they kept above such feelings, were
none the less unable to discriminate between the antiquated local laws
and those that were still useful and even good. They destroyed local
institutions, often created to meet actual requirements, to impose, for
instance, upon the people of Sicily Piedmontese laws, the inspiration
of which was usually imported from France or England. They had the
impression that it would be dangerous to the unity of the country to
keep some of the local laws, or to make new ones to meet the particular
needs of this or that province. In the minds of these passionate
creators of unity, unity was a quite fragile affair, produced by
them _ex tempore_; they did not see that it could only be the result
of a slow elaboration, bound to go on for generations, and that the
final success of their enterprise was more likely to be ensured by an
intelligent interpretation of tradition than by the application of
exotic doctrines that did not fit any of the historical characteristics
of the country.
The same singleness of vision was to prove blinding in regard to
several other points; but it will be enough to state here that the fact
that the men who had sacrificed themselves to the cause of unity had
all been gentlemen, led those in power to consider the higher classes
as exclusively constituting the nation they had brought into being. The
rest were politically non-existent; and in the haste to develop the
commercial and industrial possibilities of the country a good deal too
much was done to enthrone capital and invite thereby the advent of
Socialism.
Finally, another cause of trouble—indeed, another consequence of the
same lack of political tradition and education—was the impossibility
of forming proper party organisations. Who was Left—and who was Right?
Discrimination was impossible. Parties, like all historical organisms,
are called into being and developed according to, and in consequence
of, the political development of the country. In Italy they had to be
produced, planned and organised all at once, by the mere empirical
decisions of men, who, whatever their ability, or the loftiness of
their ideals, could not avoid the arbitrariness and the errors to
which the best individual men are subject, limited as their views are
by their personal feelings or ambitions. Therefore, what happened
was this: some followers of Mazzini who had joined the Liberals in
the struggle for liberty, stood out as republicans; some who had
followed Garibaldi and who had for ten years longed to take Rome from
the Pope, became anti-clerical democrats; the rest were not to be
clearly distinguished from one another because a man who was a staunch
monarchist may have been in the same time anti-Catholic if he was a
Freemason, whilst another might have had strong democratic tendencies
and yet stand for tradition. The best instance of this may have been
Crispi: he belonged to the Left, and certainly often acted and felt
like a man of the Right.
Such confusion was to reach its climax when, after 1866 and 1870, it
was understood that the king and the government, having obtained the
Veneto from Austria, had given up the intention of adding Trento and
Trieste to the kingdom. Then the extreme Left joined irredentism to
its anti-Catholic activity. They went on speaking of the ethnographic
right that such provinces had to claim themselves as Italian, and
they artfully bound their anti-religious campaign to a programme that
sounded highly idealistic. No wonder that the different governments
that succeeded each other should lose their time fighting the ghost
of financial bankruptcy. One thing only can be brought against them,
and it is that though all men of great culture they did not understand
how unhistorical were their actions. They should have known that their
conception of State and citizen, their idea of what is the function
of the government, had been taken ready made from other countries and
lazily accepted without any proper study of its antecedents. Some were
Anglophile, some under their new Germanophilism hid the most perfect
assimilation of French doctrines taken in their easiest and, therefore,
most abstract formulas. None took liberty for what the word had meant
of actual and positive political conquest to the average Englishman
of the seventeenth century; they did not even take it for what it had
meant of practical improvement to the Frenchman of the eighteenth
century; they took it as a rhetorical figure with an abstract concept
behind it, as soon as it ceased to mean independence from foreign rule.
They termed themselves Liberals, however, and when they came to be
ministers of a Liberal government they professed sometime a very
curious notion of what such a government should be; Cairoli put it down
in three words, _reprimere non prevenire_; an excellent motto perhaps,
when the citizens are used to the exercise of their duties and rights,
but soon proved to be dangerous in a country where traditions had been
trampled upon during half a century. In less than a decade Italy was
the prey of anarchy, for in 1878, the same Cairoli, had to defend the
king’s life in Naples at the risk of his own, and in Florence and Pisa
bombs were thrown against the crowds rejoicing over the king’s narrow
escape. The Liberals looked at the way legislation worked in France and
in England, but, like all followers of Illuminism, they took it for
granted that there existed a certain kind of animal which was the same
wherever and whenever you find Man, and they looked at the application
of the system, not at its origin, not at its philosophical and
political antecedents; in short, they did not see that it was brought
about by the whole history of the countries in which it flourished, and
they believed that it would work wherever men lived together in nations.
CHAPTER III
NATIONALISM AND SOCIALISM
Under such circumstances what was the government for the political
classes? A coach in a land of brigands; for the most popular elements
a coach to be attacked on the roadside; for the better elements, a
coach they had a right to drive, whip in hand. Every man stood up
against the government either begging or threatening; so that it is no
wonder that the next generation of gentlemen mostly stood aside and
shunned politics, seeing that at best the men who mixed in it were
moved by selfish ambition, or were a vulgar crew of Arrivists and
mischief plotters. Abstention on the one side was, however, a form
of selfishness, as harmful to the state as Arrivism on the other.
Provided they kept clean hands, the abstentionists did not mind that
the national conscience should be either corrupted or lulled to sleep
by the people whose interest it was that it should slumber. Obviously
their withdrawal from public life had the same cause as the ambition
and the unscrupulous opportunism of the others. After fifty years of
heroic life and feelings, they wanted to attend to their own business
and enjoy life privately. Public cares and struggles had been the order
of the day for half a century, and public conscience relaxed; with
a sudden eclipse of national consciousness, Italy lost the pride of
autonomy in foreign affairs and ceased to realise in deeds the part it
had to play in the history of the world.
Its foreign policy is the best index of the spiritual conditions of the
period, and according to the historian, Michele Rosi (who is neither
a Fascist nor a Liberal, nor a Socialist, because he is a man born to
put together facts, historical facts, and live a passionate life among
them instead of living it among men) the line of conduct of Italian
foreign ministers at this stage can be described as the policy of men
who distrusted themselves more then they distrusted others. Rosi does
not say so, but the facts he puts together do say so.
Of this the best proof was the Triple Alliance. In 1873 Marco Minghetti
went with King Vittorio Emmanuele II to Berlin and to Vienna to discuss
a second alliance with Germany and more cordial relations with the
Austrian court. The followers of Garibaldi raised an outcry as they
saw in this a sure proof that the King of Italy was giving up Trento
and Trieste, whereas it had never been thought in the past that Rome
or Venice might have been so abandoned. In Parliament, however, the
Left was quite willing to lean on the shoulder of Germany, and was
submitting even to an alliance with Austria, although some of the
members had dark remembrances of its rule. But at the same time they
flirted with France, who was going more and more to the Left, and whose
anti-clericalism seemed to cheer on their own anti-Catholicism.
In 1877 Francesco Crispi, the best statesman of Italy at the time,
one of those men of the Left whose mentality brought them mostly to
think and often to act as if they had belonged to the Right, made
a diplomatic tour to the capitals of Germany, Austria, France and
England. He had one open aim, and another one not quite so fully
acknowledged, which was to look for support against a possible
aggression that was feared both from Paris and Vienna. The impression
he received was that Berlin might accept an alliance with Italy
against France, on the understanding that Austria would be left free
to do what she liked in the East. Thirty years before, Italy, still
in the making and far from seeing yet her way to unity, had attacked
single-handed the greatest empire of Europe in an offensive war; now,
out of fear of a possible attack from France, which Bismarck himself
declared very unlikely, she entered into an alliance from which she
received only orders and prohibitions. When the Congress of Berlin took
place, all that the representative of Italy could do was of so little
avail, that the Germans declared that the French and the Italians
had to settle the question of Tunis between themselves. This did not
admit of any compensation to Italy for the Austrian occupation of
Bosnia-Herzegovina and expansion in the East. The Italian policy at
that congress betrayed a total incapacity to display the policy of a
great State in foreign affairs. The reasons were threefold, the men in
power had a very poor understanding of the forces and the interests of
the country and, in consequence, could not act according to these; they
were holding on to ideologies, that had served their time and whose
high-sounding rhetoric could only help them to hide the vacuum of their
minds; finally, they had a sense that their home affairs were getting
more and more out of hand and this feeling may have been the most
cramping of all the circumstances in which they stood.
