Now to understand the distinctive essence of Fascism, nothing is more
instructive than a comparison of it with the point of view of Mazzini
to which I have so often referred.
Mazzini did have a political conception, but his politic was a sort of
integral politic, which cannot be so sharply distinguished from
morals, religion, and ideas of life as a whole, as to be considered
apart from these other fundamental interests of the human spirit. If
one tries to separate what is purely political from his religious
beliefs, his ethical consciousness and his metaphysical concepts, it
becomes impossible to understand the vast influence which his credo
and his propaganda exerted. Unless we assume the unity of the whole
man, we arrive not at the clarification but at the destruction of
those ideas of his which proved so powerful.
In the definition of Fascism, the first point to grasp is the
comprehensive, or as Fascists say, the "totalitarian" scope of its
doctrine, which concerns itself not only with political organization
and political tendency, but with the whole will and thought and
feeling of the nation.
There is a second and equally important point. Fascism is not a
philosophy. Much less is it a religion. It is not even a political
theory which may be stated in a series of formulae. The significance
of Fascism is not to be grasped in the special theses which it from
time to time assumes. When on occasion it has announced a program, a
goal, a concept to be realized in action, Fascism has not hesitated to
abandon them when in practice these were found to be inadequate or
inconsistent with the principle of Fascism. Fascism has never been
willing to compromise its future. Mussolini has boasted that he is a
_tempista_, that his real pride is in "good timing." He makes
decisions and acts on them at the precise moment when all the
conditions and considerations which make them feasible and opportune
are properly matured. This is a way of saying that Fascism returns to
the most rigorous meaning of Mazzini's "Thought and Action," whereby
the two terms are so perfectly coincident that no thought has value
which is not already expressed in action. The real "views" of the
_Duce_ are those which he formulates and executes at one and the same
time.
Is Fascism therefore "anti-intellectual," as has been so often
charged? It is eminently anti-intellectual, eminently Mazzinian, that
is, if by intellectualism we mean the divorce of thought from action,
of knowledge from life, of brain from heart, of theory from practice.
Fascism is hostile to all Utopian systems which are destined never to
face the test of reality. It is hostile to all science and all
philosophy which remain matters of mere fancy or intelligence. It is
not that Fascism denies value to culture, to the higher intellectual
pursuits by which thought is invigorated as a source of action.
Fascist anti-intellectualism holds in scorn a product peculiarly
typical of the educated classes in Italy: the _leterato_--the man who
plays with knowledge and with thought without any sense of
responsibility for the practical world. It is hostile not so much to
culture as to bad culture, the culture which does not educate, which
does not make men, but rather creates pedants and aesthetes, egotists
in a word, men morally and politically indifferent. It has no use, for
instance, for the man who is "above the conflict" when his country or
its important interests are at stake.
By virtue of its repugnance for "intellectualism," Fascism prefers not
to waste time constructing abstract theories about itself. But when we
say that it is not a system or a doctrine we must not conclude that it
is a blind praxis or a purely instinctive method. If by system or
philosophy we mean a living thought, a principle of universal
character daily revealing its inner fertility and significance, then
Fascism is a perfect system, with a solidly established foundation and
with a rigorous logic in its development; and all who feel the truth
and the vitality of the principle work day by day for its development,
now doing, now undoing, now going forward, now retracing their steps,
according as the things they do prove to be in harmony with the
principle or to deviate from it.
And we come finally to a third point.
The Fascist system is not a political system, but it has its center of
gravity in politics. Fascism came into being to meet serious problems
of politics in post-war Italy. And it presents itself as a political
method. But in confronting and solving political problems it is
carried by its very nature, that is to say by its method, to consider
moral, religious, and philosophical questions and to unfold and
demonstrate the comprehensive totalitarian character peculiar to it.
It is only after we have grasped the political character of the
Fascist principle that we are able adequately to appreciate the deeper
concept of life which underlies that principle and from which the
principle springs. The political doctrine of Fascism is not the whole
of Fascism. It is rather its more prominent aspect and in general its
most interesting one.