The pedigree of fascism

CHAPTER III NATIONALISM AND SOCIALISM

Under such circumstances what was the government for the political classes? A coach in a land of brigands; for the most popular elements a coach to be attacked on the roadside; for the better elements, a coach they had a right to drive, whip in hand. Every man stood up against the government either begging or threatening; so that it is no wonder that the next generation of gentlemen mostly stood aside and shunned politics, seeing that at best the men who mixed in it were moved by selfish ambition, or were a vulgar crew of Arrivists and mischief plotters. Abstention on the one side was, however, a form of selfishness, as harmful to the state as Arrivism on the other. Provided they kept clean hands, the abstentionists did not mind that the national conscience should be either corrupted or lulled to sleep by the people whose interest it was that it should slumber. Obviously their withdrawal from public life had the same cause as the ambition and the unscrupulous opportunism of the others. After fifty years of heroic life and feelings, they wanted to attend to their own business and enjoy life privately. Public cares and struggles had been the order of the day for half a century, and public conscience relaxed; with a sudden eclipse of national consciousness, Italy lost the pride of autonomy in foreign affairs and ceased to realise in deeds the part it had to play in the history of the world.

Its foreign policy is the best index of the spiritual conditions of the period, and according to the historian, Michele Rosi (who is neither a Fascist nor a Liberal, nor a Socialist, because he is a man born to put together facts, historical facts, and live a passionate life among them instead of living it among men) the line of conduct of Italian foreign ministers at this stage can be described as the policy of men who distrusted themselves more then they distrusted others. Rosi does not say so, but the facts he puts together do say so.

Of this the best proof was the Triple Alliance. In 1873 Marco Minghetti went with King Vittorio Emmanuele II to Berlin and to Vienna to discuss a second alliance with Germany and more cordial relations with the Austrian court. The followers of Garibaldi raised an outcry as they saw in this a sure proof that the King of Italy was giving up Trento and Trieste, whereas it had never been thought in the past that Rome or Venice might have been so abandoned. In Parliament, however, the Left was quite willing to lean on the shoulder of Germany, and was submitting even to an alliance with Austria, although some of the members had dark remembrances of its rule. But at the same time they flirted with France, who was going more and more to the Left, and whose anti-clericalism seemed to cheer on their own anti-Catholicism.

In 1877 Francesco Crispi, the best statesman of Italy at the time, one of those men of the Left whose mentality brought them mostly to think and often to act as if they had belonged to the Right, made a diplomatic tour to the capitals of Germany, Austria, France and England. He had one open aim, and another one not quite so fully acknowledged, which was to look for support against a possible aggression that was feared both from Paris and Vienna. The impression he received was that Berlin might accept an alliance with Italy against France, on the understanding that Austria would be left free to do what she liked in the East. Thirty years before, Italy, still in the making and far from seeing yet her way to unity, had attacked single-handed the greatest empire of Europe in an offensive war; now, out of fear of a possible attack from France, which Bismarck himself declared very unlikely, she entered into an alliance from which she received only orders and prohibitions. When the Congress of Berlin took place, all that the representative of Italy could do was of so little avail, that the Germans declared that the French and the Italians had to settle the question of Tunis between themselves. This did not admit of any compensation to Italy for the Austrian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and expansion in the East. The Italian policy at that congress betrayed a total incapacity to display the policy of a great State in foreign affairs. The reasons were threefold, the men in power had a very poor understanding of the forces and the interests of the country and, in consequence, could not act according to these; they were holding on to ideologies, that had served their time and whose high-sounding rhetoric could only help them to hide the vacuum of their minds; finally, they had a sense that their home affairs were getting more and more out of hand and this feeling may have been the most cramping of all the circumstances in which they stood.

Negative as it was, the attitude of the government was in harmony with that of Parliament. When, in January, 1879, the Senate disapproved of its foreign policy, the head of the government, who was Depretis, shifted all responsibility by saying that, as Prime Minister, he had in that department followed faithfully the traditions of the Right, although he belonged to the Left. In February of the same year, Mussolino strongly advised them to enter into an alliance with Germany; he knew, said he, that Bismarck would accept it unwillingly, as he believed the Italians to be unfaithful, but that he would do so nevertheless, needing Italy against France. Nothing could be less heroic, than a Senate which had good grounds to feel pride in the newly achieved national independence, and was yet so low spirited that it could accept an alliance on such grounds.

The ideal of the Risorgimento had been realised, and as the new leaders had no new ideals they had nothing further to realise; they were bodies without souls, with nothing that might give them a chance to display the gifts with which nature had so largely endowed them. Materialists in philosophy they strove to make the country more and more materialist, fighting religion under the names of clericalism and obscurantism.

Obviously what kept the various governments of Italy from having a dignified foreign policy was that the country was in a state bordering on anarchy. One cause of this was lack of experts in all the political classes, devoid, as the best men were, of personal or traditional experience to help in the application of their imported legislation; but the main cause was undoubtedly the amorphous state of the working classes. If man is to be called a political animal, the labourers of Italy were not men fifty years ago. They did not care what happened and did not think they had anything to say in the matter: they were politically unconscious. Not that they were stupid: their art, their songs, their traditions attest the contrary.

Their political unconsciousness, far from making things easier, rendered a good Liberal government very nearly impossible; for apathy and indifference in the lower class, while it may be very well under an absolute monarchy of the patriarchal type, under a Liberal constitution is apt to prove a curse. First, the lower middle class kept drawing men from the people, and these men, with the natural gift of adaptation the Italian shows to a greater degree than the slower northern races, rose too quickly and too quickly became conscious of their plebian force and of the opportunities offered to them by the difficulties under which the government was working. Among these men and among the crowds of half-intellectuals employed by the State in the innumerable offices created by the centralising administration, in the national schools, in the railways, post services and so on, the members of Parliament, who belonged to the Left, recruited their votes. How quickly these electors realised that their chances of getting all the political importance in their hands rested on the extension of the franchise need not be emphasised. The dates are eloquent, Rome became the capital of Italy in 1870, in 1882 the franchise is extended, and immediately a workman, Maffi, and a pure Socialist, Andrea Costa, are elected.

Without attempting a sketch of the development of Socialism in Italy, it must be said that it certainly did a great deal of good to the country. It aroused the working masses from their slumber and bettered their material conditions, which badly wanted bettering. To stir the people out of their amorphous state and make them conscious of their rights was a very wholesome operation. It would have been better to have made them realise at the same time that rights never go without duties, and that to co-operate in public life they had to undertake the one in order to get the other. But this, however, was more than could be expected from agitators, who often had, themselves, a very poor notion of the relation of right and duties. Their incitement to the people was to make material well-being, the ultimate end of all effort.

