Fascism and Culture

Giovanni Gentile

Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1928

English translation of the chapters, unified and standardized for study purposes

CONTENTS

I The Unity of Culture

II Labor and Culture

III Against the Neutrality of the School

IV Inaugural Address of the National Fascist Institute of Culture

V Declarations

VI Continuing

VII The Institute’s Aims

VIII The Programme

IX Revision

X The New Higher Council of Public Education

XI The Philosophical Congress of Milan

XII The Italian Encyclopedia and Fascism

XIII The Fascist Press and Party Responsibility

XIV The Academy of Italy

XV Words to the Young

XVI The Religious Problem in Italy

XVII The Roman Question

XVIII New Documents on the Roman Question

XIX Brunophobia, Hypocrisy, and Other Matters

XX The Naples Address and the Clerical Uproar

_{Chapter I}

The Unity of Culture

(L’unità della cultura)

If by culture we mean simply the sum — not so much of items of knowledge as of the mental habits that develop through the acquisition of knowledge, and that make possible a further, swifter, and broader acquisition of still more knowledge — it will readily be granted that it is precisely this culture that makes the cultivated man. But, on closer reflection, this culture does not merely make the cultivated man: it makes man as such. For it is only too clear that man is truly man precisely because he alone, among all natural beings, distinguishes himself from the totality of nature, and thereby declares himself to be himself, inasmuch as he is conscious of being — and therefore of existing and acting.

Consciousness, which can no longer be regarded as something natural, that is, as something given as primitive; for whatever one naturally is or does can only be an object of consciousness — which therefore implies a new and higher activity, one that exists precisely in being unfolded and affirmed. A stone is a stone, but it does not know itself to be a stone; nor does the animal, however much it may feel and instinctively act in a perfectly rational manner, know itself to be an animal, nor is it aware of the logic of its own instinct. It has no consciousness.

And the child, in its rudimentary humanity, has consciousness only imperfectly: it knows in its own way what it is, and does, and desires, and so on; but it does not know this as fully as its father or mother know it, who watch over it, over its heart, its aspirations, its needs, and understand its life far better than the child itself does. Its ingenuousness, its childlike innocence, is nothing other than a deficiency of consciousness — a deficiency, of course, that only the adult can notice in the child, and of which the child itself is plainly unaware. And the gradual process of becoming a man, in the unfolding of one’s individuality, is nothing other than a continuous passing from a lower consciousness to a higher one, in relation to which the former is an absence of consciousness.

And if to wake from sleep is to acquire consciousness of oneself, then the whole of human life, in its progressive growth, may well be called a continuous awakening — one that is never entirely complete. But what, then, is awakening? The sleeper is not dead: how often, on waking, are we quite certain that we have dreamed? Sleep is dream, more or less clear or obscure; and it differs from the reality in which we find ourselves again on waking, and because of which we banish from our minds, as vain shadows, the images that had occupied it a moment before — images that had held it captive and stirred the liveliest interest, sometimes the most turbulent passions — for this reason alone: that the dreamed reality, which we think of (as dreamed) together with that far vaster reality thought of as true reality, is a part of it.

Indeed, once awake, we retain what we dreamed together with that other thing which we see as the real world, or think of in relation to this world; and in this world we find room even for our dream, as a play of images that truly occurred within us, who truly belong to this real world. To awaken, then, is to rise in mind from a smaller world to a greater one, of which one becomes aware that the former was only a part. And this precisely is what it means to acquire consciousness, or to progress in the acquisition of consciousness. One believes oneself to know, and then realizes that one did not know; that is, one knew only a part of what is later revealed as the whole that must be known in order to say that one truly knows. Hence the tendency proper to the human spirit to extend ever further the scope of its knowledge.

And that is not all. We can be awake, and yet still dream. Often one dreams with open eyes: that is, we are awake, but remain so absorbed in the images of our fancy or the ideas of our mind that, persistently pursuing images and ideas within the closed chamber of our own soul, we become strangers to the world around us — which is, after all, the real world; and we do not return to it except by being roused by some voice that calls us, or by some jolt of reality which, breaking in suddenly from without, throws our thought into disorder and interrupts its course. Now, that return from our dreams to the real world is a psychological fact identical to waking from sleep; and it is, properly speaking, the return of man not to the surrounding reality, abstractly considered, but to himself. He finds himself again, for indeed he had lost himself behind his fancies and speculations.

He was absent; he had no consciousness of himself. And in acquiring it, in becoming once more present to himself, he is able to put himself again in a position to perceive the things around him, to orient himself, to rise up, to act — in short, to lay hold once more of the reality from which he had become estranged. And so it is always, when we wake from sleep: to orient ourselves, to see where we are, to gather again the threads of memory by which we perceive the reality with which, before sleep, we had formed a single whole — this recovering and regaining of ourselves as the very same person we were and are, comes before all else. Such is consciousness: knowledge, we might say, that knows itself as knowledge; embracing reality in thought, but as hinged upon us — as our own reality.

To know, and to know the world; but not an abstract world, rather this world which we feel around us, in which there is no particle that we can imagine without reaching it through our own thought within us — almost a knot in the web of which our soul is woven: this, in short, which we can call and do call our world, or simply: this world. For it is easy to understand that the word “this” would have no meaning unless it designated a relation to us who speak. To know things, and to know them as things belonging to us, bound up with our life and forming a whole with it — this is to awaken, to acquire consciousness, to be a man. The child is still a child because it does not know the life that is the real world, and does not know itself; it does not yet have the knowledge of itself that it must have, and that it will indeed acquire in time.

It is therefore not yet a man fully made — one that it will become through culture, which, by developing both knowledge and the capacity for knowledge, may well be defined as the formation of man. Provided that culture is not confused with that part alone of it which we socially regard as the product of schooling: for culture begins before the first school, from the moment man opens his eyes to the light and begins to learn something; and it ends only when man has nothing more to learn, because his life has been extinguished. * But this culture that makes man can be understood, and has been understood, in two ways. There is no doubt that whoever speaks of culture speaks of knowledge, awareness, instruction, science. But science itself has a double meaning, and hence there can be two profoundly different ideals of culture.

We have already said as much: there is the consciousness of reality, which is the knowing of things; and there is the consciousness that man has of himself, which is likewise a form of knowledge and science — one that not everyone succeeds in distinguishing precisely from the first, though it cannot be confused with the first without losing the thread of any possible concept of culture. Man, who distinguishes himself from things by knowing them and acting upon them, does not stand before these two terms as though things were on one side and man on the other. The man who stands alongside things is himself a thing — though baptized “man” — and over against him (as over against all other things) there always remains the true man, who is the one who, in actuality, really distinguishes himself from everything he knows or acts upon. But the difficulty of this most delicate distinction has meant that, in practice, things and man came to be confused, so that with respect to science the whole of being was reduced, in the last analysis, to things. Among these — albeit with wholly particular characteristics — man too was encountered and studied; and just as there were the natural and mathematical sciences, so too there were the moral sciences, meant to know man in all his aspects and through the ever-varying forms he assumes across the changes of space and time.

For within the reality that we must come to know, there is man and his history, just as there is the solar system, and within the solar system the earth, and within the earth, life, and so on; and all of this is a presupposition of science, which does nothing but describe what exists, ascertaining, first of all, that it exists. A science so conceived can clearly arouse in man no interest beyond the generic one of so-called curiosity, by which he is continually driven to know more and more; but it leaves him quite indifferent before the results it gradually leads him to.

The world that it makes known is what it is: a world in which two and two make four, two straight lines cannot enclose a space, water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, the earth revolves around the sun, all living things die, and without eyes one does not see; a world in which there are different races of men, and among men there were the ancient Romans, and among these, Pompey, who was defeated by Caesar, and so forth. And everything is bound together, so that none of the particulars distinguishable within the whole, once it exists, could have failed to exist; and once something has been or is in a certain way, nothing could have been otherwise. Whence we say white because it is white, just as we would say black if it were black.

And so the true sage who has shaped his mind in conformity with this notion of knowledge no longer weeps, nor laughs; he is no longer moved by passion; he no longer sees any reason to be — except for his research, and for whatever furthers or hinders it. But does a science so conceived make man? Drink all there is to know Tome after tome, You will be perfectly clear Without being a man. We are all convinced of this. Such a science is erudition, but it is not culture. It is theory, one says, but not practice; it is intelligence, but not character, not personality, not moral life. But is it, then, really science, theory, intelligence?

This is the point on which clarity is not always achieved, and on which it is well worth reflecting carefully, in the interest of culture — which is the interest both of knowledge and of life. From what has already been said, it should be easy enough to gather that if consciousness, in which all knowledge consists, is consciousness of things only because it is first of all consciousness of self, then there is properly no science that man can have of things which does not imply a corresponding consciousness of self, a certain personality; nor, therefore, is a true theory possible which does not imply a practice — if by practice we mean a certain disposition of our mind toward reality.

But to clarify directly this notion of the abstractness of a knowledge having no bearing on human life may help to make even clearer what has been said about the consciousness of self that is always present in the knowledge of reality. Science as erudition is, I have said, an abstract science. It is no less illusory than a dream; for, like the dream, it takes for reality only a part of reality, and within that part it may indeed be held to be real. In it, as in the dream, man represents to himself a world from which he, who represents it, is absent, and in which he must indeed set aside himself, his interests and his passions. As in the dream, he can enter, within it, among the beings he represents to himself, only as one of them, losing himself among them, with no possibility of finding himself again, of rousing himself and withdrawing from the flight of his own representations. To awaken, in such science as in the dream, he needs to open his eyes, to see and touch himself, to feel himself from within — in short, to become present to himself once more. Yes, there is nature; but which nature? It is this nature that fills my eyes, my mind, my soul, and in which I plant myself, wishing to represent myself to myself, with my feet upon the ground, my lungs open to this air that strengthens and renews me within, and my hands ready to bring to my mouth whatever can nourish me.

Nor can I split myself into a body that is one with this nature, and into some more hidden Self that merely looks upon its body; for I myself am already that which I see and am seen by myself, and it is in this body and with this body that I develop, feeling and thinking, as consciousness. And besides, this body is mine — unlike my clothing — precisely because in all its parts it is so intimately part of me that I can in no way separate myself from it. So that the nature which I, as naturalist, study as though I myself were not there, is a nature abstractly conceived and non-existent; for what truly exists is only that nature which I cannot conceive of except as one single thing with myself. Likewise, there is indeed a history to be known. But which history?

It already lies within our soul, stirring our interest and drawing us to itself, promising the satisfaction of a need of ours, when we say that we still have it to learn. And the study of it is a deepening of our own self-representation — that is, of ourselves in relation to that reality which we distinguish from ourselves, and in which we find remnants of the past, and monuments, books, manuscripts, and memorials of every kind. History is within us; outside us, as the mere scholar would have it, it is an illusion.

The same may be said of every form of erudition — noting that erudition, in the same sense, is not only every particular or historical science, or the sum of all particular sciences (itself not immune from the fragmentary character of the single elements composing it), but also that very science which claims to stand over against the particular sciences precisely as the science of the unity of the whole, and which is called philosophy. Even philosophy, if it conceives that reality which it seeks to grasp in its universal character and its fundamental law — as so many philosophers have conceived it — as a reality that can be genuinely thought only on condition of setting aside the man who actually thinks it. For even in this case, from the whole that is supposed to have been thought, there has been excluded nothing less than that very thing by virtue of which everything else is thinkable.

A science, in short, that yields this or that thinkable thing, or the whole of the thinkable, but by abstracting from the man for whom it is thinkable, is an abstraction, a true dream, from which one must indeed awaken. * To awaken, then, means to find oneself again within the reality that is the object of thought; or, put otherwise, to think reality while also thinking oneself: to think nature while keeping an eye on that which in the end constitutes the very being of the one who is thinking it; to conceive history, in its totality and in all its individual particulars, as intelligible only within a world that has its center in us, who strive to conceive that history. So that if man has a moral or religious faith, by which he individuates himself and constitutes his real personality, this personality must also be mirrored — indeed radiated — through the whole fabric of his knowledge.

Character and knowledge must always form an inseparable whole, with two distinct faces which correspond to and answer one another, point for point. *

If man is to be man, formed by his own culture, he must not distinguish within himself between what he knows and what he does, between the theoretical world of his intelligence and the real world of his action — as though it were possible to exercise the intelligence without engaging one’s own personality in a certain conception and judgment or appraisal of the world, or to act without affirming, by the very act, a certain way of understanding life in its universality. The opposite doctrine, founded on the assumption of an absolute separability of man from the reality toward which his intelligence is directed, was already the germ of what may be regarded as the age-old malady of the Italian people, whose civilization always remained essentially that which flowered in the Renaissance.

The Renaissance was the age of the triumph of individualism, in which the individual, setting himself, in the vigorous aesthetic expansion of his personality, against history and nature, grew accustomed to separating what is essentially joined together, and could no longer conceive of the free development of personality in art and philosophy, and hence in life, except as destined to be celebrated in an entirely subjective world, different from that solid and compact formation which is historical tradition and the life of nature — and hence incapable of reconnecting with this latter, which is after all the true real world, and of acting upon it.

Hence the great spiritual freedom of the Italians of the age of decadence, accompanied by a practical scepticism arising from a submissive or indifferent disposition of minds toward the surrounding world, whether natural or historical (political and religious). Hence, too, the possibility for Italians to rise again once faith rose again, and the individual felt the need to lay hold once more of the real, and no longer to separate theory from practice, and, in short, to know no other world than the one in which one lives and acts. It suffices to compare Gioberti with Bruno, or Leopardi with Ariosto: any one of the Italians representative of the spirit and culture of the Risorgimento with any one of the writers of the Renaissance.

Bruno has a vast conception of the world in which he himself disappears, and his philosophy nowhere shows us the man who nonetheless is thinking it, as a man who has his own program to carry out in life, in the particular conditions of his personality, in his time, in his country, amid the institutions that interfere with the development of his activity. Gioberti, by contrast, while embracing in thought a world no less vast, makes it vibrate entirely with his faith as an Italian yearning for the moral, religious, and hence political resurrection of his homeland.

Ariosto ranges serenely through a luminous world that peoples his imagination with smiling images wandering over every region of the earth and even beyond the earth; but in that world (apart from digressions, which are indeed mere digressions) there is no mirroring of that other world in which he, as man, citizen, husband, father, lives with his passions, his hopes, and his labor. Leopardi, in his sorrowful and despairing poetry, is that same Giacomo who, in the depths of his soul as a man, stands before destiny and anxiously asks it the reason for his infinite sorrow, and receives no answer.

But Bruno and Ariosto belong to the heroic age of the Renaissance, when the Italian still preserved a certain vigorous, childlike ingenuousness, wholly unaware of matters falling outside the limited sphere of his personal interest, and the divorce between man and world was not yet a sign of decadence. There came, alas, sadder centuries, in which the child remained a child, but without that fervor of life and that inner richness; and there came Arcadia and erudition, and Italy fell subject to foreign powers and to a Church grown ever more worldly and estranged from its conscience. Italy rose again historically, with a real — and hence political — national value, when its spirit awoke from its long childish dream and acquired consciousness, which is consciousness of self within the real world, in the unity of culture.

It has risen again; but in order to remain standing and to progress, it must form a clear idea of this law of culture, which is the law of man’s very essence — this law of unity, which we have here only sketched in outline, but which would need to be studied and explored in depth, analytically.

_{Chapter II}

Labor and Culture

(Lavoro e cultura)

Allow me to begin with a brief declaration. At the inauguration of the School of Social Culture, it was not properly for me to take the floor — not for me, I say, considering the habits of my life, and whatever connections I might claim with a school for working men. But I did not feel I could refuse the kind insistence of my colleagues, who invited me to open this new course, out of a tribute I felt I owed to this School, which is certainly already a credit to the Commune of Rome, and which I am sure will become, in its unfailing development, a glory of the Commune of Rome. I have already touched on the reason why I did not think it should fall to me to speak on this occasion.

It is true that of late it has often been fashionable to speak of “workers of the mind” who must take their place alongside manual workers; but one must beware of the easy misunderstandings into which one so often falls owing to the ambiguity of words. I feel deeply the difference that exists between the dignity of labor properly so called and the dignity of thought; I feel that the two functions are profoundly different, profoundly different in their nature.

Thought, of course, and culture too — the effort man makes to acquire and advance culture — is indeed a labor, and must be called labor just as much as the effort man makes with his hand to enter into relation with the earth and with nature in general, for the acquisition and production of wealth; but their nature is profoundly different, and the identity of the name must not mislead us, because the difference between the labor of the hands and culture, which is the labor of the spirit, is a difference of great importance within the system of human values — a system that cannot be maintained or guaranteed unless it preserves the normal order of its relations, the distinctness of the elements that compose it. What is proper to labor, properly so called, is the relation by which it binds man to the earth, to nature in general.

Man labors inasmuch as he perceives that he cannot live alone as man, and feels, in his coexistence — indeed almost his cohabitation and necessary companionship with the rest of the world — the necessary collaboration, in his work, of the nature that surrounds him, of the earth he must till, of all the natural elements and forces that he must exploit, subordinate, and press into the service of his ends, so that his ends may be attainable. The man who labors binds himself, therefore, to the earth and to natural things; he cannot carry out his labor except together with, and in step with, the forces of nature, which he must come to know — but he comes to know them only inasmuch as he feels the need to make use of them for the satisfaction of human needs.

This trait — well known to the students of our School, who have already begun to study the first notions of economics — is the fundamental character proper to labor; and it establishes a very great difference between labor and culture. It is said that labor produces value. I too believe this, my political opinions notwithstanding, and I too profess, with firm conviction, that value is a product of labor — of labor, I mean, in the economic sense, of that labor which man alone can carry out by making use of his relations with the surrounding nature, relations he tends to draw ever tighter for the satisfaction of his own needs. There is value, there is something that has value for man, only inasmuch as man labors. Nothing that already exists naturally; nothing that man finds immediately at hand, exposed to his grasp and his desire.

In the surrounding nature, nothing useful actually has value for the man who does not reach out his hand to it, and who, by that very act — indeed already by the attention he begins to direct toward the objects of his desire — does not thereby begin to labor, and does not begin to confer, through his own effort and his own work, value upon things that pre-exist him. But this concept of value produced by labor, by which man turns to nature and makes it a means of satisfying his own needs, is a merely relative concept. We feel it every time something serves us for the satisfaction of a need — that is, we attribute economic value to something we win by our labor, or that we extract, by means of our labor, from the bosom of nature; and we feel that, independently of our need, this value would collapse. If we stifled within ourselves this need that makes us reach out our hand to the fruit of the earth, the fruit of the earth would simply go unpicked. Economic value is sustained only insofar as the corresponding need is kept alive in the human soul. We ordinarily think that needs are natural.

But the human spirit represses and stifles even those very needs that seem most imposed by the laws of nature, since it can sacrifice life itself in order to resolve problems that arise within the spirit for reasons that are wholly ideal; and all the economic goods we procure through labor, therefore, have value only inasmuch as the need lives on in us. They serve as means to an end different from themselves, an end from which they draw their own value — a value that is therefore a reflected and relative one. The true, the absolute value is known and felt by one who lives gathered up in the life of thought. He feels the sanctity, the beauty, the worth of culture as the very substance of the human spirit: a true value, an end and not a means.

We can, I have said, repress and stifle within our souls many needs, even those we call fundamental and essential to our life; but we cannot renounce the solving of problems that take hold of our spirit. Even suicide, even the renunciation of life itself, is, from the point of view of the despairing man, the solution to a problem that has become his unbearable torment. All our needs form a circle whose radius keeps extending from time to time: they develop, grow more complex, and gradually form a system — a historical system, a system of demands that once did not exist; man lived without feeling them and therefore without seeking their satisfaction, without so much as an inkling, a suspicion, of the goods that might have satisfied those needs.

Such is the character of economic values, and of the goods won through the effort of labor; but this is not the nature of properly spiritual values, corresponding to the truly essential needs constitutive of our life. Even manual labor, as the search for and production of goods suited to satisfying the needs of economic life itself, has its deep source within human consciousness. For this, indeed, is what is proper to human life, whether it is considered as a higher spiritual life or simply as natural life, whose needs are satisfied precisely by labor: that all its elements are objects of our consciousness, become the content of our thought, the very program of our life. Even natural needs become matter for reflection, and are organized into a system of means and ends that becomes matter for science.

Without thought, it is not possible to sustain and maintain even natural life itself, as it grows ever more complex and takes on varied forms through the development of civilization, and is constituted into a system of economic relations.

I repeat: when we pass from goods that are merely necessary on condition that we set ourselves certain ends, to those goods that are absolutely necessary because they correspond to the immanent ends of our spiritual life — to those needs deeply rooted in this consciousness which is the very hearth of our whole life, the atmosphere, I might almost say, in which we breathe as men, that is, as beings endowed not only with a natural life that unfolds in the midst of nature, but also with a higher life in which the natural world is transfigured — when we come to consider these other needs and these other goods, we find ourselves in the presence of a value that is not merely relative, but is the true value. Bread — our daily bread, the thing most necessary for man to live — serves us only inasmuch as we are hungry and wish to satisfy our hunger because we wish to preserve our life; but it would serve us nothing at all if we had devoted our life to some higher cause, or if, out of some disdainful impulse, we chose to renounce life and starve ourselves to death. This same bread, therefore, has no value in itself. Science, on the other hand — art, thought, and in general everything properly called the life of the spirit, that higher life to which we all aspire, since all of us, more or less, live a spiritual life oriented toward the immanent ideals of culture — culture, in short, cannot be regarded as a means to something higher: it has its value in itself. Many times the question has been asked by those who seek the value of everything from the merely economic point of view: what use is poetry? — to cite one of the highest peaks of the spiritual life, in which, it truly seems, the whole force of the life of the spirit is gathered and sublimated. What use is poetry? None, mind you. With bread we can appease our hunger; with poetry we can do nothing, once we possess it. And note, meanwhile, that one does not possess poetry merely by having in one’s pocket the book in which it is printed, the way one possesses bread once it has been bought. When a man has poured the sweat of his brow into the furrow he has sown, when he has gathered the harvest and made his bread from the grain, when this bread is at last in his hand, the bread is already in man’s power, and it serves him — and we all feel how much it serves.

Poetry, by contrast, is not possessed merely by holding the book in one’s hands, but only when the book is read, when it is savored, when the poetry rises again in the reader’s soul with that same life, in that same divine light, in which it first arose in the poet’s soul. And once one possesses poetry, as a man possesses his bread, what can a man do with it? Nothing. It has been said that poetry is a sublime uselessness. Nothing that constitutes the life of the human spirit, and that represents the goal man always strives to reach, can be regarded as a step toward some further conquest, a means to the satisfaction of a need; nothing of it, therefore, can truly be considered useful. And yet this uselessness — poetry, or art in general, or truth, whatever represents a supreme end of the human spirit — this is absolute value.

Toward this supreme goal every man naturally tends; and even the peasant, bent over the earth, laboriously breaking the clod he must fertilize with hard and painful toil, feels too, spontaneously, with no philosopher to teach him, with no prompting from outside, the sudden need to let his feeling take flight, to pour out his soul in a liberating expression, in song. And why this need? He tills the earth to produce bread, to produce that good which, from the economic point of view, is the fundamental good of life. Why does he think of anything else? He cannot help it. His nature leads him to think of something higher than bread, and higher than any economic good — of that supreme goal toward which we all naturally tend, and to which, at every instant of life, one can be sure the human soul rises in search of peace.

We may remain content merely to desire a sovereign art, leaving its privilege to the greatest spirits; we may remain, for our whole life, desiring a science whose inventive genius we do not feel within us, nor the capacity to extend its scope or deepen its reach; but whether we are poets or not, whether we are scientists or must learn the truth from others, our spiritual life is always turned toward the light of beauty, toward the light of truth, which we glimpse and manage to make our own in proportion to our powers — a beauty and a truth that our soul needs, and that we could never renounce.

That is our first and truest daily bread: it is our eternal bread! * But with the distinction we have drawn, we have not yet brought out the most important and substantial divide between the value at which labor aims and that toward which culture is turned — a divide to which I especially wish now to draw your attention, though it is intrinsically bound up with the difference we have discussed so far. Meanwhile it is clear that man, who thinks, and who with his thought shapes the ideal of life to which he continually aspires, and turns to the means that will grant it to him — man, insofar as he is man, is drawn, directly or indirectly, to direct his own being and his own action toward the spiritual values that are a product of culture. And why can he not content himself with mere economic goods, confining himself within the sphere of the world he goes on producing through labor? All properly economic values have something in common with the object in which they consist and are embodied, or from which they are drawn; they all have a particular value, just as the earth, the nature to which labor is turned, is always something particular. Wherever one looks or fixes one’s gaze, whatever one touches or takes hold of, nature — this eternal mine from which human labor extracts wealth — is always a determinate and particular nature.

Economic values, precisely because they are particular, can be added, multiplied, divided; they have a quantity; they can be greater or lesser; once divided, they can be distributed; and what is possessed by some is not available to others. The man who, through labor, aims at an economic value binds himself, ties himself, so to speak, to a determinate part of the earth and of nature, to a particular object. From one part of the earth he draws his grain, from this grain of his he draws his bread; he defends his bread as his own good — for if it did not belong to him, if another shared and partook of it, it would no longer be his, and the very reason for the labor by which he acquires it would fail him. Through labor, then, man assimilates himself to nature.

The man who labors is always, in a certain sense, bound to the soil; he resolves his labor — which is always human energy — into a physical and material existence: he plants the work of his hand at a determinate point of the earth, from which it cannot be detached. And he himself remains chained to it as to his own life. Human labor penetrates, as it were, into nature and fuses with it; it grafts itself onto nature so as to prolong, in a certain way, its course, its process.

For unworked nature is certainly very different from nature as it is gradually changed, transformed, and transfigured by the work of man; but as nature is transformed through human labor, it absorbs into itself, assimilates, and, as one indeed says, stores up all that labor — so that man disappears and nature remains; man, as an individual, as a laborer, passes away, and there remains nature, transformed, different, but always nature.

Consider: primitive nature, nature as our imagination pictures it at the dawn of human life, as this restless activity begins to assert itself, an activity that will one day range tirelessly through every corner of the world — primitive nature, still virgin, the earth covered with forests the axe of man has not yet entered, roamed in every direction by wild beasts that have not yet felt the power and the menace of the hunter; well then, this nature, little by little — since among these beasts there arises one that stands upright on two feet, and looks about, and reflects, and studies, and hoards up its own observations, building its own experience, arming its own hand with the power of thought — this nature, I say, gradually transforms itself, becomes “our nature,” this material world that surrounds us, into which we are born and step forth today, and in which we intervene, ever laboring to carry out our work.

What a difference! Seas crossed as easily as continents — indeed continents joined across the seas; mountains leveled or tunnelled through so that they no longer obstruct human commerce. And not only the seas, but the air, and almost the sky itself, invaded by man; and the earth peopled with houses, public buildings, and temples, with all the works of art. And it is man, the mighty craftsman, who has wrought this enormous transfiguration. But consider: if human life alone, and nothing else, were suddenly extinguished on earth, would all this transformed nature not go on existing, would the earth not remain just as leveled, tunnelled, transfigured, filled with houses — even with its cities emptied of men, with no more stirring of hearts, of souls, of thoughts, of poetry, of religion, of philosophy, of political struggles?

If, I say, this human life were extinguished, would not that nature remain, at least at first, just as it is — just as the sun would go on rising in the east, climbing the high sky through the day, and setting in the evening in the west? Nature changes, extends, prolongs, and transforms itself as a consequence of the human labor stored and materialized within it. But it always remains nature, extended in space and in time, and made up, therefore, of various parts, different from one another and mutually exclusive: a realm of things, which can therefore be divided and added together, and are subject to the laws of quantity and number. Such is nature; such the labor by which man modifies it. But human thought — the absolute value, that good which all men, whether fed or hungry, whether parched or quenched, always need — does not assimilate itself to nature, is not deposited and stored up within it.

Thought always stands above nature; it never solves a problem without seeing, arising at once from that very solution, a new problem: it is turned always toward an ideal reality in which problems constantly arise to be solved, in which mysteries are hidden and discovered to be unveiled, in which difficulties are met to be overcome — problems, mysteries, difficulties that are not to be found in the surrounding physical nature. Human labor leaves its effects, its products, encrusted, as it were, upon the earth: thought ranges always freely through its own infinite world.

With this consequence: that whereas there can be no value produced by human labor that does not occupy some point in the world, some part of the earth — one cannot conceive, for example, of a house that does not stand in some city, upon some ground which, if it trembles, shaken by an earthquake, will bring the house down — there is, on the other hand, no thought, no poetry, no art, no moral life, no true and proper element of spiritual life, that is bound to a point in space, to a portion of the earth’s crust, and shut up within a determinate and irreplaceable setting; there is no vision of a poet or artist that must live or die bound to the natural and particular existence of its own author. It might seem that so-called intellectual labor too, thought, the product of culture, takes on economic value.

It might seem so; and the so-called intellectual workers do concern themselves with the economic value of the product of their labor. The poet sells his verses; the painter exhibits his paintings and waits for a buyer; and so too does the sculptor for his statues, the architect for his buildings, the musician for his scores. Art, science, intellectual labor, thought, culture, all seem to take on material form just like the products of labor properly so called, and to be embodied likewise in objects susceptible of distribution, exchange, quantitative measurement — in short, of mechanical treatment. But this is mere appearance.

What is traded of art, what is ceded of science, what is let out of intellectual work — the teaching for which one accepts a fee or a salary reckoned by the number of months or days or hours — distorts and falsifies the nature of intellectual labor if we fail to draw a careful distinction. What can be bought from the poet — the volume of his verses — is something we can put in our pocket and carry away from the bookseller. But woe betide us if, wishing to cultivate our soul aesthetically, we thought we could achieve this simply by buying books from the bookseller and filling our pockets, or the shelves of our library, and leaving them there.

Books are meant to be read; and only when we realize that a book must be read, savored, invested with the force of our own thought and feeling, so that it vanishes before us in its materiality and disappears from our hand into an infinite light of beauty, into a spiritual ether in which we have before us nothing but the very visions with which the poet’s soul was peopled as he wrote — only then do we truly draw near to poetry. If we do not attain this, it is useless to have spent our money to buy the book. The materialization of culture is the falsification of culture. Culture can be truly grasped only insofar as its extrinsic, mechanical form is dematerialized and made wholly spiritual.

The teacher truly teaches only inasmuch as he does not measure or even remember the hours he spends in the classroom; and whoever watches the clock every minute cannot manage to concentrate his thought, cannot unite his own soul with that of his pupils in the fruitful labor proper to teaching, in that communion of souls in which one of the purest forms of man’s religious life is fulfilled. I mean that spiritual labor, true and proper spiritual labor, is not suited to this material form, and insofar as we do make it take on — out of necessity, for reasons this is not the place to recall — a material form, we place ourselves upon a most perilous slope, where whatever is properly spiritual, and therefore of absolute value, becomes, by materializing, denatured, and ceases to be the very good in which it properly consists. It consists, in truth, in a good that, when divided, does not diminish; when shared, is not lost by the one who produces it, but rather grows, to his ever greater advantage. The bread the farmer produces, once sold, remains his no more, and is lost to him; the bread of the intellect, on the other hand, multiplies precisely through communication, through propagation, through teaching.

This spiritual bread is not, in truth, susceptible of division and distribution, nor of economic judgment. This distinction — on which I have insisted in order to make clear the proper nature of labor, which today concerns us all the more directly as our thoughts turn to the fortunes and the future of our School of Social Culture — this distinction is worth bringing out, because it can make us feel the need that must always be alive in anyone who wishes to promote, preserve, and reinvigorate the work — itself highly human — of labor properly so called, of economic labor.

Among the human values that form the fabric of our life, manual labor, and all labor directed to the production of wealth, unfolding as it does in relation to the earth and, in general, to nature, carries within it this tendency, is governed by this law: to shut man up within the particular, to bind him to a nature that we cannot grasp, occupy, modify, or recreate economically except by means of particular determinations.

Manual labor binds us to things, to individual particular things, from which man must nonetheless free and release himself, in order to live spiritually and to give value to his own labor within his spiritual life, within the system of ideas on which his interests rest — so that he may range through that higher world in which alone he can attain the truly essential ends of his being, and satisfy those supreme needs from which springs absolute value, the norm and foundation of every other subordinate and relative value. Man, certainly, cannot wholly sequester himself from this natural world that surrounds him, and to which he binds himself with ever new ties through the ever more varied forms of his economic activity.

In these ties, which threaten to shut his nature — destined instead to unfold with infinite freedom in the luminous realm of culture — within determinate limits, man cannot but see the condition of the life he must after all live within this great fellowship of his with nature, which it falls to him to master and to spiritualize by virtue of his labor. But labor precisely binds man to nature in order to make him its master, and to clear the way for his return to himself, made more powerful and more free by the sovereignty he has won over nature.

Labor itself, illumined by thought, directed by thought toward that supreme end, toward that ideal reality in which human life is celebrated in the full fullness of its development, confers upon man the consciousness and the sense that value lies not in wealth, not in the immediate produce of labor itself, but in that life of the spirit whose triumph and fulfillment labor prepares and makes possible. For labor itself is invested and interpenetrated by the light of thought; and from the very moment man reaches out his hand to the sweet fruit of the tree, he is already animated by a desire that is at once knowledge, foretaste of that sweetness, and admiration of that color.

And labor has its own history: it divides and organizes itself, growing more complex and orderly into a system that is an economic system precisely because it is also a juridical system; and in the law of its division and organization it is guided, sustained, and advanced by the power of thought, which comes to know nature, its forces, its ways of working, and thereby increasingly places itself in a position to intervene, with its own needs and its own powers, in nature’s process.

But labor, thus interpenetrated with reflection, with study, with thought, opens out into a higher and more properly human activity, in which man, freed from economic cares, no longer constrained by needs whose satisfaction he must wrest from nature, rising above all the limitations and barriers proper to the merely natural world, takes blessed refuge in the infinite universe of culture — in art, in science, in philosophy, in religious feeling itself.

Now then, I have a firm faith that the municipal administration, which has founded this fine School of culture for workers, will be led, by the very essence and logic of the culture that workers need, to broaden its design, so as to include, beyond the knowledge useful to the ends of labor itself and of its economic and juridical organization, and necessary to an understanding of the world in which the worker acts, that higher, disinterested culture which is true culture — the culture that makes man out of man in the universality of his interests, in the worth of his ideals, in the freedom of an intellect open to every voice of the human heart: of that heart which beats in unison across every place and every age.

For, gentlemen, the worker is a worker only on condition of being a man — on condition of feeling, beyond the ties to that particular life in which he is set within a narrow corner of nature, his own life as a human life, ranging beyond the small plot in which he is chained to his daily labor, beyond those particular relations that bind him to his own person, or to his own class, or, in general, to the class of workers.

Beyond the class of workers, beyond the several trade unions, beyond the several divisions of life, beyond our very own person, which needs its daily labor to have its daily bread, there is the great life from which every worker, like every man, must always return to draw the moral strength necessary to live — the moral strength that can be drawn only from the idea of that life which beats in the heart of every man, because it is a universal law; and it is a life of faith in truth, of faith in beauty, of faith in the sanctity of holy things, of faith in the good of those actions that must be performed and cannot be omitted with impunity; faith, I mean, in spiritual values: in those values which we are all engaged, continually, in cultivating and producing, inasmuch as we are men. Whole men, and not specialists.

Not, then, higher mathematics, not physics, not chemistry, no special science; but those forms of culture, like art and the conception of life, that answer to questions eternally arising in every human soul. It is to this higher culture that we must look, hoping today that our School may become the great school of the workers — a school not of technical and specialized knowledge, but of all the culture the worker needs, in order to be a worker and to be a man. That culture which, from the depths of every soul, aspires to the highest peaks of human spirituality, and which is indispensable and essential to every man, not so much for the sake of mere intellectual refinement, but rather for that more substantial elevation which is the formation of a good will, of conscience, of moral personality.

For many things can go unknown to the individual in life, so long as others know them, given the great law of the division of labor; but there is something that no one can fail to learn and to fix unshakably in the soul. And that is faith in the good — in the good that can be done, in the good that must be done; in that good which one can feel bound to do only when one has truly deep consciousness that it can indeed be done, and that it is worth spending one’s life upon.

That good in which no man can have faith who, beyond his own particular cares, his own particular profession, his own art, his own trade, the labor and the goods that are the particular product of that labor, does not have the constant sense — as of the very atmosphere in which he breathes — of sharing in the moral essence of the world; in that moral life to which every man rises by means of culture: this higher culture, broad and comprehensive, which gives understanding of all the fundamental forms of the human spirit.

This is the auspicious sign toward which our School must strive.

_{Chapter III}

Against the Neutrality of the School

(Contro l’neutralityo della scuola)

(“Corporation of the School”), edited by A. Sacconi, year I, no. 1, 10 May 1925. Dear Sacconi, I too have long been against the political neutrality of the school, because I am against every neutrality. I dislike self-quotation, which is in any case useless; but I wish to point out that in this field too I did not wait for the March on Rome to begin thinking what I think. This may serve as a not entirely useless reminder to those opponents of good faith who, in the recent political controversies, have written very precise and carefully considered things about the history of my convictions. The school cannot be neutral either in religion or in philosophy, because it cannot be neutral in morals. And therefore it cannot be neutral in politics either.

Neutrality is a suspension of judgment, and the consequent refusal to commit oneself, through action, to one concept, program, or party or another. It is the separation of one’s personality from life — a separation that may be as lofty and generous as one likes, inspired by the broadest conceivable views, and yet one cannot actually live except according to determinate parties and social currents. It is, therefore, a breeding-ground for spectator souls, more or less indifferent to life itself, and consequently devoid of that sense of responsibility — which every man must have — for the moral reality in which he finds himself living, and in whose course he takes part and to which he contributes, even should he adopt a passive, inert, or negative stance.