Negative as it was, the attitude of the government was in harmony with
that of Parliament. When, in January, 1879, the Senate disapproved
of its foreign policy, the head of the government, who was Depretis,
shifted all responsibility by saying that, as Prime Minister, he
had in that department followed faithfully the traditions of the
Right, although he belonged to the Left. In February of the same
year, Mussolino strongly advised them to enter into an alliance with
Germany; he knew, said he, that Bismarck would accept it unwillingly,
as he believed the Italians to be unfaithful, but that he would do
so nevertheless, needing Italy against France. Nothing could be less
heroic, than a Senate which had good grounds to feel pride in the newly
achieved national independence, and was yet so low spirited that it
could accept an alliance on such grounds.
The ideal of the Risorgimento had been realised, and as the new
leaders _had no new ideals_ they had nothing further to realise; they
were bodies without souls, with nothing that might give them a chance
to display the gifts with which nature had so largely endowed them.
Materialists in philosophy they strove to make the country more and
more materialist, fighting religion under the names of clericalism and
obscurantism.
Obviously what kept the various governments of Italy from having a
dignified foreign policy was that the country was in a state bordering
on anarchy. One cause of this was lack of experts in all the political
classes, devoid, as the best men were, of personal or traditional
experience to help in the application of their imported legislation;
but the main cause was undoubtedly the amorphous state of the working
classes. If man is to be called a political animal, the labourers of
Italy were not men fifty years ago. They did not care what happened
and did not think they had anything to say in the matter: they were
politically unconscious. Not that they were stupid: their art, their
songs, their traditions attest the contrary.
Their political unconsciousness, far from making things easier,
rendered a good Liberal government very nearly impossible; for apathy
and indifference in the lower class, while it may be very well under an
absolute monarchy of the patriarchal type, under a Liberal constitution
is apt to prove a curse. First, the lower middle class kept drawing men
from the people, and these men, with the natural gift of adaptation the
Italian shows to a greater degree than the slower northern races, rose
too quickly and too quickly became conscious of their plebian force and
of the opportunities offered to them by the difficulties under which
the government was working. Among these men and among the crowds of
half-intellectuals employed by the State in the innumerable offices
created by the centralising administration, in the national schools, in
the railways, post services and so on, the members of Parliament, who
belonged to the Left, recruited their votes. How quickly these electors
realised that their chances of getting all the political importance
in their hands rested on the extension of the franchise need not be
emphasised. The dates are eloquent, Rome became the capital of Italy
in 1870, in 1882 the franchise is extended, and immediately a workman,
Maffi, and a pure Socialist, Andrea Costa, are elected.
Without attempting a sketch of the development of Socialism in Italy,
it must be said that it certainly did a great deal of good to the
country. It aroused the working masses from their slumber and bettered
their material conditions, which badly wanted bettering. To stir the
people out of their amorphous state and make them conscious of their
rights was a very wholesome operation. It would have been better to
have made them realise at the same time that rights never go without
duties, and that to co-operate in public life they had to undertake the
one in order to get the other. But this, however, was more than could
be expected from agitators, who often had, themselves, a very poor
notion of the relation of right and duties. Their incitement to the
people was to make material well-being, the ultimate end of all effort.
Vulgar as it was, yet it was the proper aim for a materialistic age,
and it had the advantage of being concrete, positive, and within range
of the people’s rudimentary political understanding. Therefore it
worked. It had the first quality that an idea must have to move people
to action; it corresponded to the real needs of the workers.
The nobler side of Socialism, that which had made it highly idealistic
and has made its ultimate end a dreamy Messianism, did not strike root
in Italy. It did not appeal to the people, and whenever it fascinated
some stray poet or idealist, like Andrea Costa or Mussolini’s father,
they failed to arouse an echo in the minds of the labourers. This
should have been sufficient to show that it did not suit the Italian
mentality. Mankind, the fraternity of mankind, the lost paradise
reconquered by the mutual love of men, could not mean much to Italian
ears. It sounded abstract, and at best did not show much chance of
being realised by the present generation. The Socialist leaders had
to attract followers with more concrete things, with plans that could
be realised, and to arouse in them a passion for an actual object.
Consequently they harped on the necessity of getting better wages for
less work. They planned Labour organisations which gradually grew
stronger, and they taught the workers to hate their employers.
Yet this was not the worst part of the leaders’ activity; that was
the corrupting consciousness they gave the workers of an unlimited
political power without any corresponding duties. Out of unfairly
treated men they made bullies, most unhappy bullies, the worst kind of
bullies. The torture of Mussolini’s youth was this rapid decadence of
Socialism in Italy, although it had the advantage over other parties
of a stock of general ideas and a definite programme. It was only the
weakness of other parties which made it look strong until the war and
during the years that followed the peace; for as far back as 1910 the
historic ideas it had brought to Italy had yielded their crop. Had it
not been so, Socialism, between 1918 and 1920, would have worked out
in open revolution. As it was, it had built up a class organisation
that was the first regular Party in modern Italy, and this meant
considerable experience for the whole nation; it had besides bettered
the material conditions of life of the lower class and awakened them to
political consciousness, which is a contribution to the development of
the country as a modern State that cannot be overrated.
Liberalism, be it of the Right or of the Left, had had an Italian
form, which had proved its consonance with the historical position of
the country by the efficiency with which it had realised its ideal.
Italy, free from foreign rule and politically one under the House of
Savoy, was doubtless the creation of Italian Liberalism. But as a
home governing party its inefficiency was obvious; one may think that
its failure was due to its non-national stock of ideas, which led to
the application of foreign legislation to a country whose needs were
not the same as those of the nations in which this administrative and
political Liberalism had come out of a long historical evolution.
Socialism, on the other hand, was yeast, and as yeast it was very good
for Italy, for the unleavened masses rose into shape and life under its
action; thereby emerging from their amorphousness they entered into the
political world and brought with them the force and life of numbers.
It brought them also to the level of the European proletariat and
introduced the Party discipline and organisation that the other Italian
parties had not needed, as their singleness of aim and the loftiness
of their ideals had been sufficient to keep their high-minded members
in unity. Yet it proved a curse, as its leaders were unable to realise
that the wretched means they had to resort to, in order to arouse men
into action, were due to the fact that the higher side of Socialism did
not fit the mentality of the people.
Another party must be now considered, and that commands a great deal of
respect from any foreigner that may have watched with loving eyes the
life of Italy: Nationalism. Corradini and Federzoni may be looked upon
as its leaders, and their followers were a mere handful of men. They
had a clear notion of what they wanted, and to a certain extent they
may be considered as the rightful heirs of the Risorgimento. Again they
were all gentlemen, gentlemen being taken as the English equivalent of
_vir_, implying the sterling quality of the individual and not at all
his social position or his æsthetic refinement, which may be merely
the consequence of wealth. Small minorities are always to be found at
the origin of any great political movement as it is the conviction of
the few which carries away the multitude of men. But then the crucial
point is that their convictions must have magnetic attraction for the
general public. And the Nationalists had not this. Their ideas were
too high and, at the same time, they were obsolete, besides being no
more Italian than those of Liberalism or Socialism.
The Nationalists’ idea of a nation was as materialist as their aims
were idealist.[1] Now this would be sufficient to condemn to sterility
the best wills in the world. To state this plainly, the easiest way is
to take man as a simile for nation. There are two ways of looking at
a man: he is _one out of many_, or he is _the one central reality_.