Vulgar as it was, yet it was the proper aim for a materialistic age, and it had the advantage of being concrete, positive, and within range of the people’s rudimentary political understanding. Therefore it worked. It had the first quality that an idea must have to move people to action; it corresponded to the real needs of the workers.

The nobler side of Socialism, that which had made it highly idealistic and has made its ultimate end a dreamy Messianism, did not strike root in Italy. It did not appeal to the people, and whenever it fascinated some stray poet or idealist, like Andrea Costa or Mussolini’s father, they failed to arouse an echo in the minds of the labourers. This should have been sufficient to show that it did not suit the Italian mentality. Mankind, the fraternity of mankind, the lost paradise reconquered by the mutual love of men, could not mean much to Italian ears. It sounded abstract, and at best did not show much chance of being realised by the present generation. The Socialist leaders had to attract followers with more concrete things, with plans that could be realised, and to arouse in them a passion for an actual object. Consequently they harped on the necessity of getting better wages for less work. They planned Labour organisations which gradually grew stronger, and they taught the workers to hate their employers.

Yet this was not the worst part of the leaders’ activity; that was the corrupting consciousness they gave the workers of an unlimited political power without any corresponding duties. Out of unfairly treated men they made bullies, most unhappy bullies, the worst kind of bullies. The torture of Mussolini’s youth was this rapid decadence of Socialism in Italy, although it had the advantage over other parties of a stock of general ideas and a definite programme. It was only the weakness of other parties which made it look strong until the war and during the years that followed the peace; for as far back as 1910 the historic ideas it had brought to Italy had yielded their crop. Had it not been so, Socialism, between 1918 and 1920, would have worked out in open revolution. As it was, it had built up a class organisation that was the first regular Party in modern Italy, and this meant considerable experience for the whole nation; it had besides bettered the material conditions of life of the lower class and awakened them to political consciousness, which is a contribution to the development of the country as a modern State that cannot be overrated.

Liberalism, be it of the Right or of the Left, had had an Italian form, which had proved its consonance with the historical position of the country by the efficiency with which it had realised its ideal. Italy, free from foreign rule and politically one under the House of Savoy, was doubtless the creation of Italian Liberalism. But as a home governing party its inefficiency was obvious; one may think that its failure was due to its non-national stock of ideas, which led to the application of foreign legislation to a country whose needs were not the same as those of the nations in which this administrative and political Liberalism had come out of a long historical evolution.

Socialism, on the other hand, was yeast, and as yeast it was very good for Italy, for the unleavened masses rose into shape and life under its action; thereby emerging from their amorphousness they entered into the political world and brought with them the force and life of numbers. It brought them also to the level of the European proletariat and introduced the Party discipline and organisation that the other Italian parties had not needed, as their singleness of aim and the loftiness of their ideals had been sufficient to keep their high-minded members in unity. Yet it proved a curse, as its leaders were unable to realise that the wretched means they had to resort to, in order to arouse men into action, were due to the fact that the higher side of Socialism did not fit the mentality of the people.

Another party must be now considered, and that commands a great deal of respect from any foreigner that may have watched with loving eyes the life of Italy: Nationalism. Corradini and Federzoni may be looked upon as its leaders, and their followers were a mere handful of men. They had a clear notion of what they wanted, and to a certain extent they may be considered as the rightful heirs of the Risorgimento. Again they were all gentlemen, gentlemen being taken as the English equivalent of vir, implying the sterling quality of the individual and not at all his social position or his æsthetic refinement, which may be merely the consequence of wealth. Small minorities are always to be found at the origin of any great political movement as it is the conviction of the few which carries away the multitude of men. But then the crucial point is that their convictions must have magnetic attraction for the general public. And the Nationalists had not this. Their ideas were too high and, at the same time, they were obsolete, besides being no more Italian than those of Liberalism or Socialism.

The Nationalists’ idea of a nation was as materialist as their aims were idealist.⁠[1] Now this would be sufficient to condemn to sterility the best wills in the world. To state this plainly, the easiest way is to take man as a simile for nation. There are two ways of looking at a man: he is one out of many, or he is the one central reality. As one out of many he knocks in every sense against the reality of the many, and is therefore identified by his very limitations. Such a conception of the man is evidently negative. He is appreciated not so much by what he actually does, but by what he has done, or possesses; not so much by what he is, but by the rank he occupies, and which may often be determined independently of his ACTUAL value. But as the one central reality a man cannot come into competition with other objects of appreciation; he can no longer be gauged from outside. Now, obviously, from the world of objective and natural reality, we are shifting to the subjective and spiritual world. We have in front of us no longer an individual belonging to the world of things—we have a person. Common wisdom has for centuries professed that to understand a person’s motives it is necessary to put oneself in that person’s position; and daily experience shows that we understand the people we love better, because we can make ourselves one with them and judge them from their own point of view. To appreciate a personality this method is indispensable; for it is not in the deeds of his past that a man must be judged—he may have been a hero in the last war and be a coward in his present family life—they are now extrinsic to him, unless he goes on living them and making them for ever his spiritual experience. He must be judged by what he is doing actually. Neither must one measure him by his property, but by what he is still able to produce; nor by the regard or contempt of the people who surround him, which is based on what he has done; nor on what his people were, but by what he actually is. None of these conditions of appreciation is fulfilled as long as we look at a man from outside and weigh his manly worth by comparing his achievement, or his property, to that of other people. Past deeds should not raise him one whit in our appreciation unless he continues them with perfect conscience of their value, for their actual and his personal value depend exclusively of the conscience he has of such value and of his aptitude to keep it actual.

Of this fact Corradini and his friends had excellent examples in Italy. Some of the landlords, who owned relatively small estates and quite insufficient capital, managed to bring their land to the highest rate of productiveness, so that the actual production was superior to that of estates of a much bigger acreage. The owners of the latifondi, on the other hand, were not all sufficiently rich to have their lands ploughed, and those who were did not always do so, although some Roman princes did cultivate thoroughly, very often as much from patriotism as from the wish to increase their incomes. Conspicuous among them were some leading Nationalists. They could see from this that the importance of a man as a landlord was not altogether dependent on the area of his estate and on his capital, and that it varied according to the consciousness he had of what the value of his estate should be and the capacity he had for realising it. But they did not think of the nation as of a man whose value, practically as well as spiritually, depends not so much on the capacity he has for doing things, as on his being conscious of such capacity. Therefore, they looked at Italy measuring it by the poor figure it cut in foreign policy, by its colonies, by its financial weakness, comparing it always in their minds with other countries; in a word, judging it from outside as if it had belonged to the field of natural science instead of belonging to the world of history, which is after all the world of Mind.

