Manawatu Daily Times Mussolini’s Philosophy

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6625, 11 August 1931, Page 6

Manawatu Daily Times Mussolini’s Philosophy

It is a favourite pursuit of political historians to trace clown the philosophical foundations of Fascism. Essentially a man of action, Benito Mussolini in the first days of his power would probably has disdained these intellectual researches. He very likely would have said that pre-Fascist Italy had to produce something anti-democratic in the place of a democracy which had been overcome with political and economic malaise. That this was Fascism and perhaps because he was Mussolini !

But, like every newcomer on the political stage, he soon began to attend to his antecedents. He exhumed the glory that was Rome. And his admirers and followers started a quest for a philosophic background which should also have a pedigree, perhaps not so deeply rooted in the past as ancient Romo, but anterior to the anti-democratic reaction of the post-war years. Mussolini himself is helping them by issuing periodical dicta on his theory of government. His latest formula appears in Le Journal, of Paris: “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

In other words, the State is absolute. It is so all-important that the individual does not count save for his part in supplying a unit without which the "whole could not be formed. After thus doing his duty, he sheds any further significance he can, which is absorbed, together with his liberty, by the State.

Many of the historians trace this super-glorification of the State to Hegel, the philosopher of pre-war Germany. In Hegel’s State there was equally no room for free citizens. “The State is the realised ethical idea. . . . This substantive unity is its own motive and absolute end. . . . This end has the highest right over the individual, whose highest duty in turn is to be a member of the State.” Mussolini in German dress!

Unlike the Bolsheviks, who still toy with the idea of making all the Governments in their own image, Mussolini is not interested in the spread of Fascism beyond Italy’s borders. He grants that absolutism may not be suitable for other peoples. He knows democracies instinctively turn from it. Theirs is the philosophy, not of Hegel, but of James Russell Lowell: “All free Governments, whatever their name, are in reality Governments by public opinion, and it is on the quality of this opinion that their prosperity depends.”

Every country, it is said, gets the Government it deserves. It might perhaps be better to say that every country gets the Government suited to its own genius. And is it not possible that even Mussolini must seel; support in public opinion? Therefore, the necessity for a Fascist philosophy.