To begin with this history of philosophy in Italy, take into account the context, beginning in particular with the rise of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile as the two leading Italian intellectual tyros in their time trying to expand beyond Hegel’s Absolute Idealism. Similarly, the intellectual substance of Theosophy has been described rightly, as an objective idealism, but not an idealism that rejects the existence of matter. Although Helena Blavatsky intervened in the great debate of the time occurring between scientific monism and Christian dualism, her philosophy does not originate from Crocean, Hegelian, or Gentilian idealism. Gentile continues to develop the anti-enlightenment romanticism and idealism of Hegel. The metaphysics of Croce and Gentile, both differing themselves, are connected to the historical context of the Italian Risorgimento. Croce and Gentile take two different trajectories, both trying to develop their own forms of monistic metaphysics, with Giovanni Gentile committing himself to radicalism.
In the intellectual aftermath of the Risorgimento, when Italy still labored under the stigma of material backwardness and cultural dependency, Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile emerged as the twin titans who sought to forge a distinctly Italian philosophy by pushing beyond Hegel’s Absolute Idealism into new forms of monistic metaphysics rooted in the unfinished spiritual labors of national unification. Croce elaborated a historicist philosophy of the Spirit in which distinct, irreducible moments of aesthetic intuition, logical concept, economic utility, and ethical will unfold immanently within history itself, rejecting any transcendent Absolute while still affirming the reality of the concrete world as the theater of liberty. Gentile, by contrast, radicalized the same Hegelian inheritance into Actual Idealism, declaring that the pure act of thinking is the sole reality, dissolving subject and object into an eternal, self-creating thought-process that continued and intensified the anti-Enlightenment romanticism of German Idealism to its most extreme monistic conclusion. Both systems arose as deliberate correctives to the positivist and materialist climate of post-unification Italy, aiming to restore philosophical dignity to a nation still regarded as poor and peripheral.
Fascism developed organically from a party, founded by soldiers and veterans with political motive and political rivals. A common political motive bounded the revolutionary syndicalists, nationalists, Futurists and philosophical idealists in Italy and Gentile to radicalism as opposed to the development of Croce’s pragmatic idealism. He shares this tendency to radicalism with Mussolini (alongside Mussolini’s anarchist sympathies and his view that anarchists were superior to socialists and communists).
Gentile’s exposition is vital to understanding the intellectual substance of Fascism, which is an entirely different ideal taught by any Western intellectual, or self-identified Fascist of our era. Hence, historical context means everything here to understand the origins and doctrine of Fascism, for Gentile specifically designs it for an Italian audience, and an answer to the dilemma of Italy within the web of complex political events.
In the period and context of Italy’s revolution, the fight was for the redemption of Italy. Gentile loathed the fact, that Italy lived in the shadow of others, and had lost its glory. Italy was not respected at the time. After the Risorgimento’s formal completion in 1870, the new Kingdom of Italy remained a fragile, incomplete nation that had traded the cultural prestige of its Roman and Renaissance past for the hard realities of late-nineteenth century Europe: chronically under-industrialized, fiscally strained, and riven by the North–South divide, it lagged far behind Britain, France and the rising German Empire in wealth, military power and diplomatic weight. High illiteracy, mass poverty, malaria and land hunger drove millions of emigrants abroad, while the humiliating defeat at Adwa in 1896 against Ethiopia confirmed Italy’s status as the weakest of the would-be great powers. Foreign observers and even many Italians themselves increasingly dismissed the country as poor, weak and dirty — an agrarian periphery living in the long shadow of its more vigorous northern neighbors and of its own vanished imperial glory.
Gentilian thought is Gentile’s interpretation of Giuseppe Mazzini’s thought. Early Italian Fascism sought to establish legitimacy by claiming continuity with the efforts of Italian Reunification known as the Risorgimento for the redemption of Italy. This partly explained their rationale for the support of Italy’s intervention in the First World War.
In order for Italy to be redeemed, it was believed, Italy needed to make history through the victory of war. Gentile influenced Mussolini to accept the distinction of Fascism as an embodiment of Mazzinian ideas, in so far as Gentile understood Mazzini and Mazzini’s romantic ideas of progress. Gentile’s Fascism infused with Mazzinian philosophical idealism highly emphasized a call to:
- National mission (the destiny of peoples),
- An all-encompassing morality,
- Anti-individualism,
- Religiosity,
- Totalitarian unity,
- Selfless duty,
- Roman tradition of family,
- Centrality of the State.
Gentile interprets these to be the call of Mazzini’s REPUBLICAN IDEALISM, which is infused into Fascism to create its civic theology. Gentile contested early on, that Fascism was positively committed to convictions such as equality, democracy, liberty, freedom and progress.