Thank God, however, “le coeur a des raisons que la raison ne connaît pas,” and some of these men, Corradini above all, were men with great hearts and deep souls. Out of faith and love of their country they realised what their conception of political reality would have kept them from seeing, namely that the root of all the evil was that the people of Italy had almost allowed the stifling of their souls. Religion in some provinces had been, so to speak, extirpated by the anti-Catholic democrats, republicans and radicals; both religion and patriotism had been lulled to sleep by the Socialists. The only political cell still living and strong was the family. The Nationalists were beset by another cause of sterility, the men these leaders recruited ... did they share their religious and truly patriotic motives? All did not, and that was the misery of it. Yet Corradini and some others were men of faith, just as much as Cavour and Mazzini had been; they could get men to join them in holding aloft a torch whose flame flickered in the cold twilight of Garibaldi’s Italy. They kept the sacred fire of Rome burning, and openly preached self-sacrifice, whilst great artists and sceptic scholars invited the youth of the upper class to enjoy life and shut themselves up in selfish existence.

The Nationalists were men of faith, and as everything is possible to him that believeth, they kept working for their cause a certain number of followers who had joined them in the hope that better openings would be obtained for the export of Italian products and for Italian emigrants if a strong Nationalist foreign policy could be substituted for the existing weak one. For the Nationalists the nation was a transcendent reality, objectively considered as to the individual. Such conception is not peculiar to Italy by any means; yet it was modified in its Italianisation, but always in a way that made it more and more a policy for the gentry. A good deal of culture (I don’t mean philosophy, but a true sense of history and a sound judgment) was at the basis of it, and this did not tend to make it a popular movement. To sacrifice oneself to something transcendent, to an historical construction, is not for the mob: not even for the lower middle classes, absorbed as they are by the problems of daily life.

There we touch what really distinguishes the Fascists from the Nationalists, for whom the State belongs to natural reality, is transcendent in its relation to the individual, and negatively conceived in its relation to other states, where it appears one amongst many. It is a great engine that needs the co-operation of all the citizens to make it work, but it does exist independently of the citizens. Philosophically this conception belongs to the eighteenth century. For the Fascists, the State is not transcendent in its relation to the citizens: it is immanent; it is their own spiritual and economical life in its political summing up. In its relation to other states it is not negatively conceived as one amongst many; for its citizens, it is their national self, whilst the other nations are constitutive of their national non-self. The positiveness of the State for its citizens implies therefore, for them, the negativeness of the other states.⁠[2] Such a conception sounds merely theoretical, and yet it was not born in words. Its painful birth was the outcome of Mussolini’s experience as a Socialist and a party leader. Words have never been given to this newest of all the conceptions that Italy is contributing to the world of politics except in an answer he gave to the judges who, in 1911, were condemning him at Forli. Besides this very curt answer, he never expressed it except in deeds, so that the form under which it is given here is contributed by the author. The rest of the doctrine that can be inferred from his four years’ speeches, legislation and administration, can be traced in the whole of the philosophical works produced by Italian idealism; but this, although perfectly consonant above all with Gentile’s theories, was certainly one of Mussolini’s most original ideas.

The task of the government is to raise the level and increase the value of the citizens, attending not to the organisation of every branch of life manifestation, but to the regulation or rather systematisation of such organisation in order to have always the most intimate fusion of state and citizens. The empirical self requires that the peasant should plough his field, sow the seed and reap the harvest. All this he is bound to do to satisfy his material needs and the work thus considered is certainly not ennobling, since man works as the slave of hunger. Fascism says to the peasant: “Thou shalt no longer plough, sow, reap for thyself, that is to say exclusively for thy material self, but for the State, which is that same empirical self plus its transcendental complement.” Hence ploughing, sowing and reaping are no longer the work of man, slave of his material needs, but of man transcending them, without disregarding them, however, and lifting thereby his daily occupation to the dignity of moral realisation of his own economic value.

The only precedent that this application of Fascism seems to have had is the Christian sanctification of work, which is undoubtedly one of the noblest gifts bestowed by our religion upon mankind. The study of Fascism as a doctrine will offer many such coincidences.

The State must be universally present as a moral factor in every branch of its citizens’ activity. It is in fact the all-pervading consciousness that man must have of his citizenship which expresses itself as the government. Obviously extension of territory should be immaterial if the people of a country could actually be lifted to this high state of political realisation.

But even at the stage reached by Fascism it is easy to see how it affects the policy of foreign states towards Italy. Bring the people to such a degree of political consciousness that every activity may be so directed that it ensures at the same time personal and national increase of value, then you can very nearly cease to trouble about foreign policy, which must be the projection of the home policy, that is to be the supreme affair of a government intent on the valorisation of its country.

CHAPTER IV THE EUROPEAN WAR AND ITS EFFECTS

In March, 1914, the cabinet of Giolitti retired owing to some differences with the Radicals. The moment was full of difficulties and the new ministry was likely to have to deal with strikes and riots at home and complications out of Italy. Sonnino, leader of the Opposition and one of the best men that the Right could boast of, refused to form a new cabinet and managed to have the office entrusted to Salandra. The German Emperor, passing through Venice on his way to Corfou, had a long talk with the king and the Marquis of San Giuliano, the fact being considered a new proof of Italo-German friendship apparently even by the government, whose endeavours were all directed to secure a majority in both Houses and to avert the storm that was threatening at home.

The railways were on the verge of a general strike, the state officials were demanding better wages and tried to enforce their requests by forming a trade union; workmen and peasants made riots in various provinces, especially in the Romagne and Marche, where in June the Red Week gave the spectacle almost of a revolution. There however the Socialists and Republicans made such a poor show that it is likely to have done a good deal towards shaking Mussolini’s faith in popular revolution. Salandra and his ministers were so beset that they let foreign affairs go unheeded or at least treated them as a matter of minor urgency. It must have been a great shock to them to realise the imminence of war.

When the war broke out involving all the great European Powers the public generally believed Italy to be bound to back the Triple Alliance. Immediately the Socialists and the extreme Left stirred up a campaign on the ground that the Italian people were pacifists and supporters of international Socialism. It is not easy to say whether, even had it been pledged to do so, the government would have been able to obtain the support of the nation to enter war immediately. Morally the people were not ready to accept a war without attack or without provocation from somebody.⁠[3] On the first of August Italy declared neutrality and on that day the Giornale d’Italia clearly stated that such neutrality was not like that of Holland or Switzerland, and above all should not be considered as definitive.

