Article EJPT

European Journal of Political Theory

11(4) 410–425
Fascism, liberalism and ! The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885112448241
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Danilo Breschi*
Libera Università LUSPIO

Abstract
Marxist theory has always maintained that a strict continuity exists between liberalism
and fascism, and has even proclaimed that there is a causal connection between the two.
Therefore fascism comes to be portrayed as the ‘armed wing’ of the bourgeoisie. The
Marxist thesis is weak for two reasons: first, because the connection between liberalism
and fascism, though it doubtless exists, is considerably more complex, mediated and
contradictory than it suggests; and second, because it axiomatically denies the revolu-
tionary nature of fascism, which despite what Marxists claim, represents a rupture with
the liberal tradition and demonstrates a relative autonomy from it. In the case of Italy,
this autonomy arises from the fact that Fascism was born from the turmoil surrounding
the genesis, the course and the outcome of the Great War, and was fed by fragments of
philosophies and political theories radically opposed to liberalism, democracy and
Marxism (though not to socialism) which arose in Europe at the turn of the 19th
century. A birth in such a turbulent cultural and political climate could not give rise
to an internally consistent and coherent ideology. The theoretical works of philoso-
phers such as Giovanni Gentile encouraged liberalism to fool itself into seeing in fascism
an unruly brother who could be put to good use by opposing socialism. This delusion
enabled the rise to power of Mussolini. The revolutionary side to Fascism could draw
on Italian populism’s latent revolutionary tradition which developed in the 50 years
following unification as a transfiguration of ideological currents which contributed to
the Risorgimento but which had been defeated by Cavourian liberalism. These included
Mazzinianism and a particular type of radical anti-monarchism.

Keywords
fascism, Giovanni Gentile, liberalism, Mazzini, populism, Risorgimento

*translated by Walter L. Adamson.

Corresponding author:
Danilo Breschi, Libera Università LUSPIO, Via C. Colombo, 200, 00145 Rome, Italy.
Email: danilo.breschi@luspio.it
Breschi 411

As Roger Griffin and David D. Roberts have suggested, the nature of fascism can
be better understood through a renewed dialogue with Marxist interpretations of
the phenomenon. These interpretations have always affirmed the total continuity
between liberalism and fascism, with fascism the armed tool of liberalism. But a
comparative analysis of liberalism and fascism before it seizes power can help us to
grasp the sense in which fascism can be conceived as a revolutionary movement.
Even then, it is not easy to distinguish within the fascist phenomenon the conti-
nuities and discontinuities with respect to preceding political, social and ideological
traditions.
Fascism is a political and ideological experience whose origins lie in Italy, and
this essay will focus on the Italian case. Continuity and rupture with respect to
liberalism are evident in Italian fascism both in the phase of origins and in the
phase of consolidation as a new regime. In order to win over a large part of
bourgeois public opinion, it was undoubtedly necessary to offer, especially between
1920 and 1922, themes that gave rise to expectations but that did not excessively
arouse suspicions in the governing class. Still, the success fascism enjoyed among
the younger generations during its first years stemmed from programmes, narra-
tives and a political style typical of an oppositional and even revolutionary
force. Because fascism had only 35 deputies in the Chamber up to 1924, it neces-
sarily had to compromise with the established powers in order to consolidate itself:
from the monarchy to the Confindustria, from the state bureaucracy to the
Catholic Church. Demonstrating its own statist side could attract the sympathies
it needed.
From the beginning, fascism in Italy had to deal with the tradition of Italian
liberalism, not only because it was the most important political culture in the
country – in the sense that it constituted the political class from Cavour to
Giolitti – but above all because fascism itself reached power thanks to a substantial
undervaluation of its revolutionary potential on the part of the liberals. This under-
valuation was furthered by the fact that a bifurcated liberal tradition came out of
the Risorgimento. During the political unification process there were two currents
inside the Italian national movement: those favouring centralized unity, on the one
hand, and federalists favouring greater regional autonomy, on the other.
Moreover, both sides were divided between monarchists and republicans. After
unification in 1861 the federalist option was almost immediately marginalized,
while the anti-monarchist and filo-republican ranks remained strong and militant.
Though a minority, this current constituted for the next 50 years a thorn in the side
of an Italian political system in need of legitimation and consensus. Thus there
emerged within post-unification Italian political culture two antithetical new cur-
rents that we might call, simplifying a bit, ‘statist’ and ‘populist’. It is from within
this ambivalent tradition of Italian political-cultural history that the genesis and
development of fascism must be understood. And this makes the question of the
continuity and discontinuity of fascism with respect to liberalism and the preceding
Italian political-ideological tradition so complicated. For historical understanding,
however, it is both essential and fruitful to study the type of liberalism current in
Italy during the early 20th century and the import of the ideological legacy of the
412 European Journal of Political Theory 11(4)

political traditions (Mazzinian republicanism and Garibaldian ‘socialism’) defeated

during the Risorgimento.
In such a context, one well understands how the thesis put forward in 1971 by
the German scholar Reinhard Kuhnl – a Marxist interpretation that goes back to
the Third International and that has been many times recycled – is both efficacious
and apparently difficult to counter.1 According to this thesis, liberalism and fascism
are simply two forms – only apparently distinct – that bourgeois class domination
has assumed in order to preserve itself and prosper in a variety of circumstances. If
we look at the nature of the regime instituted by fascism and at the politics that it
pursued between 1925 and 1940, it remains undeniable that the legislative ideology
of fascism was precisely in contrast to the liberal idea.2 By the same token, the true
knot that needs to be loosened in the relation between liberalism and fascism
consists in the reasons we use to explain the advent to power of the latter. In the
same year in which Kuhnl’s book appeared, but from a very different ideological
and historiographical perspective, Nino Valeri wrote:

In what way and by what roads and for what reasons, after nearly sixty years of
parliamentary rule, did the fascist dictatorship happen – and why did it happen and
succeed in lasting so long? How was it that the new Italy, which emerged in 1861 as the
daughter of liberty, nurtured within itself the illiberal germs that made possible the
affirmation and consolidation of a dictatorial regime?3

This is the dilemma that still torments Italian historiography: was liberal Italy
somehow ‘pregnant’ with fascist Italy? Was the latter born from the inner workings
of the liberal era? And should we regard the relationship between liberalism and
fascism as one of continuity or even ideological and – still further – political-
institutional consanguinity? These are the crucial questions to which one must
try to give an answer.
Roger Griffin is right when he says:

. . . interwar fascism exerted a trans-class and genuinely ‘mass’ appeal (however

embryonic and unsustained), and contained an autonomous radical element inde-
pendent of attempts by the forces of capitalist reaction and bourgeois self-interest
to use it as an ‘agent’ in its struggle against socialism.4

This is undoubtedly true of Italian fascism. Fascism was the political creation of a
man of action, Mussolini, who grew up in the Romagna of republicanism and
maximalist, revolutionary socialism. In him it is certainly not possible to find
any trace of liberalism. Mussolini’s objective, which took shape during the crisis
of the liberal state (to which he contributed in a decisive way), was that of seizing
power at any cost. Notwithstanding his fidelity to this maximalist and revolution-
ary matrix, Mussolini could not fail to settle his accounts with the liberals and with
the ideological tradition that had more or less inspired the political class of the
young Italian state during the previous 60 years. Even more than that: a prominent
component of that group of scholars and cultured people who believed in the
Breschi 413

fascist Duce and who thought it was opportune to collaborate faithfully with him
imagined that they could recuperate and revitalize a very idiosyncratic liberalism –
the Italian one – which was connected to the Risorgimento movement from the
beginning. And here an ideological operation was achieved that today seems to us
totally self-conscious and carefully planned but which, in all probability, simply
resulted from a deep and tragic loss of moderate public opinion. This public opin-
ion was lacking in a crucial double sense. On the one hand, it lacked underpinnings
in a political class adequate to the challenges of a postwar world, supported by a
precise identity internally solidified by hierarchical structures yet also dynamic in
the manner of modern mass parties. On the other hand, it lacked a solid liberal
democratic tradition capable of confronting excessive state power.
We cannot forget that the legal doctrine that had accompanied and promoted
the construction of the young Italian nation state did not involve anything outside
state institutions; hence the mass parties were considered to be ‘anti-state’ and
political rights were thought to be capable of being exercised only in relation to
state institutions. The Italian juridical doctrine was informed by state-centric and
even authoritarian principles, and it was transmitted to the political class which
understood those principles to be the specific attributes of its own liberalism.
Influenced by the German school, in which the monarchical principle and a
strong limitation on the representative principle came to dominate, Italian juris-
prudence proposed a ‘liberal statism’ that removed every reference to the revolu-
tionary contractualism developed in France and the United States at the end of the
18th century and therefore to the constituent power that resides in the people and
that can be solidified in a precisely worded written constitution. If the people,
according to the definition given by the Jacobins, means the ‘universality of
living citizens’, then post-revolutionary European liberalism, which sought to
establish institutions as free as they were solid, needed to substitute for a people
so understood the idea of a nation considered as a natural-historical reality. In
other words, the nation configured itself as a product of history and not as the fruit
of a compact resulting from the free will of the individuals subject to it. In this view,
the public power does not depend on ‘a contractualist construction from below’ but
is ‘the organic reflection of the nation’ and the custodian of rights.5 Only by work-
ing within the state does the individual become entitled to the rights which derive
from the state.
Late 18th-century Italian liberalism, whether legal or philosophical, did not
assimilate in a totalistic and slavish way this kind of specifically German formula-
tion. The Risorgimento was born from the interaction, now divergent, now con-
vergent, of a moderate, pro-monarchical and diplomatic wing and of a democratic,
republican and insurrectionist wing. We can also affirm that the variegated, post-
unification Italian liberalism maintained this double ‘soul’ which, in certain thin-
kers, manifested itself up to the 20th century. A national liberalism mixing the two
souls arose, which had as precursors such well-known personalities as the brothers
Spaventa – Bertrando, the neo-Hegelian philosopher, and Silvio, the patriot and
politician of the ‘Historical Right’ (Destra Storica), who alongside Cavour played a
leading role in the final phase of Italian unification and therefore was assigned a
414 European Journal of Political Theory 11(4)

number of ministerial positions between 1862 and 1876, finally becoming a senator
in 1889. Regarding the latter, a bibliographical profile published in 1932 gives the
following eloquent testimony to the idea of the state upheld by an important cur-
rent of liberalism in the immediate post-Risorgimento period:

We were born yesterday, we are still children; are we truly a strong state? We have
forged Italian unity; do you believe that this unity will be strong enough to resist the
impact of the centuries? . . . this is my faith; but the work we have done will only last
fifteen years. Machiavelli said that new states which are weak will be lost. . . . Are you
worshippers of the state? Yes, I am a worshipper of the state.6