In his critique of Benedetto Croce, Gentile stated that FASCISM developed from liberalism, and into a mature, ethical, total conception of the state. Gentile argued that classical or individualistic liberalism (as in the English model) was incomplete, and Fascism is its complete transformation, as the ultimate expression of the State, embodying true freedom. Gentile’s idea here is referenced in historical analysis of his work (see Gentile, l’anima culturale del regime fascista) where he emphasized, “Il liberalismo ora si chiama fascismo” (“Liberalism now is called fascism”).
“As far as I am concerned, liberalism is not reborn, because it never died. As all ideas, it is transformed in life, which is never lived in vain, and in which nothing is preserved unchanged. It is transformed, and now it is called fascism. . .which is the most coherent, historically mature and perfect conception of the state as freedom. . .” (Giovanni Gentile, Che cosa è il fascismo: Discorsi e polemiche, or What is Fascism: Speeches and Polemics)
Gentile demonstrates his faith in the democratic masses and the best among them, when he stated that history is not made by the heroes, or by the masses, but by those heroes who sense the inarticulate, yet powerful impulses of the moving masses.
The heroes, he says have always been the few, an elite, who then proceed to inspire and galvanize the masses, and in this process of making history, “the masses find a person who succeeds in making explicit their obscure moral sentiments.” “The moral universe is that of the multitudes,” he says, “and the multitudes are governed and energized by an idea whose precise features reveal itself but to a few, an elite who then proceed to inspire masses and give form and life to history.”
It is certain, that Giovanni Gentile considered Mussolini could be guided, and be a hero. Gentile was wrong, and the path he chose was his alone. While Gentile possessed a moral philosophy, which he tried to infuse into Fascism, Fascism developed everything but that moral system. For Mussolini, there was no time. Fascism had to be pragmatic and adapt quickly to the situation at hand. Fascism, as Gentile expounds, relates to Zen Buddhism, the philosophy of the Shogun military dictatorships, and Stoicism.
Without Gentilian thought, Fascism is merely the reflected aspects and flaws of D’Annunzio’s and Mussolini’s psychology and a gang of thugs. The issues of the early party led it to shed such early notions, including members who defected, or left the party, to be replaced by zealots all-consumed by Jewish-Masonic conspiracies, and cracking the skulls in of their political opponents in the streets.
The way Fascism developed reflects the psychology of its leader. Gentile claimed the Fascist State was to be democratic, and Fascist revolutionary thought to be centered on freedom and liberty. This was understood through an ennobling spiritual philosophy and metaphysics. However, the modern Fascist today appears merely a Fascist, because of having fell too headlong into an internet rabbit-hole, and understands Fascism through propaganda reels, trying to find justification for one’s aesthetic racism.
In Gentile’s philosophy, life is seriousness, and man ought to learn of their inner spiritual nature, our place within the moral order of things, and our duty or individual responsibility to the progress of our evolution as a civilization. The humanism of young Gentile exists in Fascism, or “radical humanism” as he directly defined it.
There are scholars who claim to unveil what they call Western illusions about Plato, arguing that the origins of Fascism and totalism can be found in the writings of Plato. This contains their emphasis on the decadence of modernity and the Ages of Man.
The vices, failings, trappings, and degeneration of morality and order through the ages are all the same plea to bring to life once again a truly ennobling philosophy. Gentile not only emphasizes the necessity of the connection between thought, action, and will, familiar in the objective idealism of Theosophy, he shared at its basis this same plea, however through his own philosophy and interpretations, which became eventually less important in the later stages of Fascism.
The foundational elements of Fascism can be studied through these:
- Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism
- The Manifesto of San Sepolcro
- The Verona Manifesto
- The Diary of the Will
- The Fascist Movement in Italian Life
- Palmieri’s The Philosophy of Fascism
- Gentile’s The Philosophic Basis of Fascism and The General Theory of the Spirit
- The Constitution of Fiume (and Fiume’s history and D’Annunzio’s view on it)
- History and Ideas on Giuseppi Mazzini and his disciples
- History on French Revolution, English Republicanism, and the Italian Risorgimento.
You may also study the instructive Carl Cohen’s “Communism, Fascism, and Democracy: The Theoretical Foundations” often used in introductory college courses on Political Theory. This book includes direct writings by Friedrich Engels, Robert Owen, Georg W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Mao Tse-tung, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Machiavelli, Friedrich Nietzsche, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, John C. Calhoun, John Dewey, George Bernard Shaw, Russell A. Kirk, Norman Thomas, Friedrich A. Hayek, Pericles, Alexis de Tocqueville, and others.