As one out of many he knocks in every sense against the reality of
the many, and is therefore identified by his very limitations. Such a
conception of the man is evidently negative. He is appreciated not so
much by what he actually does, but by what he has done, or possesses;
not so much by what he is, but by the rank he occupies, and which may
often be determined independently of his ACTUAL value. But as the
one central reality a man cannot come into competition with other
objects of appreciation; he can no longer be gauged from outside. Now,
obviously, from the world of objective and natural reality, we are
shifting to the subjective and spiritual world. We have in front of
us no longer an individual belonging to the world of things—we have a
person. Common wisdom has for centuries professed that to understand
a person’s motives it is necessary to put oneself in that person’s
position; and daily experience shows that we understand the people we
love better, because we can make ourselves one with them and judge them
from their own point of view. To appreciate a personality this method
is indispensable; for it is not in the deeds of his past that a man
must be judged—he may have been a hero in the last war and be a coward
in his present family life—they are now extrinsic to him, unless he
goes on living them and making them for ever his spiritual experience.
He must be judged by what he is doing actually. Neither must one
measure him by his property, but by what he is still able to produce;
nor by the regard or contempt of the people who surround him, which is
based on what he has done; nor on what his people were, but by what
he actually is. None of these conditions of appreciation is fulfilled
as long as we look at a man from outside and weigh his manly worth by
comparing his achievement, or his property, to that of other people.
Past deeds should not raise him one whit in our appreciation unless he
continues them with perfect conscience of their value, for their actual
and his personal value depend exclusively of the conscience he has of
such value and of his aptitude to keep it actual.
Of this fact Corradini and his friends had excellent examples in Italy.
Some of the landlords, who owned relatively small estates and quite
insufficient capital, managed to bring their land to the highest rate
of productiveness, so that the actual production was superior to that
of estates of a much bigger acreage. The owners of the _latifondi_,
on the other hand, were not all sufficiently rich to have their lands
ploughed, and those who were did not always do so, although some Roman
princes did cultivate thoroughly, very often as much from patriotism as
from the wish to increase their incomes. Conspicuous among them were
some leading Nationalists. They could see from this that the importance
of a man as a landlord was not altogether dependent on the area of
his estate and on his capital, and that it varied according to the
consciousness he had of what the value of his estate should be and the
capacity he had for realising it. But they did not think of the nation
as of a man whose value, practically as well as spiritually, depends
not so much on the capacity he has for doing things, as on his being
conscious of such capacity. Therefore, they looked at Italy measuring
it by the poor figure it cut in foreign policy, by its colonies, by
its financial weakness, comparing it always in their minds with other
countries; in a word, judging it from outside as if it had belonged
to the field of natural science instead of belonging to the world of
history, which is after all the world of Mind.
Thank God, however, “_le coeur a des raisons que la raison ne connaît
pas_,” and some of these men, Corradini above all, were men with
great hearts and deep souls. Out of faith and love of their country
they realised what their conception of political reality would have
kept them from seeing, namely that the root of all the evil was that
the people of Italy had almost allowed the stifling of their souls.
Religion in some provinces had been, so to speak, extirpated by the
anti-Catholic democrats, republicans and radicals; both religion
and patriotism had been lulled to sleep by the Socialists. The only
political cell still living and strong was the family. The Nationalists
were beset by another cause of sterility, the men these leaders
recruited ... did they share their religious and truly patriotic
motives? All did not, and that was the misery of it. Yet Corradini and
some others were men of faith, just as much as Cavour and Mazzini had
been; they could get men to join them in holding aloft a torch whose
flame flickered in the cold twilight of Garibaldi’s Italy. They kept
the sacred fire of Rome burning, and openly preached self-sacrifice,
whilst great artists and sceptic scholars invited the youth of the
upper class to enjoy life and shut themselves up in selfish existence.
The Nationalists were men of faith, and as everything is possible to
him that believeth, they kept working for their cause a certain number
of followers who had joined them in the hope that better openings
would be obtained for the export of Italian products and for Italian
emigrants if a strong Nationalist foreign policy could be substituted
for the existing weak one. For the Nationalists the nation was a
transcendent reality, objectively considered as to the individual. Such
conception is not peculiar to Italy by any means; yet it was modified
in its Italianisation, but always in a way that made it more and more a
policy for the gentry. A good deal of culture (I don’t mean philosophy,
but a true sense of history and a sound judgment) was at the basis of
it, and this did not tend to make it a popular movement. To sacrifice
oneself to something transcendent, to an historical construction, is
not for the mob: not even for the lower middle classes, absorbed as
they are by the problems of daily life.
There we touch what really distinguishes the Fascists from the
Nationalists, for whom the State belongs to natural reality, is
transcendent in its relation to the individual, and negatively
conceived in its relation to other states, where it appears one amongst
many. It is a great engine that needs the co-operation of all the
citizens to make it work, but it _does_ exist independently of the
citizens. Philosophically this conception belongs to the eighteenth
century. For the Fascists, the State is not transcendent in its
relation to the citizens: it is immanent; it is their own spiritual
and economical life in its political summing up. In its relation to
other states it is not negatively conceived as one amongst many; for
its citizens, it is their national self, whilst the other nations
are constitutive of their national non-self. The positiveness of the
State for its citizens implies therefore, for them, the negativeness
of the other states.[2] Such a conception sounds merely theoretical,
and yet it was not born in words. Its painful birth was the outcome
of Mussolini’s experience as a Socialist and a party leader. Words
have never been given to this newest of all the conceptions that Italy
is contributing to the world of politics except in an answer he gave
to the judges who, in 1911, were condemning him at Forli. Besides
this very curt answer, he never expressed it except in deeds, so that
the form under which it is given here is contributed by the author.
The rest of the doctrine that can be inferred from his four years’
speeches, legislation and administration, can be traced in the whole
of the philosophical works produced by Italian idealism; but this,
although perfectly consonant above all with Gentile’s theories, was
certainly one of Mussolini’s most original ideas.
The task of the government is to raise the level and increase the value
of the citizens, attending not to the organisation of every branch of
life manifestation, but to the regulation or rather systematisation of
such organisation in order to have always the most intimate fusion of
state and citizens. The empirical self requires that the peasant should
plough his field, sow the seed and reap the harvest. All this he is
bound to do to satisfy his material needs and the work thus considered
is certainly not ennobling, since man works as the slave of hunger.
Fascism says to the peasant: “Thou shalt no longer plough, sow, reap
for thyself, that is to say _exclusively for thy material self, but for
the State, which is that same empirical self plus its transcendental
complement_.” Hence ploughing, sowing and reaping are no longer the
work of man, slave of his material needs, but of man transcending them,
_without disregarding them_, however, and lifting thereby his daily
occupation to the dignity of moral realisation of his own economic
value.
The only precedent that this application of Fascism seems to have had
is the Christian sanctification of work, which is undoubtedly one of
the noblest gifts bestowed by our religion upon mankind. The study of
Fascism as a doctrine will offer many such coincidences.
The State must be universally present as a moral factor in every
branch of its citizens’ activity. It is in fact the all-pervading
consciousness that man must have of his citizenship which expresses
itself as the government. Obviously extension of territory should be
immaterial if the people of a country could actually be lifted to this
high state of political realisation.
But even at the stage reached by Fascism it is easy to see how it
affects the policy of foreign states towards Italy. Bring the people
to such a degree of political consciousness that every activity may
be so directed that it ensures at the same time personal and national
increase of value, then you can very nearly cease to trouble about
foreign policy, which must be the projection of the home policy, that
is to be the supreme affair of a government intent on the valorisation
of its country.
CHAPTER IV
THE EUROPEAN WAR AND ITS EFFECTS
In March, 1914, the cabinet of Giolitti retired owing to some
differences with the Radicals. The moment was full of difficulties and
the new ministry was likely to have to deal with strikes and riots at
home and complications out of Italy. Sonnino, leader of the Opposition
and one of the best men that the Right could boast of, refused to form
a new cabinet and managed to have the office entrusted to Salandra.