The tenor of the press showed on which side an eventual intervention of Italy would take place. Everybody was either neutralist or interventionist, but nobody was in favour of an intervention on the side of the Triple Alliance. The most Germanophile never went farther than neutralism; all that they hoped and prayed for was the non-intervention of Italy.

The argument of the neutralist papers was based on a statement of the economic and individual sacrifices that war would involve, and a plea that Italy could not yet be fit to enter such a conflict. Anti-idealists or sceptics (as many of the sons of the heroes of the Risorgimento were) they all agreed to regard life as the supreme value and material well-being as its natural frame. Of war they only saw the destructive side. They were certainly logical. A conception of life so thoroughly materialist could not permit of a higher view of war; for war certainly does destroy life and if it can and does promote an improvement in the material conditions of life it is only as a remote consequence of the class changes, and the industrial and commercial stimulus carried in its trail. The immediate consequences are certainly unsettling and paralysing to business.

On the other hand the interventionists had as the basis of their argument a set of platitudes the abstract ideology of which was nearly as objectionable as the materialism of their opponents. France, Belgium and England were identified with right and civilisation, Germany and Austria with wrong and barbarity. Therefore Italy should have the honour of being among the righteous avengers of liberty and civilisation against their traditional foe, barbarity. This opposition of two abstractions to the materialism of their opponents betrayed the ideologic heirloom of the eighteenth century, so dear to the self-admiring minds of the educated mob. For there is such a thing as an educated mob and it is sure to be on the side that offers a high sounding rhetoric, a certain number of stock phrases and a fascinating ideology. It is so much easier to accept ready-made ideas than to work them out from actual reality.

It was not likely, however, that such claptrap should move the people to war. Fortunately, there was another side to the question and that was the chance of getting Trento and Trieste, in whose intellectual life the old spirit of the Risorgimento had kept two strongholds. All that was Liberal and traditional in the Italy of the nineteenth century rose to the bait. The highest form of Italian Liberalism and its aftermath Nationalism, unfurled their standard with the old zest and their followers displayed their immortal eagerness to make this last addition to their forerunners’ building of Italy. Not only were they splendid in the propaganda days, but they were the first to enlist, and both young Nationalists and old Liberals made it a point that “no gentleman should stay at home.” Naturally the echo they aroused was far from being general. If all the Liberals and the Nationalists were gentlemen not all the so-called gentlemen belonged to these parties; there was as much political indifference among the higher classes as among the lower. But it is only fair to say that the war which gave rise to the national and political consciousness whose first expression is Fascism was mainly due to the pressure and the enthusiastic campaign of Italian Liberalism and its offspring Nationalism.

This much being said in praise of the Nationalists, it may be remarked from the Italian point of view that the misrepresentation of the time and of the character of the world conflagration could not have been carried much farther. It was indeed the last flare of their imported notions of political reality. For nearly five centuries intellectual tradition had bestowed upon Italians a mentality which is historical nearly beyond understanding for foreigners. It will be traced back in another chapter from Dante’s De Monarchia, but it may be here taken from its first practical assertion. Machiavelli, at the end of the fifteenth century, acting as Chancellor and Secretary of Florence, was honoured with the unlimited trust of the Gonfaloniere a vita and in every respect proved himself worthy of such high consideration. He was exceedingly grateful to the man who entrusted him with missions, the official charge of which could not have been legally bestowed upon him. Yet, whatever his regard for the high-mindedness of his principal, from a close study and strict observation of political facts he came to the conclusion that nothing could prevent the Gonfaloniere’s policy from failure.

Dino was elected Gonfaloniere a vita when the son of Lorenso il Magnifico had to leave Florence in a hurry after having failed to avert the transit of Charles the VIII and his troops through Florence. Cosimo and Lorenzo dei Medici had only ruled for about half a century but the changes which had taken place during that time in Tuscany and in the whole of Italy were so great that history shows whole centuries which have not displayed half of the difference made, for bad or good, by the civilisation of the time. History was indeed at a turning of the road so that when Dino came in power there was as much difference between the political world anterior to the Medicean rule and his own as there is between the sweet and gentle art of the Beato Angelico, and that of Signorelli who introduced realism in his own vigorous art. Good Dino, however, having been chosen Gonfaloniere to bring Florence back to its former virtuous ways, looked to the old Republican days for a model of government, and he failed to give his fellow citizens the political advantage that would have met their needs just as Signorelli would have shown himself a failure if he had painted exactly as the Beato had done. Machiavelli was no optimist, but whatever the weakness of his conception of history due to the philosophical notions of his time, he did not give himself up entirely to abusing the wickedness of the people. Sure enough, they were wicked—far more so than they had been before the Medicean had corrupted them—yet they were above all different and had, therefore, to be governed according to different ideas.

It is no wonder, therefore, that the Florentine Secretary should have spent so many hours of his enforced leisure after the realisation of the event, the inevitability of which had so long haunted him, to warn his contemporaries and the posterity of the necessity of governing not according to a mummified ideal, but in harmony with one’s own time. Bisogna riscontrarsi coi propri tempi and to do so he recommends the statesman again and again to get direct information of that which he calls la verità effettuale delle cose, that is effective or actual truth in matter of politics. It is both the experimental method of Galileo and Vico’s historical understanding of society that are alluded to in this constantly recurrent admonition of the man whose shrewdness was to blind posterity for several centuries and throw the power and depth of his political genius in the dark.

In 1915 such an excellent jurisconsult as Prof. Salandra and such a first-rate diplomat as Sonnino seemed to realise but little that such a principle existed. At best they harped on Trento and Trieste, when they did not display their rhetoric on the conflict between civilisation and barbarity. Still this territorial conquest, whatever its importance as a traditional ideal to realise, was presented above all as a rectification of the northern frontiers strictly necessary for the safety of the nation and ethnologically justified. Nobody ever seemed to realise that this aim should not have been the first objective to a nation which lacked that which is the very essence of the national entity, that which entitles a collectivity to have ethnological frontiers, in short a national conscience and a national will.

Nobody seemed to realise it, but there was one man who did, and there we have the second flare of genius to be credited to Mussolini. He had become gradually conscious through constant contact with the working class, and the middle class as well, that they would never be fit for political life unless they acquired what they lacked through sacrifice. The recent Red Week had shown him that they would not fight, that they might set traps for other people’s lives, but they would not face either blows or death for anything; and when the war came he saw that there Italy had the one chance it could have to acquire what the genial people who called themselves its citizens lacked to lift themselves into the higher sphere where human beings are prepared to live and to die for their political ideas.

