This is my translation of Giovanni Gentile’s philosophical grounding for the fascist worldview. This is NOT something I agree with, but I believe that if I’m going to disagree with something, I ought to disagree with what it actually says, not what other people tell me it says. So I have sought to read and understand political ideologies from their source material. Given that this was written in Italian, and I can read Italian, I thought I would render a translation of the work. It is divided into 13 different sections.
1. Like every solid political concept, fascism is both praxis and thought; action in which a doctrine is inherent, and doctrine that, springing from a given system of historic forces, rests inside you and operates on you from within. It therefore has a form correlated to the contingencies of time and place, but at the same time an ideal contained within that elevates it to an expression of truth in the higher history of thought.
One doesn’t act spiritually in the world as a human will that dominates wills without a concept of both the transient and particular reality on which one must act, and of the permanent and universal reality in which the first has its being and life. To understand men, one must understand man; and to understand man, one must understand reality and its laws.
There is no conception of the State that isn’t fundamentally a conception of life: philosophy or intuition, a system of ideas that unfolds in a logical construction or is collected in a vision or a faith, but it’s always, at least potentially, an organic conception of the world.
2. Likewise fascism won’t be understood in many of its practical behaviors, as a party organization, as an education system, as discipline, if one doesn’t look at it in light of its general way of conceiving life: which is spiritually.
For fascism, the world is not this material world that appears on the surface, in which man is an individual separated from all the others and standing on his own, governed by a natural law that instinctively brings him to live a life of selfish pleasure in the moment. The fascist man is an individual that is nation and homeland; by a moral law that ties together individuals and generations in a tradition and a mission, that suppresses the instinct of life closed off in a brief walk of pleasure, to instill, as a duty, a higher life free from the limits of time and space: a life in which the individual, through the abnegation of self, the sacrifice of his particular interests, even his own death, fulfills that thoroughly spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists.
3. Therefore a spiritual conception also rises from the general reaction of the century against the weak and materialistic positivism of the 1800s. Anti-positivistic, but positive: neither skeptical nor agnostic, neither pessimist nor passively optimistic, as are, in general, the doctrines (all negative) that place the center of life outside of man, who, with his free will, can and should create his own world.
Fascism wants man active and engaged in action with all his energies. It wants him manfully aware of the difficulties that exist and ready to face them. It conceives of life as a struggle, believing it’s up to the man to conquer whatever is truly worthy of him, creating in himself first of all, the instrument (physical, moral, intellectual) to build it up. This is true for the individual, for the nation, as well as for humanity. Thus the high value of the culture in all its forms- art, religion, science, and the supreme importance of education. Likewise the essential value of work, with which man overcomes nature and creates a human world (economic, political, moral, intellectual).
(Explanatory note for people like me who weren’t sure what some terms meant: Positivism is essentially scientific materialism, the worldview that reality is what is empirically given, and knowledge is built from external observation. It assumes a knowing observer, and an independent object that is “out there”. )
4. This positive conception of life is clearly an ethical conception. It encompasses all reality as well as human activity that masters it. No action is devoid of a moral meaning; nothing in the world that one could strip of the value that belongs to everything in relation to moral ends. Therefore, the life which the fascist conceives of is serious, austere, religious: all balanced in a world sustained by the moral and responsible forces of the spirit. The fascist disdains the comfortable life.
5. Fascism is a religious conception, in which man is seen in his inherent relationship with a superior law, with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and elevates him to a conscious member of a spiritual society. Anyone who, in this religious milieu of the fascist regime, limits himself to mere opportunistic considerations, has not understood that fascism, beyond being a way of governance, is also, above all, a way of thinking.
6. Fascism is a historical conception, in which man could not be what he truly is, unless he is functioning in the spiritual process of the group in which he participates; the family and social groups, the nation and in history, in which all nations collaborate, and from where the great value of traditions in the memories, the language, the customs and the norms of social life. Outside of this history, man is nothing.
Because of this, fascism is against all the individualistic abstractions, founded in the materialism typical of the 1700s; and it opposes all utopias and Jacobin innovations. It doesn’t believe happiness is possible on the earth as it was conceived of in the economic literature of the 1700s, and therefore rejects all teleological concepts in which, at some certain point in history, there would be a final arrangement of the human race. This would entail putting oneself outside of history and the life that continues to flow and become real.