Now, a school that sets out along this path, instead of fulfilling its essential office as an instrument and constructive activity of moral life, evidently becomes instead a baneful agent of disintegration, ruining all the fundamental energies of a people’s spiritual life. That is why we combat the secularism of the so-called “neutral school,” of which, fortunately, nothing has been heard for some years now. A good sign: some progress has indeed been made, despite the ignorance, the prejudices, and the ill will still under arms. It was once dogma that one had to respect the conscience of the child and not burden it prematurely with religious instruction and with participation in a faith that only later, freely, with open eyes and mature reason, the grown man ought to choose for himself.

This might have seemed a cunning trick like any other, meant to postpone indefinitely something one wished to repudiate and exterminate altogether. And yet, in some at least, it was instead the purest naivety, the effect of a genuine and authentic ignorance of the life of the spirit — which is always free, always mature, always rational, and yet is never free, never mature, never rational. And it is in this being both at once, and not being either, that its strength consists. That is why we combat, and must combat, this other kind of secularism which would banish politics from the school — from the school understood as the relationship between teacher and pupils, and from the school understood as the teacher’s own conscience and the ideal of life he must pursue.

Certainly, politics divides, while the school must unite, and does unite, by nourishing that common humanity through which men understand one another and work together to raise, all of them together, the spiritual edifice in which civilization comes to be realized. The school makes brothers not only of the men of a single age, but of every age, making us relive the very life of our fathers and appreciate the worth of all that was beautiful and true, great and worthy, in the joy of their spirit; it makes brothers not only of a single place and people, but of every place and people among whom thought has been and is still shared with us, and among whom labor has been and still is carried on toward the common work of humanity. All this is perfectly true. And every time, amid the most violent passions of political struggle — which, as the years go by, draws us in and wraps us in its coils, carving out ever deeper divisions between our souls — we turn back to the happy years of youth spent in schools where our present adversaries were once our companions, when we studied together, our thought and our hearts turned toward that art which belongs equally to all, toward that science which is the universal and immortal labor of every age and place, a wave of tenderness floods our hearts, like the tenderness that accompanies our most distant childhood memories, when, around the same hearth, the family — alas, now scattered — was daily gathered in a single feeling. But childhood, however beautiful, must nonetheless come to an end. The family grows, and must grow; and it must divide; and woe to the child raised as though he were to spend his whole life under his mother’s eye, never crossing the threshold of his father’s house.

The school cannot take part in the daily battle of life, which is a life of ever-renewing conflicts. But the school must prepare us for this life; and the child, and later the young man too, must be accustomed to lend an ear to the din which, beyond the enclosure in which he is still being trained, comes from the life awaiting him, with its problems and its differing interests — interests nonetheless destined to be reconciled. He must be trained to study these problems and to hold fast to the will to solve them; he must therefore begin to acquire a taste for them, to gather and nurture in his soul some seed capable, in due time, of sprouting, taking root, and living vigorously in a person of character who truly counts for something. Dante, whom every Italian school studies, or ought to study, cannot be understood by an neutral soul. To understand him is to feel him.

Nor can a soul devoid of any temper and any faith feel him, since his own soul is powerfully tempered and vigorously animated and shaken by his faith. He, being a whole man, can speak only to whole men, men engaged, as he was, in all the problems that make up the seriousness of life. The school, therefore, cannot shut itself up either in grammar, or in mathematics, or in any other subject that is merely an ornament or furnishing of the intelligence. This intelligence can be formed only by forming the personality. Hence one must come to understand everything, and to love everything, insofar as it is true that to understand is to love. But love must always set out from, and return to, a center: some point of view, some faith, some pillar on which the conscience may securely rest.

And the teacher who shapes the school in his own image must indeed bring to it a soul open to every voice of life; but a soul that is truly a soul, with its own orientation, its own direction, and that stands at the center of its own world, serving him as the ultimate criterion of every judgment, the fundamental principle of every inspiration and of every action in the fulfillment of his most delicate office. We therefore want today a national, Italian school, governed by a vigorous conception not so much of the rights as of the duties of the Italian people — that is, of every Italian. A conception that is not narrowly and foolishly chauvinistic, but is nonetheless uncompromising, and religious.

And this is indeed politics — but a sacred politics, whose deniers we intend should be regarded not as champions of breadth of ideas and freedom of spirit, but as vulgar and wretched profaners of the temple, which it falls to us to guard jealously. Liberty? Yes — she is indeed the very goddess of the temple of which we speak: but liberty, as you know, is no one’s natural birthright, but rather an ideal to be realized, a duty to be fulfilled, the highest conquest to which man can aspire through self-abnegation and sacrifice.

_{Chapter IV}

Inaugural Address of the National Fascist Institute of Culture

(Discorso inaugurale dell’Istituto Nazionale Fascista di Cultura)

Excellencies, Gentlemen, I shall speak first, briefly, of the origins, and then of the spirit and the aims, of this National Fascist Institute of Culture. Many will still recall how, after the Bologna Congress of March of this year and the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals that emerged from that Congress, the literary men and would-be literary men of the Aventine suddenly awoke and launched a polemic that seemed unbecoming and heedless of any sense of national dignity: a polemic aimed not at disputing, before foreigners, that the greater number of Italian scholars and writers adhered to Fascism — which would have been a matter of little interest either to foreigners or to Italians — but rather at discrediting and tearing apart those who had indeed adhered to it, as though this could in any way reflect well upon those who had not.

The liberal and democratic newspapers, as had been foreseen, joined the chorus, applauding loudly this querulous and peevish Counter-Manifesto, and proclaiming, with their proverbial sincerity, the antithesis between Fascism and culture. Had not the Fascists themselves boasted of a wild and violent barbarism, vindicating will and dynamism against the frigid ideologies and spiritual refinements that are the ordinary products of culture? Was not the negation of the values won through the movement of studies and science in the liberal age implicit in their fierce aversion to the mentality of the old regime? You will perhaps recall that someone, whose ingenuousness verged, to tell the truth, on simple-mindedness, tried to set intelligence and Fascism against one another. On the other hand, it was not possible for the Fascists to sit patiently listening and let it pass.

That is not their style. And in order to answer the blows of their adversaries — indeed, to return them redoubled — a breach was opened against culture, against intelligence, against philosophy; and some rather biting jibes against the philosophers and philosophy were taken literally, for there are always people who read the words and not the thought of the one speaking. And in the end there was a risk of giving currency, both within our walls and beyond them, to a legend that could have a certain plausibility even in the eyes of Fascists themselves: the legend of a Fascism barbaric in the Nietzschean sense, a scorner and trampler of culture.

It then seemed, to the intelligent — if not intellectual — Fascists placed in charge of the propaganda office of the Directorate of the National Fascist Party, that it was time for the Party to assert its own faith in its own culture, by founding a national institute which, after the fashion of all the traditional academies, would gather and coordinate, from the Fascist point of view, all the men most eminent in the various disciplines composing the body of scientific thought; but which, unlike the old academies, would spur these intellectual energies not to shut themselves up in abstract speculations remote from any action upon the economic, moral, and political life of the nation, but rather would turn them all toward illuminating and shaping the consciousness of the new Italy that the Fascists envision — proud of its glorious past and, at the same time, made mighty by a renewed fervor of labor and thought within the discipline of a State conscious of its lofty national destinies.

This Institute, which today we have the honor of inaugurating in the presence of the Head of the Government, on the Capitoline Hill, is meant to be not merely a new form of the manifold, innovative, and creative activity of Fascism, but, above all, a profession of faith worthy of the profound spiritual motives of the Fascist movement, worthy of the Italy whose splendid traditions and immortal forces Fascism aspires to gather and strengthen within itself. And here, Excellencies and Gentlemen, is our profession of faith — one which, we are certain, is also yours. Fascists can smile at the charge of ignorance leveled against them by certain adversaries. Above all today. I hope that someone may still arrive in time to open his eyes, and see that what is happening today in Italy, and around Italy, cannot be explained by violence, by high-handedness, by the curtailment of liberties supposedly perpetrated by the Fascists. The facts that have been laid, rightly or wrongly, at the door of the Fascist Party, and gathered together to depict it as spent, ought by now to have brought Fascism down; and by now the Italian people ought already to have overcome this painful crisis, whose resolution certain wise men were awaiting. Instead, the outcome most decisively belies those predictions.

Italy, far from expelling Fascism from her bosom, is becoming wholly Fascist; and abroad she neither loses nor gains ground because of it; and the greater part of those Italians who, until yesterday, opposed Fascism, now recite their confiteor, even though no one invites them to do so. Clearly, then, it is no longer a matter of men, but of ideas.

There is a man, a hero, a privileged and providential spirit, in whom this thought has become incarnate, and vibrates unceasingly with the powerful rhythm of a youthful life in full flower; but when it was whispered to Mussolini, in good or bad faith — “break away from the party; Italy wants Mussolini, but does not want Fascism” — Mussolini replied: “No — Mussolini and Fascism are one and the same.” The strength of the man did not lie in the strength of the many who followed him, whose company, whether he felt it or not, could not always seem an advantage to him; it lay in the thought — a thought that would cease to be the determinate thought it is, were it to cease, in whatever way, being the faith of a multitude.

And indeed, as with all ideas that have worked powerfully upon humanity, precisely by becoming the faith of the masses, it is folly to believe that Fascist thought, in order not to lose its value and its historical efficacy, must be exactly understood and precisely defined, in itself and in all its theoretical and practical connections, by every one of those who adhere to it. There may be one or two formulas repeated by all as though sacramental: these are the watchwords that practically and immediately distinguish friend from foe; but formulas are not ideas, and do not act as ideas do.

They create myths, arouse blind, wholesale assent and adherence, set in motion the forces of feeling and will, making possible those great masses of men who overturn age-old historical positions — instruments animated by a thought that nests and lives in a few guiding spirits, indeed in one alone, who is the Duce. But this thought is alive both in the one who leads and in the many who make themselves its instrument. On this condition it is a living, true thought, adherent to the history of which it is both product and principle, from which it is born and upon which it reacts in a process that is never finished or exhausted. Every thought lives by feeding itself and by producing.

And the world watches with admiration the truly wondrous development through which Fascist thought matures in its leaders, and in the Leader: a thought ever new and yet ever coherent, unexpected and logical, miraculous and yet so simple and natural! Hence it has so often been said that the doctrine of Fascism lies in its action. It is not an ideology, it is not a closed system, and it is not even truly a program, if by program we mean a preconceived design projected into the future. The Fascist’s word is a deed: the reform he envisions lies in the bill which — through the adaptation that the Fascist regime has made, and could not historically have failed to make, of the constitutional machinery, in form and in spirit, to its own needs — swiftly becomes law and the very life of the State.

Hence it has also been said that Fascism is more a spiritual attitude than any determinate content of thought. A century from now, historians will be able to say what Fascism wanted, because they will know what it did: today I do not think I lack respect for Benito Mussolini if I say that not even he could answer that question. And indeed no one, better than he, feels the providential character of his own work, presided over as it is by a will and an intelligence superior to every particular and subjective calculation or interest; no one, more than he, distrusts clear and distinct ideas, and those solutions which — as he himself said at the Augusteo — philosophers give to the problems of life on paper: abstract, theoretical solutions, that is, anticipated ones, not matured through the slow ripening of the consciousness of reality, as that reality itself, in fact, ripens. No one, more than he, is possessed of the religious reverence owed to a thought that unfolds thus, free of personal passions, through a sleepless consciousness wholly steeped in the intuition of a great national and human reality in its divine becoming.

No one, more than he, is proud of his mission; no one, more than he, is humble in devoting his whole being to the mission whose responsibility he feels so profoundly. This, gentlemen, is not homage to the man: it is the plain truth, one that helps explain many things at which many people marvel. Fascism, then, is thought. In its polemical, negative aspect, it is easy enough to point out its most salient traits — traits that in turn illuminate the fundamental motive and the original inspiration, and hence the essence and the strength, of this movement, toward which the young turn with instinctive impulse. Do you wish to understand Fascism? Look at the enemies it has fought, and which, of course, it will have to go on fighting even after having slain them, since they easily rise again within the very ranks of Fascism itself. Democracy?

Yes — but not the democracy that is the education of a people summoned and spurred to take part in governing itself, all of it, from the so-called ruling classes down to the humblest laborers, men and women alike — summoned in earnest, sincerely, and therefore gathered and ordered according to the categories in which the people feel their own life and their own real interests, and from which they draw an ever more enlightened and firmer consciousness of the actual, indissoluble bonds by which they are jointly linked to the unitary organism of social life; but rather the democracy of the demagogic lawyers, who knew no other “people” than the one they managed to drag along by tickling the unhealthiest passions, and by miseducating them away from any realistic political sense of the citizen’s most concrete duties and rights. Socialism?

Yes, socialism too — but the radical-tinged, humanitarian, internationalist socialism, which likewise ended up in an empty democratism, indifferent to any concern for or consideration of economic reality — which is a determinate historical reality and therefore itself national, and, within each nation, solidary, founded on concrete collaboration rather than on the abstract class struggle; not the socialism that raises material conditions and vindicates the moral and political dignity of labor; not the socialism that recognizes the origin of all property in labor, which, together with every other form of human activity, is the source of every good having any value; not the socialism that reveals how much of a people’s political power and moral vigor rests on the solidity of its economic structure. Liberalism?

Yes — the liberalism of the negative State, the State absent from the field where the economic and moral forces of the nation must contend with one another and be composed into legal discipline; the agnostic State, ignorant of its own worth as a central and superior personality or will, one that stimulates and governs every particular will operating within the nation, giving worth to every effort made within that scope that carries in itself the seed of an effective contribution to the progress of the human spirit, insofar as that spirit finds its concreteness and historical efficacy in that specific national form.

But not the liberalism that denies castes, privileges, and divine rights, and envisions the immediate adherence of political institutions to the will — that is, to national life itself — and hence the necessity of allowing the nation to draw forth, from its own deep bosom (where the gentlemen of democracy have neither the habit nor the interest to look), the fundamental laws of its own regime. The Popular Party? Yes, that too — this hybrid party, born of pseudo-Catholic modernism and of socialism, which threatened for a moment to entangle Italian public life in the coils of ambiguity and hypocrisy. But the Popular Party that Fascism fought and destroyed was precisely this contradictory compromise between democratic socialism — which is particularism and materialism — and Catholicism, which is discipline and moral solidarity, the exaltation of values superior to the interests and fancies of individuals and of categories, and the vindication of the absolute superiority of duty over right, of self-abnegation and sacrifice over every, even most just, satisfaction of one’s own particular needs: war, death itself if need be, infinitely to be preferred to the calm and comfortable life of a family gathered, far from the storm, around the peace of its own hearth. But here too Fascism denied whatever did not accord with the true principle that was nonetheless present in that program.

It did not reject this principle: indeed, it took it seriously, and felt, as no government in Italian history ever has, the intimate connection of all the energies of the nation — all of them, in substance, moral energies — with a vigorous religious faith, rooted by millennial traditions in the heart of the Italian people. And here too it has, in earnest, done what others merely said they wished to do. In the end, Fascism appears to have sown the field with ruins. In reality it has done nothing but build. Nothing that the past handed down to us, and that drew people’s souls because it had a meaning and was a useful stone for the edifice the new Italy was striving to build, has been abandoned: only the ground has been cleared of the cumbersome materials that stood in the way of construction. And the long-awaited, longed-for construction has begun.

With the opposition arising from formal quarrels and embittered personal passions now fallen away, the whole Italian people today senses and recognizes that a new life has burst forth from its very breast; looks with unlimited trust upon its liberator; is exalted by the spectacle of construction, by which, day by day, the edifice of the new power of the Fatherland rises. It senses, darkly, that this purging — which looks like a destruction of the old parties’ ideas — this reviving and empowering synthesis of the old faiths, attests to the presence and action of a new force.

A force that has summoned, out of the sluggish shadow of the postwar years, the young martyrs of the new Fatherland awaited but not yet born of victory, and then the serried phalanxes of the black shirts ready for the daring of the 28th of October, and then the Militia, and an iron Party, and a Corporation sweeping, in its ferment, through every form of national labor — a force that, through obstacles which, from time to time, seemed bound to check its effects, has gradually brought the whole nation into formation: a nation of forty million men; a nation among the oldest in the world, one that has passed through every experience, tried every idea, worn down by every ideology and every tyranny, and, at least apparently, inclined to skepticism and lack of discipline: it has brought this whole nation into formation, and fused it into a single feeling — a burning ambition for greatness to be won at any cost, at the price of any sacrifice.

It has drawn it up like an army, within whose ranks there will be, as in every army, the faint-hearted, the treacherous, and the cowardly; but, swept along and carried by the mass, these too march, all of them march, under the same flag. What is this force? There is no need, here, to inquire into it. However it be defined, it is evidently a spiritual force. Certainly not a miraculous one — it springs also from Italy’s ancient and recent history, and above all from the Great War, and will be explained by history as the flaring-up of a fire that was already smoldering in our consciousness, and many sparks of which had already flown before the war fought by Italian youth with the soul of a great people.

But the blazing of this fire is also a sign of a new strength in the Italian spirit, risen to a higher and prouder consciousness of itself — turned no longer to the past, as it once was accustomed, but to the future: not, therefore, given to rhetorical and idle boasting over sterile achievements, but austerely and industriously ready for new and arduous efforts and for the deployment of energies not yet tried. This seems to me a purely objective historical observation. On it, all observers of present-day Italian life may find themselves in agreement, whatever their personal convictions and political leanings in taking part in it. We men of learning who have placed our faith in Fascism, addressing those who still stand on the other side and are not utterly blinded by passion, can say: here, at least, is a new Italian culture, created by Fascism. I say a new culture, because culture is not content but form: it is not a certain quantity of instruction, concentrated or diffuse, but spiritual power; it is not matter, but style. Today in Italy there is a spiritual force, as we have seen: a vigor that tends to pervade and inform the whole of life with itself. Not all the manifestations to which this movement gives rise will be to everyone’s taste; but what matters is this: that there is a new spirit, which no one can mistake for something superficial and capricious, because this force is indeed the very one to which the whole nation has bowed, indeed toward which it has moved with ever-quickening pace.

There is a fundamental note, dominant through every form of Italian spiritual life — one that fulfills an ancient hope of those few Italians who, in the past, achieved whatever still casts light upon the history of their people. And from it there emerges indeed, and takes ever clearer shape, a new soul, with which we understand, in a way previously unknown, the greatness and the singular merit of those few Italians, and the neglect of the multitude, whom in every age they strove to raise to a higher consciousness of their own being and their own duty. With this new soul, for example, we today feel the heart of Manzoni beat more strongly, as does that of Leopardi, of Mazzini as of Gioberti, of Garibaldi as of Cavour: for we feel the deep, religious earnestness with which each of them, in his own way, felt the problem of life that occupied his whole spirit.

Never as today have we been able to read Alfieri, feeling our own souls burn with that broken fury which always burned in his, for having lived his passion for a serious, virile, proud, disdainful humanity, and for an Italy that, as a nation, need not be ashamed of itself. What new thing has entered into us, giving us this sensibility, this sign of new needs of the spirit and new orientations in life and in thought? * Gentlemen, I say what I feel within myself; but I believe I am expressing a feeling we hold in common. There breathes in our breast a feeling that must be called new, with regard to the majority of Italians, but which, I repeat, is the secret of the greatness of all our great men, and of the age in which Italy appeared great in the world. It is a religious feeling. And this must not be confused with the faith of the religious man in the vulgar sense of that word.

The religious man usually acquires such familiarity with his God as to end up allowing himself, in practice, the most casual intimacy in his relations with Him, and, in any case, takes the liberty of thinking of Him only now and then, without seeing or feeling His inevitable presence always and everywhere. The religious feeling of which I speak, by contrast, is that by which one takes life seriously — truly seriously, and therefore not before others, but first of all within the depths of one’s own conscience, where thoughts arise and ripen in secret, thoughts from which springs all the good and all the evil of the world.

This earnestness, this religiosity — which makes us take all things seriously, and no longer separates doing from saying, action from thought, literature from life, reality from programs, life and death from the triumph of our ideals faithfully served — this is the new spiritual value that Fascism has instilled in the Italian soul: this is the level to which it now strives to raise the national culture. * Those who still stand on the other side will perhaps not readily agree; they will say that they too take life seriously — indeed, that they could give us lessons on this score. My answer is: ex ore tuo te iudico — out of your own mouth I judge you.

For their doctrine is that famous one which distinguishes theory from practice, thought (art or philosophy) from life, and preaches the indifference of the man who lives by the intellect before the clash of practical faiths, denying the indivisible unity and identity of the man at his lectern or his writing-desk with the man in the assembly or on the field of battle — making, in short, of intellectuals so many absentees from life. We have indeed seen these old-style Italian intellectuals at the window, while, in the streets below, the young were running to the fight and to death; and from the window they watched, and studied, and judged, and made prognostications, waiting for the noise gradually to die down so that they might return in peace to their papers. At a certain point, however, their hope was shattered. From the street the young men lifted their eyes upward, and told those onlookers a thing or two; and forced them to come down — if only to defend themselves against the mockery and the provocation of those young men — in short, to practice anti-Fascism.

And it is no small merit of the Fascists to have flushed them out and forced them to take a stand. It has always happened thus. One cannot fight without accepting the ground chosen by one’s adversary, who thereby wins over even the reluctant, if only through the very act of war. Now, I could not say whether there is still anyone left at the window. And if, in the street, resistance to Fascism still continues, I am certain that this resistance will gradually fall away, and that we shall end by coming to an understanding, at least with those of good faith.

These now believe that, sooner or later, it will fall to them to withdraw and return to their desks — or, without metaphor, that it will always be necessary to go back to distinguishing between life and thought, to shut the school off from all politics, and to let man, prey to his own visions and his own systems, estrange and distract himself from the cares of the world in which the heart of the living, acting man beats as it marches to meet its destiny. And we shall not deny that there is a certain instrumental kind of culture, by whose rule two plus two will always make four, whether one is adding up caresses or adding up blows.

And this instrumental culture — which is mere knowledge, the organization of well-ascertained facts, criticism, erudition, doctrine — is not something the Fascist wishes to be rid of: he who aspires to strengthen national and human life in general, and who spurs the young to arm themselves with physical and intellectual powers in order to win the battle to which they will be called. For otherwise his style, the earnestness he champions, would be mere mannerism, and not the real force that it is.

When, in its origins, the Christian faith — which was evidently a new culture, a new spiritual value, destined to shape and reform the whole moral and intellectual life of man, and therefore a new style — came to clash with the erudition and the intellectualist philosophy of the Greeks, it had at first an instinctive movement of repugnance; and the first apologists seemed possessed by an impulse of aversion and invincible struggle. But very soon the new consciousness felt that it was not possible to defeat paganism without wresting its own weapons from its hands; and it appropriated literary forms, and even philosophical systems, which it bent to serve as instruments useful for satisfying new spiritual needs, without this satisfaction having to entail any regression along the path already trodden by the ancients

We of Fascism, having emerged victorious from the battle, have by now attained that full freedom of spirit with which we can divest ourselves of certain passions of the first hour, and thereby recognize the national worth both of certain forms of culture that seem to us false only insofar as they are insufficient, and of so many men who had neither the eyes nor the heart to see the lofty sign toward which they ought to have looked and led Italian youth, but who nonetheless worked seriously and honestly to bring into the field those stones with which young Italy has begun to build its great edifice. Those stones — why not say it? — we cannot, and do not wish to, renounce. We have not come to deny any of the good that has been done, in whatever way, or that others continue to do, for the nation and for the human spirit.

And we have always felt it one of our first duties to recognize, and to make others recognize, all the authentic values of Italy’s spiritual patrimony.

Absolute intransigence, in that no leadership or position of command will ever be given to one who is still repugnant to the new Italian consciousness. This, allow me to say here, does not amount to saying: to one who does not carry the membership card of the Fascist Party. Indeed, there is no true intransigence that could content itself with a card or a material badge. But the greatest possible latitude, wherever a culture or some other good, possessing intrinsic worth, can indeed be used as a valid instrument for the great work of construction that is the mission of Fascism. A latitude that will grow easier every day, as, once the second condition is fulfilled, the first term of the great Roman warning — parcere subiectis et debellare superbos, to spare the humbled and to war down the proud — appears ever more fitting and just.

For the day is not far off, unless I am mistaken, when all Italy will be Fascist, and the Party, proud of its victory, will be able to throw open its ranks to all Italians and merge with all of them in a faith rendered stronger and surer by the great deeds accomplished, and by the universally felt necessity of marching along the glorious road. History encourages such expectations, whose fulfillment, naturally, depends — for the part that concerns us here — as much on the Fascists as on those anti-Fascists who still lie hidden in the universities, after having been flushed out of the lodges and off the Aventine.

I recall what happened in Italy in and just after 1860 — if, as I believe, our old adversaries will now allow us to speak of a Fascist revolution comparable in some way to the one carried out in Italy in that year — when the most representative men of liberalism had not only to change fundamental laws and clash with customs and traditions most stubbornly resistant in some regions, but had also to resort, in the field of culture, to methods which, it seems to me, the Fascist Government has not yet employed.

Francesco de Sanctis — the teacher of today’s liberal men of letters and philosophers — was governing education when thirty-four professors of a single university, that of Naples, were dismissed at a single stroke; and that same De Sanctis, as Minister of Education in the government headed by Camillo Cavour, sent packing, in a single day, every member of that Royal Academy, to make room for philosophers, jurists, archaeologists, men of letters, and scientists of the new regime. Some of these were not comparable, in talent and learning, to those who took their place. But there were also distinguished men among them.

And they were retired without anyone even thinking of “ultra-Fascist” laws. [1] Our liberals — if there are still any about — might recall the examples set by their own masters at moments when, rebus ipsis dictantibus (the facts themselves dictating it), things were done in earnest — that is, in Fascist fashion. In Fascist fashion; nor is even this word improper, since those masters, too (let me note this in passing) had in mind the ancient fasces of the lictors.

One need only have seen a few numbers of the Risorgimento, edited by Cavour in ‘48, bearing on its front page the fateful emblem wrapped in the tricolor. [1] It will be worth rereading, on this point, a page of Villari’s Di chi è la colpa (1866) [Whose Fault Is It], which can show how the Fascists did the very same thing the liberals did in 1860, by the logic inherent in such things — a logic at which there is no reason to be surprised: the revolution, Villari observes, was now carrying liberals into government and into public office, and what drove them forward was generally their political standing, not their administrative capacity — where, indeed, could they have acquired such capacity? Officials came instead from exile, from prison, from conspiracy, from the ranks of the volunteers, and suddenly found themselves in the highest posts, given them as a reward for sufferings endured.

And this was only natural: in those uncertain and suspicious times, when old officials might be thought friendly to the fallen governments, and a thousand dangers pressed on every side, political loyalty was worth a hundred times more than administrative skill. The rich, the noble, the powerful man who openly declared for the new government was pushed forward hand and foot, regardless of his worth, so long as he served as an example to others; and wherever a shadow of political influence could be supposed — in every Prefecture, in the Police, in the Ministries, in the Municipalities — men of proven loyalty were needed, and so posts went to men of more character than experience, more enthusiasm than special knowledge. And once this rule was adopted, matters proceeded with frightful blindness; setting aside the few men of great talent, and setting aside the adventurers and dishonest men whom revolutions always bring to the surface, the number of the incompetent was appalling.

(Villari goes on to recount, by way of illustration, how he once recommended an honest young liberal of very little education for a post, at the request of a man who had spent ten years in the galleys and asked nothing for himself; within two days the young man had been given a post at fifty scudi a month in one of the most difficult and complicated branches of the administration, utterly at a loss as to how to perform his duties — and yet, as it happened, the matter turned out no differently from all the rest; and how another young man, whom Villari had almost persuaded to take up serious study rather than live in a civilized country in ignorance, came instead to take his leave, having just been appointed a judge on the island of Capri.) (Le Lettere meridionali ed altri scritti, Florence, Le Monnier, 1878, pp. 212–4.) But the Fascists of ‘48 and of ‘60, once the new regime was seated on solid foundations — foundations which we, who emerged from the war onto a new horizon, found already laid — laid down their arms.

And so, little by little, the Bourbon loyalists and the partisans of the Grand Duke disappeared, since they no longer represented anything; and Italy became wholly Italian, welcoming into her bosom even the unrepentant eulogists of the old order, who sooner or later joined those same innovators they had once seen dressed as tyrants, and worked together with them, each at his own post, each doing what he could for the Italian people. This, Excellency and Duce, is the spirit of the new National Institute of Culture, which, with your approval, we have christened Fascist, so that it may not harbor within itself the seeds of the old Italian academies — learned, but estranged from life, shadowy, apolitical, agnostic, intellectualistic.

And we, in the midst of the Italian people, and among the schools where that people has begun to renew and temper itself to the new ideal of national life, wish to raise a banner able to call together and gather around itself men of thought and men of action, in a society that makes thought feel its immanent practical responsibility, and makes action feel its own secret source in the sentiments that thought educates and nourishes.

Around this banner there are already gathered a hundred scholars, writers, and artists who adhere to the Italian program of which You, Excellency, are the soul; but there have also gathered all those Bodies, Associations, and Institutes which, above and beyond any aim of profit or trade-union action, set out, through free initiative, to contribute to the intellectual, moral, and economic progress of the Italian people, and who will be invited and assisted by us in a national work of Fascist solidarity — a work that will illuminate the greatest present national problems and help form the new Italian political consciousness. The Institute has its own review, and will have series of studies and pamphlets, on which work has already begun. It already has a library in the Palazzo del Littorio, open to all, at every hour of the day.

It will offer courses of lectures and conversations in Rome and in the provinces, where its activity already branches out into a network of cultural institutes joined to this central one by a common program and by Fascist discipline. It will be a great free school, which Fascism intends to animate with its own faith, for the education of Fascists, for the education of Italian youth. And the Party has faith, from this very day, that even the skeptical and the doubtful, the suspicious and the fearful — those still on the other side, still waiting — will come to look with sympathy on this initiative of ours.

We who stand here are men who have given our lives to the school and to the young. Grateful to the Fascist Party, which places in our hands new instruments of spiritual life, we call the young men of Italy around us: we call them, once again, to study — to studies that are severe reflection and total understanding of life, and that give rise to, or awaken, a faith, whatever that faith must be, but one turned toward the Fatherland and sanctified by magnanimous purposes. Our Duce, thus do we believe we serve you as it pleases you to be served — by serving Italy.

_{Chapter V}

Declarations

I am allowing this discussion to be published as well. It may strike some readers as a little too theoretical and abstract, but I consider it useful, even though Professor Ferretti’s argument often wraps itself in obscurities that may be impenetrable to anyone not well acquainted with certain doctrines and their terminology. But on this subject I think a few brief declarations are called for. The first is this: that here, as in similar articles published in earlier issues, a particular point of view is adopted, for the very simple reason that no one has ever been able, or ever will be able, to speak without adopting one; and that Volpicelli’s point of view is, naturally, Volpicelli’s own, without anyone — least of all Volpicelli himself, who is an intelligent man, as the reader will have noticed — being able to claim that he speaks as the authorized interpreter of Fascism.

The second is that this journal has been, and will remain, the organ of the National Fascist Institute of Culture; but that does not mean it intends to set forth and propagate some particular doctrine of an orthodox stamp, to be imposed as law upon all Fascists who have the good habit of studying and thinking. That would not be a reasonable aim, because Fascism is not a philosophy, nor does it possess a closed and finished philosophy after the manner of a catechism. It may be that someone dreams of this ideal — of turning Fascism into a kind of catechism. To me that seems a ridiculous and absurd ideal, and one utterly foreign to the whole spirit of Fascism. Our journal therefore intends to remain open to all intelligent and studious Fascists who have something to say; and it intends to propose, and to submit to criticism, every idea whose clarification may be of service to Fascism.

Criticism of others’ thought and criticism of our own: free, unprejudiced, unceasing. Only in this way is one truly alive, and only in this way can the Fascist mentality progress and produce. But I wish to make one further declaration. It is not true that my friends and I mean to practice here what some like to insinuate as “Gentilianism.” That would be a matter of the worst taste, utterly at odds with everything I have always said, written, and taught in every way I know. Whoever asserts this in good faith thereby shows that he has not read my books, in which I have always fought against the illusory vanity of the school and lashed without mercy the intellectual and moral laziness of the so-called disciples. This — need it be said? — does not rule out that there are, and may and should be, affinities and convergences of thought that are entirely impersonal and legitimate.

What is opposed and not tolerated here is not whatever runs counter to a philosophy — mine or anyone else’s — but whatever is incompatible with the dignity of thought, and is proof of a lack of culture and preparation, and a manifest sign of insincerity and want of courage in defending one’s own ideas. For insincerity and want of courage are the negation of Fascism.

_{Chapter VI}

Continuing

Educazione fascista carries on from Educazione politica, with the wish to conform ever more closely to the programme already pursued by the previous journal as the organ of the National Fascist Institute of Culture. A programme of culture, but a Fascist programme, and therefore a political programme. Not the programme of a party, which would be a faction, and hence a particular form within which any culture, however materially rich, could not help but be stifled, since culture is universality, or, if one prefers, humanity.

But the programme of the nation: of that nation with which the Fascist party aspires to coincide, and with which it virtually already coincides, hunting down, both outside itself and within itself, every trace of factionalism, in order to establish a common and fundamental national consciousness that finds its expression, its strength, and its realization in the State, as law and as power, both internal and external. For the nation, so understood, is nothing particular or narrow, but a universal and necessary form of human personality, which makes history only through the State.

And for the Fascist the State is not an abstract structure, a kind of shirt of Nessus that some despotic force imposes on national life in order to bind and compress it at will; rather, for the reason already indicated, it is the nation itself, insofar as it historically attains consciousness of itself, feels itself one in its memories, wills itself to be so, and thus, as a whole, welcomes and promotes these very same aspirations. 1) In the January 1927 issue of Educazione fascista.

To speak, then, of Fascist education is, from our point of view, to speak of national education; with this caveat: that for us the nation is not a natural given but a historical process — and not a historical process already accomplished, but a historical process in the making, alive and active in the consciousness and will of the living: an ideal to be realized, rather than a fact or a monument merely to be kept watch over. And since this process is realized concretely in the State, it follows that Fascist education is essentially political education, inasmuch as it derives and draws its energies from a mentality already stripped of every individualistic or abstractly universalistic conception of life, and tends to raise this mentality to an ever higher clarity and awareness.

A mentality unwilling to shut itself up within any form of intellectualistic culture — erudition or science, art or philosophy, technique or politics — where these are the expressions and activities of a spirit lacking a concrete, practical, totalitarian interest of its own, and hence a clearly defined orientation toward the world and the society to which it belongs. A mentality scornful of every kind of dilettantism — even the most refined dilettantism of science, and even of philosophy and of religion itself — when these answer only to abstract needs, to curiosity, to problems not rooted in that same humanity by virtue of which every man, whether scientist or not, artist or not, religious or sceptical, must nonetheless take his own stand, feel he has an interest to defend, have reason to fear or to hope, and therefore, in some measure, must strive and fight for an ideal of his own.

A serious, Dantesque mentality: for this is what is supremely characteristic of the poetic personality of the father of Italian culture — that his poetry is poetry and nothing but poetry (not politics, nor religion, nor philosophy), yet it is the poetry of a soul wholly stirred and vibrant with political feeling; that is, open to the sense of the concrete, inseparable, and inescapable relations between one’s own individuality and the world that surrounds it, and the whole. A mentality which — need it be said? — is no invention of Fascism: whose merit lies, on the one hand, in having roused this mentality, which seemed to have lain dormant in the depths of the Italian spirit, in having roused it, strengthened it, and set it high and in full view before the eyes of Italians as an ideal to be aimed at and striven toward with every effort; and lies, on the other hand, in having brought this mentality to bear upon the concrete substance of national life, inserting it, as a most powerful lever, into the actuality of the State. For the Fascist ideal could, in the past, live most intensely in exceptional souls, who nonetheless worked profoundly during the period of the Risorgimento. Today it is the law of the national consciousness; it is the very spiritual reality of the State in its movement, to which, through the corporative order, the mass of popular consciousness is, for the first time, being raised up and gradually led to adhere.

And this ideal — which is, I repeat, the ideal of a serious life, gathered inward in work, in thought, in the inmost depths of the spiritual life to be enriched and realized — this is the ideal of culture: the ideal of our Institute, the ideal of the new Italian soul, which the world may judge and appreciate in various ways, but which the whole world senses as a new soul. But it is the ideal of a culture that has its root in a renewed political consciousness and reaches forward toward the new political life of Italy. Art, history, literature, science, the school and the legal institutions, moral and religious life, military preparedness, social, financial, and economic movement — these are different elements, but all essential to the content of the new culture.

And this culture must cultivate each of these elements according to its own specific nature, without doing violence to it or imposing upon it demands foreign to it and, for that very reason, repugnant and harmful. It must permeate all of them with its one single spirit, and thereby quicken them, fuse them, make them the very sap and blood of this Fascist consciousness, toward which all of us, in various ways, labor — we who are Italians living in this present hour. In this journal, then, we shall keep our eyes open upon the whole of Italian life — certainly not with the pretension of systematically reviewing all of it, but with the intention of calling readers’ attention to the problems that seem to us, from time to time, most worthy of consideration and most relevant to our national life. We shall set forth, clarify, and discuss.