It is, in fact, this national conscience, this spiritual and, therefore, unlimited gift that the war has bestowed upon Italy, and it is only now that Carducci, the most typically civic of all Italian poets, could write with perfect truth:

Nevertheless it is not Fascist Italy, it is not the real friends of Italy, who will ever find fault with the ideas that brought Italy to join the Allies and face the tragic ordeal of war. For it was the war, the mystery of death faced by millions of her sons, which has made Italy a moral value, and a first-rate historical factor in the present political world. The select minority that was the brain and soul of the Risorgimento has disappeared; national consciousness now fills the individual consciences of the majority, and this extension of the national conscience had nothing to do with the extended vote; it is a consequence of the war. Personality, national personality means actual unity of conscience and will just as much as individual personality. Such personality has effectively been born in Italy out of the ordeal that meant direct or indirect sacrifice from every man and woman, for nobody would doubt the reality of the object for which his sacrifice was made. Italy and her star were, up to 1915, a good theme for popular or academic literature, but when it had required blood and tears from every home it became that which could easily be transformed into the most awful and objective reality. Hence the religiousness of their new realisation of Italy.

It loomed indeed awful, like an obscure divinity, when it called men who did not quite know why they had to fight to the supreme sacrifice. One has to keep in mind how little civilisation and barbarity, pompous words, meant to the Italian lower class, and how little Sicilians or Neapolitans cared for Trento and Trieste. After Caporetto it was a different matter. The traditional foe was on their land, and by then they had realised what war meant. Therefore, one may say that their national soul was tempered between Caporetto and the Armistice, and that only then they became an ethical value, a spiritual entity or rather personality fit to play a part in the constructive history of the world. The point cannot be over-stated.

It is only through the war that the spiritual reality of the country was enabled to strike roots in the souls of the labourers and middle class men, ceasing thereby to be the monopoly of a small intellectual and aristocratic minority.

The subjects of the King of Italy all became Italian citizens, and the people was finally one in its full independence; it was, indeed, the last act of the Risorgimento.

Few foreigners, no foreigner so to speak, had in 1915 a fair idea of what was the state of mind of the Italians and still less of what could be their mentality. It will not be too daring to say that in this ignorance lay the cause of all the diplomatic difficulties and of the fallacious appreciations of what that country could give, or has actually given, with the consequent mutual vexations that were to strain the relations between the Allies and Italy.

The author had already, in 1915, spent two years in Italy and studied a good deal; yet youth did not allow at the time more than an intuition of the fact—the conviction of which was to be acquired by ten years of experience, observation and study. The Allies expected too much of a generation whose fathers had fought the Wars of Independence with sheer heroism and with material means that England or France would have considered hardly fit for a colonial campaign. On the other hand, they overlooked the possibilities of a people who had in front of itself the whole of its national future, an historical mentality which was likely to keep it from the sterilising conception of positivism, abstract idealism or materialism, once it should have reached a clear sense of its own secular reality, a Lacedemonian frugality, and finally intellectual forces not inferior to those of the Kantian and Hegelian Germany. The Italians for their part had to overcome a radical scepticism. They had a very poor opinion of what military achievement they could get out of their lower class, their traditional financial deficiency made them fear economic destruction almost more than the life sacrifice of so many men. Munitions were a nightmare, renewal of their coal and wheat stocks a puzzling problem. They had to trust blindly to the Allies. In fact it is a wonder that they should have overcome the sense of despondency that might have paralysed them altogether.

Thus it happened that the Italians did actually achieve far more than they expected, far surpassing their own opinion of their military efficiency; whilst doing far less than the Allies had expected. Hence no end of misunderstandings. They thought that they had surprised us by an unsuspected revelation of force and efficiency and they ascribed our rather disappointed attitude to envy and fear of their new power. Before the war they thought too little of themselves, because, as we have said, they were still nationally unconscious, while the British and French governments overrated the forces that they might contribute without acknowledging their ambitions to develop the latent forces of which they were conscious. Such misunderstanding was to breed all the difficulties that we knew of at the end of the war. The Italians had been victorious in war, they had triumphed over their enemies, and above all over themselves, since they had asserted their reality as an actual political value. But they were defeated in peace, or at least were on the very point of being defeated and destroyed by peace.

The several Treaties of peace, the conferences of the Allies, were a long sequence of disappointments to the people of Italy. The incomprehension of the real state of things in that country reached such a degree that had Socialism in Italy been endowed with a more violent vitality Bolshevism would have flourished. The propaganda of the Socialist party increased daily on ground most favourably prepared by the general discontent and received moreover the collaboration of the so-called Popolari—a kind of Social Catholic party that in theory was to take the place of the clericals. Whether their leader, Don Sturzo, a man of remarkable power, realised the sacrilegiousness of using Catholic priests to pervert the minds of the peasants or not, the Popolari brought their violences to such a pitch in some provinces that they not only matched, they surpassed the Reds.⁠[4] Naturally, these parties and the men who were not supposed to belong to them, but were flattering them in case of an eventual revolution, were wont to represent the war and the sacrifices that had been made by the country as the cause of all the social and economic difficulties. To them, the only consequence of the war was the destruction of what had been laboriously done between 1870 and 1915.

It was at this juncture that some people banded together their aspirations, which seemed in the main to be the realisation in the Adriatic of all the value of what they called “their mutilated victory.” They had mostly been in the trenches, and they clustered round Gabriele d’Annunzio who led them to occupy Fiume, which was still under the control of the Allies. The Allies left the whole affair to Italy and had the Italian government, or a strong party, backed d’Annunzio and his friends, the course of events would have been different. The country wanted Fiume, certainly, but with what will did they want it? With a will that was national at last, because it was not moved exclusively by Irredentism, and did not identify itself with the will of the upper classes, but was a feeling with the whole people. They had deserved it; they were conscious of a right acquired through the common trial of the whole nation. It was, however, more a velleity than a will. The new spiritual life was quivering, it could express itself in a puerile gesture of the hand towards the object of its passion, but it could not yet express itself in action. Will or velleity—it was certainly the first manifestation of a really national life striving against the paralysing scaffolding of its political organisation. The professional politicians had been trained when politics were merely a question of technical detail, when to be a Deputy meant merely a job as a bargainer, to get the votes of the people for a party on the understanding that the party would satisfy the arbitrary and personal requirements of its electors, with the possibility of coming to power any day in one of the incredible combinations that came to life almost daily and made the Chamber a nursery of ministers.