Politically, fascism wants to be a realist doctrine. Practically, it aspires to resolve only the problems that arise historically on their own, and find, or suggest, their own solution. To act among men, as in nature, one needs to enter in the process of reality and master the forces at work.
7. Anti-individualistic, the fascist concept is for the State; and for the individual in as much as he aligns with the State, which is the conscience and universal will of man in his existence in history. It is against classic liberalism, which sprang from the need to react to the absolutism, but has exhausted its historic function when the State was transformed into the will and consciousness of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; fascism reaffirms the State as the individual’s true reality.
If liberty should be the attribute of the true man, and not of that abstract puppet which individualistic liberalism imagines, fascism is for liberty. It’s for the only liberty that could be a serious consideration; which is the liberty of the State, and the individual within the State. Since, for the fascist, everything is within the State, nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has any value, outside the State. In this sense fascism is totalitarian, and the fascist State, the synthesis and unity of all value, interprets, develops and empowers the whole life of the people.
8. There are no individuals outside the State, nor groups (political parties, associations, unions, classes).
For this reason, fascism is against socialism, which reduces the movement of history to class warfare and ignores the state unity that fuses the classes in one economic and moral reality. Likewise, it is against classist unionism. But within the sphere of the ordering State, fascism wants to recognize the real needs from which the socialist and unionist movements originated and value them in the corporative system of reconciled interests in the unity of the State.
9. Individuals are classed according to their categories of interest; they are unionized according to their different associated economic activities; but they are first, and above all else, the State. The State isn’t a number, such as the sum of individuals forming the majority of a people. For this reason, fascism is anti-democracy, which makes ‘the people’ equal to the largest number, lowering them to the level of the majority. The most honest form of democracy is when ‘the people’ is thought of, as it should be, qualitatively and not quantitatively, as the most powerful ideal because it’s the most moral, most coherent, and truest, which is realized within the people as the consciousness and will of a few, or rather, of One, and which, as an ideal, tends to be realized in the consciousness and will of all.
The “all” are those who by nature and history, ethnically, derive the grounds to form a nation, and set on the same path of development and spiritual formation, as a single consciousness and will. This isn’t a race or a geographically defined region, but a historically self-perpetuating stock, a multitude unified by an idea, which a will to existence and power: self-conscious, a personality.
10. This superior personality is indeed a nation insofar as it is a State. The nation doesn’t generate the State, according to the obsolete naturalistic conception that served as a basis for the theory of nation-states in the 19th century. Indeed, the nation is created by the State, which gives to a people aware of their own moral unity, a will, and therefore an effective existence. The right of a nation to independence doesn’t derive from some literary and idealistic awareness of its own existence, much less from a de facto situation more or less unconscious and inert, but from a conscious activity, from a political will at work and disposed to demonstrate its own rights: that is, from a sort of State already in the making. The State, in fact, as a universal ethical will, is the creator of rights.
11. The nation as a State is an ethical reality that lives and exists inasmuch as it develops. Its stagnation is its death. Therefore, the State is not only an authority that governs and gives shape to laws and values of spiritual life to individual wills, it’s also a force that makes its will valued abroad, making it known and respected, demonstrating through actual fact, its universality in all the necessary determinations of its development. Thus, it is organization and expansion, at least potentially. As such, it can adapt to the nature of human will, which in its development knows no barriers, and which is achieved proving its own infinity.
12. The fascist State, the highest and most powerful form of personality, is force, but spiritual. It sums up all the forms of moral and intellectual life of man. One can’t limit it therefore, to simple functions of order and protection, as liberalism would like. It isn’t a simple mechanism that limits the sphere of presumed individual liberties. It is the shape and interior law and discipline of every person; penetrating the will as well as the intellect. It’s principle, the central inspiration of the living human personality in the civil community, descends to the depth and nests in the heart of the man of action as well as the thinker, of the artist as well as the scientist: soul of the soul.
13. Fascism, in the end, isn’t only a giver of laws and founder of institutions, but an educator and promoter of spiritual life. It desires to remake not the appearance of human life, but the contents, the man, the character, the faith. To this end discipline is needed, and authority that penetrates inside one’s spirit, and rules over you uncontested. Its symbol therefore is the lictor’s fasces; the symbol of unity, of force, and of justice.