In any case, one should never forget how profoundly the historical conditions in
which the political unification of the peninsula was achieved conditioned the scale
of priorities in the political and ideological agenda of Italian liberalism. Ultimately,
the liberals – a term which always indicated the leading class in the post-unification
period – ‘needed to play a role that did not also allow them to become the defen-
ders of the individual’ but rather obligated them to the fastest possible construction
and consolidation of the state, with all that this usually entails in terms of very
limited sensibility towards individual rights, civil and political.7 The fear of losing a
good so recently acquired – national unity – induced the leading class to push in an
extreme way towards the side of state intervention as a cohesive and propulsive
force. On the other hand, the unified state reached beyond the moment in the last
quarter of the 19th century in which, throughout western and central Europe, there
began the second constructive phase of the modern state, which assumed, in name
and function, the character of an ‘administrative state’.
From the 1870s there was a departure from earlier liberal practices. It should be
noted that, in this liberal refounding of the state in the ethical, state-worshipping
and nationalistic sense, it was unusual to see references to Cavour, who was con-
sidered to have been an able diplomat and a ‘liberal’ in the eyes of the fascists and
the nationalist liberals only to the extent that he was able to realize the political
unification of Italy and set out the preconditions for a powerful new nation state.
In this connection, a historical reference that Mussolini made in his 15 July 1923
speech to the Chamber of Deputies is interesting. Polemicizing before parliament
with Giulio Alessio, an ex-radical who became a liberal deputy of the social-
democratic, parliamentary group, Mussolini mocked the claim that the
Risorgimento had been a revolutionary movement that had involved the popula-
tion. It wasn’t like that, Mussolini proclaimed; on the contrary, ‘the Italian people,
deep down’, were ‘absent and often hostile’.8 In any case, the decisive movement of
national deliverance, capable of preparing ‘the real unity of the nation’, had been
primed by a decision that Cavour made ‘without consulting Parliament, without
consulting the Council of Ministers, and, above all, at his discretion, without
imposing conditions of any sort’. The reference was to the Crimean War. That
crucial episode, the Duce surmised, was a confirmation of the indisputable fact
that, ‘in those solemn hours, the decision was entrusted to a single man who needed
to consult only his own conscience!’9 Cavourian liberalism came then to be
Breschi 415

assimilated and developed as a form of pragmatism inspired by a strong patriotic

sense that could even be exalted to the point that it turned into an aggressive and
expansionist nationalism.
The partial continuity between liberalism and fascism can be best grasped if one
understands it on the level of the practical functioning of the political system of
post-Risorgimento Italy – above all after the so-called ‘parliamentary revolution’
of 1876 in which the left headed by Agostino Depretis came to power. On the plane
of ideals and ideologies, and even more on the level of self-representation, the
divergences between liberalism and fascism were enormous. There were numerous
and important differences regarding the mode of governance and the effective
weight accorded to parliamentary institutions and, in general, to mechanisms of
representation – as well as, not least, to civil and political rights. Nonetheless, it is
in the history of the Italian political system that the Mussolinian adventure must be
located. It was not simply a matter of extraparliamentary force and a violent
takeover but of the participation in the government of nearly the whole of the
old leading class, who sought out and/or willing accepted their role, whether pol-
itical or intellectual, in an Italy which they called ‘liberal’.
As Valeri has written, in the wake of the studies of Christopher Seton-
Watson,10 ‘the majority of the liberal deputies shared the tolerant attitude of
the old statists – Salandra, Giolitti, Orlando, Nitti – who rather than ally against
fascism preferred ‘‘to compete among themselves behind the scenes in order to
gain fascist support’’. For them liberalism was no longer an operative faith but a
practical current.’11 By the same token, from the days of so-called ‘transformism’,
inaugurated by Depretis in 1882, the decision-making process was the prerogative
of shapeless and changing parliamentary groups ‘whose members were united
only’, Valeri confirms, ‘by a defensive attitude against the threats of the two
extremes – left and right, clericals and socialists – then in bloom’.12 If an affirm-
ation of this sort might be mitigated and in part corrected today in light of more
recent historiographical advances, the fact remains that a similar perception of
political and parliamentary reality circulated widely among the political and the
intellectual classes in Italy, especially as they sought to deal with the trauma of
the world war. As the liberal Olindo Malagodi – who was director of the news-
paper La Tribuna – observed, the antiparliamentarianism so widely diffused in
educated, political and social circles at the end of the 19th century was directly
proportional to ‘the influence of the popular classes on parliamentary institu-
tions’.13 Parliament was introduced and valorized to the extent that it was func-
tional for the urban bourgeoisie against the aristocratic regime of the landowning
classes. Nonetheless, universal suffrage had stimulated the progressive balance of
forces and put to a strong test the staying power of convincing liberal institu-
tions. This at least was the opinion of the liberal Malagodi a few years after the
fascist conquest of power – a significant opinion given what it reveals about how
heterogeneous the liberal Italian formation was during the 1920s and how much
fascism was able to divide liberals. Mussolini’s movement, which then became the
dominant party in the coalition government of 1922 to 1924, was able to appeal
to the fear of the bourgeois classes in light of the recent disorder and the fear that
416 European Journal of Political Theory 11(4)

it might return, even if from the fascists themselves and no longer from the
social-communist or Catholic-popolari sides.
And this is the key element that explains the initial adhesion to fascism – in the
form of moral support and political approval – of liberal intellectuals such as
Benedetto Croce and Luigi Einaudi. It is an element that is also useful for offering
a possible response to the question of why an indisputable anti-fascist such as
Giovanni Amendola was able to hypothesize in October 1922 the onset of negoti-
ations with the fascists. The manner in which this exponent of liberal democracy
evaluated fascism less than a month before the March on Rome is expressed so
elegantly that it deserves to be quoted here at length:

If we want our judgment to be superior to the passions of those who oppose us, we
must in the end recognize that the ‘fact’ of fascism is accompanied by a strong and
radical restoration of national consciousness springing forth from our victory in the
war and in a consolidation in the Italian spirit of the moral value of our participation
in the Great War. Tomorrow, when this period of violent crisis has passed, all the
political parties will return to having equal citizenship rights in our public life, and
there will undoubtedly be an important socialist party in Italy, notwithstanding the
momentous impressions of today. But the soul of that party will no longer be found in
polemics; it will instead live in harmony with the national consciousness, in which it
will easily recognize, just like every other Italian party, its necessary premise.14

In short, what Amendola saw was a fascism that could be restored to its proper
place of legality and liberal-monarchical constitutionalism once, having exercised
its equilibrating function as an anti-socialist or rather an anti-subversive force, it
accepted parliamentary institutions and statutory guarantees at the appropriate
time. But he noted that the situation entailed serious uncertainties and risks:

What is the reconstructive idea that will direct and guide the new political current?
The idea appears, in part, neither clear nor precise. It appears on the whole as an idea
that will succeed in being subversive if it does not become quickly subordinated and in
disciplined service to the state. Yesterday’s reaction can be variously judged, but it
constituted a fact of undeniable value; today’s organization and the reconstruction of
tomorrow – such as might be desired and attempted by fascism – raise the gravest
doubts and call out to all people and to parties to assume responsibility for
themselves.15

Another fact that was rather common in the various postwar Italian liberalisms
is well synthesized by Amendola’s remarks: the difficulty of defining a political and
social phenomenon as protean and slippery as fascism. One should never forget
that we are just a few years after October 1917 and the philo-communist rebellions
moving through east–central Europe. A fear of the ‘Bolshevik’ threat and a faith in
the ‘patriotism’ of the Black Shirts seemed to satisfy a decaying ruling class that did
not want to recognize the intrinsically subversive nature of the Mussolinian
movement.
Breschi 417

That said, a historiographical valuation of the limits and the errors of the liberal
ruling class in those years should not commit the mortal sin of judging them from
hindsight. One should underline instead how much depended on the appearance of
fascism, that is, on the way it appeared to contemporaries, and how this image was
conditioned by two factors: the contingent political exigencies of the liberal polit-
ical class, which was divided and lacking in leadership adequate to the current state
of exception, and pre-existing political-theoretical categories that continued to
inform the Italian liberal ideology during those years. It is this perception of fas-
cism that has made the entire Risorgimento and post-Risorgimento liberal trad-
ition in Italy vulnerable to being discredited. It is equally certain that the liberal
elite did not understand how to evaluate – or, in any case, that it undervalued – the
state of exception which was produced by a bilateral subversive threat, coming
from both left and right, though increasingly from the right. Or, more simply, one
might just note that Salandra, Giolitti and the others chose the least of the evils,
according to a purely instrumental political logic.
The instrumentalization of a political and cultural tradition and its most import-
ant exponents does not in any way cancel out the subversive force of the
Mussolinian design. On the contrary, already by 24 May 1920, the Duce of fascism
had publicly affirmed: ‘One should not sink the bourgeois ship, but enter into it in
order to expel the parasitic elements.’16 The strategy was therefore clear, even if its
outcome was to remain uncertain, at least until January 1925 – the pivotal moment
in the construction of a definitively postliberal and anti-liberal regime.
Mussolini used the old liberal political class as a source of political practice and
thereby connected with tradition, while paying little attention to the ideology and
the representative institutions that had been created by that same class. He did,
however, pay attention to certain choices made by that class and above all to its
mode of governing. His interpretation, more than being distorted, was a deliber-
ately partial and reductive interpretation – but not one that was historically
unfounded and, at bottom, in error. On the contrary, he had a good point on 16
November 1922, when, in a speech marking the seating of his first government, he
recalled that with his appointment – by the King – to the office of Prime Minister,
under the pressure of the March on Rome and the years of political and social
instability, ‘it has happened for the second time in the brief passing of a decade that
the Italian people had appropriately unseated one minister and dismissed one gov-
ernment quite apart from – and against – any parliamentary directive. The decade I
am speaking of’, continued Mussolini, ‘was between May 1915 and October
1922’.17 The reference was obviously to the anti-parliamentary manner and oli-
garchical mode in which Italy had entered the war just a few years before.
It was therefore in the crucible of the First World War – in the propaganda for it
in 1914–15 (by the government and the interventionists, democratic and non-demo-
cratic) and in sustaining that propaganda from 1915 to 1918 – that Italian liberal-
ism underwent a decisive turn, rebuilding itself with ‘volatile’ ideological
admixtures and thereby polluting its nature. The embrace of some seemingly dis-
tant elements was certainly favoured by the peculiarity of the liberal tradition,
which had constituted itself amidst the constant provocation of consolidating
418 European Journal of Political Theory 11(4)

and developing a ‘neonatal’ state among the mature European states of late 19th-
century Europe. And these latter were states that became steadily better thought
out and better governed by their respective national elites, who were self-confident
and ‘great power’ exporters of civilization in a running international competition.
It nonetheless remains undeniable that for the men of the Risorgimento

. . . independence from the foreigner, political unity, and free institutions formed an
indivisible triad, each term of which necessarily recalled the others, since one could not
understand unity without independence, nor independence without unity, nor either
of them without liberty; and the events and the suffering of our entire history was for
them the confirmation of that fact.18