On the 28th of September, 1919, the government appointed General Badoglio Extraordinary Commissioner of the Venezia Guilia and accepted a discussion on the matter in the Chamber. Neither the men in power nor the opposition felt it possible to accept the suggestions of the Press, of various associations, and even of their friends who were urging the necessity of Fiume’s annexation. The Ministry gave in its resignation after dissolving the House and the elections returned 157 Socialists, among whom were moderate men like Turati and Treves and many new men whose programmes were openly revolutionary, and over a hundred Popolari. These parties had a good deal in common. Their propaganda had been nearly perfect and had appealed to the people by that definiteness and practicalness of purpose which is the main string to pull in order to move Italians to action. They were not dreamers and even in their worst or best ideals they were for definiteness of means and purpose. There is in the Italian mind such a strong tendency to take a realistic view of things that to this characteristic the best and the worst of their history might be traced for twenty centuries.

The Nationalists had been returned in very small number, but were mostly young, with considerable intellectual culture, fit and ready to assume responsibilities. They had all done active service in the war and were sorry to see its meagre result. They required an audacious and strong policy without being able, however, to see clearly how this was to be realised. Liberals held a good many seats but they were so split up that they should rather be considered as a set of groups than as a party; they even called themselves different names and had no common programme.

After these elections one had the impression of watching the systematic extinction of the flickering flame that had signalised the coming to light of the new national conscience. One must have spent those years in Italy, have actually lived the life of the Italians, felt all their actual experiences and at the same time have had a good historical and intellectual grounding in all that concerns the country, to understand fully the tragedy of it. They seemed to precipitate themselves from the soaring heights of national conscience to the lowest and vilest egotism. Material well-being was again the order of the day and not yours or theirs or the children’s, but mine. Beyond that nothing. Reality was again atomistic and the atoms constitutive of it were absolutely irrelatives. Nobody seemed to reflect; all were acting and behaving like children. Truly it is the subjectiveness of the period that must be taken as its characteristic. They seemed to move each in his own world. Even financially they seemed to have reached an unbridled licence. The constant principles that regulate economic relations which form the basis of society were disregarded. Objective reality was ignored just as it is ignored by children and to a certain degree by artists. They had the economic deficit constantly on their lips—but never had such spendthrift way of living been displayed in their country—and they seemed to overlook the moral deficit betrayed by such an atomistic subjectiveness.

Consider the factories. It is evidently a high rate of production that will ensure the interests of both labour and capital. Well, the workmen, or women, set themselves to get higher wages as they have done in most countries, but in the north and centre of Italy they did it with such a childish and, therefore, savage and lawless will that the works had to be shut in many instances and were not reopened until the advent of Fascism. So that it can be said that by not taking into consideration the actual production as a whole, and the owner’s interest, they reduced their legitimate desire for a better life to the destructive whims of children and ruined their own interest.

The schools reflected the same destructive state of mind. That which makes the school is surely not the building; the children are not pupils if they do not learn, and neither is the master a teacher except inasmuch as he does actually teach. Discipline having slackened to such a degree that it bordered on anarchy the pupils had one fixed idea to do no work, and a great many of the teachers—not all indeed, for the teaching body has always counted in Italy a number of first-rate men—had the same purpose. Teaching and learning were reduced to a ghostly shadow by the reduction of schools to a subjective purpose by both parties. The professors saw in their function the title it gave them to their stipend and the pupils attended school just for the degree or the promotion to which such attendance entitled them.

Such a false vision of life is certainly not natural to the Italian people, and it had taken a great deal of trouble to introduce it in a country the mentality of which is above all realistic. It is natural to think that the Socialist and Popolari leaders were guilty of the most criminal falsehoods.

On the 15th of June, 1920, when Giolitti was called upon to form a new ministry, the government of Nitti had wrought such havoc in the few months he had been in power that the old statesman was hailed Salvatore della Patria on his coming to power by the very people who had called him a traitor five years before. Yet the new government found that the best thing to do was to let things go on as they were, with the result that factories were taken possession of by workmen, and a strong reaction took shape under the wings of the new-born Fascism, which came out with the simple programme of restoring order even against the state if it was necessary.

Public opinion at the end of the year gave a clear proof of the depressing influence the government had had on the national conscience allowing Giolitti, who had truly never been a Nationalist, to compel d’Annunzio and his men to evacuate Fiume without any protest against the bombardment inflicted upon them. When, in the next spring, the elections took place, all the old parties were there again with the addition of Fascism. The men of the new party were mostly new to politics altogether, whilst some came from all the old parties (including the Socialist) and they had all of them taken an active part in the war. In the districts they had made national blocks with Nationalists and Liberals and the few seats they obtained were not lost by the Popolari or Socialists, who were returned in the same proportion as they had been in the last House.

The first characteristic of the Fascists was that they seemed to have the same programme as the Nationalists, whilst they were displaying the power of mass organisation that had been till then the privilege of Socialists and Popolari. (This characteristic holds good up to now.) They wanted to realise the political programme of the best men of Italy by lifting the working class up to it. As to their aim it was then exclusively the political and moral realisation of the practical and spiritual value they ascribed to the war victory. They had nothing like an abstract programme. When realisation is not one with conception—and such has been the case for the last two centuries—the political systems stated on paper appear all harmony, and their consequences all for the best; but the trouble begins as soon as their application is sought.

Fascism has no ideologies but a cogent system of ideas able to give what ideologies will never give, promptitude and coherence of action. These ideas serve as a criterion of action rather than a theory. If it draws the attention of foreigners as a beacon light it is because it does show a way out of the abstraction that in a certain sense seems to have perverted our modern vision of social and economic reality. The method it enforces of looking invariably at both the terms of any one relation is practical, as only can be a method the axle of which is a highly philosophical conception. For the divorce between thought and action pronounced by the philosophy of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries might induce us to believe that speculative thoughts had nothing to do with everyday life, whereas the simplest and humblest action or relation to be productive has to be the direct and immediate expression of a thought, scientific or speculative. The peasant who lifts his axe over his head before striking it into the wood is not making a choreographic flourish with his tool; its weight is augmented by the height to which he lifts it and the combination of the force of gravitation with his own sends his blade to the core of the wood. He certainly does not think of the force of gravitation, but he acts upon it. In the first contract, tacit though it may have been, the man who lacked hands to plough his fields and the men who had no field to plough, came into a relation that was the typical relation of the one and the many which has stood as the fundamental problem of ethics and politics in the philosophy of all ages. When synthesis rules theory and a synthetic view of reality rules practice then the relation is kept in consideration as the living bond of the two parties, and the greater product of the harvest is the common aim. But when analytic methods, either empirical or rational, prevail in philosophy, practical life is infected with a ferocious individualism, the necessary consequence of which is the unjust attribution of the harvest to one of the two terms, to the ruin of the relation which has to be bilateral if it is to be at all.