The German Emperor, passing through Venice on his way to Corfou, had a
long talk with the king and the Marquis of San Giuliano, the fact being
considered a new proof of Italo-German friendship apparently even by
the government, whose endeavours were all directed to secure a majority
in both Houses and to avert the storm that was threatening at home.
The railways were on the verge of a general strike, the state officials
were demanding better wages and tried to enforce their requests by
forming a trade union; workmen and peasants made riots in various
provinces, especially in the Romagne and Marche, where in June the
Red Week gave the spectacle almost of a revolution. There however the
Socialists and Republicans made such a poor show that it is likely to
have done a good deal towards shaking Mussolini’s faith in popular
revolution. Salandra and his ministers were so beset that they let
foreign affairs go unheeded or at least treated them as a matter of
minor urgency. It must have been a great shock to them to realise the
imminence of war.
When the war broke out involving all the great European Powers the
public generally believed Italy to be bound to back the Triple
Alliance. Immediately the Socialists and the extreme Left stirred up
a campaign on the ground that the Italian people were pacifists and
supporters of international Socialism. It is not easy to say whether,
even had it been pledged to do so, the government would have been able
to obtain the support of the nation to enter war immediately. Morally
the people were not ready to accept a war without attack or without
provocation from somebody.[3] On the first of August Italy declared
neutrality and on that day the _Giornale d’Italia_ clearly stated that
such neutrality was not like that of Holland or Switzerland, and above
all should not be considered as definitive.
The tenor of the press showed on which side an eventual intervention
of Italy would take place. Everybody was either neutralist or
interventionist, but nobody was in favour of an intervention on
the side of the Triple Alliance. The most Germanophile never went
farther than neutralism; all that they hoped and prayed for was the
non-intervention of Italy.
The argument of the neutralist papers was based on a statement of
the economic and individual sacrifices that war would involve, and
a plea that Italy could not yet be fit to enter such a conflict.
Anti-idealists or sceptics (as many of the sons of the heroes of the
Risorgimento were) they all agreed to regard life as the supreme value
and material well-being as its natural frame. Of war they only saw the
destructive side. They were certainly logical. A conception of life
so thoroughly materialist could not permit of a higher view of war;
for war certainly does destroy life and if it can and does promote an
improvement in the material conditions of life it is only as a remote
consequence of the class changes, and the industrial and commercial
stimulus carried in its trail. The immediate consequences are certainly
unsettling and paralysing to business.
On the other hand the interventionists had as the basis of their
argument a set of platitudes the abstract ideology of which was nearly
as objectionable as the materialism of their opponents. France,
Belgium and England were identified with right and civilisation,
Germany and Austria with wrong and barbarity. Therefore Italy should
have the honour of being among the righteous avengers of liberty and
civilisation against their traditional foe, barbarity. This opposition
of two abstractions to the materialism of their opponents betrayed
the ideologic heirloom of the eighteenth century, so dear to the
self-admiring minds of the educated mob. For there is such a thing as
an educated mob and it is sure to be on the side that offers a high
sounding rhetoric, a certain number of stock phrases and a fascinating
ideology. It is so much easier to accept ready-made ideas than to work
them out from actual reality.
It was not likely, however, that such claptrap should move the people
to war. Fortunately, there was another side to the question and that
was the chance of getting Trento and Trieste, in whose intellectual
life the old spirit of the Risorgimento had kept two strongholds. All
that was Liberal and traditional in the Italy of the nineteenth century
rose to the bait. The highest form of Italian Liberalism and its
aftermath Nationalism, unfurled their standard with the old zest and
their followers displayed their immortal eagerness to make this last
addition to their forerunners’ building of Italy. Not only were they
splendid in the propaganda days, but they were the first to enlist,
and both young Nationalists and old Liberals made it a point that “no
gentleman should stay at home.” Naturally the echo they aroused was
far from being general. If all the Liberals and the Nationalists were
gentlemen not all the so-called gentlemen belonged to these parties;
there was as much political indifference among the higher classes as
among the lower. But it is only fair to say that the war which gave
rise to the national and political consciousness whose first expression
is Fascism was mainly due to the pressure and the enthusiastic campaign
of Italian Liberalism and its offspring Nationalism.
This much being said in praise of the Nationalists, it may be remarked
from the Italian point of view that the misrepresentation of the time
and of the character of the world conflagration could not have been
carried much farther. It was indeed the last flare of their imported
notions of political reality. For nearly five centuries intellectual
tradition had bestowed upon Italians a mentality which is historical
nearly beyond understanding for foreigners. It will be traced back in
another chapter from Dante’s _De Monarchia_, but it may be here taken
from its first practical assertion. Machiavelli, at the end of the
fifteenth century, acting as Chancellor and Secretary of Florence, was
honoured with the unlimited trust of the _Gonfaloniere a vita_ and in
every respect proved himself worthy of such high consideration. He was
exceedingly grateful to the man who entrusted him with missions, the
official charge of which could not have been legally bestowed upon him.
Yet, whatever his regard for the high-mindedness of his principal, from
a close study and strict observation of political facts he came to the
conclusion that nothing could prevent the Gonfaloniere’s policy from
failure.
Dino was elected _Gonfaloniere a vita_ when the son of Lorenso il
Magnifico had to leave Florence in a hurry after having failed to
avert the transit of Charles the VIII and his troops through Florence.
Cosimo and Lorenzo dei Medici had only ruled for about half a century
but the changes which had taken place during that time in Tuscany and
in the whole of Italy were so great that history shows whole centuries
which have not displayed half of the difference made, for bad or good,
by the civilisation of the time. History was indeed at a turning of
the road so that when Dino came in power there was as much difference
between the political world anterior to the Medicean rule and his own
as there is between the sweet and gentle art of the Beato Angelico,
and that of Signorelli who introduced realism in his own vigorous art.
Good Dino, however, having been chosen Gonfaloniere to bring Florence
back to its former virtuous ways, looked to the old Republican days for
a model of government, and he failed to give his fellow citizens the
political advantage that would have met their needs just as Signorelli
would have shown himself a failure if he had painted exactly as the
Beato had done. Machiavelli was no optimist, but whatever the weakness
of his conception of history due to the philosophical notions of his
time, he did not give himself up entirely to abusing the wickedness of
the people. Sure enough, they were wicked—far more so than they had
been before the Medicean had corrupted them—yet they were above all
different and had, therefore, to be governed according to different
ideas.
It is no wonder, therefore, that the Florentine Secretary should have
spent so many hours of his enforced leisure after the realisation of
the event, the inevitability of which had so long haunted him, to warn
his contemporaries and the posterity of the necessity of governing not
according to a mummified ideal, but in harmony with one’s own time.
_Bisogna riscontrarsi coi propri tempi_ and to do so he recommends the
statesman again and again to get direct information of that which he
calls _la verità effettuale delle cose_, that is effective or actual
truth in matter of politics. It is both the experimental method of
Galileo and Vico’s historical understanding of society that are alluded
to in this constantly recurrent admonition of the man whose shrewdness
was to blind posterity for several centuries and throw the power and
depth of his political genius in the dark.
In 1915 such an excellent jurisconsult as Prof. Salandra and such a
first-rate diplomat as Sonnino seemed to realise but little that such a
principle existed. At best they harped on Trento and Trieste, when they
did not display their rhetoric on the conflict between civilisation and
barbarity. Still this territorial conquest, whatever its importance
as a traditional ideal to realise, was presented above all as a
rectification of the northern frontiers strictly necessary for the
safety of the nation and ethnologically justified. Nobody ever seemed
to realise that this aim should not have been the first objective to
a nation which lacked that which is the very essence of the national
entity, that which entitles a collectivity to have ethnological
frontiers, in short a national conscience and a national will.
