Status Updates From Mussolini's Intellectuals: ...

Gentile acknowledged the socialist origins of Fascism when he identified Italian communists as “impatient corporativists” who failed to understand the logical and “dialectical” development of an historic social and philosophical idea

In his exposition of 1925, Pellizzi identified Fascism with Gentilean Actualism and correspondingly saw it as an “engine” of change. Italy, like the Soviet Union, sought to address the social and economic issues of the modern world. The critical difference was that Fascism saw those issues as fundamentally ethical rather than simply materialistic

Like many revolutionary socialists, Bombacci saw Fascism as the redemption of a flawedMarxism that failed to appreciate the role of nationalist sentiment in the mobilization of masses. He argued that the Marxist canon did not seem to appreciate the psychosocial impact of the pretensions of the advanced industrial powers on those communities

Evola considered to be truly “alien” were never really explicity cataloged—except in terms of Semites (although that proscription seems to have been restricted specifically to Jews) and the deeply pigmented peoples of sub-Saharan Africa

Terms that had become familiar to Fascists, such as “hierarchy,” “leadership,” “elitism,” the “state,” “imperialism,” and “myth” all had their meanings transmogrified in the lexicon of Evola’s “traditional Mediterranean vision

Evola was never a fascist, however the term is understood. He provided idiosyncratic meaning for all its principal concepts in his candid effort to further the interests of that arcane Tantric and Vedic Wisdom that he had made his own.
With respect to Fascism, he advocated a total rejection of any notion of a “totalitarian state” that rested on a nationalism that required obedience and commitment.

What was necessary was to create an environment in which individuals, and communities of individuals, would identify their most fundamental interests with those of the state.
For Spirito, Fascist syndicalism and corporativism commenced as “a grand experiment in economic conciliation . . . that is to say, as an effort in the reconciliation of class interests within the superior interests of the nation.”

Fascists were to argue that citizens in the industrialized democracies really had very little choice in terms of their leaders. Their choices, Fascists argued, were very largely determined by occult and special interest groups, media manipulation, mimetism, suggestibility, and errant influences

Gaetano Mosca, long before the advent of Fascism, had mounted assessments of political life that provided collateral support for just the kind of elite rule suggested by Actualism. He was followed by Vilfredo Pareto and his notion of the dominance and succession of political elites in the shaping of history

Actualism was to contend that the state was an antecedent and enduring “transcendental reality” in which the abstract individuals of self-indulgent liberalism actually achieved their moral being. It was evident to Actualists that the empirical individual as he was understood by liberalism—independent of the state—was but a “phantom,” an unlikely fiction

Fascism was prepared to involve the state in complex economic activities if that intervention was conceived necessary to further one or another primary ideological commitment. Under those circumstances, as time passed, it became more and more difficult to distinguish purely economic matters from those that were political and the proper function of a presumptively Manchestrian administration

Both Vilfredo Pareto and Maffeo Pantaleoni gravitated into the orbit of Fascism because both, as essentially free-market economists, saw merit in Fascism’s opposition to socialism and Marxist economics. Pantaleoni argued that, in his judgment, Mussolini was among the most serious economic “Manchestrians” that had ever served in the Italian parliament

Fascism sought to give “the peace, the tranquility and the opportunity to return to labor that the people sought—with love if possible, or with force, if necessary.” Thereafter, neither Mussolini nor Fascism spoke of any accommodation with the elements of the former system. The talk, thereafter, was of the totalitarian, corporative, and ethical state—the final collectivist synthesis of nationalism, syndicalism,

For Spirito, the very notion that one might coherently speak of an objective reality independent of collective reasoning was cognitively meaningless. For Actualists, reality could only be a product of the reasoning of a thinking community. The evidence for any reality, whatever, could only be given as part of a shared consciousness—immanent in collective consciousness itself

The single imperative ideal “to which all else is subordinated,” Mussolini maintained, was the maximization of the interests of the nation. Should the evidence indicate that the nation prospered under a monarchy, Fascists were monarchists. Should there be evidence that the monarchy was dysfunctional, Fascists would be republicans

Sorel had originally perceived that committed community of solidarity in the workers’ syndicates of the first decade of the twentieth century. By the end of the First World War, the nation appeared a more likely prospect.

By 1918, Panunzio correctly anticipated the formal fusion between the political nationalist and the national syndicalist movements that, in fact, took place in 1923 in the course of Fascism’s entrenchment as a regime

A. O. Olivetti, one of syndicalism’s foremost theoreticians, pointed to an evident reality: socialism, as an international revolutionary association, had disintegrated under the pressure of nationalism

The federated syndicalist community would extend its authority over a defined territory and would represent the specifically political interests of the combined constituent syndicates. It would represent the interdependent will of the more ample and more general corporative interests of the confederated syndicates

While Marx and Engels speak of history as the history of class conflict, Gumplowicz offers a textured account of history composed of a complex interaction of social elements—hordes, tribes, clans, sects, ethnic communities, city-states, classes, nations, and sundry “syngenetic” groups—spontaneous associations formed by a natural solidarity, each configured by group-building influences—kinship, shared interests, commo

nationalism was to represent itself with an explicit political character. It was to be manifestly developmental, antidemocratic, antiparliamentarian, and statist. It was to be a doctrine that would attract leftist as well as rightist intellectuals. In historic fact, what was transpiring was a “synthesis between extreme Right and Left, which lay at the basis of Fascism

be prepared to acknowledge the influence of national sentiment on the overt political loyalties of Italy’s working classes. Olivetti recognized that the nation, presumably exorcised by traditional Marxism, still retained a critical hold on many

syndicalists argued that while class-based syndicates might very well serve the corporate interests of industrial labor, there was the evident need for some overarching national agency that could coordinate interests and negotiate differences. It was suggested that syndicalists who had learned their antistatism from the half-century-old analyses of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels might do well to reconsider ...

Because of their parlous circumstances in the modern world of reasonably well developed industrial competitors, less-developed nations were compelled to create a strong, centralized government capable of marshaling all the community’s material and spiritual forces if it were to accomplish the rapid development of its infrastructure, its agriculture, and its industries.

List had argued that the fate of nations was substantially influenced, if not determined, by the development of its productive forces—and that development was contingent on those factors rehearsed by Rocco

“Free trade” and “free markets” served an instrumental purpose in an economic system predicated on the already accomplished extensive and intensive development of productive forces

Both syndicalists and nationalists recognized that collective psychology informed political behavior. Both sought to understand the processes involved. Traditional Marxism had not provided an account of how revolutions proceeded—how masses were moved to revolutionary enterprise. Marxism had not spoken of the role of leaders in the mobilization of masses

People and government must proceed united, like thought and action in individuals, towards the accomplishment of [their] mission.” Mazzini sought the nation’s redemptive renewal in what he identified as a “National Italian Revolution"