This concrete way of looking upon every economic and social problem does not indeed present itself as a miraculous way of removing the class struggles, which are, after all, one of the main forces at play in the civilising process of mankind. It is merely the way of looking at it that befits the intellectual level reached by man through the efforts of genius and through the blood and tears of the many by which social and economic progress is achieved.

After all that has been said it is surely unnecessary to point out the absurdity of considering Fascism as a reactionary tendency. It goes indeed steadily forward and its leader would not have the historical mind he has, if it meant to reject the labourers’ claim to preserve the recognition of their interests, which is the one noble conquest of socialism. The “reaction” was never against the working classes’ rights; it was against all rights that did not spring from duties. It was against exclusive power—tyrannical as all exclusive powers are bound to be—that it reacted with the full consent of the population, as sick of being bossed by a mob minority as the mob had been to be bossed by the gentry fifty years before. Truly it would be a strange illusion of the upper classes if they were to believe that Fascism had come to restore “the good old times”; for that which it has come to restore or rather to establish is the really Christian equality of men. Christian because it intends rights to be consonant with spiritual value and actual recognition of duties.

The revolutions of the past were always justified by the necessity of enforcing the claims of a single class. Fascism in its synthetic view of life strives to enforce the rightful claims of all classes, and considers them rightful as far as they present rights and duties on the same plane. If it looks to the past it is to understand the present, but its knowledge and understanding of history do not allow it to believe that history proceeds backwards.

Part II PHILOSOPHICAL ANTECEDENTS OF FASCISM

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHICAL ANTECEDENTS

CHAPTER II HUMANISM AND RENAISSANCE SHAPING THE HISTORICAL MIND OF ITALY

The spirit of Humanism—the veneration for antiquity which animated it—was quite obviously different in Italy from what it was elsewhere. That the difference consisted in the closer affinity of the scholars to the world they studied is obvious also. No greater proof is needed than the difference between the architecture of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Western Europe and in Italy. Art, as conceived by modern æsthetics, is that degree of mind, the function of which is neither theoretical nor practical, but consists in expressing through intuition the whole life of the mind. We can, therefore, rightly appeal to art as the most faithful witness to the spirit that animates an epoch. Ample documents illustrating the difference between the spirit of Humanism in France and in Italy can be found in the works of Emile Mâle on the Gothic art of France, and in any illustrated book of Italian mediæval Art, such as the small but excellent album of Ojetti.

Romanic architecture flourished in both countries between the eighth and twelfth centuries, and its monuments in France, such as St. Sernin of Toulouse, leave no doubt as to the debt of the country to its Roman conquerors. Even at that time, when the South of France had not yet altogether lost its traditions as the Roman Province, we can see new tendencies at work. In Italy, the contemporary buildings, pieced together with fragments of ancient columns, capitals, architraves, employed as simple building material, point to the more intimate co-existence in Italy of the old and new elements. It is sufficient to recall two churches of the ninth century in Rome, St. Maria in Domnica and St. Prassede, both following the model of the great Constantinian Basilicas. While their architecture is inspired by the classic age of Christian art, and the materials are stolen from Pagan monuments, their mosaics evince a healthy realism that asserts the living tradition of local art, despite the obvious and predominant influence of the East. But this persistence of Roman influences does not exclude those of the North; Carolingian art greatly influenced Italy, especially in certain forms of decorative work. The golden altar of St. Ambrogio in Milan, the canopy above it, and some of the stuccoes at Cividale, prove the force of these influences in districts ethnically and historically favourable to their reception.

By the eleventh century feudal society had either lost or assimilated the pre-Christian elements, legacy of the ancient world, which at first had cemented together the various racial tendencies extant in Europe at the close of the Roman Empire, thereby preparing the way for new thoughts and ways of living. The Northern world had fully realised a new social order, developing a new spiritual life and consequently a new art to express it. Although this art contains numerous and important classical and Eastern elements its originality is manifest. We are confronted with a new world with its own idealistic and naturalistic tendencies. The boldness of the architecture, together with the minute rendering of nature in the decoration testify to that union of abstract speculation and close study of reality that will characterise all the subsequent developments of Northern thought. Mâle has clearly shown how the artists have drawn upon all the theology, the philosophy and the literature of the age to express at the same time both the highest spiritual and the plainest practical life.

Italian architecture of the same period, following more faithfully the old tradition, stands in great contrast to this originality. St. Ambrogio in Milan is an excellent example of this traditional growth of Italian art in the days that witnessed the full development of communal liberty. Very different from the Constantinian Basilica, even as the Commune was not the exact counterpart of the Roman Municipium, its heavy structure, so eloquent in its massiveness, must have appealed to its middle-class builders. In other Lombard churches we meet with the same attempt to create a new style with classical elements. In seeking to harmonise traditional disposition with the new needs, they tried to avoid the extreme novelties of the North, too alien to the Roman well-balanced and unlyrical mentality. The style of such buildings is present to every mind and reveals better than any description the unbroken descent from Imperial Rome. Indeed, from Lombardy to Sicily, from Venice to Genoa, various are the styles flourishing in the Peninsula; yet it is easy to detect everywhere strong traces of such descent. The Baptistery of Florence is a very good instance of this traditionalism and recalls faithfully that of the Lateran of the time of Constantine. In entering San Miniato in Florence, where the fanciful details of the decoration follow and are subordinate to the severely classical architecture, we almost feel on the threshold of the Renaissance, although still in the eleventh century. In the monuments of Pisa, Lucca and Pistoia we find the same classical qualities in the architectural scheme, united to the more poetic fancies displayed in the decoration. There is thus a conscious dependence on antiquity in the main architectural features, together with the utmost readiness to accept foreign accessories. St. Mark’s in Venice displays, even as the history of the amphibious Republic, all the sumptuousness of the East, but even in such an exotic scheme the architecture still relies on Imperial Rome, which had itself absorbed many Eastern elements. Torcello, Trieste, Murano, show as clearly as the Lombard communes the slow process of evolution that was to lead to the Renaissance. Byzantine elements are not as alien as Gothic to Roman tradition. The contemporary jurists had shown the great contribution of Byzantium to the development of Roman law, and Byzantine motives were assimilated more easily than those from the North.