Moreover, the liberalism of the Risorgimento, and thus that of the Historical Right
and the Historical Left, never rejected the concept of democracy in an a priori
manner or irrevocably. Rather these liberals intended to let it arrive as a more or
less gradual and controlled concession by the state of suffrage and other individual
rights.
Or, to put the point the other way round, the liberalism that backed the first
phase of fascism, both as a movement and then as a governing force, had already
made a sharp distinction between liberty and democracy, equating the latter either
with anarchic dissolution or with a utopia that, if it was not to be merely imprac-
tical, would be based on a communitarianism held together by an all-pervasive
state control of individual consciousness and will. The thought of Giovanni
Gentile, Gioacchino Volpe, Carlo Curcio, Carmelo Licitra, and many others,
had very little liberalism in it beyond an explicit claim to the word ‘liberal’.
These intellectuals exemplify the further step from statist liberalism into fascism
itself. For them, what counted much more was the weight of the ‘Italian tradition’
within which they declared their desire to stand. A ‘primacy’ in which nationality
understood as exclusive and involving supremacy over others – geopolitical and
military as well as ethical and spiritual – ended up counting far more than the idea
of a ‘primacy’ understood as the capacity to produce high works of ingenuity and
to favour the well-being of the citizens. For these men there was not any trace of
so-called philo-fascist liberalism, except in the sense that citizens would participate
in the whole and act on the basis of that whole as synthesized by the state and those
leading the state, animated by those ‘Spartan’ virtues embraced in the political
utopia of Rousseau.
The liberalism that gave credence to fascism in the early 1920s nourished itself
on a Risorgimento myth that the war had reactivated and diffused among many
strata of the Italian intellectual class, which recovered that national-patriotic ideol-
ogy that had in Mazzini their ‘prophet’, to use the definition that the philosopher
Gentile adopted in his important writing of 1923. It is precisely in Gentile’s work
and thought that the fusion between neo-Hegelian idealism and Mazzinianism is
made, a fusion that will constitute the most original ideological element in fascism
as it prepared itself to become a regime. It is certainly not a coincidence that
Gentile, in the celebrated conference held in Florence in March 1925 that was
Breschi 419

significantly entitled, ‘What is fascism’, dedicated ample space to Giuseppe Mazzini

and his concept of liberty regarding ‘the needs of the nation regarding foreigners
and the needs of the citizens vis-à-vis the state’.19 But not only this: Gentile estab-
lished a direct and very tight connection between fascism and the ‘spirit of the
Risorgimento’, to which Mussolini’s movement had returned ‘with that great vigor
which could be gained from the new consciousness of the great challenge met with
so much honor by the Italian people and from the certainty of its capacity to strive,
to win, and finally to count in the history of the world’.20
In the aftermath of the war, and confronted by the threat of a revolution of the
Bolshevik type, that ideal and material patrimony did not get lost but was rather
defended and translated into a state that finally achieved that unity of the people
and the nation that in 1861, and during the 60 years following, it had failed to
realize. For this reason fascism was compatible with the ‘new’ liberalism, or the
refounded liberalism, which in reality was the political and ideological reactivation,
opportunistically modified, of that part of the Risorgimento movement which had
been decisive for the achievement of national unity but which had not won the
institutional game. I am speaking, obviously, of the democratic and republican
movement of Mazzini. The modification made concerned the abandonment of
republican traditions which some – one thinks of Delio Cantimori – replaced
with that vague revolutionary yearning which corporatism, among other fascist
myths, supposedly incarnated from the late 1920s forward.21
In addition, the new liberalism was combined with an idea of the ‘strong state’,
which brought together liberal conservatives like Salandra with nationalists
like Rocco and Federzoni, as well as that variegated alignment of supporters of pol-
itical realism who counted among their ranks personalities of the calibre
of Gaetano Mosca and Benedetto Croce. From this amalgam came the ‘Italian
tradition’ of which Gentile and Volpe spoke, as well as young scholars such as
Curcio and Licitra. Curcio defined this tradition in 1924 in the following terms:
‘here is the spirit that emerges from the entire road traveled by the Italian nation:
organize the state, discipline it, and give it spiritual content to impose upon the
world’.22
For his part, Licitra, editor of La Nuova Politica Liberale, a journal founded in
January 1923 on the initiative of Gentile, Croce and Giuseppe Lombardo-Radice,
gave a good explanation of the ideological work in progress, commenting upon
Gentile’s decision to join the PNF (the Italian Fascist Party). That decision was the
fruit of a peculiar and selective reinterpretation of the history of the Italian
Risorgimento and its aftermath as well as of the nature of Italian liberalism and
the crucial guiding role it had played. According to Licitra,

. . . inside the old liberalism of the Risorgimento there had operated a liberal current
that was at the same time truly national and extremely modern, mixing as it did
Gioberti, Cavour, and Mazzini. Taken up again by the Historical Right, the current
underwent an eclipse and a marginalization when the Historical Left came to power
and, with it, a long period of democracy, though democracy of a social character more
than a political one.23
420 European Journal of Political Theory 11(4)