Nobody seemed to realise it, but there was one man who did, and there
we have the second flare of genius to be credited to Mussolini. He had
become gradually conscious through constant contact with the working
class, and the middle class as well, that they would never be fit for
political life unless they acquired what they lacked through sacrifice.
The recent Red Week had shown him that they would not fight, that they
might set traps for other people’s lives, but they would not face
either blows or death for anything; and when the war came he saw that
there Italy had the one chance it could have to acquire what the genial
people who called themselves its citizens lacked to lift themselves
into the higher sphere where human beings are prepared to live and to
die for their political ideas.
It is, in fact, this national conscience, this spiritual and,
therefore, unlimited gift that the war has bestowed upon Italy, and
it is only now that Carducci, the most typically civic of all Italian
poets, could write with perfect truth:
“Ei dipinga il trionfo dell ’Italia
Assorta novella tra le genti.”
Nevertheless it is not Fascist Italy, it is not the real friends of
Italy, who will ever find fault with the ideas that brought Italy to
join the Allies and face the tragic ordeal of war. For it was the war,
the mystery of death faced by millions of her sons, which has made
Italy a moral value, and a first-rate historical factor in the present
political world. The select minority that was the brain and soul of
the Risorgimento has disappeared; national consciousness now fills
the individual consciences of the majority, and this extension of the
national conscience had nothing to do with the extended vote; it is a
consequence of the war. Personality, national personality means actual
unity of conscience and will just as much as individual personality.
Such personality has effectively been born in Italy out of the ordeal
that meant direct or indirect sacrifice from every man and woman, for
nobody would doubt the reality of the object for which his sacrifice
was made. Italy and her star were, up to 1915, a good theme for popular
or academic literature, but when it had required blood and tears from
every home it became that which could easily be transformed into the
most awful and objective reality. Hence the religiousness of their new
realisation of Italy.
It loomed indeed awful, like an obscure divinity, when it called men
who did not quite know why they had to fight to the supreme sacrifice.
One has to keep in mind how little civilisation and barbarity, pompous
words, meant to the Italian lower class, and how little Sicilians or
Neapolitans cared for Trento and Trieste. After Caporetto it was a
different matter. The traditional foe was on their land, and by then
they had realised what war meant. Therefore, one may say that their
national soul was tempered between Caporetto and the Armistice, and
that only then they became an ethical value, a spiritual entity or
rather personality fit to play a part in the constructive history of
the world. The point cannot be over-stated.
It is only through the war that the spiritual reality of the country
was enabled to strike roots in the souls of the labourers and middle
class men, ceasing thereby to be the monopoly of a small intellectual
and aristocratic minority.
The subjects of the King of Italy all became Italian citizens, and the
people was finally one in its full independence; it was, indeed, the
last act of the Risorgimento.
Few foreigners, no foreigner so to speak, had in 1915 a fair idea of
what was the state of mind of the Italians and still less of what
could be their mentality. It will not be too daring to say that in
this ignorance lay the cause of all the diplomatic difficulties and
of the fallacious appreciations of what that country could give, or
has actually given, with the consequent mutual vexations that were to
strain the relations between the Allies and Italy.
The author had already, in 1915, spent two years in Italy and studied a
good deal; yet youth did not allow at the time more than an intuition
of the fact—the conviction of which was to be acquired by ten years
of experience, observation and study. The Allies expected too much of
a generation whose fathers had fought the Wars of Independence with
sheer heroism and with material means that England or France would
have considered hardly fit for a colonial campaign. On the other hand,
they overlooked the possibilities of a people who had in front of
itself the whole of its national future, an historical mentality which
was likely to keep it from the sterilising conception of positivism,
abstract idealism or materialism, once it should have reached a
clear sense of its own secular reality, a Lacedemonian frugality,
and finally intellectual forces not inferior to those of the Kantian
and Hegelian Germany. The Italians for their part had to overcome a
radical scepticism. They had a very poor opinion of what military
achievement they could get out of their lower class, their traditional
financial deficiency made them fear economic destruction almost more
than the life sacrifice of so many men. Munitions were a nightmare,
renewal of their coal and wheat stocks a puzzling problem. They had to
trust blindly to the Allies. In fact it is a wonder that they should
have overcome the sense of despondency that might have paralysed them
altogether.
Thus it happened that the Italians did actually achieve far more than
they expected, far surpassing their own opinion of their military
efficiency; whilst doing far less than the Allies had expected. Hence
no end of misunderstandings. They thought that they had surprised us
by an unsuspected revelation of force and efficiency and they ascribed
our rather disappointed attitude to envy and fear of their new power.
Before the war they thought too little of themselves, because, as we
have said, they were still nationally unconscious, while the British
and French governments overrated the forces that they might contribute
without acknowledging their ambitions to develop the latent forces of
which they were conscious. Such misunderstanding was to breed all the
difficulties that we knew of at the end of the war. The Italians had
been victorious in war, they had triumphed over their enemies, and
above all over themselves, since they had asserted their reality as an
actual political value. But they were defeated in peace, or at least
were on the very point of being defeated and destroyed by peace.
* * * * *
The several Treaties of peace, the conferences of the Allies, were
a long sequence of disappointments to the people of Italy. The
incomprehension of the real state of things in that country reached
such a degree that had Socialism in Italy been endowed with a more
violent vitality Bolshevism would have flourished. The propaganda of
the Socialist party increased daily on ground most favourably prepared
by the general discontent and received moreover the collaboration
of the so-called _Popolari_—a kind of Social Catholic party that in
theory was to take the place of the clericals. Whether their leader,
Don Sturzo, a man of remarkable power, realised the sacrilegiousness
of using Catholic priests to pervert the minds of the peasants or not,
the Popolari brought their violences to such a pitch in some provinces
that they not only matched, they surpassed the Reds.[4] Naturally,
these parties and the men who were not supposed to belong to them, but
were flattering them in case of an eventual revolution, were wont to
represent the war and the sacrifices that had been made by the country
as the cause of all the social and economic difficulties. To them,
the only consequence of the war was the destruction of what had been
laboriously done between 1870 and 1915.
It was at this juncture that some people banded together their
aspirations, which seemed in the main to be the realisation in the
Adriatic of all the value of what they called “their mutilated
victory.” They had mostly been in the trenches, and they clustered
round Gabriele d’Annunzio who led them to occupy Fiume, which was
still under the control of the Allies. The Allies left the whole
affair to Italy and had the Italian government, or a strong party,
backed d’Annunzio and his friends, the course of events would have
been different. The country wanted Fiume, certainly, but with what
will did they want it? With a will that was national at last, because
it was not moved exclusively by Irredentism, and did not identify
itself with the will of the upper classes, but was a feeling with
the whole people. They had deserved it; they were conscious of a
right acquired through the common trial of the whole nation. It was,
however, more a velleity than a will. The new spiritual life was
quivering, it could express itself in a puerile gesture of the hand
towards the object of its passion, but it could not yet express itself
in action. Will or velleity—it was certainly the first manifestation
of a really national life striving against the paralysing scaffolding
of its political organisation. The professional politicians had been
trained when politics were merely a question of technical detail, when
to be a Deputy meant merely a job as a bargainer, to get the votes
of the people for a party on the understanding that the party would
satisfy the arbitrary and personal requirements of its electors, with
the possibility of coming to power any day in one of the incredible
combinations that came to life almost daily and made the Chamber a
nursery of ministers.
On the 28th of September, 1919, the government appointed General
Badoglio Extraordinary Commissioner of the Venezia Guilia and accepted
a discussion on the matter in the Chamber. Neither the men in power
nor the opposition felt it possible to accept the suggestions of the
Press, of various associations, and even of their friends who were
urging the necessity of Fiume’s annexation. The Ministry gave in its
resignation after dissolving the House and the elections returned 157
Socialists, among whom were moderate men like Turati and Treves and
many new men whose programmes were openly revolutionary, and over a
hundred _Popolari_. These parties had a good deal in common. Their
propaganda had been nearly perfect and had appealed to the people by
that definiteness and practicalness of purpose which is the main string
to pull in order to move Italians to action. They were not dreamers
and even in their worst or best ideals they were for definiteness of
means and purpose. There is in the Italian mind such a strong tendency
to take a realistic view of things that to this characteristic the best
and the worst of their history might be traced for twenty centuries.