Free criticism — but mindful of the duties that higher interests may, from time to time, impose upon thought, thought being all the freer the more prudent, watchful, and farsighted it is, and, on that condition, constructive. Polemics will, as far as possible, be banished. Certainly, neither personal apologetics nor personal attacks will ever be admitted; for to educate in the Fascist manner means, for us, to educate in the seriousness with which every question must be treated, both those called practical and those called theoretical — a seriousness that is an effort to view them with that objectivity by which questions can be of interest to everyone, and by which their solution can be universally accepted. Dissenting voices, too, will be welcomed.

Discussion will thus be genuinely fostered, and each person will be able to do his best to reflect upon and examine his own ideas carefully — nothing being more pestilential than ideas professed dogmatically and blindly. Educazione fascista will be an arena open to all Fascists who have the habit, the taste, and the method of thinking, and who wish to share their ideas in common — just as every Fascist will always offer up, for the fatherland, his own life and his own soul, in common with all. As the organ of a national Institute, and not of a single person or a group of persons, still less of a school, the journal, before admitting any page to its pages, will always ask itself whether that page is worthy of an Italian.

_{Chapter VII}

The Institute’s Aims

Ministers, the programme of the Institute created by the Party for the disciplining of the new Italian culture? Well, that was an act of faith, and the affirmation of an idea, rather than the beginning of the unfolding of a practical and concrete programme. For our programme could not be carried out without certain conditions; and those conditions still had to be created. And it is to creating them that we have devoted this whole year’s work. To create them, we wanted the Institute to become a corporate body, and thus bound by rules that would make its entire activity easily subject to oversight, and stripped of any personal character. The Duce, who feels keenly the task entrusted to our Institute, has not for a single day ceased to take an interest in our work, to encourage it, and to further it.

It is to him that we owe the Institute’s becoming a corporate body — not only because the Office of the Prime Minister gave the Institute that initial endowment necessary for the recognition of any legal person, but because with him the Statute was studied and drawn up in every particular, so that the Institute’s perpetual existence and character might be firmly guaranteed, with a Governing Council — which also serves as a Board of Administration — appointed by royal decree. In this way the Institute has acquired a public character, which makes it a thoroughly national organ. For Fascist, to us today, means national, Italian; and nation, in turn, means, or must come gradually to mean, State — whether the State administers directly, or promotes, protects, or merely recognizes and guarantees by its sovereign will.

This is not State-worship, as some continue to repeat without troubling to understand the most elementary conditions of the State’s reality. For the State cannot be a mere word; it too must have, God willing, a content of its own. The new form assumed by the Institute has made possible a first government subsidy, which now allows us finally to begin carrying out our programme — and we are already at work — as well as the assignment of a seat worthy of us in a famous state-owned palace; and it is not without significance that the National Fascist Institute of Culture should be installed there: the Palazzo Giustiniani. There we have been given the left wing of the first floor, adjoining the part assigned to the Senate, with an entrance on Via Giustiniani.

Magnificent rooms — one of them very spacious, suited to house the Institute’s library and to serve, at the same time, as a lecture hall for the courses we shall begin at once. The work of fitting out and furnishing is already well under way, and soon the Institute, thus renewed and in full possession of the means required for the lofty function entrusted to it, will be opened to the public. — But does the Institute already have a library? — Yes; we have not idled away this year of preparation. The Institute was born as an organ of the Central Directorate of the Fascist Party, whose founding Statute in fact numbers the Institute’s president among the Party’s high officers, as one of the members of the Grand Council.

And so, during the past year, it was housed in the Palazzo del Littorio itself, in a fine and spacious room, where the library began to take shape — though, owing to its location, it could not be made available to the public. And throughout this whole first period of preparation, the Party’s Directorate never failed to provide for the organization’s first needs, assisting both with the purchase of books and with the publication of the journal meant to serve as the Institute’s organ. The Party’s services in this respect, and above all those of its Secretary General, have been very great. First in the Honorable Farinacci, and then in His Excellency Turati, we found watchful and ready interpreters of the Duce’s will.

In this way it has been possible not only to assemble a first solid nucleus of a library and to distribute, throughout the provinces, books useful to the formation of the new national consciousness, but also to publish a journal and to launch series of volumes and pamphlets, which will now receive further growth and wide development. The printing of the first volume of a Bibliographical Yearbook of Fascism is imminent; it will contain a reasoned survey of everything written about our movement from 1919 to 1925 — in newspapers, books, and pamphlets, in Italy and abroad, by Fascists and anti-Fascists alike, by friends or simply by scholars. And the volume for 1926 is already in preparation. It will be a working tool whose usefulness anyone can readily see, from whatever point of view one judges it. And it will be one of the most eloquent documents of the vastness and historical importance of the movement that the Fascist Revolution has aroused throughout the world. — It is said that the journal, too, will be renewed. Can you tell us something about that? — Well, it will be renewed, but so as to continue along the same path it has already taken. The editorial staff is being enlarged; and in order to hold this staff together, from now on I shall personally take charge of its direction. Regular columns are being established, entrusted respectively to writers of special and undisputed competence. The range of subjects and matters within the journal’s scope is thus being enriched and more clearly defined, with the intention that it should reflect all the principal forms of national activity, which the Fascist spirit must always pervade and govern from within. Hence a closer adherence to concrete, present-day problems, and fewer theoretical and abstract discussions, in which it is easy to slide into idle polemics.

A healthy eclecticism, within the Fascist spirit — which is a ferment, not a precipitate that can be collected, defined, and preserved. The Duce has suggested that we call the journal “Educazione fascista.” And so it will be called; and it will set out to contribute, through the exposition and criticism of ideas, through the examination of situations and of moral problems, to the creation of the Fascist Italy that we want — renewed, that is, not only in its outward forms and discipline, but inwardly, in minds and in hearts. Not the assertion of a school of thought — which would be to belittle something immense for every Italian who feels the historical significance of the profound revolution now being accomplished — but an effort of criticism and illumination brought to bear on the robust faith that stirs and moves the national soul.

For to act, to act, to act: yes, this is necessary; but to act is also to think; and to think means also to study and to render account to oneself, as best one can, of the concepts one employs, and of the road one is following, behind the Duce. He proceeds straight, swift, and sure toward the lofty goal; but not infrequently he must, alas, look back, and mingle with his praise both exhortations and reproaches for those who stop, or fall back, or lose their way. And that is why a Fascist education of minds is needed. That is why the Duce is with us; and — I want to give you a piece of news that will please the readers of Il Tevere — the first issue of our journal, which will appear in the coming days, will open with a message from the Head of Government, who thus bears witness to his confidence in us.

Confidence not in our persons, but in our programme, which is entrusted to a Council that includes some of the most eminent men of the Party. It is enough to recall their names: Turati, Arpinati, Bianchini, Bottai, Ercole, Giuliano, Leicht, Rocco, Rossoni, Volpe, Volpicelli. They will meet in the coming week to discuss the Institute’s first budget — a budget which will likewise be published, and which everyone will be able to read.

_{Chapter VIII}

The Programme

Culture, in its headquarters at the Palazzo Giustiniani. Excellencies, Gentlemen! I thank you for attending this inauguration of our courses in political culture, and of this headquarters assigned to the National Fascist Institute of Culture by the will of the Head of Government. Your presence makes more vivid in us the sense of the duties imposed upon us when we were called, nearly a year and a half ago now, to direct this Institute — solemnly announced on the Capitoline Hill, but now renewed and reconstituted through legislative measures suited to its lofty aims. But your presence also comforts us in the hope that our work will be followed and sustained by your adherence to the Institute’s programme, and, I would also like to say, by your trust. Ours is a programme of culture: of the formation and diffusion of culture.

But it is a programme different from all those that schools and academies might propose. For — let me say it at once — our Institute wishes to be neither a school, still less an academy. For the young and for cultivated men who wish to deepen their knowledge and form clear and precise ideas on the principal subjects of contemporary thought and the pressing problems of present-day life — problems which Fascism raises, encounters, and must resolve — it will hold courses of lectures, such as the one beginning today, given by authorities of high standing.

It opens its library, already rich in historical and literary, economic, legal, and political works, and in the best periodicals in these fields, to all who wish to find here new resources for their own culture, not always easily accessible elsewhere, and to frequent, together, the company of scholars ready to offer advice and useful bibliographical guidance on request. But a school it will not be. For no one here presumes to have a doctrine to teach; no one here wishes to play the master. There are already too many schools in Italy, and there is no reason why another should be founded here! The Institute will animate and give discipline to studies and research, and will promote debates on the living problems that concern the country.

But it aspires never to become an academy (another academy!), for it will take great care not to pursue science for science’s sake, and it holds, as part of its programme, that scientific thought itself can and must be considered not only in itself, but also as an instrument, or element — which indeed it is — of the human personality: and I mean the personality that realizes a national and universal, and therefore moral, consciousness and will.

The Institute will publish not only its own journal and a bibliographical yearbook of the Fascist movement, but also the following five series: 1. a series of Notebooks (Quaderni), dealing with special questions of current concern; 2. a collection of new or recent Italian Political Writings, suited to illuminating the path that Italian thought, both in practice and in theory, is following; 3. a collection of Historical Studies illustrating the great political events and economic movements of the modern age, as well as the development of the most celebrated and important doctrines that, from the Renaissance onward, have prepared or commented upon the evolutions and revolutions of political rule in every civilized country; 4. a series of Classic Writers on Politics, of every age and nation, in good translations with concise introductions; 5. a series of Lives of Distinguished Italians. Publications, as you see, directed toward forming the political mentality of Italians — but a well-squared mentality, founded on a broad study of the scientific, economic, legal, and moral questions to which every concrete and effective political action is bound. A political mentality, then, that is not abstractly, simply, or superficially political, but one that engages all the powers of the intellect and demands and stirs every interest of the spirit — and those qualities of subtlety, of critical acumen, of a sense for the complexity and difficulty of every real problem of actual life, which distinguish the truly intelligent man, who always speaks little, from the glib talker who chatters on forever.

The number of intelligent people, as is well known, has always fallen short of the desire for them, or at least of the need for them; but after the war, after the Revolution, amid such a ruin of dogmas, such a fever of renewal and anxiety for new orders and new faiths, the need is great and the desire most keen. Gentlemen! Every one of you knows that many of the ideas which, until yesterday, served us as points of orientation have fallen. Ideals that seemed untouchable have been shattered, or have been so narrowed as to inflame and render impatient the longing for different and higher goals. Names that once shone like beacons have grown so dim as to be scarcely discernible, and not a few have fallen into oblivion.

Men who, through their activity, their teaching, their writings, once comforted and reassured our spirits as infallible reserves of strength on which one might draw in time of need, have receded into a distance as of centuries. An age has evidently come to a close, and every day we feel more keenly our separation from an irrevocable past. The seeds of the new life ferment in tumult, and promise an imminent flourishing that will spring up, wondrously, on every side, and already announces itself and fills with hope the hearts of those who have eyes to see and a heart to feel and to foresee. This new life is a life of will, of passion, of thought; it is a new consciousness, a new spirit. It does not arise out of arbitrary whim or deliberate design, but neither does it arise from a blind, unconscious impulse.

It is reflection, self-examination, mastery and control of the paths to be followed, and the labor of clarification — for only through the exact statement of problems can man solve them and advance along his way. Hence the era now opening before us will give us a new Italy only insofar as it gives us a new culture, a new thought, a new man. And already we can see the principal lines of its outline. For it will not consist in a system in the narrow sense of schools, confessions, or sects, but in a new way of thinking and understanding life. Whoever fails to perceive this new spirit — still vague and undefined, and taking forms that are sometimes improper and often contradictory — which today presses upon our social and political, moral and intellectual life in Italy, does not live in our time; and therefore does not know what Fascism is, nor how profound is the revolution it has wrought.

This revolution, even today, after so many laws and radical reforms, is certainly not yet an accomplished fact. It is being accomplished through the working of a force superior to the wills and even to the very ideas of individual men, who crowd together into a vast current, set in motion by an idea that not everyone succeeds in explaining to himself, and that some do not even manage to receive into their souls. A force which indeed, in the course of its advance, sweeps along even those very persons who appear to be its standard-bearers, and which always finds new instruments ready to carry it forward. A force that operates unceasingly, and that no one — neither Fascist nor anti-Fascist — is able to halt. A historical necessity, which no one any longer believes it useful to deplore, however discontented or repelled he may be, and to which, therefore, many who resisted until yesterday are now yielding. A force, a historical necessity, which has become a person in a Man endowed with singular gifts of creative genius, who, hour by hour, as though inspired and moved by some mysterious instinct, goes on creating this new Italy, amid the intent admiration and the anxious apprehension of the world. It is a revolution of regime, but it is a total revolution, and therefore a spiritual one. Hence so many things that in the past seemed dreams and utopias are today realities, and no one is any longer astonished by them.

Everyone, even the unwilling, is coming to adapt himself to looking at the world with new eyes, and thus to perceiving the possibility of so many things once judged impossible — and, conversely, the impossibility of things once thought certain. Among these things, I might venture to include the very fact of our being gathered here today, in this place. The hall in which I speak was once a Masonic temple; and when we first entered it, the first thing we had to do was give this vault a fresh coat of paint, tinted as it was in a pale blue and studded with stars. This library, in this hall, is a symbol of our revolution!

And yet the war against Freemasonry — against every kind of Masonic lodge, whether or not it hides behind starry ceilings, against the old mentality that Fascism was born to overthrow — is not yet entirely won; and some battles still remain to be fought, less noisy but no less difficult, and even more important than those that already mark our victories. And one of them must be fought here: I mean, in the minds and souls of Italians, where so many prejudices still lurk that must be destroyed, and where so many convictions still have to be planted, and so many feelings aroused, and moral habits formed.

Only then will the victory be complete, and the spirit be able to open itself to the broad breath of a generous intelligence, freeing itself from the narrowness, meanness, and miseries characteristic of the Masonic mentality — abstractly rationalistic, and therefore anti-religious; individualistically liberal, and substantially materialistic; and thus open to all those shallow, pseudo-scientific conceptions that make of life a pleasure without pain, a right without duty, a conquest without sacrifice. Here, then, Fascism will fight its good fight. Here, at the center, and in the branches that extend into every Italian province, strengthened by the encouraging word and the approval of the Duce, by the hundreds of members it counts in every city of Italy, and by the adherence of all the universities and institutions of higher learning, which have hastened to rally around us.

Our action will thus unfold across a vast national network of concerted and disciplined activity, through a powerful bundle — a fascio — of souls bound together in a single faith. But the Institute has no wish to become, for that reason, a new Freemasonry of fanatical adepts, factious and intolerant. Our ideal is that of a Fascist Italy that coincides with Italy itself: of a party that, having become the State, is the nation itself. And the nation must, by degrees, gather into itself effectively — not merely in name, in its living history and not merely on the civil registers — all Italians, and educate them all, and bind them all together in the new faith. The new faith is, for us, above all a moral faith: the very faith we always lacked when our Italy fell into decline, and the faith that revived when Italy rose again.

Faith in the truth of the ideal, and in man’s capacity to realize it, if he wills to. Faith in this human will, which knows how to will seriously and in earnest, at the cost of any sacrifice, even of life itself — but first at the cost of that sacrifice which is more modest, yet more difficult, than death itself willingly met for an ideal: the sacrifice of life’s petty vanity and frivolity; of the chattering presumption that judges and criticizes everything and hands down verdicts on all things; of the dissipated conceit of acting and thinking entirely for oneself, with no law over one’s head, and no force to make that law prevail (for laws without force behind them are not laws, but lies); and of the foolish inclination to conceive of one’s own person, with all its interests, as shut up within the skin of one’s own body, or, at most, within the narrow circle of one’s own family. Our faith is faith in the sanctity of discipline, in the reality of the Fatherland, which, in the actuality of present consciousness and will, gathers up the life of countless past generations and perpetuates it in the work of the generations whose coming it prepares. A moral faith, which is a religious faith, because it turns to and calls upon the deep forces of the spirit, which guide us along providential paths and lead us toward sure ends.

For we are convinced that whoever does not take things seriously in this way may well carry a party card and a badge, but will not be a Fascist. This is the way of regarding life that Fascism demands: an austere way, scornful of all the softness and weakness that are sterile and corrupting compromises; merciless toward every illicit indulgence that bends the law to the convenience and false interest of individuals; impatient of that easy laughter which furnished such abundant material to Italian literature in its saddest ages. A way of thinking that at once exalts and humbles, as does every faith of a religious character, making man feel both the nothingness that he is and the totality that he can be and do, if he wills it, and if he submits himself to the law by which every free will is governed. Is this the Fascism we have daily before our eyes?

This is not a question of my own devising. I often hear it put, with a note of sorrow, by many; and I suspect it may have risen from the depths of the souls of some of you, on hearing me enclose the essence of Fascism within ideal formulas. I therefore put the question to myself, and I answer it. I answer with a declaration habitual to our Duce, who likes to repeat that he is a pessimist, that he is not satisfied with the Party he holds in his grip, that he is not content with his own men — not content with us. And yet, notwithstanding this pessimism, from no other soul has such faith ever burst forth as blazes in his words, and as he knows how to communicate to whoever comes near him. Indeed, the true optimist — not the superficial or Panglossian kind — has always been a pessimist.

For, gentlemen, what else is faith in the future, wherein alone we can seek the life to which we aspire, if not the will to create that very future? And from where can this innovating, constructive will arise, if not from an acute and unbearable dissatisfaction with the present? Yes, the strength of Fascism lies in its own restless dissatisfaction with itself. This is the foundation of its indomitable faith. With this faith — which is the faith of Fascists in Fascism and in its powerful Leader — we are here at work for the Italy of our fathers and for the Italy of our children.

_{Chapter IX}

Revision

(Revisione)

The new title of this newspaper is a promise and a program. And, of course, not only with regard to political institutions. For it is well known, and the Fascists know it very well, that a new political regime cannot be anything concrete, historically significant, and realistically effective, unless it is the expression of a new economic and moral life, and, as it were, the organic will of a new consciousness. This consciousness already exists in Italy, and pulses through every form of national life, breaking old encrustations and shaping new structures suited to its more vigorous rhythm. But it must go on developing.

And the new institutions and new laws that the regime is creating and enacting, the new newspapers through which it illustrates and defends its own thinking, are directed precisely toward this development, and promote it through hard effort — a continuous, tenacious labor of the whole Italian people, united in a remarkable discipline. This development, moreover, also takes place independently of the programmatic action of the regime (government and party), and gradually surpasses the specific aims we set for ourselves; it acts upon us in turn, and, as one says nowadays, virtually frames us, and carries us along — a higher spirit, the animating force of history, of which we are at once the makers and the result. This is, in my view, a notion of no small importance, both for Fascists and for non-Fascists, if any still remain.

Indeed, above all for the latter, who until a few months ago could still suspect that something arbitrary lay within the Fascist movement, dependent on the good pleasure of a few individuals — individuals who, sooner or later, through the fury of bitter polemics, waged with the pinpricks of the mocking wit so dear to Italians, or with the back-stabbing of the loud scandals staged in the most shamelessly brazen press, might be intimidated, surrounded, disarmed, and swept aside. But by now, I believe, even they might begin to convince themselves that Fascism is a historical movement, one that touches the very roots of national life and exercises an irresistible dominion even over its leaders — who, many times, hold their posts out of duty or, if one prefers, out of necessity. This, then, is a matter of a new consciousness that is developing. It must develop.

Herein lies the promise and the program. And Regime Fascista will earn our applause if it bears this in mind, for this is the time for construction. By now the load-bearing walls of the Fascist State have been raised. All of Italy is gathered and disciplined in the resolve that the announced ideas be carried out. These ideas, however, are not yet fixed and set down on paper in such a way that nothing remains but to apply them. They are, rather, tendencies still to be realized. They are needs still to be met, and problems still to be solved. We have, thank God, the men; we have the tools; we have minds that are ready; and the Country waits with confidence.

We must work, reflect, study, choose, rise, and improve day by day — through self-criticism, through the relentless purging of men, but also of ideas and sentiments — and clarify ourselves to ourselves through steady effort, so as to gain, through greater clarity and depth of our thought, a more powerful force for the work we have undertaken. And in this work of inner construction, which makes possible and facilitates the outer construction and the creation of that economic and political power of the Nation which is the goal of Fascism, there is a fundamental duty to bear in mind: that of a rigorous revision of the Italian consciousness. A revision, then, not to be confused (heaven forbid) with the one already preached by the well-known revisionists, men moved by the best of intentions but incautious in a criticism that risks drying up the faith necessary for action, and prone to the intellectualistic exercise of one who is tempted to step out of the ranks in order to watch how the mass marches on. Not a revision of the postulates of Fascism, which possesses within itself, in its own spontaneous and healthy development, the selective virtue with which others would seek to correct it from without. But a revision of the values and concepts of Italian thought, insofar as these are the patrimony, and therefore the foundation, of that national consciousness which is the deep personality of every cultivated and conscious Italian. And here indeed lies an entire program of work, to which Regime Fascista must bring its own contribution. Let me explain. We are all agreed, by now, in wanting the school to be Fascist — that is, in wanting all national education, from earliest childhood to university youth, to be inspired by Fascism.

But a Fascist school does not exist simply because it has been entrusted entirely to card-carrying Fascists. What is needed within it is the Fascist soul. This is the essential thing. And this Fascist soul is not that of the young man thrilling with a vague and undefined faith, however ardent and untamed, ready to give the Roman salute and obey the Duce’s orders with military discipline. This is only the beginning, which must be followed by the rest. That faith must have a content, must be nourished by ideas; it must correspond to a personality — one which, whether acting or thinking, whether as citizen or father, friend or teacher, in every relationship of its activity, always has a style, its own way of reacting and behaving: a character that sets the Fascist apart from the non-Fascist. Suppose he is a historian.

Well then, if he is not content to be a Fascist merely in words and by simply paying his membership dues to the Fascio’s treasury, it is impossible for him not to animate history with his Fascism — not to see it, as the saying goes, through Fascist eyes, not to represent and reconstruct it in his own way. So it has always happened whenever a new spiritual orientation has taken hold; this is the law of every historical conception. If he was a historian even before becoming a Fascist, and his conversion to Fascism has no effect on his previous thought, this is a sign that the conversion was merely extrinsic and formal; it means we are faced with one of those empty, insipid souls who are the radical negation of Fascism. And what I say of history I say of all culture that touches on human concerns, engaging man’s life and feeling.

This certainly does not mean that the Fascist must falsify history and all the other forms of scientific knowledge. So banal a suspicion will not arise in any intelligent person reading these lines. I mean only that man must be present in every part of his culture, as in all his actions — man with his character, if he has one. And I say that Fascism, if it is to be that serious thing which it has shown itself to be through the action it has been able to exert on the whole of national life, cannot be something accessory, unrelated to the very character of the man who adheres to it. The conclusion, then, is that the school and all national education will be able to take on the spirit of Fascism only as that spirit gradually reforms all the historical and moral elements of the Italian consciousness. Let me offer an example.

The history of literature — one of the principal strands in the formation of national consciousness, inasmuch as this consciousness gathers itself around the concept of its own development, a concept that is renewed from time to time as ideas progress and thought matures generally — this history reveals itself, and must reveal itself, in a new light to the soul of the Fascist, who will be led to discern and bring out parts or aspects that previously remained in shadow, to discover connections that previously escaped notice, to devalue writers who were too highly esteemed, and to bring out the worth of other writers little appreciated in the past.

Not that the universal criteria of judgment can change as a result of Fascism; but these criteria presuppose, in their application, a perception of what is present in a writer and must be sought and felt — a perception that does not depend on those abstract criteria themselves, but rather on the perceptive disposition of the man who must make use of them. And this perceptive disposition, or sensibility if one prefers, is in the

Fascist sharpened and cultivated by the feeling for certain values, certain attitudes of the spirit, and, in short, by an intuition of life that is characteristic of Fascism, as I have shown elsewhere. This does not mean that the Fascist historian must dress Italians who lived and died before 1919 in black shirts, when black shirts, it seems, had never yet been seen. Such jests should be left to the yellow press, even when written by professors of philosophy. I have advised some young friends of mine on a collection of Fascist Pages, in which pages of Fascist flavor by pre-Fascist writers will be printed; and I would think of contributing to it personally with a Fascist Mazzini, made up of passages from the writings of the democrat Mazzini.

My idea is that in many of our writers, in the best of them, there are elements in which today we can see a foreshadowing of Fascism — and these are the most vital elements of their writings, the very ones that made them most appreciated when no one yet spoke of Fascism. And if one does not wish to speak of foreshadowing, one may say (which amounts to the same thing) that Fascism gathers into its living synthesis many of the elements scattered throughout earlier Italian thought, and, of course, that of other nations as well. We must therefore revise these writers of ours, just as we must revise the whole of our culture. 1) From the first issue of Regime Fascista of Cremona, 1 January 1926.

_{Chapter X}

The New Higher Council of Public Education

(Il nuovo Consiglio Superiore della P. I.)

Consiglio Superiore della P. I.” (“P. I.” = Pubblica Istruzione, i.e. Public Instruction/Education). Minister, I feel that I speak for the sentiments of all my Colleagues on the Council in thanking Your Excellency for the trust you have placed in us by calling us to this most exalted position, and for the honor you have done us in bringing us your greeting. But I believe I also speak for the unanimous feeling of those present in telling you today, at the outset of our work, that we have come here with a deep awareness of the duties the Government placed upon us in electing us to be part of this new Council.

This Council, thanks to the well-matured criteria that you have upheld, remains unchanged in its governmental character — which is to say, in a constitution in which someone bears, before the Country, and therefore before the field of education, real and effective responsibility — while being renewed in its membership so as to become the first Higher Council decidedly and thoroughly Fascist in character. As it must be today, in order to direct Italian schooling toward the high goal at which the new national consciousness aims. This, there should be no need to declare, does not mean that the new Council will be politically partisan or sectarian; it means, rather, that it will be conscious of the national aims of Italian culture.

This culture, outside and within the school, must be forever withdrawn from that absurd agnosticism which, having spread from religion and the supreme guiding concepts of life, had already extended to political convictions, to the sentiments by which every civilized man is bound to the history of his own Country — which is consciousness of the Fatherland in its past and in its future — and thereby threatened to erode and corrode the very moral foundations of national life. The age of that agnosticism is now closed. This Council too knows that it must work toward the new history, which will not give us that great, ordered, powerful, political Italy now shining before our minds unless it first gives us an Italy remade from within — in thought, in belief, in moral habit, in the will for renewal, for seriousness, for the religious devotion of one’s whole life to a high ideal.

Thus our Council will bear in mind something that everyone speaks of in theory but that everyone forgets in practice: that questions of instruction are, in their substance, all questions of education — that is, moral questions. The Council will therefore concern itself greatly with the discipline of study, for pupils and for teachers alike, and will work with you, Honorable Minister, to establish in the school that austere regime of respect for the law and for the objective requirements of study which the Fascist Government has wanted and promoted from the very outset. The very appointment of this Higher Council is a seal that may disabuse those all-too-facile and naïve praisers of times past who deluded themselves into thinking they could obtain from you, little by little, a reform of the reform of ’23 and a return to the old order.

Our presence here, it seems to us, clearly attests to the Government’s resolve not to depart from that school policy which was wholly an act of faith in Italian youth and in the Italian school, and in the people who emerged victorious from the war. To this program we shall be glad and proud to collaborate with you, Minister, with faith and with loyalty, with the ardor and the intransigence of Fascists. For as to the new direction the Government has impressed upon the Italian spirit through the school, we are certain that all those whom you have called here are its unreserved supporters. And we may place sure reliance on the intelligent and fervent collaboration of those whom, with high political wisdom, you have chosen to represent here the new free Universities, which the Fascist Government, with a courage unthinkable in other times, willed into being, once it had shattered the idols of the old prejudices that, until a few years ago, held the national soul in bondage. In this field a freedom has been achieved whose value can be denied only by those who fill their mouths with the word without knowing the thing itself. Over this freedom, which is one of the greatest achievements of the new Italy, we, for our part, shall stand guard. 1) Address in reply to the greeting of His Excellency the Minister P. Fedele, at the session of 16 February 1926.

_{Chapter XI}

The Philosophical Congress of Milan

(Il Congresso filosofico di Milano)

I believe the newspapers made too much noise over the philosophical congress held in Milan from the 28th to the 30th of March. It was not worth the trouble. Why so much public interest? Certainly not on account of Croce’s paper on Italian philosophy in the Baroque age, which, perhaps — and perhaps not — seems likely to be all that will remain of the Congress’s proceedings. An interesting paper, because it cast some gleam of light on a few little-known or poorly known points in the history of Italian thought; but of rather scant scientific importance, if one considers the contribution that the thinkers recalled by Croce made to the progress of philosophy: a most modest contribution indeed. These are evidently studies that can attract the attention only of specialists.

Little noticed was the address of the venerable Varisco on the concept of the State, on its ethical nature, on the absolute character that it must therefore possess, and on its vigorous and powerful order. A philosophical address, of solid speculative structure, and therefore ill-suited to arouse the interest of a wide public. It was applauded by the very same people who then greeted with great acclaim the absurdities uttered on the same subject in the lecture that gave the Congress its particular character — that of Professor Francesco De Sarlo, on “High Culture and Liberty.” The President of the Congress, Martinetti, is not De Sarlo. A different culture, a different intellect, a different taste.

Yet his inaugural address, too, ranged through the commonplaces of disoriented philosophers: against the alleged improper mingling of philosophy and politics, whereby empirical forms would supposedly be promoted to truths of the ideal order (which, on the contrary, is precisely the reproach that the philosophers who combat their absurd distinctions direct at these very critics); against the pantheistic naturalism which, according to the most superficial interpretations, is supposedly concealed within the most recent forms of idealism; against the attempts of the neo-scholastics to revive a philosophy that history has left behind, and so on. Commonplaces one has heard repeated so many times that there was no need to go hear them again at a congress.

Commonplaces and gossip, because these were not philosophical theses but polemical jabs against so-and-so and such-and-such: absent persons, who therefore could not answer, but whose mere name is said to be enough to produce a very great agitation in good Martinetti’s nervous system. But gossip that could be understood and followed only by some twenty of those idlers who in recent years have turned philosophy in Italy into material for personally motivated chatter, and which therefore could not interest many people.

It is true that the reports of the Congress showed the great majority of those attending to consist of those melancholy intellectuals scattered here and there about the country nowadays, discontented with the present regime, who had gathered in Milan for a demonstration of a political character, and were therefore ready to seize eagerly on any allusion that might stir their troubled feelings. But if the audience noted Martinetti’s excessive hostility to anything new, it does not appear to have dwelt on those political hints that had likewise been deliberately introduced into his address as an outlet for the distress that afflicts Martinetti, as it afflicts so many others whose deep sleep has been broken by the present Italian political movement, and who are forced, poor souls, to engage in politics for the sole reason that they do not wish to engage in politics.

And they have no peace; and they grow angry with this person and that, who, having lost none of their own composure, calmly invite them to consider this fact, which is the most open refutation of their thesis: the fact of the political action which they themselves passionately carry out even as they argue this absurd thesis of theirs — contradicted by the whole of history — of a philosophy wholly free of present-day political interests. What did draw the public’s attention to the Congress, instead, was De Sarlo’s address and the protest that Carlini raised against it. An address that was a tissue of the most hackneyed, most threadbare commonplaces, which is nevertheless said to have sent the listeners into raptures — in praise of the goddess Science, the goddess Liberty, of the immortal Principles, of the sacred Rights of the individual, of Freedom of thought, and other such novelties which by now not only the Fascists but all — I say all — cultivated men consider foolishness.

Hearts leapt with joy: those of the elementary schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, nursed on the old positivist pedagogy now retired for some years past; those of the free-thinkers, who, driven from their lodges, have seen an era of spiritual tyranny that went by the name of liberty — and was so comfortable, and sometimes even profitable — set forever; those of the professors incapable of remaking their own culture and gnawed by resentment at seeing youth flock with enthusiasm and ardor around philosophers whose appeal they had never managed to understand; those, in short, of the stragglers who, in the words of this rancorous speaker, after months and years of craven silence, find the expression of ideas that had lain hidden and nested in a corner of their sluggish brains, and of feelings long brooded over in the secrecy of their trembling hearts.

A shrill female voice or two was heard: — ‘At last, at last! For five years these things could not be said!’ — Five years? And who stopped you from saying them? There are tons of printed paper that can be filled with novelties of this sort, for the consolation of the fools of philosophy, of politics, of journalism, of the schools, of every defeated party and every extinguished little sect. And are your appetites still not satisfied? Had thousands of people attended the Milan philosophical congress, the spectacle it presented would certainly have been a painful one.

Had that hundred or so present represented the best of Italian culture or philosophical scholarship, one would have to feel mortified before the world at the fact that the congress could be so moved by the address of a philosopher such as Professor De Sarlo — about whom, since in the judgment of the congress members themselves, and of all those in Italy and abroad who view Fascism with suspicion, there is still supposed to be one intelligent Italian competent in philosophical matters, one may see the merciless treatment given him by Benedetto Croce in the Critica twenty years ago. But in Milan Professor Martinetti had summoned only the men he could trust. Carlini was there by mistake.

And he reacted fiercely to De Sarlo with a firm but measured statement, which appeared in a few newspapers but which the overheated pseudo-philosophers did not allow to be read out — as tangible proof of that unbounded love of liberty which fills their breasts! There was indeed, besides Carlini, one or two others accustomed to making the most extravagant professions of Fascist faith; but on this occasion they thought it wise to vanish. In conclusion, the Congress represents a heavy passive balance for so-called Italian philosophy — that is, for the men who have arrogated to themselves the role of its exponents. A scientific passivity and a national passivity, since foreigners too have watched this rather undignified spectacle of scholars clamoring without cause, incapable of discussion, and have found in it no grounds for admiration. A political passivity?

No, because the little anti-Fascist demonstration at the Congress comes from men who have not the slightest importance in Italian life today: they do not even know what Fascism wants, or what it consists of. They look at this or that individual Fascist, and make petty questions of persons out of it. Wretched stuff. The Rector of the University cut the Congress short by refusing it further use of the premises, which he, as the Government’s representative, could not keep open to anti-government demonstrations and to tumultuous gatherings that set the students such a poor example. The President of the Congress protested. A young man — who is really a precocious old man — came forward with a motion 2 in which the Congress denounced its own most unhappy end to the International Committee of Philosophy Congresses. A gesture whose dignity anyone can appreciate, and one that humiliates Italy before foreigners on account of these wretched men.

Foreigners who, fortunately, do not confuse the Italy of such men with the real Italy — just as they have never believed Italian philosophy to be represented by that merry philosopher who teaches in Genoa, and jumps and dances and pulls faces before the public, proving today the truth and tomorrow the falsehood of whatever philosophy falls into his hands — idealist one day, skeptic the next, dogmatist later still, yesterday a philosopher of authority, today of liberty, forever a sophist and an empty mind, applauded this time too, in Milan, for his latest farce, that of ‘Critical Materialism’ — which is to say, of the squared circle.

Poor Rensi — why does he not allow himself a little rest, after so much labor, so many systems, so much chatter? 1) From Popolo d’Italia, 14 April 1926. 2) I was told afterward that the motion was read out by this young man because he was secretary of the Congress, but that it was not put forward by him, and that the appeal to the International Committee was an anonymous cry from one of those present at the reading of the motion.

_{Chapter XII}

The Italian Encyclopedia and Fascism

(L’Enciclopedia italiana e il Fascismo)

Dear Forges, Well then, I have read with attention, as your writer of ‘Passaggi a livello’ in Saturday’s Tribuna wished me to, the words he quotes from Il Tevere; and I had already read the whole of Interlandi’s article in that afternoon paper. But neither Interlandi nor you should be offended if I declare frankly that from those words, and from the whole article, I have nothing to learn — neither for my own way of understanding Fascism, nor for the Italian Encyclopedia, which I have the honor of directing. I am only confirmed in my conviction that even among the most intelligent rank-and-file of our Party, certain ideas are still not clear enough; and that discipline suffers for it — the discipline we hold dear as one of our fundamental duties and interests.

For discipline means division of labor and respect for one another’s competence; not only toward those above us in the hierarchy, but also toward those beside us, or even below. Each man at his post, bearing the weight and the right of his own responsibility. Otherwise we fall back into that democratic chaos of unlamented memory, when it was thought right for everyone to have his say, and ideas kept getting muddled again and again, so that one had to start over every little while: in short, nothing was ever concluded. The Fascist Party, on the matter that some now wish to reopen for discussion, already has precise directives.

I might also recall the speech I gave on the Campidoglio on December 19th concerning the problem of national culture, how it presents itself to the Party and how it must practically be resolved — a speech fully approved by our Duce and welcomed by you in L’Idea Nazionale. In truth it did nothing more than reflect and interpret the practice and the spirit of Fascism. Which has not come to destroy, but to build; and if it sets out to renew, it does not aim at the surface, but at the interior, at what lies deep.

It does indeed intend to animate the whole of national life with an ardent political passion — a moral and religious passion for the creation of higher values; but it does not tolerate, cannot tolerate, that this passion should dissipate and wither into empty superstitious formulas, into contests and manhunts of persons, or into displays of Party cards, so often, alas, shamefully abused and exploited! As if the Fascist Italy we have longed for could be the one we would have on the day when the famous forty million Italians, of every sex and age, were all enrolled in the Party. No, dear Forges; for me as for you, Fascism is a powerful force because it is an idea — a great idea, which must make its way by routing ancient hostilities that are forever springing up again, by stimulating, empowering, coordinating all the real forces of the Nation.

And this idea, so that its motion may not halt, must be nourished, defended, sustained; for this idea one must fight; in it we must place our hopes and our faith. If it lives, and is sound, and rises ever higher and shines forth in minds and souls, it will find its men, will form them and train them to that generous spirit of sacrifice and that tenacious will to power which can give us the Italy we long for. Otherwise we shall lose ourselves in vain struggles and in words that will one day be forgotten. The men to employ, when along the way it falls to us to choose our collaborators in the work we believe in, are those who, by aptitude and preparation, can most usefully help us realize our idea. This is what Benito Mussolini has always done, with his sure and effective will.