Notwithstanding the importance of having brought the masses into public life, it
was now necessary to teach them how to orient themselves towards the institutions
of the nation state and to transform themselves into an Italian citizenry that would
be fervently devoted to the patriotic ideal. In short, it was necessary to appeal again
to that Italian tradition that aimed to combine state and nation in an effective way,
configuring a ‘new liberalism’ that in the wake of the political and ideological
movement of the Risorgimento might prove adequate to the postwar era, since
the liberal idea, ‘just like any idea’, becomes transformed ‘and is now called, and
ought to be called fascism: the most coherent, the most historically mature and
perfect conception of the state as liberty’.24
The Great War was a decisive rupture from an ideological point of view as well:
the political culture that was progressively marginalized in the first decades after
unification, becoming a kind of anti-system opposition – that is to say, the
Mazzinian and Garibaldian tradition – had suddenly found a way to remake itself
as a revolutionary ideology for the new generation. In substance, this remaking
involved a pseudo-religious conception – more exactly, a neo-romantic one –
which affirmed the triumph of will and a vitalism that was often fed by images of
sacrifice for an ideal that at an extreme limit might even require death. In the back-
packs of many Italian soldiers could be found a copy of Mazzini’s The Duties of
Man.25 Thus the fascist ideological matrix remained more tied to sentiment than to
doctrinal purity, even if Giovanni Gentile contributed in decisive ways to providing a
philosophical version of it that could seduce and galvanize a restless generation. It is,
then, also in the metamorphoses of leftist, post-Risorgimento radicalism that we
need to look for many elements of the fascist mentality, which, precisely because it
was a mentality, cannot be pigeon-holed in terms of a left–right dichotomy. It was
rather a ‘state of emergency’ ideology, and in that sense revolutionary, devoted to the
primacy of immediate and furious action. First the war, then the biennio rosso (two
red years), which spread a climate of subversivism and violence but also provoked
fear among the bourgeoisie – those were its incubators. It was then up to Mussolini
to maintain the internal political and social situation in a state of permanent agita-
tion. In this way Mussolini both satisfied the destructive demands of his young
squadristi and allowed his leadership to be presented as uniquely able to guarantee
the restoration of the shattered liberal order, routing the ‘reds’ and bridling in his
own ‘Black Shirts’. The role that fascism always assigned to violence can be
explained in terms of its genesis and reason for being, which is to say, war interven-
tionism and theoretical and practical voluntarism. By the same token, violence
justifies the ideology’s revolutionary nature, in a sense not so different from that
invoked by the Jacobins during the emergency of the war and economic crisis to
which they responded with the creation of the revolutionary Tribunal and therefore
the Committee of Public Safety. The difference regarding the Jacobin precedent is
that the Terror was not freely and consciously chosen by the political men of the
Mountain, while Mussolini and the Fascists – just like Lenin and the Bolsheviks –
adopted it as a precise political strategy.
Early fascism, especially after its turn to the right in the wake of the serious
electoral failure of November 1919, tapped into and put itself at the head of that
Breschi 421

which Pareto in April 1922 saw as the ‘religion that primarily dominates’ Italian
political and social life, i.e. patriotism.26
Very soon thereafter, fascism made itself hegemonic on the front represented by
nation and state, as against the ‘antination’ and ‘antistate’ that the socialists, com-
munists, and, in part, even the Catholics had occupied. This defence of the nation
and state seems to make Mussolini’s Black Shirts deserving of the appellation
‘liberal’, particularly in the environment of the neoconservative bloc under the
leadership of Antonio Salandra during the immediate prewar years, which accord-
ing to a democratic liberal like Edoardo Giretti had usurped the liberal name. But,
all things considered, not even radical and democratic liberalism can today be said
to be entirely free from responsibility for the creation of that climate of mistrust
that surrounded the institutions of the post-Risorgimento liberal state. In fact,
‘antigiolittismo’ (opposition to the governments of Giovanni Giolitti) was the cata-
lyst of all the political and cultural forces that contributed to the decline of a certain
idea of the Risorgimento – the liberal and parliamentary idea – which was open to
a cautious and gradual but still unequivocal democratization of institutions. The
liberal method was abandoned in order to make more rapid and sharper responses
to the social question, insofar as internal politics was concerned, and to the chal-
lenges unleashed by the clash among great-power imperialisms, insofar as foreign
policy was concerned.
One thinks also about the attacks that Giolitti and the governments close to him
suffered in the first 20 years of the 20th century on the part of the Corriere della
Sera of Luigi Albertini. His influential collaborator, the liberal economist Luigi
Einaudi, assumed towards fascism ‘positions of benevolent waiting, in the hopes
that it would be able to resolve the problems of the liberal state in the sense
expressed by liberals’.27 Mussolini’s clever move in appointing Alberto De
Stefani as Minister of Finance (and soon to a double appointment that also
included the Treasury) contributed to those hopes. As Riccardo Faucci has
recalled, ‘for close to two years the liberal economists and the Mussolini govern-
ment marched in perfect agreement’.28 De Felice has also recalled how on 14 May
1923, Einaudi defined Minister De Stefani as ‘an old thoroughbred liberal’. In fact,
at just that moment, De Stefani was the object of harsh attacks and criticisms on
the part of the fascist press and by the most intransigent followers of the
Mussolinian movement.29 It was the Matteotti murder and the ‘silence of the
industrialists’ regarding that tragic event, as well as Albertini’s move into anti-
fascism, that led Einaudi to abandon any further philo-fascist illusions, even if in
July 1925 he still rendered a largely positive judgement about De Stefani.
Evidently, both the antigiolittismo of radical democrats like Antonio De Viti de
Marco and the philo-fascism of liberal economists like Einaudi had very different
purposes than those of the followers of D’Annunzio, the nationalists and many
participants in the Florentine circle around the journal La Voce, not to mention the
maximalist socialists and the revolutionary syndicalists. And yet their criticism,
often very bitter and aimed at delegitimating the liberal ruling class in moral
terms, contributed along with other political and ideological attacks to ensure
that ‘at the advent of fascism no one any longer believed in democracy’30 – whether
422 European Journal of Political Theory 11(4)