The Nationalists had been returned in very small number, but were
mostly young, with considerable intellectual culture, fit and ready to
assume responsibilities. They had all done active service in the war
and were sorry to see its meagre result. They required an audacious and
strong policy without being able, however, to see clearly how this was
to be realised. Liberals held a good many seats but they were so split
up that they should rather be considered as a set of groups than as a
party; they even called themselves different names and had no common
programme.
After these elections one had the impression of watching the systematic
extinction of the flickering flame that had signalised the coming to
light of the new national conscience. One must have spent those years
in Italy, have actually lived the life of the Italians, felt all their
actual experiences and at the same time have had a good historical and
intellectual grounding in all that concerns the country, to understand
fully the tragedy of it. They seemed to precipitate themselves from
the soaring heights of national conscience to the lowest and vilest
egotism. Material well-being was again the order of the day and not
yours or theirs or the children’s, but _mine_. Beyond that nothing.
Reality was again atomistic and the atoms constitutive of it were
absolutely irrelatives. Nobody seemed to reflect; all were acting and
behaving like children. Truly it is the subjectiveness of the period
that must be taken as its characteristic. They seemed to move each
in his own world. Even financially they seemed to have reached an
unbridled licence. The constant principles that regulate economic
relations which form the basis of society were disregarded. Objective
reality was ignored just as it is ignored by children and to a certain
degree by artists. They had the economic deficit constantly on their
lips—but never had such spendthrift way of living been displayed in
their country—and they seemed to overlook the moral deficit betrayed by
such an atomistic subjectiveness.
Consider the factories. It is evidently a high rate of production
that will ensure the interests of both labour and capital. Well, the
workmen, or women, set themselves to get higher wages as they have
done in most countries, but in the north and centre of Italy they
did it with such a childish and, therefore, savage and lawless will
that the works had to be shut in many instances and were not reopened
until the advent of Fascism. So that it can be said that by not taking
into consideration the actual production as a whole, and the owner’s
interest, they reduced their legitimate desire for a better life to the
destructive whims of children and ruined their own interest.
The schools reflected the same destructive state of mind. That which
makes the school is surely not the building; the children are not
pupils if they do not learn, and neither is the master a teacher except
inasmuch as he does actually teach. Discipline having slackened to such
a degree that it bordered on anarchy the pupils had one fixed idea
to do no work, and a great many of the teachers—not all indeed, for
the teaching body has always counted in Italy a number of first-rate
men—had the same purpose. Teaching and learning were reduced to a
ghostly shadow by the reduction of schools to a subjective purpose by
both parties. The professors saw in their function the title it gave
them to their stipend and the pupils attended school just for the
degree or the promotion to which such attendance entitled them.
Such a false vision of life is certainly not natural to the Italian
people, and it had taken a great deal of trouble to introduce it in a
country the mentality of which is above all realistic. It is natural to
think that the Socialist and Popolari leaders were guilty of the most
criminal falsehoods.
On the 15th of June, 1920, when Giolitti was called upon to form a
new ministry, the government of Nitti had wrought such havoc in the
few months he had been in power that the old statesman was hailed
_Salvatore della Patria_ on his coming to power by the very people who
had called him a traitor five years before. Yet the new government
found that the best thing to do was to let things go on as they were,
with the result that factories were taken possession of by workmen, and
a strong reaction took shape under the wings of the new-born Fascism,
which came out with the simple programme of restoring order _even
against the state_ if it was necessary.
Public opinion at the end of the year gave a clear proof of the
depressing influence the government had had on the national conscience
allowing Giolitti, who had truly never been a Nationalist, to compel
d’Annunzio and his men to evacuate Fiume without any protest against
the bombardment inflicted upon them. When, in the next spring, the
elections took place, all the old parties were there again with
the addition of Fascism. The men of the new party were mostly new
to politics altogether, whilst some came from all the old parties
(including the Socialist) and they had all of them taken an active
part in the war. In the districts they had made national blocks with
Nationalists and Liberals and the few seats they obtained were not
lost by the _Popolari_ or Socialists, who were returned in the same
proportion as they had been in the last House.
The first characteristic of the Fascists was that they seemed to have
the same programme as the Nationalists, whilst they were displaying the
power of mass organisation that had been till then the privilege of
Socialists and _Popolari_. (This characteristic holds good up to now.)
They wanted to realise the political programme of the best men of Italy
by lifting the working class up to it. As to their aim it was then
exclusively the political and moral realisation of the practical and
spiritual value they ascribed to the war victory. They had nothing like
an abstract programme. When realisation is not one with conception—and
such has been the case for the last two centuries—the political systems
stated on paper appear all harmony, and their consequences all for the
best; but the trouble begins as soon as their application is sought.
Fascism has no ideologies but a cogent system of ideas able to give
what ideologies will never give, promptitude and coherence of action.
These ideas serve as a criterion of action rather than a theory. If it
draws the attention of foreigners as a beacon light it is because it
does show a way out of the abstraction that in a certain sense seems
to have perverted our modern vision of social and economic reality.
The method it enforces of looking invariably at both the terms of any
one relation is practical, as only can be a method the axle of which
is a highly philosophical conception. For the divorce between thought
and action pronounced by the philosophy of the sixteenth, seventeenth,
and eighteenth centuries might induce us to believe that speculative
thoughts had nothing to do with everyday life, whereas the simplest
and humblest action or relation to be productive has to be the direct
and immediate expression of a thought, scientific or speculative. The
peasant who lifts his axe over his head before striking it into the
wood is not making a choreographic flourish with his tool; its weight
is augmented by the height to which he lifts it and the combination of
the force of gravitation with his own sends his blade to the core of
the wood. He certainly does not think of the force of gravitation, but
he acts upon it. In the first contract, tacit though it may have been,
the man who lacked hands to plough his fields and the men who had no
field to plough, came into a relation that was the typical relation
of the one and the many which has stood as the fundamental problem of
ethics and politics in the philosophy of all ages. When synthesis rules
theory and a synthetic view of reality rules practice then the relation
is kept in consideration as the living bond of the two parties, and the
greater product of the harvest is the common aim. But when analytic
methods, either empirical or rational, prevail in philosophy, practical
life is infected with a ferocious individualism, the necessary
consequence of which is the unjust attribution of the harvest to one of
the two terms, to the ruin of the relation which has to be bilateral if
it is to be at all.
This concrete way of looking upon every economic and social problem
does not indeed present itself as a miraculous way of removing the
class struggles, which are, after all, one of the main forces at play
in the civilising process of mankind. It is merely the way of looking
at it that befits the intellectual level reached by man through the
efforts of genius and through the blood and tears of the many by which
social and economic progress is achieved.
After all that has been said it is surely unnecessary to point out the
absurdity of considering Fascism as a reactionary tendency. It goes
indeed steadily forward and its leader would not have the historical
mind he has, if it meant to reject the labourers’ claim to preserve
the recognition of their interests, which is the one noble conquest
of socialism. The “reaction” was never against the working classes’
rights; it was against all rights that did not spring from duties. It
was against exclusive power—tyrannical as all exclusive powers are
bound to be—that it reacted with the full consent of the population, as
sick of being bossed by a mob minority as the mob had been to be bossed
by the gentry fifty years before. Truly it would be a strange illusion
of the upper classes if they were to believe that Fascism had come to
restore “the good old times”; for that which it has come to restore or
rather to establish is the really Christian equality of men. Christian
because it intends rights to be consonant with spiritual value and
actual recognition of duties.
The revolutions of the past were always justified by the necessity of
enforcing the claims of a single class. Fascism in its synthetic view
of life strives to enforce the rightful claims of all classes, and
considers them rightful as far as they present rights and duties on the
same plane. If it looks to the past it is to understand the present,
but its knowledge and understanding of history do not allow it to
believe that history proceeds backwards.
Part II
PHILOSOPHICAL ANTECEDENTS OF FASCISM
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHICAL ANTECEDENTS
Fascism is the concrete way of considering any organisation or relation
in the light of the aim for which it was created. Such a method sweeps
away a good deal of claptrap rhetoric and a great many prejudices.
What matters is the actual working of an organisation towards its aim,
and not at all the exclusive interest of one of the two contracting
parties. Obviously this is the practical application of one of the most
famous propositions of the philosophy of Mind. It is just as obvious
that after a first period of political system exclusively for gentlemen
and by gentlemen, and a second period of a political system exclusively
drawn for the benefit of the lower class, it was natural that any sane
party should have tried a synthetic policy, above all in a country
where the mentality is essentially realist.
The motto of Fascism is order and hierarchy. This is the necessary
consequence of its taking into consideration always the aim and its
actual realisation. If efficiency is to be ensured to any organisation
from the family upward it is evident that every member of it must play
his part in the way which is most likely to ensure efficiency. Yet
this notion of discipline is a trifle more modern than it sounds, at
least in Italy. Nothing can better illustrate it than the example of a
football Captain and his men. The boy who acts as Captain, let us say
John Smith, has no authority over his fellows, except when, ceasing to
be John Smith, he is Captain of the team, and while they are actually
playing, practising or arranging a game. His authority is not personal,
it is actual to the sport interests of the team, or the school they
represent, so that it is not demeaning to any of his team to accept
the dictates of his authority. Indeed the boys’ commonsense is strong
enough, in England at least, to make them realise an idea which they
would comprehend with great difficulty in its speculative form. To them
it is obvious that their Captain’s authority is as absolute as it is
actual and impersonal. He is Captain as long as he is an actual value,
as long as he is a factor of efficiency to the general play of his
side. His authority does not diminish one whit of the players’ liberty,
because the will of every single player is that his side should win,
and such identity is that which makes the actual reality both of the
team as an individual, or rather as a person, in the world of sport and
of the single players as members of that team. The Captain is entrusted
with the co-ordination of a number of wills, and their welding into
one in his own person, so that each boy freely wants what all want.
Divergencies are merely negative—as is constantly shown by the negative
scoring of sides in which first-rate men play without this unification
of their single wills.
Thus football comes to illustrate perfectly the most difficult of all
the Gentilian notions instinctively acted upon by people who will
never be able to read one line of Gentile’s works, the notion of
liberty taken as actual identification of each single will which is
liberty with the common will which is law. Again the boys’ commonsense
would find it as ridiculous to argue over their Captain’s orders when
playing, as to go on considering him as their superior when the game
is over, or when they have detected among themselves a better Captain.
Thereby they teach the world a deep truth, that is to say that no value
can be considered as static, and that its realisation being dynamic and
actual it cannot be achieved once for all, but is a continuous process
of developing one’s own efficiency.
Hence the notion of discipline and liberty acted upon by boys playing
football results in a conception of hierarchy which is also shared by
Fascism, and is pregnant with so much social and political reformation
that one cannot insist too much upon it. Nor can one abstract it from
Gentile’s system, of which it is theoretically and practically the
centre. In their organisation the boys certainly do not consider the
team’s hierarchy as being definitely settled any more than Fascists
would consider any one political constitution or method of governing
as final, that is to say as perfect. To their young minds, full of
freshness and elasticity, it would sound absurd not to be able to alter
their arrangements and to modify their play in the best interests of
the team. If a boy slackens in his practice his unfitness will soon
betray the fact and his contribution to the positive scoring of the
team will be thereby diminished. But with this new view of hierarchy
which Fascism takes as being grounded on actual value, the most
unstable of all living reality thereby destroying every notion of any
permanent class or organisation—the contribution to international
politics of Fascism as the immediate consequence of its national and
political antecedents comes to an end.
Passing now to the exposition of the philosophical genealogy of Fascism
it may be well to remember first that there are no such things as
“national” philosophies, philosophy being the historical process of
infinite Mind; secondly, that as a consequence of the oneness of such
a process, there are no such things as brand new conceptions either
in the most sublime of theoretical systems or in their practical
realisation such as pedagogy or politics. Neither is there any such
thing as an international system, and this ought to be sufficient
to destroy any hope of internationalisation of mankind. Every great
nation is a contributor to the life of Mind, and may be said to
take in international politics a part which is proportioned to its
theoretical contribution. Each school of thought takes the problems in
the solution of which it displays the peculiarities which distinguish
its genius from another school, either when this has given to it all
the development of which its own genius was capable, or when it is
developing it on unilateral lines.
In philosophy good examples of this are the obvious derivation of
Bacon’s and Descartes’ problems from the Italian philosophers of the
Renaissance, and the mutual influence of English empiricism and French
rationalism; in politics the influence of England on France during
the whole of the eighteenth century and of both countries on Italy
during the nineteenth century. Looking at any history of philosophy or
politics serves to illustrate the point. For one follows the living
process through which theoretical notions are born one out of the
other, and one realises the part played by the characteristics of each
nation in the constructive play of historical forces. There could be
no stronger evidence both of the intellectual interdependence of
countries, and the absolute necessity of their political independence.
The relation of theoretical and practical life ought no longer to be
one of exclusive opposition. Pragmatism has done something towards
the simplification of it and the oncoming idealism is achieving it
in a way that may be said radical. In the history of the last three
centuries, however, we see philosophy considering thought and action
as the two terms of an irreducible dualism; yet such dualism must not
be considered a product of the perverseness of modern thought. Ovid
has left us a verse which settles the point even for people unfamiliar
with pagan philosophy. It is only the deliberate application of a given
system which may follow after its conception, but the spontaneous
conformation of political reality to the actual life of the mind is
generally simultaneous with the conception of the theories of which it
is the practical expression. A good illustration of the point can be
had from Germany. Lévy Bruhl has sketched the parallel development of
German philosophy and national consciousness in a work which is not as
famous as it deserves. After Hegel’s death, when his system has given
birth to its two political offsprings, the statolatry of Imperialism
and the myth of Marx’s Communism, the maximum force of expansion is
on the verge of being reached by Germany and the country is not far
from becoming the prey of national fanaticism, which is as blinding as
the religious fanaticism that appears in the history of all churches
when, having exhausted the force of expansion that is dependent on the
immediacy of their faith, they want to go on expanding artificially
through arbitrary force.
Few legacies of the first centuries of modern thought have been
as harmful as the divorce between the two manifestations of human
activity. It was, however, inevitable. Faith in the positive teaching
of the Church was the first snare into which early thinkers fell; for
it is not exact to say that they professed the existence of two truths
merely to escape danger. They firmly believed it. Most of them were
good Catholics, and as sure in their scientific maturity as in the days
of their childhood that the Church was right. On the other hand they
were sure of the result of their observations and experiments. They
were sure in both cases, and so they simply inferred the co-existence
of two truths. Nowadays, it sounds childish and the reciprocal
limitation of the two truths would be obvious to any modern student,
but in those days the problem had not received the light that it has
received since; and they were perfectly in earnest. The philosophers
followed suit for two obvious reasons; science was still for a very
long time identified with philosophy, and the sixteenth century
thinkers, when they were faced by the dilemma of being heretics or of
discarding their passionate researches, took to considering religion as
belonging to the practical manifestation of mind whilst scientific and
philosophic researches were its theoretical activity. One more step and
religion was to be identified as the enemy of science.
* * * * *
When Europe emerged from what has been called the Dark Ages of
obscurantism—in antithesis to the age of light to which belonged the
writers who thus labelled an epoch, which was dark and obscure to them
merely because they knew very little about it—intellectual life was
so full of buoyancy that men fretted at the tethers of a school of
thought which they could disregard after having come to such efficiency
under its discipline that they felt like boys coming intellectually of
age. Scholasticism having patronised Aristotle as “The Philosopher,”
Plato was for the first time opposed to him, then Neo-platonism; then
modern “national” schools of thought arose at the breaking up of
the intellectual world. For a United Intellectual States of Europe
existed during the Middle Ages; and the biographies of St. Anselm and
St. Thomas tell us eloquently how, in their centuries, a man could
pass from country to country to follow his studies with the greatest
simplicity. At the time of St. Anselm, nationality could not be traced
in a man’s works. By the time Roger Bacon wrote the differences had
developed, and it is not impossible to find his character as a sturdy
Briton standing out distinctly in his works. Such national tendencies
expressed themselves only in matters of little moment, and it is a fact
that the wonderful correspondence which passed between scholars kept
the humanism of each country in touch with that of all others; it is
none the less obvious that there were essential differences between the
character it gradually assumed in various countries, a character and
an attitude that may be identified as the initial stage of the various
European mentalities.
The best proof of this is to be had in the essential and irreducible
differences manifest in the conclusions to which Italian, English and
French philosophy came on the very same problem, which they found on
the threshold of modern civilisation. Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon
and René Descartes treated the same question when their respective
countries emerged from the later Middle Ages with their respective
schools coming to light from scholasticism through humanism. The
problem of knowledge faced them in this dawn of modern intellectual
life; and the same passionate reaction against Aristotelianism and
scholasticism compelled their researches to take the same bent. Yet
they came to widely different conclusions and the differences hold
good even to-day as characteristic of Italian, English and French
mentalities.
Bruno, whose metaphysic is wonderfully synthetic and pregnant with a
lyricism the echo of which runs through the work of Vico, faces the
problem of truth, of scientific truth according to him, in order to
find theoretical ground to reject the authority of antiquity considered
by his forerunners as the well of all worldly wisdom. A conception
known to that same antiquity but very uncommonly acted upon takes hold
of his mind. Truly old age must be wiser than youth, but antiquity is,
compared to his age, the nursery age of mankind, and a fairly good
student of the sixteenth century knows far more than Aristotle, because
he may know, if he chooses, all that Aristotle knew, and all that has
come afterwards to the knowledge of men. Each generation brings its
stone to the constructive activity of man’s experience. Hence the idea
he expressed _veritas filia temporis_. Thus he proclaims that which
will be the motto of every true Italian thinker; reality is essentially
and above all, Historical Reality.
In England, Bacon, starting on the same errand, through his researches,
was induced also to consider more and more that the regard of man for
the authority of tradition is one of the greatest obstacles to the
progress of science, and that servile veneration for Aristotle is,
above all, to be condemned as paralysing the initiative of modern
thinkers. Learning is not to be considered as the work of antiquity,
as a work already done; it is instead an arduous task still to be
accomplished and the first step on the way towards its accomplishment
must be the rejection of the old logic and its syllogism. Man must
trust to his personal experience, the immediate experience of his
senses. Nothing could be more anti-historical in its consequences than
this assertion, the unilateralness of which would be astonishing from
a man who felt the whole of historical and social world as a pulsing
reality, if it was not justified by the intellectual antecedents of the
English national consciousness coming to realise its own personality
just at the time in which Bacon thought and wrote. He could not very
well be expected to see the condition of his own experience in the
experience of his forerunners, in the age in which self-assertion
was the successful motto of every great man flourishing in England.
The abstraction thus made of all the historical past conditioning of
man’s experience was balanced for the time being by his own historical
and political sense and by the love of life as a whole so strong in
Elizabethan days. Yet henceforth reality in the eyes of any true Briton
was to be _Empirical Reality_.
A French thinker faces the same problem. René Descartes at first sight
is everything that Bacon is not; whilst the English philosopher is a
mixture of recklessness and worldly wisdom, anxious to enjoy everything
that power and wealth can beget, and drink to the dregs the cup of
life, the French metaphysician recoils from the cares of power and
the noisy turmoil of society. A longer consideration, specially from
a more philosophic point of view, reveals affinities that were going
to tell on their theories. Both lack the youthful enthusiasm common
to German and Italian thinkers, and both give shape to their theories
with a cautious prudence that marks them as men of the world. Their
conclusions betray their divergencies and affinities much better than
any analysis of their life and character could; for Descartes certitude
is reached by way of induction when in the silence of meditation he
comes to his famous statement _Cogito, ergo sum_. The touchstone of
certitude is identified with the actual consciousness of man in the act
of thinking. If I think surely I am; but of the rest, that is to say of
the knowledge of the exterior world I have no control, and traditional
science is communicated to me and was originally obtained through the
senses just as my actual objective knowledge, therefore it cannot be
accepted as certain. Aristotle and all the traditional fetishism come
to nought. The _tabula rasa_ is implied as definitely in this as in
Bacon’s work; in both cases man must begin his work from the foundation
and put to the test of his own experience, empirical in one case,
rational in the other, the legacies of his predecessors. The difference
however implied in the terms empirical and rational is fundamental
and the pedagogy and politics grounded on English philosophy whilst
laying down rules and formulas inferred from systematic theories, will
always be susceptible of being tempered by a direct call to experience
and commonsense. The rationality of French philosophy does not allow
of such adaptation. To this day the cogency for good or bad which is
characteristic of French theories is the consequence of their perfect
deduction from a first principle; hence the radicalness that mars
some of their practical application. With the exception of men greatly
influenced by foreign philosophy, the French thinkers all took reality
as being Rational Reality; and all their systems were bound to be
radical in their applications.
In their rationalism or empiricism, France and England threw overboard
the past that loomed indeed rather oppressive, and in so doing they
assert man, in his individual determination, as the ground of all
reality. It is perfectly allowable to consider that the two schools
were bound to stimulate and temper each other. The atom, the monad
at the basis of their system is always man, but at the outset the
unilateralism of Bacon’s gnoseology, a method based so to speak
exclusively on sense knowledge, called for the mathematical and
deductive method of Descartes in order to display all that it held
virtually of scientific progress. On the other hand the French
deductive method, although admitting the inference and resorting
to it in its research of first principles, stood in sore need of a
well-balanced recognition of the part played by sense perception in
human knowledge. This will be specially obvious in the political
consequences of the two theories. For both had their political system,
in which their common character prevailed, inasmuch as the seventeenth
century was for France and England the century of metaphysics whilst
the eighteenth drew the conclusions of their premises, seeing to the
application or realisation of all that was fertile as a suggestion of a
renovating process to be undergone by society.
Bruno’s historical reality was left in a corner, for it could not have
been integrated in our system to which it was then contradictory,
and still less in the political conditions that were to be the
outcome of our theories, since it was consonant with them only as far
as the individual was the basis of his reality as well as of ours.
His individual is, however, neither rational, nor empirical; he is
historical, and this implies that he cannot be considered bereft
either of his roots in the past nor of his projection on the future.
Nothing therein tends to diminish man; on the contrary everything
adheres to him, dilating his personality right into infinity. But this
notion of man was far too difficult to be realised even theoretically
in the sixteenth century, and the arduous task of the French and
English schools was to pave the way for the German and modern Italian
thinkers and provide them with a starting-point to reach the heights
from which the relation of the transcendental and empirical selves can
be detected, and the historical notion of man realised in the light
of such a conception. In Bruno it is not, however, a mere intuition
although it is realised only as far as the conception of science and
its historical development are concerned. The practical realisation
of this notion implied a new conception of tradition and authority,
which, far from being shaken to pieces, are in it invested with a new
and nearly sacred character. Antithetic thereby to Protestantism, it
knocked no less against the transcendent reality of God as understood
then by decadent scholasticism and by most Catholics.