And whoever practices politics where a technical problem needs solving is not practicing politics but talking nonsense; and thereby shows that he has no political vocation, nor that absolute sincerity and lofty disinterestedness that accompany genuine political passion — the passion that a moved world sees blazing in the words and deeds of Mussolini. The Italian Encyclopedia, as it arose in my own thinking, and as my friend Treccani sees it, with his firm Fascist faith in Italian culture and will, has a technical organization of its own, which I shall never refuse to discuss with any friends who take an interest in it and wish to study it together with me.

But I should consider myself unworthy of the Party card the Fascist Party offered me in May of ’23, when it recognized in me one of its forerunners and a Fascist who always meant what he said, were I to be found harboring so narrow a mentality as to fail to distinguish politics from technique in a work that will amount to a great examination, sustained by the thought and character of Italians, before all the civilized nations — most of which preceded us in this arena — were I, out of some ill-timed preference for shutting myself up in the stronghold of my own comrades, to neglect to make use of every resource and every force that Italy can supply me for the building of this great national monument.

This monument, once completed, will itself recall and vindicate, as no work has ever done before, what the civilized world, in every field of thought, in every art, in every kind of labor, in every form of humanity, owes to the Italian people; and it will also show what vast and solid scientific organization, that is, what strength of higher discipline, this people, reanimated by Fascism, is capable of today — reanimated in its very fabric, in which everyone, even the non-Fascists, obeys the surge of new life that draws the Nation upward. On this account, if I am not deceiving myself, the Italian Encyclopedia will be able to call itself one of the most splendid works of the new Italy: of Fascist Italy. It will turn out so, not through any merit of mine — indeed, despite all the errors I may commit along the way — but through the merit of the Italians of today.

Who, unlike the Italians of yesterday, no longer shut themselves up, even in scholarship, within a selfish individualism; they feel that even scholarly work must be cultivated as a national duty, one that entails obligations of organization and solidarity, even at the cost of personal sacrifice, for the honor and the good of their country. This, for me, is Fascism. It is that Fascism which can declare with rightful pride: I am not a party, I am Italy. It is the Fascism that can and must rally all Italians to every national undertaking — even those of the anti-manifesto. Who, should they answer the call, will not come (Interlandi may rest easy) to practice anti-Fascism: they will come, at least within the Encyclopedia, to bring the contribution of their competence — to do mathematics, or chemistry, or physics, in short, science.

Science, of course, of the kind an Encyclopedia can offer, which is not a book with an individual personality of its own, but an exact, clear exposition, accessible to every cultivated mind, of what is established at a given time in every order of facts, and of what has been historically most important in thought, past and present, in every order of ideas. All of it, in our Encyclopedia, from the standpoint of the culture of the Italian people.

But if, faced with the future Italian Encyclopedia, there should be Fascists who — unaware of the enormous sum of labor it will have cost and of the countless problems its solution will have required, indifferent to the national value and significance it will represent as the first collective product, in the scientific field, of the Italian people — shrug their shoulders and twist their faces over some name that might, from one season to the next, offend I know not what Fascist sensibility, and prefer, as I am threatened, the illustrated Melzi instead, I shall not for that be scandalized, nor shall I hold it against Fascism. I, dear Forges, shall go on distinguishing between Fascism and Fascists. Thank you, and best regards. 1) Letter to the Editor of La Tribuna, 28 April 1926.

Translator’s note on names: “Forges” is Roberto Forges Davanzati, editor of the Rome newspaper La Tribuna; “Interlandi” is Telesio Interlandi, editor of the newspaper Il Tevere; “Treccani” is Giovanni Treccani, the industrialist who financed the Enciclopedia Italiana (still known today as the Treccani); the “Melzi” is the popular illustrated Dizionario Melzi, a rival reference work of the day. The “Campidoglio” is Rome’s Capitoline Hill, seat of the city government, where Gentile had given a public address the previous December.

_{Chapter XIII}

The Fascist Press and Party Responsibility

(Stampa fascista e responsabilità di partito)

At its meeting of March 2nd, the Directorate of the National Fascist Party adopted an excellent resolution, which we trust to see rigorously applied as soon as possible: to review the entire Fascist press and to classify newspapers clearly into Fascist papers and those which the Party Leadership cannot regard as such, though without there being any reason to forbid their continued existence.

The true and proper newspapers of the Party, authorized to represent its interests and to speak in its name, will, in short, be recognized and formally designated; and this status of theirs — which today can often be a self-interested presumption or a false pretense, a source of the most deplorable and dangerous confusion — will become a matter to be judged no longer by the editors and writers of the individual papers themselves, who, for their part, can at most aspire to such a status, but by the Party, to which it falls to decide when this aspiration is legitimate. The principal and most evident reason for the resolution can only lie in the actual state of affairs: in which many newspapers arrogate to themselves the title of Fascist, and do not deserve it.

They do not deserve it because they are insensible to that political and moral atmosphere which the spirit of Fascism is gradually creating, and within which the Fascist breathes who does not shut himself up in his own particular ideas, does not stand apart and cut himself off from the movement of the Party — which must be the movement of the whole Nation; or because they are dominated by small, narrow passions and by murky spirits repugnant to that broad, ideal conception of life and to that pure and elevated moral bearing which forms so great a part of the very essence and strength of Fascism.

Newspapers that fail to win the public’s sympathy and esteem; newspapers that take a certain frivolous delight in scandal and personal gossip, and that leave the most fervent friends and the most sincere admirers of Fascism at a loss, unable to convince themselves that a party informed by the strictest and harshest discipline has no way of preventing certain unworthy journalistic displays. All this, obviously, could not fail to draw the attention of the Party Leadership, which is accordingly setting out to satisfy certain most urgent needs, both of Fascists and of non-Fascists. But this cannot have been the only reason. I believe that the resolution in question was also suggested by a lofty conception of political education, one that must be affirmed and vigorously upheld: the concept of the responsibility of the Fascist press.

In this press, given the unity and the tightly compact organization of the Party, it is necessary above all that the leaders leave nothing and no one in the shadows, in that grey and uncertain zone where an organ or a writer might now be said to be authorized and now be disowned, depending on whether the organ or the writer happens to be well inspired and manages to win applause, or instead meets with the public’s disapproval. If there is a press that can in any way be considered the Party’s own — since this Party is wholly controlled and subject to the judgment and direction that comes from above — then trust must be placed in those who deserve it, and only in those who deserve it; but responsibility must then be assumed for the use that the one so trusted will make of it, until an explicit act intervenes to withdraw the trust once granted. No masks.

Everyone will proceed with an open face. Party responsibility; and therefore the regime’s responsibility. Certainly a most serious burden, one that the regime, and through it the Party, would not take upon itself unless it felt its shoulders powerful enough to bear it, and unless it were confident of being able to walk along open roads and in the full light of day, accounting for all its actions.

But it is equally necessary, and even more so, that whoever believes he may draw upon and arm himself with the whole strength of a Party as vast and powerful as the Fascist Party — which, moreover, is no longer merely a party, inasmuch as it increasingly merges with the State itself, presuming to act and speak in its name, and lending the full weight of the Party to its every action and word — should take upon himself, and feel, the enormous responsibility of everything he does and everything he says. Let him remember that he is no longer a private citizen expressing his opinions for whatever they may be worth, committing no one but himself, and venturing, at his own risk and peril, upon some attitude merely for the pleasure of experimenting according to whatever ideas he happens to have worked out in his own head.

Let him know that Party and Regime are engaged in his conduct and in his writings: that the Italian people look to what he says in order to form an idea of these; and that foreigners, and history itself, will take account of his words not only to judge him, but to judge his country. A double responsibility, then: that of the leaders and that of the rank and file. Recognizing the necessity of this double responsibility seems to me an act of sincerity and political courage, and a lofty resolve toward a new and fruitful discipline within the Party. But I wish to make one further observation. Defining precisely what the Fascist press is has meaning on one condition: that the other press be recognized as exempt from any obligation to Fascistize itself, and yet capable of performing a sound and useful function within the organism of Italian public life.

And if this was indeed the Directorate’s intention (as I do not think can be doubted), then this recognition, on the Party’s part, of the non-Fascist press — coming after the recognition, made a few months ago, of the certainly respectable role that must be allowed, in the economy and in the whole of Italian social and spiritual life, to honest Italians who, without holding a Fascist Party card, nonetheless contribute to the wealth, the progress, and the power of the country — is a political act of great value, destined to produce admirable fruit. For it is fitting that a certain systematic form of polemic against newspapers that are not organs of the Fascist movement should at last cease — a polemic that would tend to exterminate every form of expression of thought unable to claim to represent the thinking of the high hierarchies of Fascism or of the Government.

An unhealthy tendency, which, under the appearance of the most wholehearted Fascist zeal, resolves itself into a muffled and insidious war against the very vitality of Fascism. For, if nothing else, the very thought of the Party and of the Regime would die on the day it had absorbed everything, had no more difficulties to overcome and no more minds to win over. Finally, it may not be entirely superfluous to observe that, even within the ranks of the recognized and card-carrying Fascist press itself, Fascists and non-Fascists alike will have to understand the duties of discipline cum grano salis. This press must indeed mirror the thinking of the Party and of the Government. But what that thinking is will not always be so fixed, or so easily ascertainable, that, as often happens, some young hothead can leap up out of the blue to charge this or that writer with heresy.

One must bear in mind that, as has been said here before, Fascism is a doctrine in motion, and not a catechism. Nor is it even a philosophical system of the kind all systems are usually imagined to be: neat and closed, to be taken or left. The thought of Fascism lies in the facts it is progressively bringing about: it matures in the decisions of the Party, and above all in the laws of the Fascist State. But before a law is reached, the Fascist Party, with the intelligence and the faith of all its followers, searches out its own path. The Duce, in this respect, is a singular and remarkable example of a sincere and unprejudiced search for truth, defining nothing before its time, binding himself to no opinion that more mature reflection and shrewder criticism might contradict. Along the way, the utmost freedom; once the goal is reached, close ranks, each man at his post.

_{Chapter XIV}

The Academy of Italy

Honorable Senators, The Central Office unanimously proposes that you vote to convert into law the decree of 7 January 1926, No. 87, establishing the Royal Academy of Italy. This decree assigns the Nation a lofty ideal program; and the Senate, which has always had the honor of gathering and protecting the most distinguished intellectual forces of Italians in the sciences, letters, and arts, and of directing its most vigilant care to the defense and enrichment of the spiritual interests of the Italian people—both in the memory of the past and in the aspirations of the future—cannot but assent to this noble act of the Government. An act of faith and of will.

Italy is a country rich in traditions, in experience, and in literary custom—the homeland and cradle of those fellowships of intellectual workers which, in the fifteenth century, amid the rise of all the classical forms of thought and life, were the first academies. These went on to reflect, multiplying and taking on varied forms, the development and vicissitudes of our culture, and spread from our country to all the nations of Europe and the West.

Italy, I mean to say, is a country that has already seen many academies born and die, or live now gloriously fruitful and stimulating to the genius and activity of individual writers and artists, now obscurely sterile and flattering to petty provincial vanities and to the idle fashions of decadent and corrupt taste, and to a mind passively inclined to echo stale or foreign ready-made ideas; a country that still possesses many academies, an inheritance of the political and moral fragmentation in which the various Italian regions—if not the various provinces and cities—lay in the past; and which for more than half a century have nonetheless labored admirably, in Turin, Milan, Venice, Bologna, Naples, and Palermo, to rise to national dignity, free of every parochial constraint.

And yet this Country, once its political unity was achieved and consecrated in Rome, promptly saw to the creation there of a national academy which, in its very name, already took up a glorious tradition, and which, through the wealth of scientific value of the memoirs and works it published, at once placed itself in a position to rival the greatest academies of every nation—a powerful instrument of intellectual advancement and of Italian national spirit. Now, in a country such as ours, a new academy might have seemed unnecessary, indeed not even opportune.

It might also have seemed that it would be better, and more in keeping with the style of the Fascist Government and of our time, to provide for Italian culture—and, what matters more, for the very character of Italians—not by indulging any further the old academic spirit of this people, in which literature, science, and art too often became the occasion or pretext for a life of mere form and outward show, but rather by spurring the existing academies to greater activity and even to more constant responsibility, through new arrangements and more generous subsidies. But your Central Office has not been of this opinion.

In rereading the Government’s reports on the present bill to both houses of Parliament, it dwelt on a statement it considered of particular importance: “The new Institute, through which the aspiration of writers, artists, and scholars becomes reality, itself traces its origins to our revolution.” From this follows the conclusion that the Royal Academy of Italy “must have a task altogether different from that of the other Academies existing in the Kingdom, which are otherwise deserving of merit for the contribution they have given to the progress of learning, and whose life and autonomy the present decree guarantees.” These clear words should not be forgotten by anyone who asks the reason for the new Academy. It is founded, then, as the Academy of the new Italy: of the greater Italy that Italians have learned to know and to will in the blood-soaked trenches, in the anguished waiting of supreme risk, and in the exhilaration of final victory—of that Italy which the vast majority of Italians feel to have truly been born after the war, not at all different from and detached from ancient, historic Italy, yet profoundly opposed to that most recent Italy, and to whatever in the old Italy made this possible and all but plunged it into the languor of the immediate postwar period. That vast majority, whose united and firm conviction the Senate interprets with a sensitivity as ready as it is wise and sure.

In this sense the new Institute is named the Academy of Italy: of the Italy, that is, alive today in the soul of Italians, proud of its magnificent traditions, yet not so blindly worshipful of its past as to fail to feel, in manly fashion, the impatient and energetic need to renew that past through work, through discipline, through arms, through thought. The Senate, which has so often given proof of knowing how to heed this new heartbeat of Italy, cannot but properly appreciate what we have called the act of faith implicit in the founding of the new Academy. Academies have at every period been the mirror of a country’s culture and spirit. And in Italy a new spirit is fermenting and maturing, one that has sought its form and its organ of development and historical formation in the Royal Academy of Italy.

This Academy, however—and it is well that the Government has said so explicitly, indeed formally guaranteed it in Article 9 of the decree, a point the Central Office is pleased to note—does not replace any of the existing Italian academies, and will not impose any obstacle or limit on their present activity; rather, it should prove a help to them in a work of collaboration and integration. The Government’s report to the Senate makes this point as well. And in truth the animating thought of the Fascist regime is as far as possible from any negative tendency. It intends not to destroy but to build; and whatever good has been and is being done is respected by it, valued, sought out, and put to use for the construction of the new spirit and the new power of Italy.

Aware of the value of traditions, which are the roots of the individuality of peoples, the substance of their consciousness, the foundation of their will, it aims to revive and strengthen them rather than undermine them. Science, literature, and art belong, moreover, to history, where the new grafts itself onto the old; and what has already been produced is a sacred patrimony and a necessary reserve for whoever has real capacity for new works. The Royal Academy of Italy, then, will be neither a threat to the other academies, nor can it be suspected of becoming a workshop of futurist improvisation.

The new Academy will certainly be what the Head of Government makes of it, through the choice which the decree entrusts to him of the members who will compose it: above all through the choice of the first thirty, who will form its original nucleus and who, having the right to designate the academicians who may be appointed thereafter, will remain the permanent seed of the Academy to come. The life, the fortune, and the historical significance of the Academy of Italy therefore rest in the hands of the Head of Government. Sure hands, in which the Senate places its entire trust.

It draws fresh confirmation today from the very concept that it sees inspiring the proposed institution—one destined, as the Report to the Senate states, to represent “the will of Fascist Italy”: that will which has given us many great proofs of itself, and which in every field tenaciously pursues an ideal of national renewal, so that all the healthy forces of the Italian people may be reawakened and directed toward swifter development; but which in every field is itself, above all, an effort to arouse, educate, invigorate, and render powerful a will that is united, serious, and industrious.

To the Royal Academy of Italy the present decree promises a worthy seat, and promises means adequate to the vast office assigned to it of “promoting and coordinating the Italian intellectual movement.” The Central Office has questioned the Head of Government to obtain assurance regarding the fixed allowance provided for in Article 4, which is to be established by further measure. It is pleased to be able to tell the Senate that it has received precise assurances on this point, guaranteeing that this allowance will be generous, and truly adequate to the functions entrusted to the Academy. The Central Office expresses the wish that the announced measure follow as soon as possible, to show how the Government, with considered foresight, has seen to eliminating the difficulties in which the Academy would otherwise remain immediately and permanently entangled, were the means assigned not proportioned to its aims. For those aims cannot be limited to, nor even chiefly reduced to, the pensions and honors with which the Academy will reward the country’s most eminent intellectual figures. For these men the truest honor and the most coveted reward will always be that of being able to work with their talents, thanks to the instruments provided to them, for the benefit of ideal interests—which are also the deepest real interests of the Nation.

Gentlemen Senators, you who on every occasion have given your warm approval to the resolute purpose of the Head of Government to spur the Italian people toward new greatness, need no lengthy argument to see, in the Royal decree submitted for your vote, the noble and luminous image of the Fatherland envisioned in it—proud of its intellectual glories, reverent toward the men who most greatly honor it in the world, ready to heed the prophetic and admonishing voice of its worthiest future. 2. Speech to the Senate (Session of 16 March 1926.) Honorable Senators, Of the speakers who have addressed the present bill, only the Honorable Ciccotti, it seems to me, has spoken in opposition to the bill itself; but I must confess that, although I made every effort to follow him through the many digressions into which he wandered, I have not managed to grasp the reasons that lead him to oppose it.

Many of the things he told us were already written in my own report in support of the bill he intended to speak against. And I will go further and say that all the various arguments he thought it necessary to raise—as though today the general state of public education were under discussion—pointing out and lamenting the great gaps and serious needs afflicting every branch of learning in Italy today, are, in my view, so many arguments in favor of the present law. For this law, in the end, does nothing but promise and guarantee new and considerable support to Italian scholarship. This follows readily from the content of the law itself; it is explicitly assured by the Report with which it was presented to the Senate; and it has been formally confirmed to our Central Office in a special communication received from the Head of Government.

The means will be ample and adequate to the aims assigned to the new Academy, which will make use of them for the benefit of all the institutions through which the Nation’s intellectual movement is or can be promoted: for the benefit of schools, libraries, and the great scientific or artistic undertakings that need the interest or the favor of the State—including those extensive publications which Ciccotti recalled as the pride of the most illustrious foreign academies—and for the benefit of the present Italian academies, which the new institute does not aim to supplant, but only to assist, in proportion to the means which the Government, through the new Academy, intends to devote to Italian scholarship, and to the authority it intends to confer on this Academy, without, however, limiting or in any way harming the autonomy of the academies already in existence—an autonomy which, according to the provisions of the bill, will remain whole and intact.

I therefore do not see the reason why Senator Ciccotti is concerned about some sort of intellectual dictatorship supposedly to be attributed to the Royal Academy of Italy. There is no dictatorship. And I am entirely in agreement with my colleague Ciccotti that intellectual dictatorship is a contradiction in terms, and that in the field of learning, of science, of thought, one can live only by freedom and autonomy. But in the law under discussion I see no word that in the least threatens these principles. Article 2 states that the Academy is to promote and coordinate the Italian intellectual movement: two words of perfectly Italian coinage, with which I believe even the scrupulous conscience of the Honorable Garofalo may be satisfied, and which are of clear meaning, and fully in keeping, in what they ask of the future Academy, with the sound principles invoked by the Honorable Ciccotti against the feared dictatorship. For if it is true that no initiative of culture, no idea, in short nothing that is called an intellectual movement, arises by imposition or by design, it is equally true and evident that one can neither promote nor coordinate what does not already exist, and that what does exist can, for its happier development and better result, only be placed in more favorable conditions of life. This an institute or a law can do; and this is what the founding of the new Academy aims at.

The Honorable Ciccotti bristles at this law because he finds it vague, indeterminate, and, in this indeterminacy, threatening to the future of the other Italian academies—toward which, I confess, I have not understood whether or how far he is well disposed. Why, he asked himself, why not confine ourselves to coordinating the activities of the academies we already have? But how could that be done, if this is precisely the office of the Academy, which meanwhile he does not want? If he believes that the existing academies need coordination, then let him vote for the present law, which, in recognizing the existing Italian academies as highly deserving of merit in scholarship, aims only to bring their work together into one harmonious and complete program.

That is why I said I could not see any reason why the Honorable Ciccotti should not feel able to endorse the concept that has inspired the decree which is today proposed to the Senate for conversion into law. He told us: academies arose when the need was felt, in intellectual work too, to join the efforts of the learned. But it was later believed that this purpose could better be achieved through universities; and the work of the academies passed to these, and the academies’ reason for being fell away. Now, I take the liberty of observing to the Honorable Ciccotti—who is, as our colleagues know, that distinguished historian—that in fact the very opposite of what he told us occurred.

Universities are institutions that preceded academies by several centuries; and when academies arose, through the work of the humanists, they represented a real advance in the history of culture, one that cannot be disputed. On the other hand, the Honorable Ciccotti himself thought it proper to recall to the Senate’s memory the merits of academies even in periods after that in which the direction of scientific work is supposed to have passed to the universities—not only of Italian academies, over which he chose to pass lightly, but of foreign ones, thanks to which great collections were made possible by the discipline that bound several generations of scholars together around a common program under common rules.

He was quick, indeed, to recall that Italy owes to the effort of one man alone, the great Muratori, the greatest collection of historical sources that it possesses; and that likewise, to the tenacious will of one man alone, the late lamented Fiorini, it owes the reprinting—begun with courage and carried forward with success—of the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores.

But since he entered upon this subject, I do not know why he failed also to recall the parallel collection to that of Muratori which, for forty years now, the Italian Historical Institute (which is itself a kind of academy) has been publishing to the great honor and benefit of scholarship—an institute to which Fiorini himself in the end recognized the value of joining his own work, and to which, after Fiorini’s death, the continuation of the great reprint has likewise been entrusted, a task it will certainly carry through to completion, drawing to itself and directing the labor of a great number of scholars. In conclusion, the Honorable Ciccotti has not told us why the founding of the new Academy cannot prove useful to the studies in whose defense he spoke. Certainly, the new institution does not take away from, but adds to, the endowment assigned by the State to national scholarship.

And of this endowment only a part, and not the greater part, is reserved for the personal stipends of the academicians. This will not be the part on account of which the Senate could say that public money is being put to poor use, or that the means assigned to the intellectual life of the Nation are being diverted from their purpose. The Senate, which has always given proof of knowing how to esteem highly the higher values of the intellect, and of judging with the most exquisite discernment what the Nation owes to the sum of all its energies—but particularly to those by which it spiritually sustains and advances itself—recognizes that anything is well spent which worthily serves to reward those who most honor the country in thought and in art, that is, in the field in which, in the end, all peoples measure their strength against one another. And I turn now to the other speakers.

I say at once that the Central Office recognizes the just basis of the recommendations made by the Honorable Rajna, Crispolti, and Garofalo, and makes them its own; and it trusts that when the Government, through the statute, comes to determine in all necessary detail the manner and means of the Academy’s organization and work—now defined only in general terms in Article 2 of the law—it will bear them in mind. The Statute will give the Academy that precision and definiteness of character, of powers, and of program which may dispel some of the doubts that have been raised in the Senate in the course of the present discussion.

As for the doubts which our venerable colleague Rajna, with his customary meticulous care, has drawn from comparison with academies of other Nations, I believe they may already be dispelled if one considers—the consideration is a very simple and obvious one—that there is no reason to draw the comparison at all. The Royal Academy of Italy does not intend to be, and must not be, either the Institut de France or the Académie Française. In Italy, the various existing royal academies, divided into special classes, correspond to the Institut—above all the Royal Academy of the Lincei (the national Academy). These are to be preserved, and will be preserved.

As for the Académie, it does indeed have a special task with regard to the vocabulary; and the Honorable Garofalo has already expressed, as the Senate has heard, the wish to see a first class or section of the future Italian Academy devoted to the study and safeguarding of the pure national language. On this point, since Senator Rajna too did not fail to turn a wistful thought to a famous Italian academy which once held that office, and was indeed, in its origins, a model for the Académie, I cannot but make a precise statement. It is one entirely contrary—I hope my colleague Garofalo will forgive this frankness—to the tasks he has wished for the new Italian Academy.

For if this Academy is to be, as we intend it to be, the Academy of this new Italy which is conscious of having the future before it, it must have done once and for all with ideas, traditions, and customs that have had their time, and that recall to us the centuries in which Italy gazed idly upon itself and rested content in the cult of certain national idols. Such as this idea of language, to be preserved from every innovation, to be kept intact in its ancient purity as handed down to us by approved writers. It is time everyone understood that there is no language fit for writers, or able to sound on the lips of living men who have their own thought, their own passion, a soul to express, unless it is always new, always original—even if it should resemble that of our fathers and of the ancients!

Yes, there have been writers who made it a point of conscience to speak in their own way—but they were called, for instance, Basilio Puoti, to give a name which Senator Garofalo himself mentioned. By which, of course, I do not mean to praise neologisms and barbarisms. It is a question of good taste, not of vocabulary. The new Academy is justified as the organ of a new spiritual movement. A new movement! But does this new movement exist? And where is it? Where are its manifestations—works of art, systems of thought? These are questions which, precisely because we stand at the beginning of a spiritual movement, cannot receive the precise answers that its adversaries await with a half-smile on their lips. By the time we are able to write the history that is wanted, this movement will already be spent. The present crisis of the Italian conscience is an experience.

And this, Honorable Senators, is not the experience of a party, still less of a few individuals: it is an experience of the vast majority of Italians, a national experience. It is this new spiritual condition that explains the origin of the new Academy. And it is only too natural—I was about to say only too just—that whoever lacks the eyes, or lacks the spirit, to perceive this new condition should fail to be persuaded of the necessity of the institution. When the Accademia della Crusca was founded by the convivial men of letters of Florence at the close of the sixteenth century, Italy was (at least in Florence) weary and exhausted by its own great literary creations, and had turned, in reflection, to philology and to the analytical study of the form of those creations. There were no longer writers, and grammarians came in their place. Unable any longer to create, men turned back to review what had already been made.

Analysis, which always tends toward mechanism, succeeded the synthesis of the spirit. No one will deny the Crusca all merit, since even a dictionary, when it is made, and made well, is useful; but Italy, fortunately, has emerged from that period of stasis, and the Crusca no longer holds the interest it once did. The Accademia del Cimento arose in the following century because there had been a Galileo, because there had been his pupils, and because one and the same spirit, one and the same passion for research and experiment, united them and bound them together in common labor. In Florence, the Cimento; in Rome, the Lincei: two glorious academies, but both of which fell when the Galilean school declined and set.

The Government’s Reports, with which this law was presented to the two houses of Parliament, take as their starting point the new fact which the historian, the Honorable Ciccotti, will not wish to deny. Call it revolution, or whatever else one likes: it is a new spiritual reality seeking its way. And there is no cause for wonder, Honorable Ciccotti, if it still has something of the vague and undetermined about it. Life, when it awakens, and is at the height of its vigor, and promises the most, is not yet fully determined, and has not yet yielded those results by which it might be defined.

Article 2 of the law, in charging the Academy with promoting and coordinating the Italian intellectual movement, adds: “preserving the national character pure, according to the genius and traditions of the race.” These are words that may sound like mere words to minds not disposed to accept them—words repeated so often, and worn and abused through use and misuse. But they are perfectly clear to the vast majority of Italians today. And with this I believe I have answered a request for clarification addressed to me on this point by the Honorable Senator Vitelli. To whom I have no difficulty in replying that the existing Italian academies too have always remembered that they were Italian.

But I add, without hesitation, that there is more than one way of remembering this, and that the way in which the Italian character of Italian thought will have to be kept in view by the new Academy may also be a new way, if it becomes a fundamental guiding criterion—one of those criteria capable of informing the whole activity of an academy, just as they can inform the whole activity of an individual. But if Senator Vitelli wants something quite precise and almost tangible that establishes a difference between the new Academy and the others, I ask him to note a feature of the new institute that has been passed over in silence throughout this entire discussion. The Royal Academy of Italy, unlike any we have had until now, embraces within its scope not only the sciences but also the arts.

Too often we have had to hear that our very own most distinguished writers (not to mention artists, who were always excluded) were able to cross the threshold of the academies, in which the Nation gathered its greatest minds, only because—at least those few who managed it—they were not merely poets or writers, however great their worth, but were also scholars of poetry and literature, historians, and therefore, in a sense, at the same time men of science. The Royal Academy of Italy will gather into its single flame all the brightest rays of the nation’s intelligence. And in this sense it will be the first truly national Academy that Italy has ever had.

An Academy of the Nation, which finds in the State its practically highest form and its most powerful strength. Senator Crispolti—according to the interpretation which Senator Vitelli, perhaps out of one of those mischievous pleasantries he is fond of indulging in, gave to his speech—would like to see the Academy of Italy opened also to students of theology. And here Senator Vitelli recalled the old theological faculties suppressed in Italian universities fifty years ago, and cited by way of comparison the flourishing theological schools of the German universities, and asked, I believe, that both academy and university open their doors to theology. These are proposals I cannot accept, for reasons which I shall confine myself to touching on with the greatest discretion.

It is enough to note that the comparison so often attempted in this matter between Protestant countries and Italy is impossible precisely because Italy is not Protestant. The German university reflects German culture and history, in which even Catholicism itself takes on a character different from that in Catholic countries; and theological studies draw, in Protestant universities and even in Catholic ones, their stimulus and sustenance from the nature of the relations between State and Church, and from attitudes of conscience that do not exist, and never could exist, in Italy. There, accordingly, these subjects remain and must remain the exclusive domain of the Church. I do not wish to try the Senate’s patience any further.

I will close with the observation with which my report began: the principal reason why your Central Office proposes that you give your vote to the founding of the Royal Academy of Italy. Honorable Senators, this Academy is an act of faith. In founding it, Italy affirms the awakening of its conscience, of its inner energies—the promise of an intellectual life worthy of the great power that Italy wishes to be, and will be—and prepares for this life its highest organ. (Lively and general applause.) Source text: Giovanni Gentile, Fascismo e cultura, Milano, Treves, 1928, Chapter XIV, «L’Accademia d’Italia», pp. 122–141. Translation produced for academic/research use; original Italian text in the public domain.

_{Chapter XV}

Words to the Young

We are in the fifth year of the revolution, that is, of the new Italy; and we are still at the beginning. Much has been done; but very much remains to be done; and the work already accomplished would come to nothing if it were not renewed day by day in the youthful soul, and in the eager passion with which the Fascist must labor for the building of the fatherland and of the civilization in whose image he exalts himself. The new laws will indeed remain a dead letter unless they are observed, and made to be observed, with deep conviction and adherence of spirit—that is to say, with absolute devotion to an ideal still to be achieved. The reforms have already been drawn up and enacted; but they require sustained effort of study and of organization on the part of the whole people that has faith in them.

Internal opposition has been overcome; but there remains, and it is a harsh one, external opposition, which Fascism will not overcome except by the constant daily proof of its own historical necessity and consequent vitality and importance. A remarkable discipline has been established in national life, one that has drawn every class, every age, every activity into its ranks. But this discipline must pass from being an external order to becoming an inner hierarchy and harmony, through the ever greater clarification of the Fascist program and the ever more intimate adherence of each individual soul to the regime and to the men in whom it is embodied. The Fascist party has almost become the Italian nation, which turns with unshakable faith to its Chief, to its Duce: who is no longer merely the head of the party, nor only of the government, but of the Italian people.

This people, however, crowds around him, yet cannot all reach him, and must have his thought interpreted for it and receive his orders through agents and secretaries who are not always—indeed are rarely—its authentic interpreters; and from this arises a dissatisfaction and unease which no act of will can suddenly cut short, since the remedy can come only from the slow formation and selection of the party’s own ranks. And then, and then… Fascism, once it has achieved its settled order, or a form that satisfies the most pressing political and moral needs of its followers and of the Italian people, will indeed have created a great force. But this force will then have to be used.

Italians, with their restored finances, with their more powerful arms, with the united will of a whole people reinvigorated in its faith and in its culture, in its labor and in its trade, will have to demonstrate in deeds this force created by Fascism. They will have to make the new history for which they are preparing themselves today. And this will be the work of the young. It falls to them, in particular, to prepare themselves, and to open their souls to the generous faith that Fascism has instilled in Italian hearts. This faith is not fulfilled by carrying a party card or falling into formation, still less by the easy pursuit of anti-Fascists, or by the carefree singing of youthful hymns, or by the pomp of ceremonies—however necessary these may be.

Those who sing or march best, and are least often absent from the Party’s rites, are often precisely those who are most ignorant of the Fascist’s true duty, and who most deserve to be shunned and cast out. Certainly, a mass party cannot be formed and maintained through the most scrupulous selection of the men it gathers beneath its banner. And the masses are always a great social force, one that may not be neglected in politics. But the masses, on the other hand, cannot be held together except by ideas, by moral forces, the lack of which has at every period been the cause of the dispersal and disbanding of multitudes that had seemed most solidly united. Fascism therefore has need of moral forces. And these do not arise, and do not develop, without that ardor in which youth is rich, and without those efforts which must above all be asked of the young, however much they may feel their difficulty. What is needed is that will by which each one looks more to himself than to others, and thinks first of correcting his own faults, laboring, through toil, self-denial, and sacrifice, to build his own character. A will that knows no limit to self-devotion, nor any truce in the struggle by which a life worth living is won. An austere, silent, religious will. This is what is asked of young Italians today. It is not a program of ideas to be received and spread abroad.

For Fascism is not, and never will be, a catechism, or a doctrine already formulated, or one to be formulated in sacramental propositions. Fascism is life, and a doctrine of life; a direction and an inspiration. No one has ever thought of making it a shirt of Nessus. Many, it is true, fall into the error of seizing on some phrase in passing and fixing it as an eternal truth; of mistaking a contingent method for a maxim or an absolute principle, and busy themselves defining untouchable dogmas and raising insurmountable barriers. But from these theologians of Fascism, these ignorant theorizers, these timid and suspicious men who would dam up the revolution, the young must keep their distance.

The sturdy trunk of Fascist faith admits, and can bear, many branches of ideas, in which the one indispensable thing is that each person bring to it seriousness of inquiry and conviction, sincerity and honesty of thought. What is indispensable is that each one form his own ideas for himself, honestly, each thinking with his own head, and cultivating that head as much as he possibly can, since it is his to put to the fullest use. And therefore the young must shun rancorous polemics and partisan attachment to this or that doctrine as the one authentic Fascist doctrine, and shun as well all academic intolerance—which is often something worse than mere pedantry among intellectuals, concealing self-interested personal rivalries and petty private reprisals. Fascism is an elevation and a renewal of the spirit.

It is an aristocracy of character and an ardor of souls yearning for a higher moral life. The young must know this, and must feel it. Source text: Giovanni Gentile, Fascismo e cultura, Milano, Treves, 1928, Chapter XV, «Parole ai giovani», pp. 141–145. Translation produced for academic/research use; original Italian text in the public domain.

_{Chapter XVI}

The Religious Problem in Italy

Gentlemen, The subject of my inaugural address could well be the theme of one of the usual university lectures. But let me tell you at once that I have not come to deliver an academic dissertation. I am here to talk with you about a question that I understand and feel to be one of those questions touching the fundamental chords of the human heart, one in which no one has ever been, or can ever be, uninterested. I will tell you, too, that I have not set out to speak to you as a scholar or as a politician, but as one man speaks, openly, to men bound to him by the same interests and the same feelings. And so I confess, without vanity or false modesty, that in beginning to speak I trust I shall hold your full attention, and I do not fear that, once this hour is over, most of you will go away shrugging your shoulders and smiling at the melancholy musings of philosophers.

The problem that I shall try this evening to set out clearly in its precise terms is indeed one of the most delicate of philosophical problems, but of that philosophy — more or less reflected upon — common to every human soul, which arises and rises again continually from the depths of all the thoughts of daily life. A philosophical problem because a human problem. But also a historical problem. For the very concept of religiosity, to which the first part of my address will be devoted, will serve to introduce us to the examination and understanding of a question that concerns no longer our life as human beings in general, but our life as Italians: a question that arises from our national history and today forces itself upon our attention, arouses our present interest, and is alive among the problems that most torment the Italian spirit today.

And it is worth our while to study and penetrate the difficulties proper to religious consciousness in general, and to see how to overcome them from our own point of view, in the form they have historically assumed in the course of our national consciousness. * Let us begin, then, with the philosophical problem. Let us avoid abstruseness, and see this problem as it arises from the thought of everyone. For man does not live without finding himself faced with this problem; and if he fails to examine it, define it, and come to clarity about it, it weighs upon his soul and becomes a torment, and often an anguish.

Man, in fact, does not live by instinct, dominated and blindly driven by the laws of life: he is conscious of what surrounds him and of what befits him to do in this world that surrounds him; he may content himself with obscure, confused ideas, but he always thinks, reflects, and keeps his eyes open on things, on men, and on himself. He looks about him, and taking in the great spectacle unfolding before him in the infinity of space and time, he pictures to himself a natural world, possessing certain forms, a certain aspect, and certain immutable laws that make it what it is, and which man must recognize as such even as a rule for his own action directed toward the satisfaction of his needs.