this was because they were fiercely anti-democratic or simply bitterly disillusioned.
The cultural delegitimation caused by the concentrated attacks by the multi-
faceted, and internally contradictory, anti-Giolitti front add up to an objective
crisis of the state aggravated by the unscrupulous conduct of the conservative
and nationalist wing of the equally multi-faceted Italian liberal ruling class. It
was conduct – above all, regarding the means chosen for Italy’s entrance into
the First World War – that isolated both the government and the parliament.
After 1925 the break from every continuity with the liberal experience, both at
the political-institutional level and at that of ideology and legal culture, was openly
declared by fascism itself and found an explicit and definite legislative translation in
the work of the nationalist Alfredo Rocco, serving as Minister of Justice. We
should no longer be an ‘agnostic’ state, Rocco wrote in 1927, but rather a state
with ‘its own life and its own goals, superior to those of individuals, and to which
the goals of individuals ought to be subordinated’. He then added: ‘the fascist state
contains liberalism and supersedes it; it contains it because it makes use of liberty
when it is useful to do so; it supersedes it because it restrains liberty when it is
dangerous’.31 At the end of the 1920s, well before the structural changes induced by
the great crisis of 1929, the transformation of the Italian state from liberal to fascist
had essentially been completed.
The relationship with Italian liberalism cannot exhaust the nature of fascism,
especially its ideological mixture. What Griffin and Roberts tell us about the pres-
ence of an autonomous revolutionary dynamic must be taken seriously, even if the
role of the old liberal ruling class was important. So far I have attempted to clarify
the reasons why political and cultural elites failed to recognize the real identity of
fascism and its claim for a revolution. So what was it they were missing?
Italian fascism can effectively be considered a ‘revolution’ if we understand that
this term was born before Marx’s theories and so Marxism cannot exhaust its
significance. The two first major revolutions, the American and the French, did
not approach the ‘social question’. Only in France, during the very short Jacobin
phase, was the ‘social question’ raised and the Revolution was identified with
finding a solution. The Thermidor ended the matter, and we must then wait
until 1848, at least, for the political return of the ‘social question’. So, revolution
does not necessarily and exclusively denote the radical transformation of the eco-
nomic framework and underpinnings of a society. Originally, it meant a constitu-
tional and institutional change. A wider sense of the term ‘revolution’ is therefore
possible and legitimate.
In this wider sense, fascism can be considered revolutionary because the political
institutions of the parliamentary system were emptied and the one-party structure
essentially replaced it. It was a novelty in the European political panorama of the
first decades of the 20th century. The role of the masses was a novelty in Italy – and
not only in Italy. From this point of view, we could assert that fascism was revo-
lutionary also at a social level. Of course, contrary to the Marxist perspective, the
working classes were involved only passively. But their integration into the wider
category of ‘people’ – intended as ‘the Italian nation’ – permitted them to obtain
some state grants (subventions) or to receive a kind of public interest, even if the
Breschi 423

fascist aim was only to consolidate the ‘consensus’ to the dictatorial regime. In this
sense fascist corporatism was important and surely innovative in comparison with
previous liberal policies. Even if one can’t speak entirely about a revolutionary
system, one can nonetheless speak about a modern and post-liberal system of
regulating the relations of the workforce. The modernity of corporatism was
based on the assumption that the elimination of social conflict would not have
negated class divisions in society nor denied legitimacy to the organization of rep-
resented interests but rather have brought back unions within the sphere of the
state. The result of the fascist corporatist policies was a hyper-bureaucratic state,
which is the fascist legacy in the Italian democratic republic from a political-
institutional point of view. This kind of state system, inspired by corporatist the-
ories, was inherited by the main Italian political parties and unions because it is a
really effective means to gain and maintain electoral consensus. It was the Italian
way to the welfare state in the second half of the last century.
David D. Roberts is right when, recalling Ernesto Laclau’s analysis of fascism,
he contends that the Mazzinian radical tradition helps us understand fascist rad-
icalism, with its particular conceptions of ‘revolution’, ‘the people’ and ‘the social
question’.32 Giovanni Gentile was the philosopher who, more than any other,
provided a new interpretation of Mazzini’s thought at the end of the First
World War.33 In this intellectual operation we can find the true meaning of his-
toricism for fascism. The way Karl Popper uses the term in reference to Marxism
and other totalitarian ideologies seems less persuasive and less correctly applicable
to fascism. Roberts rightly stresses the role played by the Marxist revisionism of
Lenin and Sorel at the beginning of the 20th century. In this revision Lenin quoted
another important name: Giovanni Gentile. At the end of the 19th century, the
future philosopher of fascism tried to reconcile Marx with Hegel. The result was his
very particular kind of idealism, which was close to Fichte’s. Thus the concept of
‘praxis’ was relevant, and the result was the triumph of activism. Gentile’s histori-
cism meant ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ are the same and this perfect coincidence is the
thought as action. Human thinking can be revealed only by human activity inside
the current of history. History is thought as action, that is ‘will’. This was a phil-
osophy perfectly adequate to the Italian (and European) youth protest at the
beginning of the new century, reinforced by the Great War and the consequent
birth of a ‘trincerocrazia’ – the aristocracy of the trenches, as Mussolini dubbed it
in his newspaper Popolo d’Italia. In this sense, the historicism that fuelled Gentile’s
and his followers’ ideology was not committed to a teleological conception of
history or to the presence of a Zeitgeist which predetermines the evolution of
human events. The starting point for Gentile’s revision of Marxism was the
Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the
world in various ways; the point is to change it.’34
In this way, the ideology of fascism contains a component that is related to the
Marxist revolutionary attitude: Gentile’s idealism, so-called ‘attualismo’ (where the
thinking thought is named ‘the pure Act’). The proof of this can be found in Ugo
Spirito’s intellectual activity during the fascist regime.35 Examining his theory,
there are many similarities with the Hegelian left, and we can find elements from
424 European Journal of Political Theory 11(4)

