"Reason and science" says Renan (who had certain pre-fascist
enlightenments) in one of his philosophical meditations, "are products
of mankind, but to seek reason directly for the people and through the
people is a chimera. It is not necessary for the existence of reason
that everybody should know it. In any case if this initiation were to
be brought about it could not be through low-class democracy, which
seems to lead rather to the extinction of every difficult culture and
of every great discipline. The principle that society exists only for
the welfare and liberty of individuals composing it, does not seem to
conform with the plans of nature: plans in which the species only is
taken into consideration and the individual appears sacrificed. It is
strongly to be feared that the last word of democracy thus understood
(I hasten to add that it can also be differently understood) would be
a social state in which a degenerated mass would have no preoccupation
other than that of enjoying the ignoble pleasures of the vulgar
person."
Thus Renan. In Democracy Fascism rejects the absurd conventional
falsehood of political equality, the habit of collective
responsibility and the myth of indefinite progress and happiness.
But if there be a different understanding of Democracy if, in other
words, Democracy can also signify to not push the people back as far
as the margins of the State, then Fascism may well have been defined
by the present writer as "an organised, centralised, authoritarian
Democracy."