He turns his gaze to that inner world which matures within his heart and mind in an unceasing succession of feelings, ideas, desires, purposes, and resolutions; and from this he draws another image, as it were of a second nature, which likewise has its own determinate mode of being and its own logic — that is, its own laws, from which man will try in vain arbitrarily to free himself. And in the very act of giving life, within himself, to a thought or an act of will whose worth he feels because he knows he thinks it or performs it by himself, on his own absolute initiative, in freedom — behold, the movement of the soul is accomplished, and he sees it before him as a fact that likewise takes its place within the infinite web of reality, which is what it is, outside our dominion, wholly immutable in its essence: a reality that we may know or not know, know wholly or in part, and in greater or lesser part, but which is always the same. And our very capacity to know it presupposes that it is in itself wholly determined, like a truth waiting to be discovered — like a vein of gold buried in the deep strata of the earth, even though undiscovered, unknown, and unsuspected by man. Nature, it is said, is beyond our power, and we cannot command it except on condition of serving it. And what of our spiritual life?

Yes — in the act by which it matures within us, we have faith that we direct its course, that we possess it, that we are its authors; but in the very instant it rises before us as a defined moment, as a concrete form — an idea, a system, an action, a sorrow, a joy, any content whatever of our consciousness — to which the soul might turn in order to take possession of it, to clasp it to itself and say, “Here is my life, my world” — that life is already swept by the present into the past: into the irrevocable past, which no longer belongs to us and escapes us and stands opposed to us as death to life. To know is to objectify. To fix our eyes upon our own inner self is to render it external to us, to estrange it from us: to find it before us, ungraspable. Is this not the very nature of thought?

Every effort it makes to take possession of its own life, as this life takes shape and is realized in some determinate form, is destined to end in the anguish of Orpheus, who, anxious to see his Eurydice, looks back at her and thereby drives her back into the underworld. This is the anguish of the human spirit: that its present, that present, flows ceaselessly into the past — into the great lake of things in which thought is mirrored, and finds itself reflected there, motionless, part of a reality that already exists and which it has nothing left to do but to know as it is, and resign itself to it. Is this not the tragedy of life? This continual setting of all that lives? This headlong race of every living thing toward death?

The protagonist of this tragedy is man, human thought, which labors unceasingly to set before itself a reality that presents itself to it by an alien, independent, inaccessible necessity; so that pleasure itself turns into sorrow (there is no greater sorrow...), and everything slips from our grasp, and the evil we did (which lay within us not to commit) once committed stands there before us, the terrifying shade of Banquo, gnawing at us and pursuing us relentlessly: an indestructible remorse, a shame that cannot be redeemed, a dead man who cannot rise again — oppressed by iron necessity. Nor will the sun ever rise in the west, nor will all the waters of the ocean suffice to wash away the stain of betrayal. What has happened has happened. And everything has already happened, once we think it. Now, what has already been is an antecedent, and therefore a condition, a limit upon our acting.

So that we cannot turn to reality and think it without feeling ourselves limited by it, gripped as in a vice that dries up in our hearts every hope, every confidence in acting freely to make for ourselves a life such as we might dream of. Every desire becomes vain, since, once the freedom by which we trusted to govern the course of things and to shape the world according to our will is extinguished, a fatal law governs everything, and sweeps us, willing or unwilling, into the universal cycle of being, indifferent to our wishes and our laments, to our prayers and our imprecations.

Even when from the depths of our breast there bursts forth a powerful force that seems to shatter the shell of our limited nature, making us partakers of immortal life and capable of creating some great work of good by which the sum of this reality, not ours and independent of us, is increased and enriched — even then, when we look upon this work as it suddenly rises up and shines before us, filling our soul with wonder, we are seized by a suspicion that easily turns into certainty: that we are not its authors, but that some hidden power has made an instrument of us for a superhuman creation — a power that pre-exists us and therefore dominates our very being. To resist it would be vain and foolish; to its law the wise man will submit; its necessity every man who is not frivolous, and who takes life seriously, will acknowledge.

But this seriousness of man — who knows well that he can create nothing, that he is the absolute origin of nothing, and therefore cannot give rise to so much as a blade of grass or a grain of sand; who cannot encounter or deal with any reality other than that which neither he nor other men make; who, in short, is born into a world that already exists and will remain in the future essentially what it already is, incapable of changes that are not already foreseeable in themselves because predetermined within the system of its own structure, and which stands there solid and massive to break every human presumption and every vain wish for impossible reforms — this seriousness, which makes man thoughtful, which makes him weigh every action, every word, every thought, and sets him before death and mystery, and makes him feel his radical impotence and wretchedness and nothingness — is this anything other than the sense of the divine?

When man feels that he has everything before him and nothing in himself, he bends his knees, prostrates himself, and worships the Infinite on which he depends and from which he cannot distinguish himself. He lives religiously. But man ought not to think — that is, he ought not to live — in order not to fall into such a situation. He is therefore naturally religious. And his whole thought may be regarded as a continuous construction of divine reality, wholly objective, set over against him, infinite in its position, as a reality beyond which (so long as it is thought) it is impossible to think any other. To think is to present oneself before God. And the more one thinks, the more one will feel the presence of God — of God, who is everything, before man, who is nothing. On the one hand, then, the necessity of religion.

And you feel that I am looking at only one side of the question, touching on it, passing over it. But what I have said is enough to show us that man cannot organize his own spiritual life — that is, the exercise of thought — without a religion. It would suffice to deepen the considerations already made, and to draw out the consequences of the conclusion reached, in order to define precisely the concept of the religion essential to the human spirit, and to determine the goal toward which the spirit tends in order to satisfy this need in the highest manner most in keeping with its nature. But, on the other hand, the spirit cannot abandon itself to this tendency, which draws it toward annihilating itself before a reality that stands absolutely opposed to it and transcends it, because its nature is likewise invincibly repelled by such annihilation.

The man who in the face of the infinite must, by necessity, negate himself is also the very man whom religion itself celebrates in the shaping of its dogma and in its worship; he is the man who, just as he subjects dogma to a labor of development and interpretation all his own — through which religion is realized by way of a laborious history, made entirely of human thought and struggle — likewise develops and idealizes ever further the divine cult, not only through liturgical ceremonies that are continually adapted and modified, but also by means of works of sacred architecture, painting, music, and poetry, in which man best displays his inventive, original, creative power, and evidently brings to reality a contribution that without human genius could not even be conceived.

It is true that this very creative genius proper to art has itself, at all times, also been regarded as a divine inspiration, by which man becomes once again an instrument in the hands of the divinity, and artistic creation a miracle summoned up from the unconscious, unreflecting depths of the soul by a superior and mysterious force — a miracle of which the artist himself would be not the author but the spectator. * And so be it. But man, however wide he opens his eyes and arches his brows before what appears to him and which he does not know he himself has generated, can in no case fail to judge. Whether or not he judges the object of his thought, he cannot fail to judge his own thought itself: he cannot fail to esteem it as true thought, that is, as not to be confused with any of the infinite other thoughts that would be false; he cannot fail to feel it as his own, as that which he chooses and discerns from error, and affirms; nor can he disown it or treat it indifferently as one of the many thoughts that others might think. Discernment, choice, opposition to error, affirmation or appropriation — in all this the subject sets himself at the very foundation of truth itself; he sets himself up as a free activity that is determined and conditioned by nothing external, since he could think of anything whatsoever as external to himself only by a judgment which would always presuppose his own free activity. Est Deus in nobis; and He speaks through our mouth.

True: but this is unthinkable unless we set ourselves over against Him and listen to His voice, and judge as true this perception by which we think that He is within us and speaks in us. Without freedom, not only would the activity by which God reveals and presents Himself to us not be ours; but not even the very act by which we recognize this transcendent revelation and presentation would be ours. * Man, therefore, cannot strip himself of this fundamental freedom, which is the essential condition of any activity he attributes to himself as endowed with worth and distinct from every other possible, divergent activity. If God is everything to us, this has meaning only on one condition: that we are able to think this.

And here, together with this indefeasible and radical freedom, there rises again the concept of man who, far from being nothing before the infinite, is himself everything: an activity (or, if one prefers, a being that manifests itself precisely in its activity, in thinking) that is infinite, and therefore unconditioned, and therefore free. The position is reversed. And religion itself, becoming the thought of man, develops historically, freeing itself from the immobility of a purely objective reality, of a God who abides eternally: being, thought, will immutable, because originally and immediately perfect. And man rouses himself in the consciousness of subjective omnipotence, as an energy that unfolds to infinity, breaking down every obstacle and freely constructing a human world, luminous, transparent, wholly spiritual.

And if, in this surge of faith in his own capacity and originality, he is assailed and momentarily even overcome by doubt, in that very skepticism he affirms an unconquerable faith of his own, an unyielding right to say for himself, on his own authority, what and how a thing is to be thought; and the more the sphere of the world through which his thought ranges is narrowed, the more he rises up and exalts himself in the consciousness of his own thought. Man lives by this subjective faith, through which he feels his own vigor, and works, and strives, and — in every case — thinks and criticizes and probes and, restless, never rests, but seeks and builds, and trusts that he will create a reality he can regard with pride as his own.

By this faith great things are done, and humble things too; by this faith one feels the responsibility of the life that lies in our hands, and idleness and vain contemplation and all wasted time become a matter of guilt for every man of spiritual sensibility. By this same faith, the very men who feel the need for religion also subject it to criticism: they abandon themselves to God and rest for a moment in Him, and then rouse themselves, assailed by melancholy and discouragement; and from blind belief doubt is born, from the Church heresy, from religion philosophy. An alternating movement divides man between consciousness of the divine and consciousness of himself; and he passes and repasses from the one pole to the other, anxiously and laboriously seeking equilibrium.

Now he turns to God and plunges into Him; now he returns to himself, like a giant who touches the earth to draw fresh strength and rise again upon himself. God and thought thus present themselves as the two opposite poles of life, equally necessary, equally essential, but opposed and contradictory.

Hence the profound humanity of the religious problem. In every human heart the dilemma poses itself: — Is it I who think God? or is it God who thinks in me? — The two solutions are equally deficient and inadequate to the twofold need of the human spirit to be free and yet not to move in a void. A twofold need that is a single need. For it is the very concept of objective, absolute, divine reality that demands an assent, a judgment — which would be impossible without the free activity of thought. And indeed the whole history of religions is agitated by this effort to save together both human freedom and the transcendence of God. God must be everything; yet man must nevertheless be something — indeed, thinking it through, he must himself be everything, in order to be that “something” which must, after all, be something.

Thought is always held in suspicion, yet is also sought after, invited, urged to think in order to recognize the truth. This contradiction, this perpetual struggle, is the problem immanent in the religious spirit. The solution? It is what it can be, what it must be: not the suppression of the two terms, neither of which can fall without dragging the other down with it. Not their unification into some comprehensive term which, assigning to each of the two its own domain, would separate and juxtapose them — for such separation and juxtaposition would be a disowning of their nature as reciprocally implying one another, whereby thinking is not possible without thinking God, but neither is it possible to think God without thinking. Not a static unity achieved and fixed forever.

But the unity of struggle: thought that lives always in this torment of turning toward God, and of reaching Him and coming to rest in Him (cupio dissolvi!), yet never reaching Him except to return again to itself, rising and ever rising from grade to grade, without ever pausing. A moving unity, in eternal movement of self-realization. A living unity, and therefore restless, forever unsatisfied with itself. There is no other possible solution. Such is the philosophical problem, and such its solution. But in the light of these concepts we can now understand the historical problem of the religion of the Italian people — that is, the relations between the historical character of the Italian spirit and religiosity. Here too I shall proceed by allusion, but, I hope, with clarity.

When one speaks of Italian history or of the Italian people, I stand with those who trace its origins to the age of the Communes, out of which they see the Humanism and the Renaissance emerging. Rome, like Greece, stands in the background of the picture of every modern civilized nation. Rome fills the memory and the imagination of the men of our Communes and of the great Renaissance; but the Rome to which the memory and aspirations of the man of the Middle Ages and of the new age turn is a Rome that lives on in the memory and aspirations of men whose conditions of life, culture, interests, and spiritual motives were quite different from those of the ancient Romans — it is not historical Rome.

Present-day Italy, with its faults and its merits, with its character and its historical physiognomy, has its cradle in our free medieval cities, where the people gathered together in defense against the feudal lords, and began, through arts and trade and commerce and navigation and study, a new life that would flower in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the Renaissance. And in this epoch of national travail, of spiritual originality and fecundity, the Italian character was shaped and formed.

It can indeed fundamentally be called the character of Renaissance man — of that century in which Italians filled the whole civilized world with the light of their genius, when scholars and students from every part of the world turned eagerly to Florence, to Padua, to Bologna, to Rome for instruction, when our artists were contended for by every court, and when the ferment of Italian intellectual life produced those universal men, like Alberti and Leonardo, who aroused the admiration of every people — bold discoverers of new lands, shrewd statesmen, and most valiant captains of fortune, teachers of war to the most seasoned peoples of Europe. What was the characteristic note of Renaissance man? It was precisely what historically empowered and made the Italian people of the Renaissance excel above all other peoples — what historically won for them a palm that no other people can dispute. It was the aesthetic attitude of the spirit, through which the Italians achieved that wonderful flowering in every art, and that splendid poetry running from Dante to Ariosto, in whose poems the human spirit gave proof of its boundless constructive power. Art is the realm of the subjectivity of the spirit.

Through art the spirit moves in absolute freedom within a world of which it is itself the creator and the arbiter; in which it finds nothing that it has not itself put there; encounters nothing opaque that it cannot itself understand and penetrate; nothing that contradicts or opposes its tendencies; nothing that halts it in its spontaneous course.

In the world of art, man at a stroke sequesters himself from reality (natural, historical, or divine) — from that reality which is not his own work, and which practical man finds confronting him as a limit to which he must adapt — the reality of life and death, where all that exists is born and all that one goes on vainly desiring dies; he sequesters himself from it in order to give free flight to his fantasy: that is, to a thought which is like a dream, one that is not measured against the solid reality of waking life, and is therefore judged neither existent nor non-existent. And thus he creates a world entirely his own, immediately subjective, which will vanish at the breath of reality, with which the artist will indeed resume contact for the necessities of living.

Because of this aesthetic attitude, already in Humanism the spirit begins to feel keenly the power of man and of thought, and exalts the individual as the maker of his own life and destiny — as indeed, without contradiction, he undoubtedly is, in the world of art and of intelligence. If the specter of fortune rises before him as a co-operating and limiting factor of human power amid the concourse of circumstances from which the possibility of success arises for each man, he fights this specter and trusts to the concept of “virtù,” as Machiavelli understands it — an individual will that never swerves from its goal but pursues it with logical and pitiless coherence along a path illuminated by intelligence. It is the age of the Signorie, in which politics itself becomes an art of personal cunning and of unscrupulous and absolutely free — even arbitrary — construction of the State.

History is read and pondered with the conviction that men are always the same, playthings of a mechanism which it suffices to master in order to dominate them. In this bold self-confidence, whereby the individual detaches himself in thought from the existing world in order to fashion one after his own fashion, of which he can boast himself the author, the spirit becomes alienated from every religious conception of life that binds the soul of the individual to a reality transcending it and enclosing it within the bounds of its own nature and laws; it takes to closing its eyes to the more serious aspects of life, which compel reflection and make one feel the responsibility of every minute lived, which make one bow the head and suffer; it dreams of a joyful, carefree life, free from the goad of sacrifice, free from anxiety over arduous goods, free from the thought of death.

The ancestral religion is professed as a form from which the spirit has fled; one is Catholic, and defends the Church and the traditional faith, but without ardor, without passion, without pain, as wise and practical men of the world do. The soul takes refuge in erudition and witticisms, in art and in the art of living; it takes refuge also in philosophy, but in a philosophy that does not teach one how to live, because it does not look at man as he is, bound by interests and duties to family, city, world, and God, but arises instead from a need of abstract intelligence, which takes up certain problems handed down by the schools and wallows in them, cultivating them intellectualistically as subject matter that has its purpose in itself. There were, of course, exceptional spirits. It suffices to recall Savonarola.

His life is the fusion and the passionate, tumultuous unity of a powerful individuality and a religiosity that mingles with moral and political life, pervading and inflaming it — and, in the fierce struggle between the individuality of the friar of San Marco and the Church and the very political forces of the time, and amid the indifference of even the most profound and self-aware spirits of the age (Ficino, for example), it drives him to his execution.

But the pyre of Savonarola, in that city flourishing with every art most humane and most splendid of the Renaissance, in the very society of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Niccolò Machiavelli, is clear evidence of this truth: that Savonarola is the negation of the spirit of the Renaissance — an artistic and, at the same time, scientific or philosophical spirit; a spirit, that is, that entrusts itself with absolute abandon to its own powers, and lives by itself, a life most rich and luxuriant, nourished by the very unrestrained impetus of a freedom unaware of any limit, but within an abstract, subjective sphere, indifferent therefore to the great religious and moral problems of serious life — of the life in which every good is a hard-won conquest, in which the personality of the individual is interwoven with that of many others in a community that demands self-abnegation, the sacrifice of the particular to the universal, of private interest to public interest, of the citizen to the fatherland, in the arts both of peace and of war.

The Italians of the Renaissance had for their fatherland a distant, vanished Rome, and for their present, only intelligence and culture. Hence the greatness of Italy in that age; but a greatness one-sided and defective. A great civilization, but an abstract one. Great individuals and great minds, but weak states and feeble wills. And so the Italians remained divided, discordant, and became the prey of foreigners. And little by little the vein of this wholly subjective spiritual life ran dry within them, and the Italian people declined. It declined because the spirit emptied itself, and took to idling in vacuous literature and in academies. There were no longer those free thinkers who, in the heroic age of thought, had paid with their lives for their abstract faith. Martyrdom disappeared from Italian history for almost two centuries.

Bruno, Campanella, the great utopian philosophers, who presumed to profess and spread — in a society they practically ignored because they theoretically failed to understand it — a free philosophy of vast breadth, were for centuries either forgotten or persecuted, in an age when the mere mention of their names became a fault, an impiety. We today, from the height of historical judgment, can say that they were wrong in their heroism, and that their martyrdom was necessary and therefore just. It was just because they philosophized with abstract intelligence, in a world as real as that into which the artist’s fantasy transports us, without connection to the true and proper reality of life, in which they too, like everyone else, were bound to live.

Bruno above all, the great martyr, whose memory will always be sacred to all who can understand the worth of a life consecrated to thought, deluded himself naively into thinking he could live free in a subjective world of his own creation, in open contrast with the real world — a world hemmed in and governed by overbearing forces, ready to crush and grind down every impulse of individual rebellion and resistance. It is thus no wonder that his contemporaries, and those who came after and moved along the same path, did not understand him, and turned their backs on him! It was too open a break that the philosopher, drawn on by the force of logic and the need for coherence, made with a life not grasped, not recognized, not felt — that serious reality with which every man who lives seriously, religiously, must always reckon.

The irreligion, the indifferentism proper to the Italian mentality of the Renaissance, revealed itself without the slightest restraint, and provoked that disapproval which may at times be the effect of insincerity and hypocrisy, but which is always, in any case, the reaction that the solid, objective structure of life opposes to the arbitrary denials of the individual. The Italian spirit remained empty. And this is the profound origin of the decadence. All the other so-called causes are merely various aspects of this one fact: the lack of a vigorous conception of life, of a faith, of a religion rooted in men’s hearts, fostered and promoted by reflection and by national culture. * I shall not trace the history of the stages through which the Italian spirit passed in its Risorgimento, a movement characterized by the birth of a literature whose authors no longer knew how to distinguish the problems of the intellect from those of life, and who felt themselves to be men and citizens as well as scholars and poets. Man is reborn. Parini is an example; but the symbol of this recovery, and the clear beginning of a new history of the Italian spirit, is Alfieri, who brings into art, into letters, onto the stage, and, so to speak, before our very eyes, no longer the poet or the man of letters content to arouse an interest or applause, but a man — indeed, man himself — vibrant with passion. That passion which makes man serious, mindful of himself in his relations with others, with a consciousness that transcends the limits of individual personality and is therefore a civic, national consciousness. In Alfieri we see at once the religious sense of life awaken, shown, if nothing else, by the Asti-born writer’s scorn for the fashionable irreligion of his day.

But in the generation that followed, when the Alfierian spark, amid the upheaval of the Napoleonic period — which forcibly drew Italians to arms and to concern for public affairs — became a conflagration, and from 1821 to 1848 the new national consciousness matured, the whole of Italian life was marked by a vigorous flowering of religiosity. Manzoni, Mazzini, Rosmini, and Gioberti, the leading figures of this age, are, in various forms, eminently religious spirits, who cast a faith into the souls of Italians — of all the Italians who felt the keen need of a renewal, and who bestirred themselves so that the Italian people might awaken and impose the problem of their own existence upon the other nations. They are the forerunners.

They know, like Alfieri, that they are speaking to the future Italian people, who indeed, when with Cavour they find the way, will come forward, will assert themselves, and will become Italy. An Italy only just sketched out, which its very first architects felt to be empty at the outset — without Italians, without an already-formed character, without a firm consciousness able to face all the problems that a nation just now born must resolve. Consider, for example, the problem of the capital: after the intuition and faith, sure in its aim but still vague as to its means, of Cavour, how much uncertainty and wavering, how much trepidation and error!

The Gordian knot was suddenly cut with a stroke of the sword: but to how many did the new situation seem a real solution? Italy had leapt into life all at once, by a miracle — one of those miracles that are the normal products of a spirit animated by a great faith: a moral miracle, accomplished by the intelligence and the heart of a few. But in that mighty creative effort, the creative energy seemed almost to exhaust itself. Spirits were left bewildered.

The old Italian of the Renaissance seemed to rise again: the cultivated man, but of an abstract culture (how vividly, after 1860, the anxious desire of Italians to modernize their culture made itself felt, appropriating the methods and results of the labor of the more advanced nations!); the man who, in order freely to expound his thought and proceed swiftly and boldly in scientific inquiry, must suppress in himself all religious feeling. Religion became a synonym for obscurantism. The contingent relations of the new State with the Church likewise drove men’s minds toward a certain insipid and foolish ideal of a secular mentality, in whose culture (art, science, philosophy) there is no room for religion. What had been the great strength of the Renaissance seemed shaken, collapsed. In books, in schools, in hearts, a desert was made.

We, who grew up in that atmosphere, still have our minds full of the discordant voices of those who stood guard over the State, over the school, and over the national culture, and of those who nonetheless fought pro aris et focis against the school and its new culture, and at times even against the State: and before our eyes there still remains the spectacle of those combatants who long and irreducibly held the field, firm in the conviction that the struggle could end in only one way — the defeat of one of the two adversaries. This was the Italian religious problem of yesterday. Today conditions have changed. There is the war between then and now. We fought it in the very spirit of the Risorgimento; and it is, in truth, the conclusion of that movement, even though not all its goals have been achieved.

But with this difference: that for the wars of ‘48 and ‘49 and of ‘59 and ‘60, the faith of a few sufficed. Our war demanded the sacrifice and the faith of all Italians. It was the first great national war, the first to set the Italian people before death for the life of the Fatherland. The spiritual shock it variously produced was therefore vast, universal. Fascism today is the living and active consciousness of the new national soul, of the young Italy (this second “Young Italy”) that made the war. Hence the attitude of the Italian soul toward religion has changed today. Today, the flame that seized men’s hearts and made so many thousands of young men, to whom life smiled with all its allurements, die serenely — that flame, taken up by the Italian people animated by the Fascist spirit, must not, cannot any longer be extinguished, if all those deaths and the final victory are not to be in vain.

And to keep that flame alive means to restore the sense of the seriousness, the religiousness, of life: to revive throughout the whole Italian people, sustaining it with the assent and the care of those who direct national politics and national thought, that religiosity which had grown listless and mortified in mere outward forms, or had been shattered and dissipated into shallow and inconsistent feelings and notions, or had been driven and compressed into a lifeless nucleus cut off from the whole complex of relations in which man lives. This religiosity, lying dormant at the bottom of men’s souls, deposited there from generation to generation by education and by the natural continuation of the moral patrimony of the people in its historical continuity and unity, has therefore been sought out.

It has been cultivated and promoted, surrounded with all the respect that is the very atmosphere of spiritual values. Hence the attitude of Fascism toward religion, already commemorated (as they say in the language of accountants!) in the first article of the Statute.

Hence it was possible, in 1923, to enact school legislation that would have seemed absurd ten years earlier: the teaching of Catholic doctrine was introduced into all the public schools of the people; religion was proclaimed the foundation and crown of all education; a legal regime of higher education was established permitting free Catholic Universities on a footing of absolute equality with the State’s own institutions of higher learning — and not out of some vain principle of secular, agnostic liberalism that lets things be and lets things pass, but out of a conscious purpose of favoring, so far as lay within the power of the State, the higher culture of the clergy, which in this respect had remained in Italy in a condition of inferiority relative to the more cultivated nations of Europe. The school, whose secularity was once held to be an untouchable dogma, is today open to religion.

At least, the door is open. It has only to enter. And, in truth, it cannot be denied that it struggles to enter. This is the fault of those who are already within and who direct the schools, in whom the old Italian is not yet dead. But it is also, one must say as well, the fault of those who are outside and must enter, and who are not content with what they have already obtained, and want more, and want too much, and arouse the apprehension and suspicion of those who, in the schools, do indeed want religion, but also want culture — that is, reflection, criticism, thought.

And so: dogmatic religious instruction in the elementary schools, yes; but then, further up, religious instruction, yes, but historical, and free of the discipline, limits, and prohibitions that mortify and impede the free formation of the mind — a mind which, religious though it be, must open itself to every current of thought, must understand every form and aspect of humanity, must gradually become universal, that is, must educate itself, become ever more reflective and self-possessed. Those, then, who must enter, still stand there at the door, dissatisfied, demanding, without trust in thought, to which the schools, in their system and their development, must be left — because, whether one wishes it or not, they belong to thought alone. And in every age, under every regime, whatever the intentions of men may have been, thought alone has always ruled there.

We have loyally held out our hand; and now it seems they would like to take our whole arm; and it is claimed that religious instruction, as the Catholic Church would have it given, should pass from the elementary schools to the secondary schools, and rise from there into the universities. And there is no lack of signs of the notion, cherished by some, that even the universities ought to submit themselves to a certain religious discipline. This is a notion which, in my opinion, we Fascists — I mean, the Italians who are working to build the new Italian civilization, religious yet enlightened, strong yet progressive, confidently open to the ever-renewing power of thought — cannot let pass; indeed, we must resolutely combat it, so that our religious program may be clear and unambiguous. And with the question of the schools there is entwined, indeed, in a certain sense, identified, the question of the relations between State and Church — a problem which here I can only touch upon, but which cannot be passed over in silence if one wishes to state, in its concrete and present terms, the religious problem of Italy today.

We Fascists, all of us, say that the State is an ethical substance: and by this we mean that it is not a force external to the consciousness of the individual, an extrinsic mechanism that descends upon the head and the will of the citizen. Understood in that way, the State would have no worth, and could never presume, by its laws, to impose upon the citizen a sacrifice — even that of life — which might have any moral value as a spontaneous act. The Head of State can call citizens to war only insofar as his will — that is, the very will of the State — is the concrete, unified expression of the will of individuals: their own very will.

The will of the individual, insofar as it comes progressively to be determined as that sovereign will in which individuals converge and unite, is a real will, as real as that of any single individual — indeed, that same will in its maximum reality and efficacy. Nothing abstract about it, but the greatest possible concreteness. And insofar as it is a universal will, reconciling interests and spirits, realizing whatever, within the sphere of common life, may rightly be regulated by legal norms, it is evidently moral. Conceived in this way, the State, being nothing mechanical and nothing extraneous to the individual spirit, is eminently an educator. The spiritual interest of the individual flows into, is completed and realized in, the interest of the State.

The whole moral content of individual consciousness, in its universality, is the moral content of the very same higher personality of the State. This personality therefore has a civilization and a spirit that nourishes it, and a will that promotes and directs it. The State therefore contains and guarantees all spiritual values, religion included; nor can it, without stripping itself of every principle of sovereignty, admit any power superior to itself, to which it should therefore have to submit in any part of the content comprised within its ethical domain. This does not mean that the State must itself be a doctor, a teacher, a priest, an engineer. It means that all these forms, and all the other possible forms of culture, like all the activities through which national life is variously determined, fall within its content.

It is understood, of course, that they fall within it while each remains, in its own being, in its own working, in its own properties and attributes, what it is: science remains science, art remains art, religion remains religion, economics remains economics, and so forth, each with its own laws and its own requirements, and with its consequent freedom. A free Church, therefore, in a free State. And equally free, everything else. A State that recognized within its territory any sovereign power whatsoever would be committing suicide. Everything spiritual is free, but within the great sphere — itself likewise spiritual — of the State. * Can this be the Church’s solution? One must answer frankly: no!

No, because the Church represents the immediate religious position, which stands in direct antithesis to this conception of the ethical State — a conception founded on the concept of man and of thought, of which religion is the negation. Hence the struggle is natural, essential to the very nature of the modern State and to the nature of the Church as an autonomous magisterium and discipline of religion. They are two worlds so conceived that each, in itself, is everything, and each therefore excludes the other. Their reciprocal relations are matters of compromise. But whoever speaks of “reconciliation” either does not love the State or does not love the Church; for an absolute and definitive settlement, one that left no further matter for discord and contention, would be — and could not fail to be — the suppression of one or the other of the two terms of this dualism. And to obtain what? Peace? Quiet? But what life has ever been lived in perfect quiet, without obstacles to overcome, without enemies to conquer? Enemies suppressed on the outside are always reborn within us. Even the life of the saint is an incessant and implacable struggle: freed from the seductions and dangers of the world, he sees the adversary rise again in his own heart, granting him no truce, forcing him once more to fight.

Every living, strong religious conscience has, in every age, lived in disquiet and anguish. Religious life itself, in its vigor, does not want reconciliation — quite the contrary. True reconciliation here too consists in the unity of opposites, preserved and defended as such — that is, in non-reconciliation. This, at least, will be a manly program, one befitting a people that does not wish to settle into an easy idleness and sloth, but wishes to work, to progress, aiming at a high ideal with ardor of spirit and with unyielding faith in its own future. APPENDIX Of the preceding address, the newspapers published only a brief summary, of which I could not even say how accurately it reflected my thought, since I confess I never read it, distracted immediately by other concerns. But since the 20th of October, when the papers spoke of it, my address has not been forgotten.

This is a sign that it was very much needed. I can attribute to no other cause the great honor done me, especially by the Catholic press and by a certain Fascist press, too zealous about religious problems that it does not feel as deeply as it would like to appear. And I let them talk, until I received from the friends of the Bolognese Fascist University the stenographic transcript of my address, which I intended to offer for the meditation of Italians, and of all men of goodwill, in the exact terms in which it was conceived and delivered.

Not because I hoped that this publication could dispel certain misunderstandings and prejudices, which are too convenient for certain polemics ever to be overcome and set aside; but because, for my own part, I wished to be able to say that I had done everything possible so that my thought should not be confused with different doctrines, and should not be judged and attacked for ideas that it rejects, according to old, famous, and overused schemes that in no way correspond to my own way of posing and feeling these problems.

And now that my address is published, I might well leave it to the disputes of men, were it not that I feel it my duty to add here, by way of a warning to the honest reader, three necessary observations on the kind of polemics that, for four months now, notwithstanding my absolute silence, have been carried on around my name, always in connection with this most fortunate address of mine. The first is that it is not true that I have denied the function of religion in the life of the spirit. Whoever reads me now will see with his own eyes the contrary: that I exalt this function, and hold it to be essential, irreplaceable, and immortal. To oppose me, therefore, with the thesis that gives a place to faith as well as to science is impossible; and whoever does so either did not hear me, or is not reading me now, or is incapable of understanding what I am saying.

And so, unless he wishes to talk nonsense, he had better not concern himself with me: since the nonsense will always remain his own. The second is that I never meant, in the slightest degree, to speak as the authorized interpreter of Fascist doctrine — not only because I would have no standing whatsoever to do so, but for an even simpler reason: that Fascism — as its Leader has said many times — is not a catechism, but an orientation, a style, a doctrine in movement, one that is still forming and developing, and which, thank God, is not defined and closed within the formulas of a system to be commented upon and explained to the uninitiated like some kind of Syllabus. Therefore, if I have erred, or shall err, the error has been, or will be, mine, mine alone, and not that of Fascism. The third is a protest against a certain polemical method that may indeed be quite politic and shrewd, but is equally iniquitous and false: the method that delights in insisting upon a distinction most useful to those who write certain letters without the address of their true addressee. And I have been very sorry that this method has not been disdained even by a Catholic writer whom I hold in high esteem, Senator Crispolti, in an article of his, “The Reality of the Regime and the Abstractions of the Philosophers,” published in the Corriere d’Italia of January 27th.

There, the Regime is warned against “the suggestions of the state-worshipping philosophy that has come back into fashion” (my fault, of course); against the risk that these suggestions “would run the Regime the danger of adulterating itself,” since the Regime has indeed raised the authority of the State, but, given its origins and dispositions, ought not to be absorbed by a philosophical system “which, taking advantage precisely of authoritarian needs and interests, believed the moment had come to make an idol of the State, even at the expense of the rights of the individual personality.” All this is information which, I fear, Senator Crispolti — not very versed in philosophical studies — draws from an article in the Civiltà Cattolica of January 15th, where certain questions are, in his judgment, treated “masterfully”: but where it suffices to say that the distinction continues to be drawn between State and Church on the basis of the distinction between the body (the domain of the State) and the soul (the domain of the Church).

Information, then, which, I take the liberty of warning the Honorable Crispolti, is not at all reliable. My philosophy is not a philosophy of state-worship; I do not absorb or crush the individual within the State; I do none of all the wicked things that Senator Crispolti, ill-informed, attributes to me.

He should not trust certain interpreters and commentators, if he does not wish to fall into the curious sophisms of which I find a sample in the course of his article, where I read: “The greatest representative of this philosophy was made a participant in the Government, but whatever his final and overall intentions may have been, he ended up leaving, in his principal acts — that is, in the school reform, his unforgettable achievement — more the trace of respect for the individual than that of state-worship: indeed, whatever has so far been achieved on behalf of freedom of teaching bears his name.

So much was possible, under the influence of the true and practical spirit of the Regime, in a man of strong and honest intellect, that respect for the intelligence and conscience of each individual, until then oppressed precisely by the monopoly of the State.” I have not finished so as to leave things there. I wanted to introduce — and Senator Crispolti knows how many difficulties there were to overcome, and how much resistance to conquer — this respect for the individual and this freedom of teaching, greater than any liberal or any enemy of state-worship had ever believed possible in Italy. These were my own ideas, formulated, preached, championed for decades. They are the consequence of my philosophy, which ill-informed commentators call state-worshipping and devouring of the individual.

Is it not sophistry that I, who in acting — and I act in consequence of my own convictions — respect the intelligence and conscience of each individual, should pass for a state-worshipper? And when has it ever been believed that a man ought to be judged, not by his own works, but by the words... of others? But, if I am not mistaken, the fashionable philosophy is, for Senator Crispolti too, a mere scapegoat. The Supreme Pontiff spoke more clearly, in his letter to Cardinal Gasparri of January 24th, on the partial dissolution of the Catholic Scouts, when he found the conception of the State already noted in his Allocutions of December 14th and 20th “as not conforming to the Catholic conception” — not in the suggestions and “flattering enticements of the fashionable philosophy,” but in the legislative arrangements of the Regime itself.

And I do not mean to say that this can be attributed to my philosophy. Indeed, I believe firmly that it cannot. But I do say that in this way one speaks more clearly, and follows the more direct path.

_{Chapter XVII}

The Roman Question

The statement made by the Osservatore Romano concerning the Eucharistic Congress of Bologna, in the very days when Italians, with a new moderation, were commemorating the Twentieth of September, possesses one great virtue: a virtue that, even in politics, is at the right moment a quality of singular worth — the virtue of clarity. For in politics it may often seem more advisable to conceal, and not even to allow a glimpse of, the precise terms of the question one aims to resolve; but very often nothing does more to increase the prestige of one’s own side and the force of one’s own arguments than setting out questions plainly — even when, so stated, they must appear insoluble.

Whether the Osservatore Romano has recognized the insolubility of the Roman Question, or of the relations between the Church and the Italian State, if the question is to be resolved in the sense of the “juridical independence or supranationality” of the Church; or whether it merely set out to demonstrate this insolubility, I could not say. Certainly its statement has thrown light on the great difficulty of any solution, as well as on the fact — obvious, though worth noting for the political interest of the Church — that the question exists, is still very much alive, and remains unresolved. And this was precisely what, in the face of certain foreign commentaries on our present relations with the Church, it seemed most urgent to clarify.

It is evident that touching upon the point the Catholic newspaper touched upon was not a very gracious thing to do toward the Italian Government; and so it is natural that there should be some disappointment or resentment among the Fascist papers, which had been lulling themselves in hopes of a solution not far off, or at least of a gradual forgetting of the burning question so abruptly put back on the agenda. It is not, in truth, very gracious, when one has agreed with someone to maintain a relationship of cordial understanding and courtesy — and has indeed welcomed every possible courtesy, even those that not long ago would have seemed impossible — suddenly to stop short because the other party looked on somewhat astonished and somewhat jealous, and to come out and say: “But mind you — remember there are still old scores between us to settle!” It is not gracious.

But that such a gesture can serve only the one who makes it, and not the other party as well, I do not believe. And so, once the first impression has faded and the discomfort that the sudden declaration may have produced has passed, I would say that it is in the interest of the Italian State and of the Government that guides its fortunes to be grateful to the Osservatore Romano for having said, on its own, without waiting for us to say it, a truth that serves it well to recall, but which serves us equally well not to forget. * The truth, however — once we have set out on the road of clarity and candor — must be told as it is, in full, so that it may serve both parties.

And this truth is that the famous “conciliation,” so often dreamed of from Cavour to Crispi and after, is a utopia; and if, as Manzoni observed, there are beautiful utopias and ugly ones, this one of conciliation is not to be numbered among the former. This is perhaps a still more candid way of putting it than the one the Osservatore Romano deserves credit for using. But this is a matter that, from time to time, demands the utmost candor, in order to recognize certain points, which might be formulated roughly as follows: 1. The international interest of the Church, for the exercise of its spiritual function in the world, undeniably requires a kind of juridical independence analogous to that belonging to any State possessing the essential elements of a State, beginning with territory, however tiny. 2. That state of some kind which the Church needs cannot arise by the will and act of the Italian State, which would always remain the arbiter of its own will and therefore entitled to modify, or even suppress, the State of the Church: for such a state, created by the Italian State, could never be anything but a dependency of it. 3. The Kingdom of Italy’s assent to the request for an ecclesiastical state — however constituted and defined, but fully and effectively autonomous — could mean nothing other than remitting the question to an international tribunal or conference, which would decide at the expense of Italian sovereignty, limiting it and therefore suppressing it. For a sovereignty whose limits it falls to others to mark out is no sovereignty at all. 4. A conciliation on the basis of the first point is therefore impossible; that is, a conciliation in law, such as the Osservatore Romano has rightly denounced in its essence, is not possible. 5. A conciliation in fact, however, is possible. It is the path along which the Fascist Regime has boldly set out in its ecclesiastical policy: to recognize the absolute religious worth of the Catholic Church, to satisfy all its just requirements, to accept all its reasonable requests. All of them, save one — the one which the Osservatore Romano recalls as ever pending and ever present: that request, and those that depend upon it and coincide with it insofar as they limit, and therefore annul, the untouchable sovereignty of the State, and would make it lose, as the Latin has it, its very reason for living.

All conciliations in fact are acceptable, so long as one does not pretend, through them, to reach that conciliation in law which cannot be expected from any effort of good will, and which the Church cannot desire without saying to the State: your death, my life. But let us leave the Latin aside, and go on using the most candid Italian. This conciliation, of which nothing has been said for some time, and of which for some time it would be best to say nothing further except that it is not a thing to be thought of or hoped for, is not, I said, a beautiful utopia. The Church — as the Osservatore Romano itself now acknowledges — enjoys all the independence it could desire. The Law of Guarantees, with its expedients and its lack of logic, has proved itself sound — even in the supreme trials of the Conclaves and of the World War.

And that merely juridical semblance of limits placed upon papal sovereignty has done nothing but immeasurably increase the prestige and moral authority of the supreme ecclesiastical power. It is true that an independence in fact is an independence that exists today and, in the abstract, might not exist tomorrow. But, without pausing to note that what is true in the abstract is not true in the concrete, it is a truth admitted by all that never, in the whole course of the centuries of his temporal sovereignty, was the Pontiff as free as he has been from 1870 to today: never, either abroad or, still less, at home. Besides, what has value is not what one has and cannot lose, by a law superior to human will, but what is acquired through our own merit, and which it lies within our power to lose or to keep. Only goods of this second kind keep conscience awake and the will alert.

And only these, therefore, have spiritual value — like the love of a soul, which is less certain, but for that very reason more precious, than infallible natural instinct, however beneficial the latter may be. And then, a juridical conciliation would indeed put an end to one dispute (the handling of which, moreover, can serve so well on so many occasions and for so many purposes!); but it would equally be the beginning of new disputes and new struggles on the same ground on which the relations between the Church and the States outside Italy are today carried on, not always cordially — with the aggravating factor of the frequency and urgency of the controversies to which shared territorial borders and the interference of many interests would give rise.

So much so that one may fear that a substantial and progressive reconciliation would never be so longed for as it would be once the formal and definitive conciliation of the conciliationists had been achieved. No friendship is more troubled than that of friends who have something to divide! The separation of the spiritual from the temporal is likewise a utopia. Undoubtedly. And so the Roman Question will always remain alive. But it is a beautiful utopia — that is, one of those ideas that in practice can never be perfectly realized, down to the last letter of logic, but which mark out directions and tendencies to which it is well to adhere. And that it is well to adhere to this idea of separation, for the sake of the highest realization both of the spirituality of the Church and of the sovereignty and ethical character of the State, is a truth that has long been believed; and we would not know how to renounce it.

_{Chapter XVIII}

New Documents on the Roman Question

The Osservatore Romano has published two articles in reply to the observations I set out in the Corriere of 30 September, and to the important statements made by Arnaldo Mussolini in the Popolo d’Italia. As usual, the polemical and formal element outweighs the substantive one in these replies; and, as usual, it is a polemic not without a few clever, almost mischievous barbs, which carry a distinct personal flavor. The writer, for instance, is sharp-eyed enough to detect in my article “a certain Hegelian streak,” and yet, conversely, careless enough to see in it nothing but the old thesis of liberalism, “if presented in strong colors.” The main question is too important to tempt us, in turn, to indulge in this minor polemic, which does not touch in the least on the substance of the arguments I put forward.

And the distinguished writer already knows perfectly well that there was, properly speaking, nothing Hegelian in my article; and he knows equally well that my thesis was not a defense of the Law of Guarantees, but the denial of the possibility and the usefulness (for the Church no less than for the State) of the solution the Holy See asks for — a solution which, I acknowledge, it does well, now and always, to ask for. For there are certain requests that, however much one knows they cannot be granted, it is nonetheless good to make, and to go on making indefinitely. This is evidently not the thesis of old liberalism, which, I repeat, from Cavour to Crispi and afterward, always aspired to conciliation and time and again repeated the attempt, meeting each time with an equally open and firm refusal.

Let us, then, set aside Hegelianism and liberalism and all such other terms and labels, good only for muddling ideas. It is better to attend seriously to the substance of the matter, and to state one’s thought clearly, without useless fencing. For my part, as one can see, I continue to prefer the utmost clarity. And I come to the point.

The Honorable Martire, in an article in Echi e Commenti, largely reprinted by the Corriere d’Italia of 8 October, had already said, in order to contradict my thesis: “What is at issue is the juridical recognition of the ‘territorial element’ that guarantees papal sovereignty — recognition which the Law of Guarantees denied, granting the Pontiff only the use of the Apostolic Palaces; yet, at the same time, with an inconsistency often noted, that same Law recognized in the Pope a singular sovereignty, one that demands sovereign honors, while in fact the Italian Government has never occupied the pontifical territory, allowing armed foreign troops to remain within it.

Should the Italian State, then, ‘by an act of constitutional will,’ and without compromising its own civil sovereignty, recognize the effective sovereignty of the Pontiff — insofar as it is exercised, as a guarantee of the independence of spiritual sovereignty, over territory the Italian State has never occupied and in which it has never performed any act of sovereignty — there would be no need whatsoever to convene international tribunals or conferences of any kind.” These are words not entirely clear, but on the whole explicit, and certainly quite remarkable if in some way authorized: for the difficult point, to my mind, was precisely this — whether the Holy See would, or could, content itself with a territorial element assigned to it by the Italian State by an act, as the Honorable Martire puts it, of constitutional will, and without any compromise of its own civil sovereignty.

Now comes the Osservatore Romano, and in its first article objects to me: “We do not see why Italy cannot create the state the Church needs for the exercise of its spiritual functions in the world. Italy alone was able abruptly to annihilate it, destroying a state of affairs that the work of centuries had established, and therefore Italy alone can reconstitute it — reconstitute it, if not on its former scale, then at least to the extent necessary to guarantee the visible independence of the government of souls.” For the Osservatore, too, then, no intervention by foreign powers or international tribunals. Pure and simple restitution on Italy’s part. “We are not asking for guarantees of independence that would make wrongs and harms impossible — absolute guarantees.... If Italy should one day decide to carry out, publicly, before the world, this act of just reparation, we are certain that it will do honor to its word without any need of foreign intervention.” This is, in conclusion, the thesis of the Honorable Martire, or thereabouts — so much so that the Osservatore seemed to be moving confidently toward the position of the Popolo d’Italia, where Arnaldo Mussolini had said that “in the fullness of its political capacity and its right, (Italy) can negotiate with the Holy See without judges and without guarantees of an international character.

Italy possesses every attribute needed to be both judge and guarantor.” And this same impression was produced in many quarters by the Osservatore’s first article; and it was voiced by some of the more authoritative Fascist newspapers, congratulating themselves on the great step the Roman Question appeared, according to this document from the organ of the Holy See, to be taking. But now comes the second article from the same newspaper, speaking in a rather different language; and while it confirms that the Roman Question does not require an international solution, it flatly denies that it is a question “solely national,” one that Italy alone could therefore resolve. It is a Catholic, universal question, and therefore supranational (if not international).

Italy, accordingly, ought to admit that it is not for her, and for her alone, to resolve it, but for Catholics, or rather for their Head, the Pontiff. “The sole judge is the Pope.... It falls to him to decide, not only the conditions of his freedom and independence, but also the guarantees necessary and sufficient to reassure the faithful of the whole world.

He alone constitutes the sole, supreme, and final tribunal, to which all Catholics must submit.” It then states explicitly that “any attempt at accommodation made unilaterally by Italy is destined to fail, because it lacks the approval of the One who alone holds the reins of the Catholic world.” And the article ends by countering the words of Arnaldo Mussolini quoted above with this precise declaration: “We do not know whether this conclusion represents his own personal thinking, or the ideas of wider circles: in any case, we must observe that so long as such ideas were to prevail, we would find ourselves in the very same conditions as on the day when the so-called Law of Guarantees was sought to be imposed upon the Pontiff — that is, in other words, after half a century’s journey, and even after five years of Fascism, we would still find ourselves, exactly as the author himself acknowledges, at the point where we started.” So much, then, for moving toward the position of the Popolo d’Italia!

Even after these new documents, the goal in view does not appear any closer; nor does the solution I considered, and still consider, less difficult than downright impossible, seem to become much easier. Impossible, that is, without compromises whose consequences, in the short run, could in my view prove unhappy — and not for Italy alone, but for the Church as well. For the rest, the Osservatore is right again on another point. It is right to repeat that “the Pope cannot be the chaplain of any Power,” and to maintain that, in order to avoid the suspicion that he might be, “the only possible remedy is open, clear, universally known disagreement.” It is right, too, to point out once more “the extreme necessity of protests — a necessity all the greater the more imprudently certain Italian journalists seize upon the Government’s ecclesiastical policy to claim... that the disagreement has been healed.” I believe that the Holy See really must make these protests; but I believe, on the other hand, that comparable and opposite interests give the Italian State just as much reason to protest against the protests of the Holy See. Each from its own point of view!

And I would venture to observe that, in asserting this right of protest, the Osservatore confirms the truth of my own thesis: that the Holy See, too, benefits from the open and acknowledged existence of the disagreement. * The controversy was brought to a close by the following declaration, published by the National Fascist Party in its Order Sheet No. 37 (20 October, Year V): “After fifty-seven years, the so-called Roman Question has, in these last days, returned to the forefront of great current interest, arousing a lively and thoroughly justified interest in public opinion both in Italy and abroad. “The debate between the organ of the Holy See and certain Fascist writers allows us, for the moment, to arrive at the following conclusions: “1. The form of the debate has been elevated and calm, worthy of so delicate a subject and in keeping with the new atmosphere created by the Fascist Regime. “2. It may be said, on the basis of the Osservatore Romano’s articles, that for the Vatican the question is not international in character, but simply bilateral — that is, to be settled between the Italian State and the Holy See. “This is correct from the point of view of both history and logic. It avoids dangerous interventions and needless complications. “3. It seems legitimate to infer from the context of the Osservatore Romano’s articles that the question of the Holy See’s real political and juridical independence is not necessarily bound to conditions of a territorial order. It is evident that, for Fascist Italy, any restoration, even on the smallest possible scale, of the Temporal Power that ceased in 1870 is, and would be, entirely out of the question — to the immeasurable advantage, in our view, of the moral prestige of the Church of Rome. “Faced with the developments of these last days, Fascists who are genuinely conscious of the power and character of the Fascist State must avoid two opposite positions, both equally removed from reality: the position of those who dogmatically assert the absolute impossibility of resolving the Roman Question, and the position of those who believe the Question can be resolved easily and quickly. “There has never been a knot in history that was not, in the end, undone — whether by force, by patience, or by wisdom: so it is with the Roman Question.

The Fascist Regime, which has the whole twentieth century still before it, may succeed, without abdicating any of the State’s fundamental rights, where democratic liberalism, in repeated attempts, failed. “The conclusion may be put thus: arduous, but not impossible.”

_{Chapter XIX}

Brunophobia, Hypocrisy, and Other Matters

First in Cagliari, then in Camerino: it is open season on Giordano Bruno — here a bust in a public square, there a commemorative and admonitory plaque on the façade of the University. No sooner had the Fascist Regime proclaimed the necessity of restoring religious feeling and a national religion than a good many Fascists here and there found themselves suddenly seized by the most ardent and impatient religious zeal, and hastened to display it in the most intolerant and unintelligent way, seeking out every occasion and pretext to make a show of the most solicitous devotion, or indulgence, toward that very Church to which, until yesterday, they had turned their backs. This haste, naturally enough, is all the greater the more urgent the interest in making people forget one’s own past and getting oneself into line with the Fascist fashion-plate.

Religious hypocrisy reinforced by a double dose of political hypocrisy. This would not be the place to dwell on it, were it not necessary here to say a word of protest against the incidents alluded to above: at Cagliari, at the hands of a few overheated small-time politicians, the statue of Giordano Bruno was torn down to make room for a Saint Francis (and it took peremptory orders from the Government to keep that statue from being destroyed, or left buried in some warehouse); and at Camerino, a plaque set into the wall in the days of naïve anticlericalism has been made to disappear. Foolish intolerance, this, on the part of those who once wished for such empty gestures in spite of the priests, as a rebuke to civilization or as outdated ideas, a challenge to systems against which the whole of history stands as invincible guarantee.

But even more foolish an intolerance, a cowardly incomprehension and vulgarity of feeling, is that of those who now destroy these by now historic monuments, taking the side of the persecutors against their victims, and dragging, in the name of an idea like the Fascist idea — which is a lofty affirmation of the power of man and of thought, and in particular of Italian thought — a cause that will always be sacred to whoever knows how to respect and prize thought freely, that is, with intelligence and knowledge: thought which, laboriously, through torment and martyrdom, advances and creates every human greatness. The authentic Fascist will always be an Italian jealous of Italy’s glories, and will never wish to deny that Bruno is one of the very few philosophers read and loved throughout the whole world.

The authentic Fascist, moreover, will without hesitation set candor and courage above the insincerity of the zealots and the timid or self-interested compliance of the self-appointed champions of Catholicity. Let each keep to his own place, with dignity, with decorum, with a watchful awareness of the limits within which every value and every principle must be contained, so that it is not abused, and so that we do not fall back into the hybrid confusions that already did such harm to the Italian soul and corrupted the fiber of our national character. One can decline to be anticlerical without being clerical. It is a matter of measure, and almost of good taste.

Another matter connected with the preceding one is the guardianship which the Osservatore Romano, the Civiltà Cattolica, and the other, more active organs and representatives of Catholic interests have taken upon themselves over the Italian school, ever since the Fascist Government reopened its doors to religious instruction. It is always the same story: hold out a hand, and they seize your arm in order to grab your head next. The teaching of Christian doctrine was introduced into the elementary schools. Pressure is now being applied, through the institution of optional courses — which it is very easy to run, in practice, as compulsory ones by means of shrewd moral pressure on headmasters and pupils — so that a positive, dogmatic instruction may be extended to the secondary schools as well.

Watch is kept over textbooks, with loud demands that history or philosophy texts be banned unless they are orthodox and approved. Watch is now also being kept, so I am told, over the teachers themselves, so that none of them may be permitted to “disturb,” through his teaching, the religious conscience of the young. This watchful vigilance has at its disposal means of I know not what effectiveness, but certainly strong and formidable ones for making itself felt; and there are inspectors to be found who believe they can turn themselves into inquisitors of the holy faith. The University alone remains untouched; but, given the theory of the hand and the arm, if we let this go on, they will climb all the way up there too. It is therefore well to come to an understanding in time, and to speak plainly and firmly.

The whole education of the Italian people must be religious; but once the seeds of a positive doctrine have been planted in young souls, freedom is required: the full and entire freedom of thought, in history and in philosophy, and candid reflection and unprejudiced inquiry and frank criticism — which is to say, the use of the intellect. Without this, nothing will ever be understood, and no man will ever be formed. The utmost care must be taken to see that this freedom is respected among the young, and, above all, among the teachers themselves. Otherwise the public school might as well be closed, and that would be all to the good. The State has the duty of itself standing guard over the school, of defending its life — which is freedom — and of removing it from the snares of dangerous false guardians.

These made their experiment, in the past, of unlimited guardianship, and its results were plain to see; the correction of them has been under way now for centuries, and the struggle has been a hard one, since it was necessary to fight not merely abstract ideas but inveterate institutions and habits of mind, which too many judged indestructible. The modern State, which is an ethical and therefore a secular state, has in the school (that is, in thought) its own nourishment and its own defense; and it cannot subject the school to the Church without abdicating its own autonomy and ethical character. These are elementary matters. It is well known that some will never admit them. But this is no good reason for forgetting them, or gliding over them with that easy nonchalance which may look like skill, but is in fact the negation of true skill.

The war we have declared on Freemasonry is not yet won. It will be won, but on one condition: that we hold ourselves, with the sovereign force proper to the State — that is, to thought — above the fray, above both the Freemasons and those against whom a Freemasonry might once have seemed necessary or useful to fight. One must be superior, and must truly exercise sovereignty. The Italian Government, fortunately, has no need of these warnings; but since it is exposed to demands running the other way, it is right that it should also hear these, which come from us, who likewise have a moral inheritance to defend — not for ourselves, nor, as used to be said, with abstract, rhetorical words, for philosophy’s sake, but for our children, that is, for Italians.

_{Chapter XX}

The Naples Address and the Clerical Uproar

In inaugurating, at Naples on the 22nd of January, that branch of the National Fascist Institute of Culture, I once again spoke of the present problems of Italian culture2 — a subject I had already touched upon elsewhere, and which seems to me among those best suited to making possible an understanding on the fundamental questions to whose solution the Institute must devote itself. These problems of our culture are more than one; some concern the means of the formation and development of culture itself (schools, institutes, laboratories, libraries, and so on), and others concern its ends — that is, the very intrinsic content of culture, which must possess a physiognomy and a character of its own if it is to be a living and fruitful culture, endowed with moral and political value, with historical significance. One of these problems — but only one — is certainly the religious problem.

Of this, too, I spoke, taking the occasion to make certain declarations, whose timeliness derived not from any need of mine to set out my own thinking — already perhaps expounded too many times,3 and known to all who might have any interest whatever in knowing my way of viewing this matter — but from the necessity of prompting, in some way, a clarification of positions on the practical ground on which we must operate; for certain signs suggested to me, and not to me alone, that certain political tendencies and forces, to which Fascism has restored prestige and effectiveness, threatened to take advantage of a lack of clarity in ideas and programs.

Not that I could claim in any way to represent those who have the right to fix the Party’s programs; for at Naples, as elsewhere, I claimed nothing beyond stating my own thought with the utmost clarity; but, convinced that on certain points the Party neither can nor will ever wish to establish fixed positions that would prejudge the solution of questions which there is no need or interest in settling once and for all, I hold that within the Party — which by now is as much as to say within the Nation — it is well that ideas should be stirred up, and that whoever holds one should therefore set it out plainly, as the reagent it can be, to provoke, through debate, the statement and hence the clarification of all the other ideas as well.

For, after all, a national Party, a regime as strong as the Fascist one, has no need to impose itself and assert itself over silence and emptiness, but can take pride in mastering living and active forces, variously determined and competing, and therefore also at odds with one another, as are all the real and powerful forces of nature and of the spirit. 2 I had spoken of it on a similar occasion in Arezzo, on 28 November 1927. 3 See, in this volume, the Bologna address, pp. 146ff. The Naples address was published in full, from the stenographic transcript, in Lo Stato di Napoli, no. of 24–26 January 1928. That part of my address met with no good fortune. Or rather, it met with too much. It was a polemic against the old Freemasonry, which ought by now to be quite dead, though some say it is instead more alive than ever, precisely because more secret, and therefore more insidious.

But it was also a firm declaration of principle against the extreme adversaries of Freemasonry — those once called clericals, and who are not, properly speaking, the Catholics, although to hear them talk one would think there were no Catholics but themselves. My declaration was a cry of alarm against the exaggerated claims progressively advanced by them in the field of culture, and especially of the schools. As regards these, in 1923 it had been generally agreed that all that could and should be asked, and done, for religious instruction was to introduce such instruction into the popular school, the school of all Italians — thereby resolving a question that had been debated in Italy for half a century. The minister who took upon himself the responsibility for this solution then had the great honor of being thanked from the pulpits of the churches.

Today — whatever the reason may or may not be — he is fiercely attacked, made the target of a relentless polemic in which criticism mixes with mockery. And why? He continues to say what he was saying in 1923, and what he had already been saying, quite plainly, since 1907. He is a nuisance because he stands firm, when instead one is supposed to keep marching. Today the demand is to go further, further still — but to where? The polemic rages on; the various Catholic papers (more or less clerical), one after another, have raised their voices in unison, and they shout. Public attacks are joined by private ones. Anonymous letters call me the Antichrist. Nothing less! That formidable logician who, half in earnest and half in jest, echoes from the Corriere d’Italia the hoarse voice of the Osservatore Romano, sneers and mocks my supposed philosophical contradictions. Poor little plague-carrier! From him I can calmly dismiss this accusation too, and all the others he will be capable of formulating.

For I would wager that not one of these profound adversaries is seriously convinced he has caught me out in those trivial contradictions they take such pleasure in laying at my door. And as for the Osservatore, what need have I to answer it, when its game has already been found out, and several Fascist dailies have themselves noticed, in the end, that its polemic is so insistent and so furious precisely because my name is only a pretext, and the true target is not me at all? (See, for instance, the Corriere Padano of the 15th and 16th of February.) As for myself, for all men of good faith who take matters seriously, my ideas need no further clarification.

They know that I am a sincere and warm supporter of religious instruction, because I desire the religious education of the Italian people; they know that, above the elementary school, I do not oppose such instruction, but believe that it can no longer take a dogmatic form; and that in this way, I am convinced, that seed can be cultivated sincerely and lastingly which must, with the greatest care, be awakened in the souls of children in the earliest grades of school. For the others I wish only to point out two things. In the first place, the question of the schools is an essentially political question.

And indeed the Osservatore takes issue with me precisely because I affirm that concept of the State which is not my own private concept, but that of Fascism: the concept of a State that is not a material instrument, but a personality that knows for itself where it is going and what path it must follow. In the second place, to those jokers who call me the Antichrist, I wish to say — not to provoke them, but because it is the plain truth — that the methods I oppose are precisely those that lead, not merely to the denial of Christianity, but outright to atheism. I say atheism; and the history of Italy proves it, for whoever knows how to read what lies within it.

Gentlemen,

I must confess that I do not begin to speak without a certain uneasiness. I came to Florence to give a lecture at the Fascist Cultural Circle, where fascists eager to reflect on and clarify their own ideas read, study, and discuss together; and I had therefore prepared an address suited to that place and that audience. Instead, to my great surprise, I find myself speaking to thousands of listeners of varied backgrounds and dispositions, in this solemn and magnificent hall so full of memory and glory, where one could not come to deliver a “lecture” without showing very poor taste, nor could one tolerate words that fail to echo the lofty voice of history and fail to proclaim a generous faith in the fatherland.

Fortunately, the very subject of my address is one of those that stir ardent and universal passions, that arouse and nourish everyone’s interest, provoking either agreement or controversy, and setting heart and mind in motion toward the essential problems of one’s own country and of life itself in general. And together with the nature of the subject, your cordial welcome encourages me to speak to you sincerely and openly about those things concerning Fascism that I have long meditated upon and feel deeply in my heart, in the hope that here too I may succeed in being understood by all, or at least not misunderstood. Where there is sincerity, there is also a good disposition to understand beyond what is said and what can be said, discerning the true point of the motives that inspire the speaker. To understand in good faith: something not always achieved.

For that matter, what I must ask of you, I would also have had to ask of the small circle of friends I would have found at the Cultural Circle. Even speaking of Fascism to fascists, I, like every other fascist, would have needed to make a preliminary remark. To say: take note, the Fascism of which I speak is my Fascism. For the fact that it is so broad a movement, uniting hundreds of thousands of Italians around the same banner and in a common faith, and being for all a single movement, and therefore a single path, a single ideal, does not mean that everyone who joins it does not see it with his own eyes, understand it with his own intelligence, feel it with his own spirit. Unity arises from this multiplicity, from this infinite variety of temperaments, psychologies, systems of culture, and conceptions of life.

The strength of Fascism derives from this rich and inexhaustible source of inspirations and the spiritual needs and energies connected to them. And it would dry up and wither in the mechanical monotony of empty formulas if it could be defined and confined within the articles of a fixed creed. For that matter, our great Gioberti, in that fragmentary book of his scattered with brilliant thoughts, in which he aimed to induce the Catholic Church toward those reforms that seemed to him indispensable for renewing and reviving that millenary and marvelous institution—even Catholicism, which is the very type of religion constituted with rigidly objective character—rightly said that every Catholic has his own. “But the Pope,” one might object, “is not of this opinion.” “Well,” Gioberti replied, “that is precisely what I am saying.” And it was no sophism.

For however hard one tries to renounce one’s own personality and adhere to a common creed, that creed will never be accepted unless it is understood in some way; and one cannot understand—beginning with the very words in which ideas are expressed—except by drawing on one’s culture, feelings, tendencies, and in short the whole complex of elements in which our personality is organized and made concrete. Around Fascism, as around something well-defined and identified, which everyone equally knows what it is, we are all gathered to work and struggle, all of us who are Italians of our time: for or against, it does not matter. Even its adversaries have been compelled by the very intensity of the fascist movement to take a position toward it.

Each will have a clearer or more obscure idea of it, more or less obscure: but all, whether exalting or condemning it, speak equally of Fascism; all, willingly or not, stand before the problem that is the subject of this address: what is Fascism? But fascists certainly conceive of Fascism very differently from its adversaries; and for the same reason, although the difference is incomparably smaller from one fascist to another, that concept varies; and the solution to the central problem, on which all are working, turns out to be noticeably different. To conceal or hide these differences, like any hypocrisy or falsehood, would be a sign of weak faith and of a dull understanding of the life that belongs to every great spiritual movement.

For life is always development and therefore continuous, incessant change: hence unity, but also variety, and internal conflict of discordant elements, from which life is driven toward new forms. And where there is the calm of stagnant water, the air grows foul and life is extinguished. This may sound ill to the ear of one who crudely represents the discipline of a party or the solidity of a school as the brutalization of the men who adhere to it. But neither brutes nor brutalized men have ever made history.

And everything great in the world of men, whether political program or philosophical doctrine, has always been in the very way I picture Fascism: a fundamental structure, a nucleus, which is a living idea, and therefore a direction of thought, an inspiration and a tendency, in which spirits meet and become attuned to one another and share in one same life, all the more vigorous and powerful the greater the number of those who contribute to it; and around that nucleus, through the spontaneous germination of the many seeds of thought that ripen from time to time in history, a varied flowering of reflections and systems, which are new organs by which the central organism grows stronger, gathering and appropriating from the atmosphere in which it lives and grows ever new energies. In that nucleus lies unity and faith. There lies the essential, the root of life and of strength.

I come to Fascism from study, from history, from philosophy. Others come from art. Others from the squadrist struggle of everyday political combat. Others from the polemics of journalism. Others from the art of parliamentary maneuvering. Others still from other origins. Each with his own soul, his own culture, his own habits, his own life, his own personality. But all arrive at the same point, and all meet on the same road: the road on which Fascism today is fighting its noble battle in Italy and in the world, to give a form of its own to the State, and through the State to the whole of the spirit. All of them: even those who, like me, always lived within school and study and meditated, apart from the militant politics of everyday life, on national problems through history and philosophy. For there is philosophy and philosophy, gentlemen.

And that ancient, famous, proverbial philosophy of the philosopher who looked at the sky and did not see the earth on which he walked, and so fell into the ditch—that philosophy, which men of sense have satirized and laughed heartily at ever since Aristophanes, a philosophy outside of life and foreign to the struggle in which life consists, blind to the interests that feed this struggle and for which all men live, rejoice and hope, or suffer and torment themselves, knowing that life is toil, effort, self-sacrifice, abnegation, passion, and the unquenched longing for a goal always to be reached and never reached—this philosophy has long been dead.

Our philosophy is indeed thought, but because life is thought; it is reflection on life, but because true life is reflection on itself, a luminous activity that unfolds along its own path, because it consciously makes that path for itself, knowing where it is going and how it can get there. All human life for us, from its humblest forms, is philosophy. And what today will be a philosophy worthy of our time cannot be a life impoverished or denatured, and almost vanished into the pale reflection of an abstract thought; rather it will be life itself, more intense, more energetic, almost heightened and sharpened by vigilant awareness of its own laws. Allow me, then, to try to answer in my own way the question we have set ourselves: what is Fascism.

And let us try to approach together what might be called, as I have suggested, the living and singular nucleus of Fascism, toward which we all look and which we all, in any case, have an interest in seeing clearly.

The Two Italys

To begin, I invite you to consider whether one might not say that history presents us with two distinct and different images of Italy, the Italy we are searching for. All of us, in truth, are searching for it. History is not a past of interest only to scholars: it is present, alive in everyone’s spirit. All who are Italian feel it: they feel they belong to this Italy, which is not merely the blue of its sky, its hills and its coastlines, nor the bleak or mountainous land that alternates with its fertile plains and smiling gardens.

Let us close our eyes, let us set aside the horizons of its landscapes, so varied in beauty and light: and Italy remains in our spirit—indeed it grows and looms larger in the glory of what it is in the mind and heart of every civilized man, whether he does it justice or merely recognizes it as the nation of intelligence and of a thousand-year culture that has never faded, of art, of solitary thinkers, and of a troubled civic life amid internal difficulties, of a nationality slow in its laborious process of organization and unification, set among the external powers contending in the vaster organizing process of modern Europe.

All of us, seeing more or less, and more or less penetrating, understanding, and feeling, carry within us, unable to detach ourselves from it, this historic, living Italy—alive with a life that stretches out and sinks its roots into the centuries, and which already is Italy, with the national character that will become ever more evident, around the year one thousand, when from the shattered Empire the communes spring up with the vigor of their liberties and their arts, preparing that Renaissance which will be the most brilliant creation of the Italian spirit, a splendid beacon to men of every part of the world—a light that the Italians of the Renaissance themselves redoubled, as they sought the harbor of the new science, the new art, the new thought, the new faith, and in short, of the modern age.

This Italy that we all carry in our hearts, and which in fact forms the substance of our being and our character in the world—if we look at it today intensely, with a gaze made sharper by our present passion for a higher and stronger national life, by this passion that has been smoldering within us since the trials of the Great War, since we felt the anguish of defeat and the pride of victory—we now see this Italy presenting itself to us in one aspect, and then in another, very different one. We see two Italys before us: an old one and a new one: the Italy of the centuries, which is our glory but is also a sad inheritance, weighing on our shoulders and pressing upon our soul; and it is also—let us say it frankly—the shame of which we wish to cleanse ourselves, for which we must make amends.

And it is precisely that great Italy which holds—as I said—so great a place in the history of the world.

The only Italy, one might say, known and studied and investigated by all civilized peoples, and whose history is not a merely particular history, but an epoch of universal history: the Renaissance. In which there is so much light, yes, and so many titles of national pride for Italians: but there is also so much shadow. For the Renaissance is also the age of individualism, which drew the Italian nation, through the splendid dreams of poetry and art, toward indifference, skepticism, and the feeble idleness of men who have nothing to defend around themselves—in the family, in the fatherland, in the world, where every human personality conscious of its own worth and dignity plants and pours itself out—because they believe in nothing that transcends the free and joyous play of their own creative imagination.

Hence the frivolity of a way of life that decayed and grew corrupt as the active feeling of nationhood was lost and spirits grew feeble; a literature in which carnival songs and burlesque oddities of every sort mingled with a comedy drawing its matter and spirit from mocking, jesting, cynical storytelling—a comedy that was therefore never true art, art that even beneath laughter makes one feel the weeping, that is, the seriousness of a spirit that knows the wretchedness of its faults, from which it must struggle to free itself in order to rise to that ideal in which alone it can live; and the academies turned into gatherings of cultivated but idle minds, where the dissertation decayed into idle chatter; names once coined in the ancient metal of a naive but serious and profound humanism now vied in wit and oddities of invention, allusions and laughable analogies; religion became an outward and lifeless form, philosophy was persecuted with torture and the stake, and science languished in intellectualistic exercise, capable of kindling the passions of literary men (as scientists too were then called), but incapable of stirring souls and planting in them the goad of those problems by which man arms himself with all his powers to move against mystery and destiny.

An empty, superficial, soulless literature. Sonnets and songs in abundance: but a man who sings and expresses his own passion, never. The academies seem like masquerades. Culture in whatever measure one wants; but barren and dead. Men without will, without character; life without programs other than those of the particular individual thinking of himself, and nothing more. Hence an Italy of foreigners, not of Italians. Italians without faith, and therefore absent. Is this not the old Italy of decadence?

The Remnants of the Old Italy

That Italy, for us, is dead; and there is another, thank heaven. And one can say, in a certain sense, as I shall explain shortly, that the first has been dead for two hundred years. But it is not so dead that we do not still find it before us even today, in this year of grace one thousand nine hundred twenty-five. There are still too many people in Italy who believe in nothing and laugh at everything, and who sigh for Arcadia and its academies; and who become spiteful toward anyone who disturbs their digestion. Do you remember the terrible Italian eve of the Great War, when the few who believed dragged along the many who shrugged their shoulders, repeating the old foreign insult that Italians do not fight?

When the young felt an obscure instinct trembling in their breasts and gave themselves to it confidently, blindly trusting in the national destiny, in the strength of the race, in the necessity of a great bloody trial that would in any case cement the recent national unity—more thought than believed, or more believed than experienced and realized—and would temper, in the struggles for which every free people must always be ready, the fiber of Italians?

And did the mature men, the wise ones, smile and calculate, and shudder at the thought of what they called useless sacrifices, and tremble at dangers which, by force of calculation, are never faced, and which are never faced by anyone not animated by an undemonstrable faith? Today that timid, myopic, skeptical neutralism is, for very many Italians at least, synonymous with an inability to feel Italian problems in an Italian way; is this not so?

But that sort of old-style spiritual temperament, which does not dare because it does not believe, which shrinks from daring because it sees no advantage in sacrifice, which measures the nation’s fortune by individual well-being, and which therefore always prefers to walk on solid ground, never to compromise itself, never to grow heated, and leaves the ideal to poets, to women, or at most to philosophers, and gladly sets aside every question that might endanger harmony and quiet living, and delights in joking about everything and everyone, and always throws the cold water of prose on the enthusiasms of poetry, and recommends moderation at all costs, and displays a sacred horror of polemics and violence, and instills in others all the maxims of egoism, and reflects, studies, understands, and knows it all as the very quintessence of shrewdness and wisdom—is this not still, for too many, the very acme of Italian refinement?

There are the Freemasons, who—as everyone knows—have planted the nail of that famous secularism, which is neither for religion nor against it; but even among non-Masons, how many Italians today do not prefer to keep silent about religious matters, and feel reluctance and shame in revealing and defending their own convictions, when they have any? All this is the old Italy, the Italy of individualism, the Italy of the Renaissance; when even the martyrdom of philosophers was fruitless because it went unhonored, and unhonored because it conformed to the very logic of their own doctrines, all individualistically shut up in a world without relation to that life in which concrete reality lay and against which they therefore necessarily collided, thus meeting with martyrdom

Man then did not feel his own personality grafted onto the social world to which each of us belongs, in which alone one can live with one’s human interests, with one’s family, with one’s faith as a moral being who has duties, a program to fulfill, a truth to profess. For nothing lives in the secrecy of our soul that does not draw us to come out of ourselves, to preach what is our truth, to communicate it to others, to strengthen it with all the energies that can contribute to it through collaboration, through living together, through the sharing of our moral life. Every faith unites men.

The Italian of the Renaissance, Down to Galileo

The man of the Renaissance, gentlemen, could indeed grow great in art, because art is a dream that abstracts from reality—from the reality in which other men too live, and the world to which our life is bound and with which we form a single whole—and ranges freely in the world of fantasy, where the individual is creator and absolute master of his own creatures.

Greatness of artists, which is also their flaw; for in this free life that unbinds us from every tie, one loses the hard sense of what may be called historical reality, where our family lies, with its many needs, which are also our own needs, since it falls to us to satisfy them and we cannot morally do otherwise; and where all other men lie too, with whom the very necessity of satisfying our needs binds us in an indissoluble bond, with shared duties in a social organism to which the person is bound, and to which all our fortunes are likewise tied, and for whose salvation it therefore behooves us to make every effort and even to risk our lives. And so these poets and artists and thinkers of ours, cultivated and refined men, did not feel the fatherland.

And Italians could be admired and despised at once; and their cities could be conquered with chalk; and a challenge like that of Barletta was possible, because Italians did not lack personal valor, and even in the art of training and leading armies they knew how to excel, and many of our captains were famous: but an Italian army there never was, there was never a single battle that could be said to have been won by Italians. Even art itself was in the end bound to decay. For not even art can live outside that moral world we call ideal—that world which man brings about through the effort of his spirit, placing himself above the life he would naturally be led to live together with all other living beings; and he brings it about because he begins to long for it as that better reality which does not exist but which he can and must make exist: all the more so the higher its value.

Now no one perceives, values, and idolizes any value as something belonging to the closed secrecy of his own consciousness; rather, always as something universal, to which all aspire, and which is certainly the patrimony of all. Art itself therefore becomes a game; and to Italian literature belongs that genre which enjoyed such fortune in the sixteenth century: burlesque poetry. And as early as the fifteenth century, art and culture could be regarded as “vanities”: those vanities against which the heroic soul of Savonarola rebelled, who paid here in this very square with his life for his repugnance toward the frivolous and skeptical spirit of the Renaissance. He took life too seriously, when, of all the representative men of the Italian spirit, no one truly took it seriously at all. He asked too much of man, when man was lacking.

And man was lacking for centuries, while the academy spread everywhere. Of which, I repeat, we still have not managed to cure ourselves. Is not even the great Galileo an academic, a man of letters? Before whose innovative genius, whose rigorously scientific thought, we bow.

But when we study his fearful and cautious life, when we read those so deferential letters of his, when we see him—the greatest Italian among his contemporaries—prostrating himself before the lords who paid his stipend and gave him leisure to study, or maneuvering and dissembling at the feet of the Inquisitors so long as they left him to meditate and write and cultivate his literary glory, and never a hint or a disdainful gesture toward those rights that were being trampled in him, never a proud vindication of his own dignity as thinker and man, never any allusion to the sadness of the times and of the fatherland, never a generous feeling for the great persecuted thinkers, dead or living, to whose thought his own was nonetheless bound—then we cannot help but feel that even in this great Italian something essential was lacking: the man was inferior to the scientist.

And he too indulges the frivolity of the so-called poets of his time; he jests and laughs in burlesque verses against his scientific adversaries. In him too there is no faith.

Vico and His Time

Between Galileo and Vico, what an abyss! In less than a century a new spirit appears. Compared to Galileo, whom he too admires, and to the whole Renaissance, to which he too is connected in many respects, Giambattista Vico seems to belong to another people, another history. He too wants to be a man of letters, and is most jealous of his literary glory; but he can conceive no other purpose for study than to “cultivate a kind of divinity within our souls.” His thought, his life, the whole man, is absorbed in a religious vision of history, which is the new world discovered by his philosophy.

An obscure philosopher, strange in the eyes of most, the author of books which he himself obscurely felt to be bringing a revolution to everything men had always thought, and to be beginning a new epoch in the human spirit, but which no one wanted to print, and when he printed them at great sacrifice to himself and his large family, no one understood them, and those among his own friends and colleagues to whom he gave them made no mention of them, and dodged out of the way whenever they crossed the author’s path, so as not to be forced to speak to him about them. Later, for a long time admired, yes, sometimes for the less important aspects of his thought, but misunderstood: solitary, like a very tall tower in a desert. Around him, no fraternal spirit to collaborate, to understand, to illuminate even some part of his system. And he never laughs.

When he attempts laughter, his satire turns into invective, and one senses the great bitterness of a soul troubled by petty adversaries incapable of understanding his lofty vision of the divine, toward which no man ever turned laughing. With Vico the religious conscience of Italy rises again; one begins to feel that life must be taken seriously: one begins to hear a voice that, when it comes to be heeded, will sink deep into souls, and set them before problems that Italy had not felt for centuries.

Alfieri

Vico already belongs to the eighteenth century, although one might say he stands against the whole eighteenth century: the century of abstract rationalism, of the Enlightenment, of materialism, of individualism. In the second half of that same century, here is another great solitary and exceptional spirit: another forerunner or prophet (as he called himself) of an Italy opposed to that of the Renaissance: Vittorio Alfieri. Another Italian who does not laugh: he writes satires and comedies, but they are no less fierce than his tragedies; he too has a cult of “letters,” but in order to solve this problem, which is his problem and the problem of Italy at the end of the eighteenth century and the dawn of the following one: the problem of man. He feels that no one can be a man of letters who is not first a man, a character, a will.

To will, to be oneself, and thus to assert oneself proudly, to plant oneself in the world with one’s own conscience, in the jealous guardianship and defense of oneself, with a thought of one’s own, however obscure, and a program of one’s own, however modest: to stand as a free person, master of oneself, in one’s own particular being, but also in one’s own consciousness as a citizen, as an Italian, and thus as a man who is truly a man: this is Alfieri’s literary problem, which is also the moral problem of all men, and the problem of the Italians who were beginning to rouse themselves from their torpid spiritual subjection to foreigners, to feel themselves Italian, and to become aware of what they needed in order not to remain beneath other nations: not to remain so morally, so as not to remain so politically.

The influence of Alfieri’s personality and teaching on the following generation—which is the generation of 1821—is very great.

Cuoco and the Awakening of National Consciousness

But already in the early years of the nineteenth century, in Milan, the center of the new Italian life, under the impulse that the Revolution and Napoleon had given to national consciousness, there was a writer—until a few years ago not known or appreciated in a measure adequate to his historical importance—a writer who succeeded in no single work in giving mature and complete form to his thought, but who, with an admirable historical essay of political acumen, philosophical depth, and historical insight into the Italian soul, with a kind of historical novel, artistically flawed but rich in eloquently expressed thoughts, and above all with a journalistic activity of abundant vein, lofty inspiration, and great effectiveness, succeeded in planting in the mind and heart of his Italian contemporaries—beginning with the greatest, Foscolo and Manzoni—the concept and feeling of a new Italy.

An Italy already dawning on the horizon, but one that could be furthered through a new moral, political, military, and also philosophical and literary education. An Italy conscious of its glorious past, not in order to grow vainly proud of it, but to draw from it argument and new hope, and virile resolve toward a resurgence to the dignity of a nation. Vincenzo Cuoco, historian, thinker, writer, took up Vico’s thought again, clarified and popularized some of its fundamental concepts, used them to illuminate the minds of his contemporaries, made of them an instrument of a new moral and political ideal for the Italian people; and lit a great torch at the head of the road on which, in the new century, the people foretold by Alfieri would set out. After him, the essentially moral problem of the man from Asti became political, and became the secret of our Risorgimento.

To remake the temper, the conscience, the character of Italians, who could never obtain what they had not earned and won for themselves. Italians, who under Napoleon had learned to fight, began to feel how one might even give one’s life in order to live—at least in order to live that life which is necessary to the man who takes it seriously. Religious feeling rises again. Our patriots, in one way or another, conceive of life religiously.

Mazzini

Gentlemen, the very type of Italian patriotism that gave us a fatherland; he to whom we shall always turn with reverent and grateful spirit, because he was the loftiest and truest prophet of the Risorgimento, the Ezekiel of the new Italy, which through him has finally risen among the nations, and now stands on her feet, and knows and affirms that she too has a place in the world, with her duties but also her rights, and will not fall, will no longer lie prostrate—for the old Italy of which we have spoken, if it is not yet entirely dead, must die: that man was Giuseppe Mazzini. He taught Italians how one loves, and how one wins a fatherland; he taught what life is in which a fatherland can be loved and won, and what, therefore, are the duties of men.

Now, he (as one of his youthful notebooks has recently revealed to us) read, transcribed, and meditated upon the most Italianly admonishing writings of Vincenzo Cuoco, without even knowing himself to be his follower. And with him he forms a chain, which links all the architects of the national Risorgimento, since all of them, directly or indirectly, felt the influence of his spirit, or worked upon a foundation that he, with the ardor of his faith and the fervor of his tireless activity, created, giving a principle, a direction, and a concrete program to the conspirators who were springing up all over Italy before him. And it reaches down to us, and gathers and concludes, in one idea and one faith, the whole history of this new Italy that is fulfilled at Vittorio Veneto, blazing forth and annihilating its ancient adversary.

Now, the Mazzinian gospel survives the wonder of the Risorgimento, for it is the faith of the Italy that arose from it; of that young Italy that Mazzini called forth. It is the fascist gospel, it is the faith of the youth of 1919, of 1922, of today: of the ideal youth of this Italy, which is made and must still be made; and which therefore remains young even in the hearts of the gray-haired, who feel the truth of the faith proclaimed by Giuseppe Mazzini. The articles of this faith are few; and because they are few, and scattered, not wrapped in the toils of a laborious and solid philosophical system, to be taken whole or left whole, they could be grasped easily and understood by multitudes of well-disposed spirits.

And they took root in thousands of youthful hearts, and sprouted and bore fruit, so that many young men could later break away from Mazzini over accessory matters, which men so often stubbornly consider essential; and they could forget that they had once been Mazzinians; but they carried away from it a remade heart and a fortified breast.

Mazzini’s Concept of Liberty

The first article was, and is: to fight materialism. Mazzini, without being a professional philosopher like a Rosmini or a Gioberti, fought materialism his whole life, tenaciously, proudly, most effectively. It was, in fact, the first root of all the weaknesses and flaws that Italians had to free themselves from in order truly to feel the fatherland and thus make an Italy. The fatherland is law and religion, demanding the subordination of the particular to a general and perennial interest, to an ideal superior to everything that has been and is, in individuals past and present, and which for every single individual is all that exists or has value.

But for the materialist there is nothing beyond the particular individual, with his instincts, his attachment to his own particular life as the supreme and absolute good, with his need to enjoy—to enjoy himself, and others only insofar as their enjoyment feeds into and increases his own: the “particular,” of which old Guicciardini spoke, the “wise” man of the Renaissance, the Italian of the old stamp. And Mazzini felt that this materialism is unworthy of a thinking man; he felt that no man can truly live a life worthy of being called human by drawing inspiration from materialism, which for him was synonymous with individualism.

In truth, gentlemen, even one who, out of a base desire for his own comfort, turns his eyes away from the high ideals of the fatherland, of duty, of the moral bonds of brotherhood that unite all men in one life—who among such people can even shut himself lazily within the narrow confines of his own thoughts and his own selfish life of petty, misanthropic passion, without at least thinking, and confiding to himself, his own thoughts? And can one think without holding as certain the truth of what one is thinking? And can there be, for anyone, a truth so subjective that it holds only for him who is content with it, without giving him the right to affirm and proclaim it whenever he pleases, as a truth to which anyone ought to assent, at least if he looks at it from that same point of view?

And can one utter a word, even in the silence of our own soul, which, if spoken, would have or come to have no meaning at all for others? Or do we not all rather feel the contrary? Thought bursts forth irresistibly and asserts and expands and propagates itself; because we think it, but as a thought belonging to all, which indeed unites in truth men of distant places and times. And the word does not sound within us without of itself tending to be spoken and to stir around it an ever wider wave of spiritual motion, of which it is the living expression or form.

And that very word which remains shut within the secrecy of our heart is a link in a chain: it is part of a discourse begun long ago and to be continued, which was spoken by others and will be, if nothing else, leaving a trace (like all the words we make sound in another’s ear) within our own soul, where it will never be erased even if forgotten, and will echo in other words and actions with which we shall address other men. Thus the word always binds us together, as something both ours and not ours: ours and others’. Of others who exist and who will exist; and of others who have existed; for the word has a history, is national, belonging, that is, to the many who speak only through our language. What follows?

The particular individual is a product of the imagination, by which each of us pictures himself as one among the many, in the crowd, circumscribed within the extreme limits of birth and death and within the narrow confines of his physical person. Whereas what each of us truly is, he feels well within himself insofar as he has a right to assert, a feeling to express, a memory to recall, a word to say, a luminous image to cast into song, into sound, into color, and in short into some eternal form: and in general a faith, any faith whatsoever, high or humble, to which to cling in order to throb in the incessant rhythm of the spiritual life, from which it is impossible, through mere tricks of imagination, ever wholly to estrange oneself.

Even in Mazzini’s time there were liberals who place the individual above all else; the liberals we still have underfoot, who balk at and oppose the irresistible movement of history. And liberalism in Mazzini’s time raised a blazing banner, that banner of liberty which Mazzini too adored, and for which he too fought. And liberty was then, politically, the nation’s need with respect to foreigners and the citizens’ need with respect to the State; it was the principal question. But already Mazzini said that true liberty is not that of individualistic liberalism, which knows no nation above individuals, and therefore does not understand the mission that belongs to peoples, nor the sacrifice to which individuals are bound. And against this liberalism he leveled the charge of execrable, blind, and absurd materialism.

The Concept of Nation

Liberty, yes, we too say today, but within the State. And the State is nation: that nation which seems something that limits us and subjects us to itself, and makes us feel and think and speak and, above all, be, in a certain way: Italians in Italy, children of our parents and of our history, which stands behind us and puts a heart in our breast and speech in our mouth, in the same way that nature, in general, with its laws, causes us to be born with a certain form and shape and destines us to a certain, well-defined and fundamentally unalterable life. It seems so, but it is otherwise. Another of the articles of the Mazzinian faith, another immortal glory of Mazzini, is this concept: that a nation is not a natural existence, but a moral reality. No one, therefore, finds it ready-made at birth; everyone must work to create it.

A people is a nation not insofar as it has a history that is its materially ascertained past, but insofar as it feels its history, and appropriates it to itself with living consciousness as its very own personality; that personality to whose building it must work day by day, always; which therefore it can never say it already possesses, or that exists as the sun or the mountain or the sea exist in nature; but which is rather the product of an active will constantly directed toward its own ideal; and is therefore called free.

A people is a nation if it wins its own liberty, appreciating its worth and facing all the pains that such a conquest may require, and gathers its scattered members into a single body, and redeems itself, and founds an autonomous State, and does not presume but creates its own being with the assistance of God, who reveals and works himself within its very consciousness. This is the lofty Mazzinian concept of the nation, which was indeed able to rouse the national feeling of Italians, and to pose our national problem as a problem of education and revolution: of that revolution without which not even Cavour would have been able to make Italy. This is the nation for which Italians can never help feeling themselves forever affiliated with Mazzini’s Young Italy, and today call themselves fascists. The nation, truly, is not geography and is not history: it is a program, it is a mission.

And it is therefore sacrifice. And it is not, nor will it ever be, an accomplished fact. It will never be that great museum which Italy once was for Italians, who kept and exploited it, and for the foreigners who came to visit it, dropping a few coins into the hands of the custodians. Yes, museums, galleries, monuments of ancient grandeur and splendor: but on condition that we feel worthy of them, on condition that we wish to be worthy of them, and do not go chasing butterflies beneath the Arch of Titus nor sit forgetfully through academic feasts and commemorations on the Capitoline; on condition that we stand proudly in defense of these memories through works that take up the most venerable traditions and ennoble the past in the present and the future.

And let the memories be a patrimony to be defended not with erudition, but with new work, and with all the arts of peace and of war, that preserve that patrimony while renewing and increasing it. And let us add new monuments too, if you like. Let us raise them in our squares to strengthen our temper, to honor the living more than the dead, in consecration of memories more recent and truly more glorious than any that Italian history possesses, and to elevate, through the admonition of generous memories, our consciousness as free citizens of a great nation. For, understood in this way, the nation makes liberty itself, more than a right, a duty: a high conquest, not obtained except through the self-denial of the citizen ready to give everything to his fatherland, asking nothing in return.

Fascism’s Return to the Spirit of the Risorgimento This concept of the nation too, on which we insist so much today, is not a fascist invention. It is the soul of that new Italy which must, little by little, prevail over the old. Fascism, with its vigorous feeling for the national impulse that drew Italians into the fire of the Great War and made them victoriously bear the tragic trial, with its energetic reaction against yesterday’s materialists who sought to annihilate the value of that trial and to prostrate the spirit of citizens in the desperate discouragement of weariness and of an anxious longing for well-being, all the more impatiently craved the harder it was to obtain; Fascism holds up before the eyes of the people the grandeur and beauty of the sacrifice accomplished, as its greatest patrimony for the future.

And thus it has once again shaken, with a powerful hand, the conscience of Italians, so that they might remember they were children of Italy, and remember the conditions that made this Italy possible from her very first Risorgimento; the conditions that gave our fathers the means to feel ashamed of the old servitude, to come out of inertia, to free themselves from the old habit of rhetoric and literature, and begin to speak seriously of liberty. Fascism has returned to the spirit of the Risorgimento with that greater vigor that could only spring from the new awareness of the great trial accomplished with such honor by the Italian people, and from the certainty of its capacity to fight and to win, and, in short, to count in the history of the world.

It has returned to it with an impulse intolerant of every weakness and every cowardice, in an unrestrainable ardor to reawaken the nation from the recent and surely momentary darkening and drowsing of its conscience, so that the fruit of the immense sacrifice should not be lost, so that the place finally deserved and nearly already attained—the place of a great power, that is, of a nation possessed of its own will—should not be lost from sight, but should rather become the very object of this will, to be won and firmly maintained.

Fascist Violence

In this impetuous ardor, Fascism, when it has believed it necessary, has resorted to violence. A thing at which the men of the old Italy have, at a certain point, shown themselves scandalized. At a certain point; because at first that violence served a purpose for them too: when the State seemed to be falling into ruin, and was no longer able to guarantee public order.

Which naturally presented some inconvenience even for those disposed to let the very moral values of the war be dispersed and trampled, and to go on smiling at the Mazzinian religion of the nation, provided only that the individual received from the public powers the security of life, from work to thought, throughout the whole range of natural liberties; in other words, provided that every decent man who thought only of himself and his family were allowed to live, for once, after all the deprivations and hardships of the war! And for that first period, even the truncheons of the squadristi seemed a godsend.

But once the State had been set back in order, once the security of normal life had been recovered, once the causes that had made that violence necessary had been forgotten—it is so easy to forget past troubles!—it was not enough for the head of the fascist government to declare that the truncheon must now be put away in the attic, and that there was now a State, sprung from Fascism, to promote and defend its ideals; it was not enough for the squadre to become a regular, though voluntary, militia of the State; it was not enough to protest every day that all of Fascism no longer wished to be a force outside the State: the truncheon, in its material brutality, became the symbol of the violent fascist spirit outside every law.

And with wicked perfidy, every crime, every abuse, every act of arrogance committed by criminals of the fascist camp was exploited (for a party that seeks to permeate and thereby educate the masses, and that numbers many hundreds of thousands of members, is naturally bound to include among its ranks delinquents, profiteers, and bullies, about whom it may be mistaken, and whom it too often comes to recognize, alas, too late and to its own harm) in order to strike a moral blow at this Fascism, which had by then become a scourge of God to its enemies. And so a preaching of Franciscan sweetness and love of neighbor arose, such as had never before been heard in Italy. Here was a Quakerism of which Italians had had no previous example.

Here was the usual “moral question,” by which people in Italy have always tried to topple strong governments possessed of some awareness of what the State is—for a State that is not strong is no State at all. I do not wish to dwell on this point. This time the old Italy must have patience, and in this moral question await the judgment of history. Fascism is not to be confused with the men who, here or there, today or tomorrow, may represent it: it is an idea, a spiritual movement, which draws its strength from itself, from its own truth, from its own correspondence to deep, historical, and national needs. And what anyone can note today is this curious fact: that the adversaries, knowing that Fascism is an idea, do not take issue with this or that fascist, but with all fascists without distinction—or at least with those who come forward and fight for Fascism.

Against them these preachers of Franciscan charity—who now call themselves liberals!—hurl, from morning till night, blows of every kind: ridicule, invective, fantastic accusations, defamation, slanders they know to be such. A violence of language and a calculated cynicism of the weapons of combat that would degrade a brigand. And none of them feel any scruple about it: not even the men of letters and philosophers who spring up, for obvious reasons, in the ranks of anti-Fascism, as they always sprang up in the old Italy against which Fascism has risen. To say to a decent man, “you are a beast, or a profiteer, or a violent man, a contractor of crimes or an instigator of misdeeds”—this, for our most innocent liberals, is not violence. As long as it is printed, violence is not violence. Such is the magic of the most sincere cult of freedom of the press.

Now, gentlemen, let us say it clearly once more, for all men of good will. There is violence and violence; and no fascist worthy of marching beneath a pennant has ever confused them. And whoever has confused them is not worthy of standing with us, and will be expelled once discovered. There is the violence of the private individual, which is arbitrariness, anarchy, social disintegration; and if Fascism is not an empty word—which not even its adversaries would claim—no enemy has ever found that violence more resolute, more forthright, more formidable than Fascism.

But there is another violence, willed by God and by all men who believe in God and in the order and law that God certainly wills in the world: the violence by which there is no parity between the law and the criminal; and it is not possible to suppose that the criminal will freely consent to accept, or rather to demand, the punishment that is indeed, as a great philosopher rightly observed, his own right. The will of the law annuls the will of the criminal: that is, it is a holy violence. And men, beginning with Jesus, resorted to acts of violence whenever they held firmly that they represented the law, or a higher and universal interest. In the Catholic Church, not only the Dominicans, but also the followers of Saint Francis. In the State, always all the armed forces. Whenever the State was in crisis, always the men of the revolution, which is the founding of a new State.

Is Fascism a revolution? Its idea is certainly revolutionary. Those who deny it its revolutionary character are those who speak, with enormous inaccuracy, of the peaceful—perhaps they mean bloodless—methods of the March on Rome, yet who are every day engaged in deploring and denouncing, urbi et orbi, the bloody and irreducible violence of Fascism.

The Recurring Barbarism of Vico

We have recalled, among the memorable initiators of the new Italy, the great Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico. Well, our profound opponents may perhaps smile to hear that the good Catholic philosopher of the New Science is among the spiritual masters of Fascism.

But I refer them to the study of Vico’s “heroic morality,” proper to the age in which, under the terror of the gods, the first men abandoned wandering Venus out of shame and, with force and violent passions conforming to the designs of Providence, founded families and thus society and the State; I refer them to his doctrine of recurring barbarism, whereby eternally (and therefore not only in fixed epochs, but whenever it is needed and for as long as it is needed) one returns to violent force in order to reorder and revive States degenerated and corrupted by the liberty proper to the more civilized nations, where reason, fully unfolded, has gradually produced a regime of absolute civil equality. How many times has Fascism been accused, with unintelligent malice, of barbarism?

Well then, yes: understand this barbarism in its proper sense, and we shall boast of it, as of sound energies that shatter false and baneful idols, and restore the health of the nation in the power of a State conscious of its sovereign rights, which are its duties.

Our barbarism will disdain the false intellectualistic culture that misleads and falsifies, prone and indulgent toward individualistic caprices and anarchic egoisms, just as it will disdain false pity and hypocritical brotherhood and even the rules of etiquette that wean men from rude and healthy frankness and accustom them to mutual deceit and to all the intolerable tolerances; but we shall kindle in the Italian soul an unquenchable thirst for that knowledge which is toil and the inner reform of man and the conquest of moral and material means for an ever higher, ever more fruitful life, for the individual and for the nation—indeed for humanity and for the world, which is ours, gentlemen, since we live in it and by it; and we shall raise our children, the young people around us trembling with enthusiasm, to feel that life is not pleasure but duty, and that one loves one’s neighbor not by procuring and easing for him a quiet life, but rather by helping and training him for work, for sacrifice.

Thus do parents truly love their children: not caresses and coddling, but active, watchful, austere, and provident care, so that each may be ready and equal to the necessities of life, to the laws of the world, to duty.

The Fascist Doctrine of the State

From our Mazzinian consciousness of the sanctity of the nation, as a reality that is actualized in the State, we draw the motives for that exaltation of the State which we are accustomed to make. An exaltation that seems mere new rhetoric to old-style skeptics, who look at us, wink, smile, half foolish and half sly, and murmur: state-worship! It is the usual fixation of liberalism, which Mazzini called individualistic and materialistic! There comes to my mind, at this moment, something said in 1882 by a worthy man, who was himself a liberal, but a liberal of good stock, one of those who truly believed in liberty and loved it in earnest.

“We have come to this,” he said, lamenting the disorders of parliamentarism and the arrogance of the radicals against the State, which they had reduced to an instrument of their whims and of the fickle demands of the crowds or of cliques—”we have come to this, that in Italy even the memory of the etymology of the word ‘State’ has been lost.” The State, at least with respect to individual caprice, must stand: it must hold firm, as something fixed, solid, unshakeable. Law and force: law that makes itself respected and does not yield every time it fails to please some individual, or fails to favor this or that category. And in order to be this force, it must be power, internal and external: capable of realizing its own will.

A rational, or reasonable will, like all those that need not remain at the stage of mere velleity but can be translated into action and triumph; but a will that cannot admit any others that would limit it. Hence, a sovereign, absolute will. The legitimate will of citizens is that which coincides with the will of the State, as it organizes and expresses itself through its central organs. With regard to external and international relations, war, in the last analysis, tests and guarantees the sovereignty of the individual State within the system of history, to which all States contribute. And the State demonstrates in war its own power, which is to say its own autonomy.

The Ethical State

This State, which wills—indeed which is the only concrete will, since all others can be called wills only in the abstract, insofar as one leaves aside the indissoluble relations by which every individual is bound to society and breathes, so to speak, its very atmosphere as language, custom, thought, interests, and aspirations—this State, I say, would not be will at all, if it were not a person. For to will, one must be conscious of what one wills, of ends and means; and to have such consciousness, one must first of all be conscious of oneself, distinguish oneself from others, assert oneself in one’s own autonomy, as a center of conscious activity; in short, be a person. But whoever says person, says moral activity; says an activity that wills what it ought to will, according to an ideal.

And the State, which is national consciousness and the will of this consciousness, draws from this consciousness the ideal toward which it aims and directs all its activity. Therefore the State cannot but be an ethical substance. Allow me this philosophical terminology. Its meaning is transparent, if each of you appeals to his own conscience and feels there the sanctity of the fatherland, which commands, with an order that admits no discussion, to be served without hesitation, without exception, unto death. The State has for us an absolute moral value, as the person in virtue of which all others have value, a value which, coinciding with that of the State, is itself likewise absolute. Consider: human life is sacred. Why? Man is spirit, and as such has an absolute value. Things are instruments, men are ends.

And yet the life of the citizen, when the laws of the fatherland require it, must be sacrificed. Without these self-evident truths, planted therefore in the heart of every civilized man, there is no social life, no human life. The ethical State? Liberals bristle at it. They do not form a clear notion of this concept; and therefore they raise the loudest protests, and appeal to traditions whose very principles are the negation of every moral reality, although they derive from a concern of a moral order; and they fall headlong into that materialism which was proper to the century in which classical liberal doctrine was formulated.

The liberals object that morality is an attribute of concrete individuality, which alone is true will, the only personality in the proper sense of the word; and that the State is nothing but the external limit of free individual personalities, whose activities it must reconcile by preventing one from being realized to the detriment of others. This negative and empty concept of the State, Fascism resolutely rejects; not because it presumes to place a State above the individual, but because, according to the teaching of Mazzini already recalled, it is not possible to conceive of the individual in an abstract atomism which the State would then have to compose into an impossible synthesis.

We think that the State is the very personality of the individual, stripped of accidental differences, freed from the abstract preoccupation with particular interests not seen or valued within the general system in which lies their reality and the possibility of their effective guarantee; a personality brought back and concentrated in its deepest consciousness: where the individual feels the general interest as his own, and therefore wills it as general will. This deep consciousness, which each of us realizes and must realize within himself as national consciousness in its dynamism, in its juridical form, in its political activity—this very basis of our individuality, this is the State. And to conceive of it outside the moral life is to deprive the individual himself of the very substance of his morality.

The ethical State of the fascist is no longer, of course, the agnostic State of old liberalism. Its ethical character is spirituality: personality that is self-awareness; a system that is will. And system means thought, program. It means the history of a people gathered into the living fire of a present and active consciousness. It means the concept of what one is, can be, and must be: it means mission and purpose, general and particular, remote and near, mediated and immediate, all fully determined. The State is the great will of the nation; and therefore its great intelligence. It ignores nothing, and considers nothing foreign to it that touches the interest of the citizen, which is its own interest: neither economically nor morally. Nihil humani a se alienum putat.

The State is neither a great façade nor an empty edifice: it is man himself; the house built and inhabited and enlivened by the joy and sorrow of labor and of the whole life of the human spirit.

Against the Charge of “State-Worship”

Is this state-worship? It is the religion of the spirit, so long as that spirit has not been cast down into the abject blindness of materialism. It is the torch brandished by the youthful fascist fist to kindle a vast spiritual conflagration in this Italy which has roused herself—I repeat—and fights for her own redemption. But she cannot be redeemed unless she restores her inner moral forces, unless she becomes accustomed to conceiving of her whole life religiously, unless she trains herself in the virile simplicity of the citizen ever ready, without hesitation, to serve the ideal, to work, to live, and to die for the fatherland, set at the summit of his thoughts, venerable, holy; and unless she loves the army and the school that make peoples powerful, and labor as the source of every national and private prosperity, the training-ground of will and character.

Fascism and the Working Classes

And Fascism—rebelling in the most uncompromising way against the myths and lies of internationalist socialism, of the men without fatherland and without duties, an exalter of the sense of right and thus of individuality in the name of an abstract and empty ideal of human brotherhood—Fascism, which conceives of this strong ethical State not as a leaden vault stifling every germ that ferments in the spontaneous life of the nation, but rather as the supreme form and the conscious and powerful unity of all national forces in their fullest successive development, does not aim to drive from the political stage the proletariat, which was introduced there and exalted by socialism. The ethical State must spring from reality itself and therefore adhere to it; and from this adherence it must draw its strength and its power.

That is why Fascism today labors to reorganize the working masses upon a national foundation and in perfect accord with its moral concept of the State; and it envisions a form of order which, freeing the State from the conventional falsehood of the old Parliament of professional politicians, will compose into an arrangement all the more durable and solid the more dynamic it is, all the social, economic, and intellectual forces from which the healthy and genuine political currents of the country are generated. I shall not go into particulars, which may be corollaries of fascist doctrine, but which are not Fascism itself. It is not the corollaries that give historical meaning to our movement. Its importance lies in the idea, in the animating spirit; that spirit against which, we are certain, the gates of hell shall not prevail.

Fascism Is a Religion

Gentlemen, Fascism is a party, a political doctrine. But Fascism—and this is its strength, let those who have not yet grasped it know it; this is its great merit, and the secret of the prestige it exercises over every spirit not fallen prey to the malicious and endless chatter of certain newspapers—is a party, a political doctrine, only insofar as it is, first of all, a total conception of life. One cannot be a fascist in politics and not a fascist, as I was just recalling at the Party branch, in school, not a fascist in one’s own family, not a fascist in one’s own workshop

Just as the Catholic, if he truly is one, invests his whole life with his religious feeling, and whether he speaks and acts, or is silent and thinks and meditates in his own conscience, or gathers and nurtures certain feelings—if he truly is Catholic and has religious sense, he will always remember the highest admonition of his mind, so as to act and think and pray and meditate and feel as a Catholic; so the fascist, whether he sits in Parliament or stays within his Party branch, whether he writes for the newspapers or reads them, whether he attends to his private life or converses with others, whether he looks to the future or recalls his own past and the past of his people, must always remember that he is a fascist! Thus is fulfilled what may truly be called the distinguishing mark of Fascism: to take life seriously.

Life is toil, it is effort, it is sacrifice, it is hard work; a life in which we know well there is no room for amusement, no time to amuse ourselves. Before us there always stands an ideal to be realized; an ideal that gives us no rest. We cannot waste time. Even in sleep, we must answer for the talents entrusted to us. We must make them bear fruit, not for ourselves, who are nothing, but for our country, for the fatherland, for this Italy that fills our hearts with her memories and her aspirations, with her joys and her travails, that reproaches us for the centuries our fathers wasted, but that comforts us with recent memories, when the Italian effort appeared a miracle; when all of Italy gathered into a single thought, a single feeling, a single desire for sacrifice.

And it was indeed the young, it was the young Italy of the Prophet, who were ready, who ran to sacrifice, and died for the fatherland. They died for the ideal, the only thing for which men can truly live, through which men can feel the seriousness of life. And thinking of these recent memories, in which all the memories of our people are gathered, in which and from which all the hopes of our future take their start, we who have an Italian consciousness, a fascist consciousness, we feel that we cannot help but see our six hundred thousand dead always before us, risen to admonish us that life must be taken seriously, that there is no time to lose, that Italy must be made great as they saw her in their final dream, as great as she must be and will be if we too sacrifice ourselves for her, day by day, always.

What Is Ontology, And Why Does It Matter?

Every political movement rests on assumptions. Assumptions about human nature, about society, about what is real and what isn't. Most people never examine these assumptions. They simply inherit them, act on them, and call the results common sense. These questions are the domain of Ontology. Ontology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of reality itself, that is, studying what exists, why it exists, and how it exists.

Fascism did not appear from emotions or feelings alone. It emerged from a serious philosophical Idea, rooted in the work of Giovanni Gentile, whose Actualism represents one of the most rigorous developments of idealist thought in the twentieth century. Idealism being the view that reality is fundamentally rational and intelligible, not detached from mind or beyond its reach. To understand what Fascism actually claims about reality, man, history, and the state, you must first understand Gentile.

And to understand Gentile, you must clear away the most common and most damaging misreading of his work. The misunderstanding that Actualism is solipsism. Solipsism being the idea that "everything is thought" means reality is a mental projection. That the external world, other people, history itself, are dissolved into the human mind, individual or collective.

Gentile was not a solipsist. He was an Objective Idealist - a position he called Actual Idealism, or Actualism. Reality, on this view, is not a mental projection, nor is it a wall the mind can never fully get through. It is structured by rational principles - logic, order, intelligibility - that aren't just tools your mind uses to understand the world, but are woven into the fabric of reality itself. These principles don't belong to you or anyone individually. They exist independently of any single mind. Mind and world are not two separate things that somehow interact - they are bound together necessarily, structurally, and inescapably, two sides of the same coin.

Don't take our word for it. Take his.

The Ontology of Actualism

Start with the self. Most people assume the self is a kind of container - a sealed interior that looks out at the world through its windows. Gentile rejects this entirely.

"The Self which would be self without other would clearly not be even self because it only is in so far as the other is."

The self does not exist prior to, or independent of, the world it confronts. I am only myself because there is something which is not me. Remove the other, and you annihilate the self along with it. The two are not two things that happen to bump into each other - each one only becomes what it is through the existence of the other.

But this raises an immediate problem. If self and world are genuinely distinct - if the object is really other than the subject - how can they be bound together so deeply?

Gentile's answer is that pure, absolute difference is incoherent. If two things were truly, absolutely different - with nothing whatsoever in common - you couldn't even think about them together. The moment you compare them, you've already placed them on common ground. Gentile makes this precise:

"Two terms absolutely different could only be thought of in such a way that in thinking the one we should not be thinking the other [...] Such pure difference could only hold between two terms which are unrelatable; so that if terms are in relation, however different they are, at least in thinking one we think the other."

To distinguish one thing from another, you already need that common ground for the distinction to be made on. Difference requires a deeper unity. But that unity is not sameness, it does not mean that the entire world is just one thing. It does not flatten the two terms into one. It holds them together precisely through their tension. This is why the world is never simply "out there" waiting to be observed. As Gentile puts it:

"Neither does the object transcend the subject nor can it be immanent in it save in virtue of the action of the subject itself."

Think about what it actually means to know something. It's not passive. You don't just receive the world like a photograph. You engage with it, make sense of it, structure it. For Gentile, that active engagement isn't just how we access reality - it's how reality becomes knowable at all. This is the hinge of the whole system.

But what does that unity actually look like in practice? Think of it this way: a living organism is not just a collection of parts. The heart, the lungs, the brain - none of them mean anything in isolation. They only function, only exist as what they are, as parts of a whole. But equally, the whole doesn't exist without them. Neither comes first. They arise together.

Gentile applies this same logic to reality itself:

"Life is not an abstract unity but the unity of an organism, in which the harmony, fusion and synthesis of various elements exist in such wise that there is neither unity without multiplicity nor multiplicity without unity."

Multiplicity here simply means the many distinct, separate things that make up the world. Unity means the underlying wholeness that connects them. Gentile's point is that neither is more fundamental than the other. You cannot start with pure oneness and derive difference from it. But equally, you cannot start with pure scattered difference and derive connection from it:

"If we start with unity, unity remains abstract and unproductive, unable to give the ground of duality; and if we start with duality, the duality cannot but be eternal duality, because it cannot but be identical with itself and therefore incapable of being unified."

In plain terms: if you begin with pure unity, you have no way to explain why anything is distinct from anything else. If you begin with pure difference, you have no way to explain how anything relates to anything else. Both poles fail on their own. Neither is the starting point. Both arise together, through the same living act. Gentile puts it in its most concentrated form:

"Infinite unity is therefore infinite unification of the multiple as it is infinite multiplication of the one. The development is a multiplication which is a unification, and a unification which is a multiplication."

Reality, for Gentile, is a process, always in motion - not chaotic, but moving according to its own rational logic. Things become that which they never were, and shift from one state to the other, always unified by being a part of the same world, yet, having different qualities and traits within it. But where exactly does it happen? Where do thought and world actually meet?

"All the infinite elements into which the world confronting me is multiplied, and all the infinite moments into which every one of its elements, and itself as a whole, are multiplied within me, in confronting me are in me, through my work. Multiplication by which one thing is not another, is my act."

The act of distinguishing, of differentiating, of thinking, seeing the world as multiple and determinate - this is not something that happens to me. It is something I do based on my grasp of reality's own logical structure. And the very fact that I can do it is already proof that I am inside reality, actively interacting with its logical principles - not standing outside making a copy of it:

"In affirming reality, the subject which affirms is the reality which confronts it in the affirmation."

In other words: you cannot know without something to know. And that something cannot be known without a mind to know it. The two are locked together - the knower and the known each require the other to be what they are. Which means the moment you recognize reality, you are already inside it. Not a spectator watching from a safe distance. A participant, bound to it, shaped by it, and shaping it in return.

"The sphere of the real osculates with the sphere of the concept."

Osculates - touches, coincides, shares the same boundary. Two circles, perfectly overlapping.

What are the two circles? The Real is everything that exists - the world, things, events, people. The Concept is the logical structure through which things are understood identity, definition, determinacy. Gentile's claim is that these two circles are never actually separate.