the young Marx in fascist doctrine. The problem is that there was more to fascist
ideology than Gentile’s historicism; we have to consider many other components,
such as Rocco’s state nationalism and Rossoni’s syndicalism. Perhaps a more gen-
eric formula, such as ‘the will to power’, would enable us to pinpoint a psycho-
logical and prepolitical attitude characteristic of all fascists.
This may be the content of the palingenetic myth that Griffin talks about: a
myth of community regeneration, as in a sort of combination of Nietzsche and
Tönnies, or Sorel and Mazzini, whose motto ‘pensiero e azione’ (thought and
action) was central to his ideological legacy.
For fascism the deposit of myth to be drawn upon was the Risorgimento in the
version offered by the political and ideological tradition of its ‘defeated victors’ –
the republican current, both Mazzinian and Garibaldian, the legacy of which was
contested by various, greatly differing political personalities and groups. That
legacy ended up profoundly modified, to the point that in certain cases it
became a distorted populism, and the name of a writer like Alfredo Oriani
(1852–1909) or a review like La Voce (1908–16) prove important to understanding
that genetic mutation of republicanism and democratic radicalism that the First
World War accelerated and translated into action and into concrete political move-
ments. It is this original fusion of a governmental liberalism that had become statist
and nationalist with a republicanism that had become a subversive populism that
we must continue to probe if we are to grasp the essence of fascism.

Notes
1. Reinhard Kuhnl (1971) Formen burgerlicher Herrschaft: Liberalismus – Faschismus.
Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.
2. See Paolo Varvaro (2006) Sul fascismo: Il pregiudizio antiliberale nella costruzione del
regime totalitario. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino.
3. Nino Valeri (1971) Tradizione liberale e fascismo, p. vii. Florence: Le Monnier.
4. Roger Griffin (2008) ‘Exploding the Continuum of History: A Non-Marxist’s Marxist
Model of Fascism’s Revolutionary Dynamics’, in his A Fascist Century, ed. Matthew
Feldman, pp. 46–8. Houndmills: Palgrave.
5. Fulco Lanchester (2004) Pensare lo Stato: I giuspubblicisti nell’Italia unitaria, pp. 114–
15. Rome-Bari: Laterza.
6. See Enzo Tagliacozzo (1932) Il pensiero di Silvio Spaventa, p. 69. Milan: Società Editrice
Dante Alighieri.
7. Antonio Cardini (1996) Il grande centro: I liberali in una nazione senza stato. Il problema
storico dell’arretratezza politica (1796–1996), p. 92. Manduria: Lacaita.
8. Benito Mussolini (1956) Opera Omnia, vol. 19, ed. Edoardo and Duilio Susmel, p. 312.
Florence: La Fenice.
9. Ibid.
10. Christopher Seton-Watson (1967) Italy from Liberalism to Fascism: 1870–1925. London:
Methuen & Co.
11. Valeri (n. 3), p. 18.
12. Ibid. p. 15.
13. Olindo Malagodi (2005) Il regime liberale e l’avvento del fascismo, ed. Fulvio
Cammarano, p. 204. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino.
Breschi 425

14. Giovanni Amendola (1922) Il Mezzogiorno e la crisi politica italiana, in his (1924) Una
battaglia liberale: Discorsi politici (1919–1923), p. 167. Turin: Piero Gobetti Editore.
15. Ibid. pp. 167–8.
16. Mussolini (1954) Opera Omnia, vol. 14, ed. Edoardo and Duilio Susmel, p. 469.
Florence: La Fenice.
17. Mussolini (n. 8), p. 17.
18. Malagodi (n. 13), pp. 65–6.
19. Giovanni Gentile (1925) Che cosa e` il fascismo: discorsi e polemiche, p. 26. Florence:
Vallecchi.
20. Ibid. p. 29.
21. See Roberto Pertici (1997) Mazzinianesimo, fascismo, comunismo: L’itinerario politico di
Delio Cantimori (1919–1943). Milan: Jaca Book.
22. Carlo Curcio (1924) L’esperienza liberale del fascismo, p. 6. Naples: Morano.
23. See Carmelo Licitra (1925) Dal liberalismo al fascismo, preface by Giovanni Gentile, pp.
41–2. Rome: De Alberti.
24. Gentile in ibid. p. xxi.
25. Simon Levis Sullam (2010) L’apostolo a brandelli: L’eredità di Mazzini tra Risorgimento
e fascismo, p. 56. Rome-Bari: Laterza.
26. Vilfredo Pareto (1980) Scritti sociologici minori, ed. Giovanni Busino, p. 1099. Turin:
UTET.
27. Antonio Cardini (2009) Storia del liberismo: Stato e mercato dal liberalismo alla demo-
crazia, p. 225. Naples: Esi.
28. Riccardo Faucci (1986) Luigi Einaudi, p. 198. Turin: UTET.
29. Renzo De Felice (1966) Mussolini il fascista: La conquista del potere 1921–1925, p. 452.
Turin: Einaudi.
30. Giovanni Sartori (1976) Democrazia e definizioni, p. 34. Bologna: Il Mulino.
31. Alfredo Rocco (1927) La trasformazione dello Stato: Dallo Stato Liberale allo Stato
Fascista, p. 16. Rome: Anonima Editrice.
32. David D. Roberts (2010) ‘Fascism, Marxism, and the Question of Modern Revolution’,
European Journal of Political Theory 9(2): 190–3.
33. See Giovanni Gentile (1923) I profeti del Risorgimento italiano. Florence: Vallecchi.
34. See Giovanni Gentile (1899) La filosofia di Marx: Studi critici. Pisa: Spoerri.
35. This is the argument of my book (2010) Spirito del Novecento: Il secolo di Ugo Spirito dal
fascismo alla contestazione. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino.