The politic of Fascism revolves wholly about the concept of the
national State; and accordingly it has points of contact with
nationalist doctrines, along with distinctions from the latter which
it is important to bear in mind.
Both Fascism and nationalism regard the State as the foundation of all
rights and the source of all values in the individuals composing it.
For the one as for the other the State is not a consequence--it is a
principle. But in the case of nationalism, the relation which
individualistic liberalism, and for that matter socialism also,
assumed between individual and State is inverted. Since the State is a
principle, the individual becomes a consequence--he is something which
finds an antecedent in the State: the State limits him and determines
his manner of existence, restricting his freedom, binding him to a
piece of ground whereon he was born, whereon he must live and will
die. In the case of Fascism, State and individual are one and the same
things, or rather, they are inseparable terms of a necessary
synthesis.
Nationalism, in fact, founds the State on the concept of nation, the
nation being an entity which transcends the will and the life of the
individual because it is conceived as objectively existing apart from
the consciousness of individuals, existing even if the individual does
nothing to bring it into being. For the nationalist, the nation exists
not by virtue of the citizen's will, but as datum, a fact, of nature.
For Fascism, on the contrary, the State is a wholly spiritual
creation. It is a national State, because, from the Fascist point of
view, the nation itself is a creation of the mind and is not a
material presupposition, is not a datum of nature. The nation, says
the Fascist, is never really made; neither, therefore, can the State
attain an absolute form, since it is merely the nation in the latter's
concrete, political manifestation. For the Fascist, the State is
always _in fieri_. It is in our hands, wholly; whence our very serious
responsibility towards it.
But this State of the Fascists which is created by the consciousness
and the will of the citizen, and is not a force descending on the
citizen from above or from without, cannot have toward the mass of the
population the relationship which was presumed by nationalism.
Nationalism identified State with Nation, and made of the nation an
entity preëxisting, which needed not to be created but merely to be
recognized or known. The nationalists, therefore, required a ruling
class of an intellectual character, which was conscious of the nation
and could understand, appreciate and exalt it. The authority of the
State, furthermore, was not a product but a presupposition. It could
not depend on the people--rather the people depended on the State and
on the State's authority as the source of the life which they lived
and apart from which they could not live. The nationalistic State was,
therefore, an aristocratic State, enforcing itself upon the masses
through the power conferred upon it by its origins.
The Fascist State, on the contrary, is a people's state, and, as such,
the democratic State _par excellence_. The relationship between State
and citizen (not this or that citizen, but all citizens) is
accordingly so intimate that the State exists only as, and in so far
as, the citizen causes it to exist. Its formation therefore is the
formation of a consciousness of it in individuals, in the masses.
Hence the need of the Party, and of all the instruments of propaganda
and education which Fascism uses to make the thought and will of the
_Duce_ the thought and will of the masses. Hence the enormous task
which Fascism sets itself in trying to bring the whole mass of the
people, beginning with the little children, inside the fold of the
Party.
On the popular character of the Fascist State likewise depends its
greatest social and constitutional reform--the foundation of the
Corporations of Syndicates. In this reform Fascism took over from
syndicalism the notion of the moral and educational function of the
syndicate. But the Corporations of Syndicates were necessary in order
to reduce the syndicates to State discipline and make them an
expression of the State's organism from within. The Corporation of
Syndicates are a device through which the Fascist State goes looking
for the individual in order to create itself through the individual's
will. But the individual it seeks is not the abstract political
individual whom the old liberalism took for granted. He is the only
individual who can ever be found, the individual who exists as a
specialized productive force, and who, by the fact of his
specialization, is brought to unite with other individuals of his same
category and comes to belong with them to the one great economic unit
which is none other than the nation.
This great reform is already well under way. Toward it nationalism,
syndicalism, and even liberalism itself, were already tending in the
past. For even liberalism was beginning to criticize the older forms
of political representation, seeking some system of organic
representation which would correspond to the structural reality of the
State.
The Fascist conception of liberty merits passing notice. The _Duce_ of
Fascism once chose to discuss the theme of "Force or consent?"; and he
concluded that the two terms are inseparable, that the one implies the
other and cannot exist apart from the other; that, in other words, the
authority of the State and the freedom of the citizen constitute a
continuous circle wherein authority presupposes liberty and liberty
authority. For freedom can exist only within the State, and the State
means authority. But the State is not an entity hovering in the air
over the heads of its citizens. It is one with the personality of the
citizen. Fascism, indeed, envisages the contrast not as between
liberty and authority, but as between a true, a concrete liberty which
exists, and an abstract, illusory liberty which cannot exist.
Liberalism broke the circle above referred to, setting the individual
against the State and liberty against authority. What the liberal
desired was liberty as against the State, a liberty which was a
limitation of the State; though the liberal had to resign himself, as
the lesser of the evils, to a State which was a limitation on liberty.
The absurdities inherent in the liberal concept of freedom were
apparent to liberals themselves early in the Nineteenth Century. It is
no merit of Fascism to have again indicated them. Fascism has its own
solution of the paradox of liberty and authority. The authority of the
State is absolute. It does not compromise, it does not bargain, it
does not surrender any portion of its field to other moral or
religious principles which may interfere with the individual
conscience. But on the other hand, the State becomes a reality only in
the consciousness of its individuals. And the Fascist corporative
State supplies a representative system more sincere and more in touch
with realities than any other previously devised and is therefore
freer than the old liberal State.