Why? Because to exist at all, something must have a way in which it exists. It must have traits, characteristics, a nature that makes it what it is rather than nothing at all. A thing with no identity, no structure, no determinacy - no way of being anything in particular - is not some mysterious hidden reality lurking beyond thought. It is simply nothing. Nothingness has no traits. It has no way of existing, because it doesn't.

To be real is therefore already to have identity, structure, and determinacy. And these are exactly what thought works with. The two circles meet perfectly because they describe the same thing from two directions - reality from the outside, thought from the inside.

This leads to the line most often pulled from context:

"Nothing is real outside thought."

Read carelessly, this sounds like solipsism - your mind inventing the world. It is a transcendental claim: reality and intelligibility cannot be torn apart. An utterly unthinkable, structureless, indeterminate thing is not some hidden layer of reality waiting to be uncovered. To be real is to have identity, structure, and determinacy. Something with none of these isn't hidden - it's nothing at all. When Gentile says thought, he does not mean your thought or anyone's for that matter. He means Thought as the universal structure through which reality constitutes itself - the same structure at work in every genuine act of knowing, the Logical Law.

This unity of thought and world is not static. It is always in motion:

"The act which multiplies the One does not destroy it; it is in multiplying that it realizes it, and thence the multiplicity which follows from the act is a multiplicity of the one. And analysis does not disperse the individuality, rather does it enrich it, make it concrete, give it power."

And that motion runs in both directions at once - from the individual to the universal, and back again:

"Think the individual and in thinking it you universalize it. Think the universal and in thinking it you individualize it."

Nothing exists as a bare particular, cut off from all relation and meaning. Nothing exists as a pure abstraction, floating free of any concrete instance. Everything is both the concrete instance at a given time, and the identity in relation to logic. Every real thing is both at once - held together by Thought as living act. And that act is never finished:

"This synthesis as the concrete reality of self-consciousness is the process which is not fact but act, living and eternal act."

Reality, for Gentile, is not something that happened. It is something happening.

Hegel and Gentile

To understand where Gentile stands, you need to understand where he came from.

Hegel argued that reality is not made of blind, indifferent matter. It has a rational structure running through it - a logical order that governs everything that exists, from nature to history to human consciousness. He called this structure Spirit. Not spirit in the religious sense of a ghost or soul, but Spirit as the universal rational principle that underlies and connects all of reality. The world is not alien to the mind because mind and world share the same rational structure. Reality is intelligible - understandable, graspable by thought - because at its root, it is the expression of that same universal rational principle working itself out through time.

Gentile inherits almost all of this. The idea that reality and intelligibility are two sides of the same coin. The idea that subject and object - mind and world - are bound together rather than opposed. The idea that history is not just a sequence of random events but the concrete unfolding of Spirit through time. All of this is present in Actualism.

Both thinkers also agree on what they call the Absolute. Not a thing. Not an object sitting somewhere complete and finished. But a living process - reality developing according to logical principles, perpetually moving, perpetually producing itself anew. Neither Hegel nor Gentile believed reality was static. Both saw it as a process, a movement, a self-creating act.

They also share an understanding of what drives that movement, called the dialectic. The dialectic is not merely a way of thinking - it is the way dynamic being itself operates. Things become what they were not prior, because their own traits determine how they interact with other things, and what kind of new state results from that interaction. Opposites don't cancel each other out. They define each other, require each other, and together produce something neither was alone. You've already seen this throughout the Actualism section. That structure came directly from Hegel.

"History is not the presupposition of present spiritual activity but its reality and concreteness, the basis of its absolute freedom."

"What is the progressive spiritualization of the world but the realization of the synthesis, which reconciles opposition even by preserving it, in the unity which is its own ground and its whole meaning?"

The Aufhebung - Hegel's term for the dialectical movement that cancels, preserves, and elevates opposing terms into a higher unity - runs throughout Gentile's thought even where the word itself never appears. The unity-in-difference described above is precisely this: difference not destroyed but taken up into a richer, more concrete whole. Form and matter are one instance of it:

"Form and matter, apparently so fundamental in their difference, are only one concept. They are the Alpha and Omega of an alphabet which form not a straight line in fact, but a circle whose end is its beginning."

There is no raw material standing outside or prior to the form that shapes it. There is no pure form hovering above material it has yet to touch. Each requires the other, and each is constituted through the other. What looks like a fundamental opposition turns out to be a single movement, circular, self-completing.

But Gentile departs from Hegel at one crucial point.

Hegel's system risks becoming a closed book. A completed account of how Spirit has unfolded, written down, systematized, read as a finished object. Gentile saw this as a betrayal of the living core of idealism. If Thought is truly fundamental, it cannot itself become a mere fact - a static result sitting there to be inspected from outside.

"The concept is not already posited but is the positive which posits - a process of self-creation which has as its essential moment its own negation."

The act of thinking is never finished. Reality is never complete. The dialectic is not a historical process that terminates in absolute knowledge - it is the permanent structure of reality itself. Always in motion. Always producing itself anew. This is what Gentile means by Pure Act: not a thing, not a result, but a perpetual self-creating movement that cannot be stepped outside of, only participated in.

Gentile and Logical Law

So, where does Gentile speak of these laws - the logical structure running through Spirit, through the dialectic, through Pure Act itself - and what exactly does he say they are? They have been in the background of everything argued so far. Gentile now names them directly, and gives them a precise status.

He distinguishes between two principles at work in reality itself. The first is Thought Thinking - the living act of reality's self-constitution, pure activity always in process, the ground from which anything knowable emerges. The second is Thought Thought - the objective logical structure that activity produces and sustains: the laws, categories, and determinate forms through which things are what they are. Gentile is direct about which one is primary:

"True thought is not thought thought... for us the thought thought supposes thought thinking; its life and its truth are in its act."

Thought Thought - the logical laws, the categories, the structures of reality - exists independently and operates whether or not any mind turns to grasp it. What Thought Thinking sustains is not the laws themselves, but our access to them. All genuine thinking is already moving within the logical laws necessarily - thinking outside them is not an alternative mode of thought, it is simply not thinking at all. Thought Thinking is therefore thinking as such, the whole domain of it, and it is precisely through this that the objective structure of Thought Thought becomes reachable by us. The laws were there before any particular mind looked at them. Thought Thinking is the act of looking.

The two are not equals. Only one of them is genuinely alive:

"It is only when we descend from thought thinking, which is activity, to thought thought, which is the limit of the activity it presupposes and itself abstract, that the principle of non-contradiction applies."

Thought Thought is the limit - the edge where living activity hardens into something we can examine, name, and reason about. The laws of logic, the law of identity, the principle of non-contradiction: these belong to Thought Thought. They are fixed, immutable, and apply precisely because they are abstractions from the act, not the act itself. You can reason within them. You cannot step outside them - because outside them is Thought Thinking, which you are already inside.

And this is where the picture becomes sharp. Galileo, whom Gentile cites approvingly, captured the status of these logical laws exactly:

"Nature is inexorable and immutable and caring nothing whether its recondite reasons and modes of working are or are not open to human capacity."

Gentile endorses this completely - and adds the decisive point: the logical structure of reality "confronts us, not posited by us, and therefore is independent of us."

The laws exist independently of any mind that turns to grasp them. What Thought Thinking does is reflect upon them - actively engaging with the logical structure of reality until it crystallizes into Thought Thought: stable concepts, definitions, and knowledge that have genuine grounding in reality precisely because they were reached through that active engagement. Thought Thought is not a distortion of the living act but its realized product - and it is through continued self-reflection that Thought Thinking returns to those crystalized forms, reflects on them, and deepens them further.

This is what separates Actualism from being mere Hegelianism - and what makes it the philosophical foundation of a politics that understands history, the state, and human will not as objects to be analyzed, but as acts to be lived.

So, what is the Fascist view of Reality?

To Fascists, Reality is a single unified plane of existence, grounded in the most fundamental principles of what is possible and what is not. For anything to exist at all, it must have an identity - a nature that determines what it can and cannot do, what it can and cannot become. Without that, it simply isn't there. Even void has its traits: that which can come of it, that which cannot, and what it is in relation to that which is not void. Nothing escapes identity. Nothing escapes the logical structure that makes it what it is rather than nothing.

This view comes directly out of the Hegelian tradition - the idea that reality is not blind, indifferent matter, but a rational process governed by logical principles that the mind can grasp and reason about. Gentile took this and sharpened it into Actualism: reality is not a finished thing sitting there waiting to be looked at. It is something happening, always moving, always producing itself anew through the push and pull of opposites that define and require each other.

These logical principles are not beyond the mind's reach. The mind can reason about Reality even at its most basic levels, with nothing in principle hidden from it. Given, of course, there is enough knowledge to work with.

This view of Reality then flows into every other area of Fascist thought. It shapes Fascist Axiology - the study of values - by moving the center of value away from made-up morality that floats free of any grounding in Reality, and toward a concrete logical question: is this justified? Justified not by feeling or habit alone, but by the nature of things as they actually are.

It shapes Fascist Epistemology - the study of what can be known and how - by rejecting the idea that the mind is cut off from Reality. The knower and the known are not strangers to each other. They are bound together, as this entire essay has argued, necessarily, structurally, and inescapably.

And of course, this shapes Fascist Socio-Political Theory. The principles around which the Fascist social apparatus, structures, and institutions are constructed are not arbitrary. Rather than derived from tradition or popular opinion alone, they are derived from this philosophical system - from the logical structure of reality itself, as reason can grasp and articulate it.

Reality is not something that happens to us. It is something we are already inside of, participating in, shaped by and shaping in return. That is where Fascist thought begins.

Contents

1 - Introduction

2 - Disclaimer on Scale and Application

3 - Foundational Principles

4 - State

5 - Economics

6 - Reform of Education

7 - Law Enforcement

8 - Social Reform

9 - Healthcare

10 - Armed Forces

11 - Foreign Policy

12 - Closing note on Fascism

Section I – Introduction

The dimension of the mind, of thought, is fundamentally what the individual truly is: his worldview—that is, his perception and understanding of the world—constitutes his base reality, his prism through which all existence is encountered. As such, it is the most important, and arguably the sole decisive, aspect of any ideological endeavor. All aspects of action are downstream from it. Therefore, the field of Philosophy acts as the most fundamental, base, and important dimension of ideological action there is. Yet this field has been persistently neglected, dismissed, or subordinated to concepts which are themselves subordinate to it—material, social, or emotional concerns—leading to widespread failure to recognize the origins and mechanics of the processes that determine outcomes in these fields.

This neglect of the cause behind all action has produced consistent failures across the aforementioned fields, due to an incomplete picture of reality. The many crises of both today and ancient times all point toward the same root: the failure to recognize the centrality of mental processes that motivate, direct, and shape the individual, his actions, and the broader social structure.

This failure to grasp thought and achieve awareness of its mechanics lies at the base of many systems and societies. It evolves into outright rejection of the principle and glorification of delusion. As a result, it creates inward-based principles, worldviews, and values, which dictate action based on principles that exist due to misinterpretations of reality

When awareness of thought's mechanics is absent, individuals default to subconscious mechanisms, passively elevating misattributed perceptions and emotional states into guiding principles and values. This process turns subjective distortions into the apparent foundation of action, creating the inward-based worldviews that dominate modern systems.

Such inward-based values do not arise through conscious choice but are induced subconsciously by ignorance and misattribution of value: the individual, unaware of thought's mechanics, ascribes axiological, and sometimes even ontological, significance to perceptions and states that are in fact shaped by prior, unexamined valuations. For example, people pursue happiness and avoid sadness as if these were inherent sources of worth and direction—yet not just the importance assigned to happiness, but the very concepts that produce the sensation, arise only from what the individual already sees as good or important, creating a closed circle where the desire exists solely to justify its own existence.

When such self-awareness is absent, the individual turns inward, exalting subjective valuations—emotions, desires, arbitrary personal constructs—as sufficient causes for action and continued being. Yet these valuations, being self-generated, require constant re-justification from the same subjective source, creating a circular and ultimately empty motivation. This process, however, collapses into contradiction. Genuine meaning must be external: derived from concrete, factual interactions with reality itself, not abstractions imposed by and upon the self. An internal “meaning” is nothing but a self-referential cycle—something that exists only to fulfill something that exists only to fulfill something else at an earlier stage of the process, ad infinitum

Fascism is opposed to the notions of glorified irrationality and irrationality in any degree. Derived from Hegelian philosophy, it is a permutation of it which seeks to impose the absolute logical conclusion of the world onto reality itself. Hence the necessity of Futurism: a total break with the past. Hence the emergence of One Future—to disclose the Logical Structure inherent in reality, dissolve the illusions of subjectivity, and actualize being that is justified rather than self-deceived.

Disclaimer on Scope and Application

This document presents the universal, foundational program of the One Future Organization, derived from the objective Logical Structure of reality and applicable to all humanity. It is the general reference for all branches and adherents worldwide. Local offices may develop supplementary guidelines to address specific regional conditions, material constraints, or other necessities. However, all such adaptations must remain fully consistent with the principles herein and may not introduce deviations, national exceptions, or subjective reinterpretations. The ultimate aim remains the unification of the entire human collective into a single, rationally organized system

Section II – Foundational Principles

Fascism goes beyond the contemporary incomplete and mystified view of the world, deriving it's ideals from Hegelian ontology, leading to what Ugo Spirito described as a metaphysically revolutionary philosophy. Therefore, these philosophical principles serve as Foundational Principles of Fascism.

1. Everything is subject to the laws of logic. Reality in all its forms—from causality to the properties of things—is structured by the principles of Logic. Meaningful action, free from seeds of self-defeat, is possible only through full awareness of these principles and their relation to humanity. Therefore, Truth is the foundational principle of our ideology.

2. Reality is one. Mind and matter form a single reality with no noumenal barrier or supernatural realm. Ideas, perceptions, and worldviews are processes that arise inside this reality. There is no basis for positing groundless concepts such as noumena—unknowable “things-in-themselves”—or for treating ideas as transcendental or beyond ordinary cognition. Such claims create a false separation between mind and reality, serving only as an appeal to some detached transcendental authority. It is a sign of one’s inability to defend his points.

3. Totality of Truth and non-democratic governance. The actions of the State must always reflect the most reasonable action. Every decision, policy, legislation, or law must rest on practically justifiable criteria and coherent, verifiable inquiry. No policy may be passed if its justification relies on baseless axiomatic ideals, speculation, or moralism. This principle necessitates non-democratic governance, because majoritarian democracy too often subordinates rational necessity to transient popular opinion and interests rather than actual justification.

4. Ego-death and mental liberation. Freedom consists in the capacity to reason without subjective distortion. Emotions, desires, and personal constructs arise from unexamined self-referential loops and evolutionary holdovers that interfere with accurate perception of reality. Ego-death refers to the elimination of pre-existing subjective interpretations. To be free means to know. True freedom is not arbitrary choice but the rational understanding and willing of necessity as one’s own.

5. The centrality of education Education is the primary mechanism for developing awareness of thought's mechanics, achieving ego-death, and aligning individuals with principles of Reality. Since the State and society are constituted by people, ensuring the education of the population is necessary for the operation of the State.

6. Human Telos A human purpose exists, it can be traced in the intent and function of organs and living systems. Nature is subject to deviation, dysfunction, and impotence — such as cancer. Therefore the true function of human life is determined by what the body and spirit are designed for, not by momentary empirical failure.

7. The Organic State The State is the ethical and rational embodiment of the human collective, organized through the principles of the Truth to serve as an expression of them at a larger scale of social organization.

8. Inherently Futurist Tradition, culture, and historical forms are expressions of subjective, limited worldviews. As there is only One Truth, there is no place for traditions or cultures. The past is to be studied only; all else must be transcended in favor of novel structures that fully reflect reality, and logical necessity.

9. We oppose the privatization of power. Anything that shifts power away from scientific processes and the Absolute toward the personal or the particular — through ownership of land, means of production, or direct individual authority through positions of power — is opposed.

10. Citizenship through comprehension of the Idea In so far as an individual’s cognitive capabilities allow him to comprehend the Ideal and he actually does so, he is a rightful member of the State. As Giovanni Gentile argued, a nation is not determined by race or region, but by unity under a shared Idea.

These 10 points reflect the clearest basis for the Fascist philosophy, and also are the necessary solutions to the ills of the greater Collective. No political system, doctrine, or movement in the contemporary times, presents a Plan of Action based in these principles. Exactly for this reason, One Future was formed.

Section III – State

Practical Governance begins from the principle that the State is the concrete embodiment of conscious reason. Modern systems fail because they treat governance as negotiation between private interests, inherited customs, or emotional appeals. Here is the solutions we offer.

1. Truth as the Sole Authority. All decisions, laws, policies, and actions derive legitimacy exclusively from their alignment with how justified they are—verified through reason, evidence, and contextual analysis. No majority vote or individual prerogative may substitute for it. The State exists to be an expression of Reason, never to attempt and offer an alternative.

2. Right to Revolution. The people retain the inherent right to revolution if any organ of the State—managers, syndicates, councils, or the political bureau—deviates from Actualist principles and begins to act autonomously or irrationally. This right is not anarchic but corrective: first through dialogue, challenge, and internal rectification; only if these fail does revolutionary action become justified to restore alignment with Truth.

3. Syndicates and Worker Cooperatives. Production, administration, and all State functions are organized through syndicates and cooperatives—associations of competent workers in each domain. These bodies provide direct, professional leadership for required tasks. Each cooperative is governed by a council that scales from local sites to state-level bodies. Councils are meritocratic, not representative in the democratic sense: positions are held by those who have objectively demonstrated superior skill, honesty, transparency, and results in advancing the given field.

4. The Grand Council. The highest functional body, composed of representatives from all major syndicates/cooperatives together with members of the political bureau. It deliberates and reaches conclusions on cross-domain projects and policies. Decisions are made through analysis, discussion, and engagement with the matters of given fact. The council serves as the center for highest level coordination and organization.

5. The Political Bureau. The Political Bureau exists as the dedicated organ of thought, because thought is what shapes all things. It is composed of ideological scholars, scientists, philosophers, and experts who have demonstrated a superior grasp of Fascist principles. Its primary role is to engage in questions of a philosophical and ideological nature, to resolve conceptual inconsistencies, and to ensure that all state conclusions and policies remain rigorously aligned with the Truth. The Bureau is headed by the spokesman of the Grand Council and serves as the indispensable guardrail of ideological coherence and rational necessity.

6. The Non-Party State. Political parties are abolished. Tribalism, factionalism, and competition between programs are inherently going to lead to the justification and promotion of irrational policies. There is only one Human Collective, one State, and one objective goal. All citizens and functionaries aim toward that goal; separation into parties would constitute ideological sabotage.

7. Status and Accountability of Managers. Managers, spokespeople, and council members are guides, not rulers. Their authority derives solely from demonstrated competence and positive results in advancing projects aligned with Reason. They hold no privileges, legal immunities, or personal protections. They are subject to constant challenge and appropriate action if they deviate or fail to produce objective outcomes.

8. Citizen Right to Challenge. Every citizen may question any decision at any level (local syndicate to Grand Council) by submitting a formal statement to the relevant office. The submission must specify the action in question, cite the exact point of inconsistency, and provide clear evidence or logical demonstration of inconsistency. All such challenges must be addressed through transparent review; failure to do so justifies escalation up the hierarchy and refusal to do so, would reflect a failure of the State apparatus to fulfill it’s functions.

The governance structure is deliberately technocratic, pragmatic, and anti-democratic: it institutionalizes the primacy of rationale over desire, the state of objective reality over opinion, and the subordination of individual will to the Logical Principles of Reality.

Section IV – Economics

The current conception of Economics begins from the idea that the Market is the concrete embodiment of conscious coordination. Modern systems fail because they treat economics as negotiation between private interests, inherited customs, or emotional appeals. Here is the solutions we offer.

1. The Question of Value The question of value has been a major issue when the discussion focuses on economics for centuries, and used as the primary critique against socialism, claiming that all value of something can only be determined by supply and demand, that is, how many people want or don't want it. However, this conclusion is incorrect for two reasons.

   A. The objective value of something can be determined through the effort, time resources, and benefit it provides. For example, easier to grow nutritious crops provide more use, are easier to produce, and hence, have more value than recreational tobacco, used for nothing but indulgence motivated by a deviant worldview, taking up resources, time and effort to produce.

   B. The example of tobacco already displayed this reason. The market doesn't act as a proper force for determining value, rather, merely a place for people to realize their desires, often twisted by those behind markets to sell more of a product, to further their own ability to indulge. Hence, we also reject the market.

2. Against Private Ownership Against private ownership. We seek to oppose private ownership, as it, neither theoretically nor practically provides any use towards the greater collective. The ability to own means of production, resources, or products, is nothing but an attempt of the individual to exert power over the collective for personal reasons. Private ownership inherently leads to individuals skewing economics against the development of the collective.

3. Syndicates and Cooperatives as Mode of Production We stand with the theory of Resource Allocation as expressed by Ugo Spirito, as it stands to be one of the most effective economic models up to date. Resource allocation is the process of sending required resources, be it food, clothes, electronics or construction materials, towards a project which requires them in the quantity the project requires them, rather than engaging in financial supplying of the project, which acts as both an unnecessary middle-man and a source of corruption.

   A. The abolition of market and adoption of resource allocation will naturally lead to currency being phased out, as a now useless middleman for transactions of often hedonistic nature.

   B. Resource allocation will be handled by specialized accounting offices, which would develop an approximation of the necessary resources, be it iron for a railroad or the necessary calories in an individual's ration, to then develop an appropriate document, single use for a project, or longer use as a food norm request to be redeemed daily.

4. Syndicates and Cooperatives Changing the mode of production. With our rejection of both market and private ownership, alongside a staunch opposition to hedonistic, recreational commodities, we will enter a more pragmatic and efficient mode of production, which will require a new mode of operation and management, worker cooperatives and syndicates will ensure, through their technocratic structure and narrow focus, efficient management by educated managers, rather than the managers being a cog of the CEOs and Bosses, who have exploited them alongside other workers for personal gain.

5. Defining the Collective We, very clearly, declare that the Collective is first of all the functioning, contributing and ideologically enlightened population. Those who can benefit the development of the State, their Comrades, and fulfillment of their Duties.

The economic system is thus anti-market, anti-property, and fundamentally collectivist: it institutionalizes the primacy of external, demonstrable value over internal, imagined value. By removing monetary intermediaries, it ensures that material life directly expresses Logic and advances the State.

Section V – Reform of Education

Education is the foundational mechanism by which the citizen acquires the capacity to perceive concrete reality and by which society maintains functional coherence. Without systematic clarity on power relations, resource flows, and mental & cultural processes, individuals remain vulnerable to deception. Fascism therefore establishes ideological education as a structural necessity: the formation of clear, verifiable understanding that allows every citizen to know what is happening and equips the entire society to operate as a unified, rational totality.

1. The Purpose of Education. Education must simultaneously provide practical skills and knowledge necessary for productive contribution and instill a clear philosophical understanding of reality. The latter is essential: individuals must grasp the mechanics of thought, recognize the principles of reality, achieve mental clarity, and internalize the ideological basis behind the structure of society. Technical proficiency without ideological alignment produces competent yet manipulatable individuals; ideological alignment without competence produces ineffective zealots.

2. Curriculum Reorientation. The curriculum prioritizes subjects that have an actual effect. Advanced mathematics, physics, chemistry, and language studies are made selective and pursued only after the student identifies a profession or domain of experise.

3. Ideological and Philosophical Education as Mandatory Core. Ideological education, which includes philosophy and economics must be made a mandatory subject, as to allow for the individual to grasp the idea behind the way society operates, as to prevent confusion and alienation in said individual.

4. Pedagogical Approach. Education is progressive and non-competitive in its early stages, emphasizing digestibility and comprehension over ranking. Challenge increases gradually as mastery deepens, but never as a contest of egos. The focus is on clarity, evidence-based reasoning, and alignment with reality rather than personal distinction or satisfaction.

5. The Educational Cooperative. Education is organized through a dedicated syndicate/cooperative of educators and philosophers. This body is responsible for curriculum design, teacher selection (based on demonstrated grasp of Truth and pedagogical results), and continuous verification that instruction remains aligned with foundational principles.

This education system is the operational safeguard that renders corruption structurally impossible and equips the citizen to function as an active, informed component of the State.

Section VI – Law Enforcement

Law enforcement is the mechanism by which the structual well-being of the State and all those within it is ensured. Therefore, law enforcement structures play an important role in the operations of the State, in combating internal fracture, sabotage, and dysfunction of other kind.

1. Reform of the Justice Process. The adversarial court system—judge, jury, prosecution, defense—is abolished as a game of rhetoric and manipulation that obscures rather than reveals Truth. It is replaced by investigative offices composed of trained, ideologically aligned personnel. Their sole task is to establish what objectively occurred: whether an act was committed, whether the individual was responsible, whether it was intentional, negligent, or accidental, and what the consequences were for the collective well-being. Interrogation, evidence collection, and reconstruction are conducted transparently and with full documentation, subject to challenge by any citizen.

2. Primarily Rehabilitative Punishment. Punishment is oriented toward education and rectification, following Giovanni Gentile's principle that enemies are not to be destroyed but re-educated. Facilities isolate individuals from negative influences and distorted worldviews while providing intensive ideological and philosophical re-training. The goal is ego-death and reintegration as a comrade. Isolation serves only to protect the collective during this process; cruelty, humiliation, or indefinite confinement are rejected as irrational and counterproductive.

3. Capital Punishment as Exceptional Measure. In rare cases of extreme, incurable delusion—zealots, maniacs, or individuals whose delusion pose an ongoing, demonstrable menace to the collective and cannot be rectified through education—capital punishment is justified as the elimination of an objective danger. This is not vengeance or moral judgment but a logical necessity to safeguard the State. Such decisions require rigorous, multi-level verification.

4. Proportionality Based on Intent and Impact Responses reflect the degree of intent and effect on the collective:

   A. Gross incompetence is treated as a severe educational failure requiring intensive rectification.

   B. Theft or sabotage of collective resources reflects deliberate prioritization of ego over reason and warrants corresponding isolation and re-education.

   C. Ideological crimes—deviation from Fascism, promotion of irrational ideals, or intentional sabotage of rational inquiry—are among the gravest offenses, as they attack the foundation of the State itself. They manifest as inability or refusal to grasp reality and are addressed through mandatory philosophical rehabilitation

5. Citizen Oversight and Appeal. Any citizen may challenge a justice outcome by submitting evidence of inconsistency with Truth to the relevant office or higher council. All cases are documented and subject to review; failure to address valid challenges justifies escalation or revolutionary correction. Transparency is required for social cohesion.

6. Rejection of Retributive or Spectacular Justice No public executions, shaming rituals, or punitive displays are permitted. These appeal to irrational emotion and perpetuate cycles of resentment. Justice is quiet, rational, and corrective—its aim is restoration of alignment, not catharsis or deterrence through fear.

The justice system is thus based on the goal of actually uncovering and solving issues, rather than emotional theatrics: it institutionalizes the primacy of Truth over vengeance, the superiority of rehabilitation over retribution, and the necessity of ego-death even in correction. It ensures that the Organic State remains coherent and devoted to its telos by addressing deviations at their root—unexamined or malicious subjectivity—rather than their symptoms.

Section VII – Social Reform

Social reforms are the deliberate restructuring of the conditions under which individuals form their concrete existence within the State. They address the root causes of fragmentation, alienation, and inefficiency that arise when human life is left to private interests, market forces, or inherited customs. Modern approaches treat social policy as either charitable redistribution or moral correction; both remain superficial.

1. Policies Based on Truth Alone. Every social policy—regarding family, reproduction, leisure, aesthetics, religion, or interpersonal conduct—is determined exclusively by alignment with objective Truth. No appeal to custom, emotion, personal fulfillment, or ancestral practice is valid. Where current norms deviate from reality's logical structure, they are reformed or abolished.

2. Abolition of Culture. Cultures are historical accumulations of subjective worldviews—limited, emotional, often ancient distortions of reality. As there is only One Truth, there is no legitimate place for multiple cultures, traditions, or symbolic systems. Architecture, clothing, art, language usage, and daily practices must be redesigned to reflect demonstrable efficiency, rationality, and contribution to the telos. The past is studied only for what aligns with Truth; all else is transcended in favor of novel, Futurist forms.

3. Inherently Futurist Social Order. Society is not to preserve or adapt inherited structures but to create new ones that fully embody the Logical Structure of reality. This Futurist imperative rejects nostalgia, heritage, or "cultural continuity" as irrational attachments. Every generation must renew the social fabric in accordance with advancing knowledge and the State.

4. 4.Irrational Behavior as Crime Behavior motivated by delusion, subjectivity, or unexamined valuation is an ideological offense. This includes:

   - Recreational use of substances (tobacco, alcohol, narcotics).

   - Deviant or irrational uses of reproductive systems

   - Adherence to unfounded beliefs, superstitions, or regressive practices.

   - Any action that prioritizes personal emotion, desire, or ego over collective Truth. Such behaviors are not private matters; they sabotage the mental clarity required for the Organic State and are addressed through education, rectification, or—if persistent and dangerous—more severe measures.

5. Universal Application of Laws. All laws and norms apply equally without exception for culture, race, ethnicity, gender, or any other category. No group is permitted to claim exemption based on historical or subjective identity. Equality under Truth is absolute.

6. Abolition of Baseless Gender Roles. Traditional notions of femininity (inaction, weakness, ignorance) and certain reactionary notions of masculinity (pure hedonism, brute force) are deviant expressions of subjectivity. Both men and women are called to embody reason, strength, effort, and intellect. Physical labor, military service, philosophical reflection, and leadership are open to all based on demonstrated competence, not anatomy. Anatomical differences (primarily reproductive) are acknowledged only insofar as they serve the telos of collective development; they impose no mental or social hierarchy.

The social reform eliminates all vestiges of subjectivity that have historically distorted human relations. By abolishing culture, irrational roles, and hedonistic norms, society becomes the transparent medium through which the State oeperates. No space remains for delusion to masquerade as virtue; every aspect of social existence is subordinated to the Logical Structure of reality.

Section VIII – Healthcare

Healthcare is a fundamental requirement for the State’s functioning through a healthy populace. Therefore, it necessitates reform, away from the current state of commodification and mystification of it by malicious or self-interested parties.

1. Scientific Method as Sole Authority. All medical practice, research, and policy are governed exclusively by the scientific method and demonstrable evidence. Obsolete or disproven practices are eliminated immediately upon refutation; novel methods are adopted only after rigorous, reproducible verification of safety and efficacy. No appeal to tradition, intuition, cultural preference, or anecdotal experience alone is permitted.

2. Public and Transparent Healthcare. All healthcare infrastructure, research, production of pharmaceuticals, and delivery of care is public and collective. No private ownership, profit motive, or market mechanisms may intervene. Medical professionals and syndicates must disclose all reasoning, data, potential side effects, and uncertainties to the public and to patients. Transparency prevents the re-emergence of egoistic or hedonistic distortions in health policy.

3. Scope of Healthcare Syndicates.

   - Healthcare cooperatives encompass not only clinical medicine but all domains that directly affect bodily integrity and development: Water and food logistics (quality, nutrition, caloric norms aligned with the Ideal).

   - Environmental quality control

   - Preventive measures

   - Mental health services (see below).

   These syndicates coordinate with other cooperatives to ensure systemic alignment with objective health requirements.

4. Mental Health as Priority Domain. Mental health is elevated above physical because the mind is the seat of actualization. Its distortions—subjective loops, unexamined valuations, phenomenological irrationality—are the root of all deviation from Truth. Mental health professionals assist individuals in achieving ego-death, dismantling circular motivations, and internalizing Actualist methodology. - Treatment rejects sedation, complacency-inducing medication, or management of symptoms without addressing root delusions.

   - The goal is not "well-being" as subjective feeling but objective clarity and alignment with reality.

   - Persistent ideological distortions are treated as ideological crimes requiring rectification

5. Rejection of Commodification and Hedonistic Medicine. Procedures or substances whose primary purpose is cosmetic, recreational, or life-enhancing are prohibited or deprioritized. Resources must serve telos-advancing ends—curing disease, enhancing cognitive/physical capacities of the people—not prolonging egoistic vanity. Life-extending care is pursued only when it objectively advances the Collective.

6. Preventive and Collective Orientation. Healthcare is proactive and systemic: population-level interventions (nutrition standards, environmental controls, mandatory conditioning) take precedence over individualized treatment where possible. Individual cases are managed within the framework of collective benefit. No "right to choose" irrational or harmful behaviors (e.g., substance abuse, refusal of clearly needed medical care).

The healthcare system institutionalizes the rejection of subjectivity in the domain most vulnerable to it: the body and mind. By making health a transparent, scientific, collective endeavor, it ensures that no individual or group can engage in their desires, urges, and perpetuate harmful practices at the expense of the collective well-being.

Section IX – Armed Forces

The armed forces constitute the armed expression of the State’s conscious will and must remain inseparable from the living body of the nation. They are drawn directly from the workers organized in syndicates and corporatives, ensuring that military capacity remains an organic extension of productive labour rather than a separate caste or professional elite.

1. Ideological Motivation and Voluntary Service. Every soldier must fully understand and willingly embrace what they defend: the Organic State. Service is voluntary and selective; conscription is permissible only when objective analysis shows that the benefits (service) clearly outweigh the costs (disruption of productive contribution). A civilian deemed more valuable in production, education, or administration is not compelled to serve unless the situation changes and their frontline utility becomes greater.

2. Combat Readiness of Worker Cooperatives. All syndicates and cooperatives undergo basic combat training and maintain readiness to assume militant functions. This includes defense against internal sabotage (when ideological crimes escalate to violence), external aggression, or facilitation of revolutionary correction in cases where State organs deviate irreversibly. The goal is a society where every contributing member can transition seamlessly to protective duties without hesitation.

3. Integration with Law Enforcement and Territorial Defense. Law enforcement, territorial defense forces, and the armed forces cooperate closely without rigid separation or rivalry. All operate under the same foundational principles: Truth as authority, meritocratic leadership, and subordination to the Ideal. Any fracture, distance, or competition between them is treated as ideological deviation and subject to rectification.

4. Subordination to Truth, Not Hierarchy. Soldiers serve Truth directly, not officers or commanders as personal authorities. Officers are guides selected for demonstrated competence in strategy, tactics, and alignment with reality. In non-urgent situations (where delay does not endanger lives), any soldier may question an order by presenting evidence of inconsistency with Truth. Such questions must be addressed through transparent review; persistent refusal to correct deviation justifies escalation up the chain or revolutionary action.

5. Rejection of Militarism for Its Own Sake. Militarism, glory in violence, or cult of the warrior is rejected as irrational glorification of affect and ego. The armed forces are a necessary but subordinate function—deployed only when dialogue or diplomacy fail to fulfill their function. All operations must demonstrate objective necessity and proportionality to the threat against the State.

6. Training and Education. Military training integrates physical conditioning, tactical proficiency, and intensive ideological education. The aim is a force where every member acts from ideological conviction and alignment with core principles of The State, not any sort of internal reasoning.

The military therefore functions as the defensive arm of the unified State, trained and structured for both external defence and the protection of the social order against internal decay. The armed forces are to be fully integrated with the worker-State through syndicates and corporatives. By drawing their strength directly from the organized productive class and subordinating all command to the State, they eliminate the risk of militarism detached from the people or praetorian forces serving private interests. In this form, the military becomes not an external instrument, but the disciplined defensive organ of the State.

Section X – Foreign Policy

Foreign policy is the extension of the State’s conscious reason into the international sphere. Its purpose is not the pursuit of temporary alliances or balance-of-power manoeuvres, but the progressive realization of rational order on a larger scale. From a Hegelian standpoint, history moves toward the concrete unification of human purpose through the State spreading across the world. The current fragmented system of sovereign states, liberal universalism, and competing national interests represents a lower, contradictory moment that must be overcome

1. Support for Fellow Fascists. Immediate and prioritized support is extended to verified Fascists factions, movements, or emerging states abroad. This includes diplomatic recognition, material aid, ideological exchange, and—if suppression or terror threatens their alignment with Truth—military assistance. Support is conditional on demonstrated honesty, dedication to foundational principles, and rejection of subjective deviations. No "suicidal empathy" is permitted: aid must advance the global Fascism without depleting resources needed for the core collective.

2. Rejection of Wasteful Aid. Aid to non-Fascist causes—whether framed as humanitarian, developmental, or revolutionary—is prohibited unless it directly facilitates their transition toward cooperation. Historical examples of resource-draining "solidarity" with vaguely aligned regimes are a great example of such policies leading to failure.

3. Limited Autarky and Positive Immigratio.n The initial Organic State pursues limited autarky to protect against external subversion and ensure self-sufficiency in critical resources. Borders remain open to positive immigration: individuals who are socially active, ideologically compatible (or rapidly rectifiable), hardworking, and committed to integration. Entry is conditional on background verification, observed alignment during probationary periods, and voluntary choice to remain and contribute. Transient or exploitative migration ("motel" treatment) is not tolerated.

In the long term, the fragmented international system will be overcome into a higher global form in which humanity realizes its shared purpose not in liberal equality, but in the disciplined unity of a single, self-conscious collective making up the State.

Closing Note on Fascism

Fascism was never put to the common word. Fascism has never been properly philosophized. Not because it lacked depth, but because its most fundamental idea has never been stated plainly: that thought and logic must govern human affairs. Every action, every institution, every decision must flow from conscious reason applied to concrete reality — not from tradition, custom, abstract rights, or popular vote. Fascism alone places the act of conscious, reasonable thought at the centre of political existence. It demands that the State itself become the living expression of disciplined reason. This is not mysticism, nor violence for its own sake, nor romantic nationalism. It is the demand that humanity finally govern itself through what it actually possesses: the capacity for rational action in the present.