The Roman legions had brought the great expanses of the North into the orbit of history, but though they left deep and undying traces behind them, they were unable to destroy the virile qualities of the Northern races. So when Christianity brought a new intuition of life to the Western world it developed locally according to the tendencies of the various nations. The result was bound to be more original where men were less influenced by the old Pagan culture and further from the mentality that had produced it, among peoples who “a cultu atque humanitate provinciae longissime absunt.” Even though their growth was to be slower in some respects, such as the cultural, such peoples were bound to absorb more completely the full import of the new faith and thus produce a thoroughly original civilisation. It was, therefore, necessary in order to glorify the new religion to produce an art as novel as the civilisation which inspired it. In contrast to this affirmation of an entirely new mentality Italy was influenced by the Roman traditions that weighed upon her; they stimulated a premature efflorescence that exhausted her virility for centuries. Her people were not forced to elaborate afresh all the elements of life; the Church had preserved for them the framework of Roman life and law. Thus the energy expanded in France and in England in working out a radically new society and civilisation, in Italy drifted partly into adapting the old formulas to the new necessities and partly into acquiring a deeper consciousness of the intimate relations with the past.

In all the struggles from the twelfth to the fifteenth century with the Empire and with the Church, the Italians invariably appealed to the traditions of Ancient Rome; and their appeal was not to a remote civilisation, but to a living tradition of their own, opposed to the feudal institutions of the barbarians. At the time of the Communes this attitude is particularly striking. The peasantry had taken shelter from feudal oppression in towns protected by the authority of a bishop, and there with the developments of commerce they grew in wealth and political power. We thus find a new social class, the burgher, that contributed immensely to the growing importance of the cities. These strong practical men were distinguished by that common sense and pride that to-day distinguishes the sturdy and self-assertive Fascists. Having established their institutions, they considered them a living part of their own persons, and brought into political life their sense of personal dignity and the energy of the mediæval Christian, ready to die for the ideas represented by his Corporation, even as the Fascist is ready to die for his symbolic Black Shirt.

The Communes, in spite of their novelty, perhaps indeed in consequence of the novelty of their self-assertion, were responsible for one of the strongest historical bonds with the past. For in their opposition to the feudal rights acknowledged by mediæval law, they appealed to Roman jurisprudence in order to prove the legal grounds of their liberties. They instinctively conformed to the past, creating forms of government rich in future possibilities, and such conformity was not, according to Professor Reggio, a mere question of high-sounding names. The Communes reproduced of the actual and essential features of the City-State, all those that could be revived. Their classicism was by no means artificial, it was intimately felt as the surest means of destroying feudalism, at that time the most assertive form of individualism. Even the present Fascist appeal to Rome is far from being mere rhetoric; Rome is considered the one force antagonistic to that anti-historical mentality due to illuminism, that has given rise to abstract demagogy and individualism.

The burghers, backed by the recently liberated peasantry, formed the strength of the Commune, and upheld the memories of Roman municipal organisation against the prevalently Germanic nobility. The Government of the Communes consisted of a college of Rectors with an Assembly of Elders, very much like the Senate of old, with various dependent clientele that recall the gentes; the heads of the various Guilds were called Consuls and took command of their men in any emergency. Their defence of civic liberties was essentially the defence of freedom to attend to their trades and occupations. Here again they anticipated Mussolini. What matters to the Commonweal is not the individual but the interest he represents. They considered that this freedom of work was incompatible with the dependence of the Commune on any superior temporal authority. This was so deeply felt that the city was placed under the protection of a Patron Saint, who, according to Ercole Reggio, was not unlike the eponymous Hero of an ancient city.

In attempting to justify these forms of political and professional life the citizens of the Commune came still more to consider themselves the lawful descendants of the Romans. Studies of Roman Law were pursued with as much zeal and vigour as any other form of practical or religious life. As long as Pisa, Milan, Cremona, Pavia, preserved their municipal liberties their whole life was imbued with a strong sense of classicism which expressed itself both in the intensified study of Roman Law, as Professor Solmi has clearly pointed out, and in the art of Niccolò Pisano. Such Roman and classical qualities were to disappear when the towns lost their municipal autonomy, only to reappear at the present day in the idealism of Gentile, whose Filosofia del Diritto is as much impressed by the seal of their realism as it is influenced by the thought of Hegel. They reappear in the Reform of the Italian Constitution, tending to substitute actual interest as the dynamic basis of the State in the place of the static and naturalistic foundation it has had up till now. They reappear above all in Mussolini, who told the author he did not wish that a theoretical legislation should regulate or rather paralyse the development of the new corporations, but that, following the example of the Romans, he wished the legislation to grow out of the minutes of every single case submitted to the Corporation Court. Before they disappeared they had pervaded all Italian life to such a degree that scholars could say we in talking of the ancient Romans, and consider Latin as their own language. Ricordano Malespini says that Frederick II spoke “la nostra lingua latina e il nostro volgare.” They had two national languages, Latin and the vernacular, the latter itself a degenerate offspring of Latin, known as the “romano rustico,” to which could be traced all the various dialects in spite of their local corruptions. The Communes had also a great influence on the formation of the Italian language, and this influence tended to unification not to differentiation, as many historians have taken for granted in consequence of their political individualism.

Francesco de Sanctis says that intellectual culture necessarily stimulates new ideas, far superior to the material necessities of man, and thereby calls into existence a more educated and refined class of citizens, putting it in communication with foreign intellectual life. The ultimate consequence is a closer connection of languages that develops not their local, but their common elements. According to him the first effects of renewed Italian intellectual life were both to restore the purity of Latin and favour the formation of the vernacular. Thus we see how the classical revival started at the very moment when the new Italian consciousness should have been born. This revival was aided by the establishment of great international centres such as the Court of Palermo at first, and later the cities of Tuscany and Lombardy. As the studies of Latin improved, the local dialects became purer and more refined. The weakness of the contemporary writers for rhetoric, for verbosity, their exaggerated love for the mere word, to which they attributed an almost religious value, seems very often the naïve pleasure of reasserting a family claim on a cherished property.

Both Guelphs and Ghibellines are followers of Rome, the former, as we have seen, finding in Roman Law the legality of their municipal institutions, the latter appealing to the traditions of Imperial Rome to justify the sovereign rights of Cæsar. The whole public life assumes a religious character as in all constructive periods of history and as is the case in Italy to-day, where the previous lack of seriousness has been considered by the greatest thinkers to have been the product of religious scepticism. At that time the object of the common veneration, the one universal feeling of the most factious of peoples in the most factious period of its history was the cult of Rome. And as Religion played such an immense part in their whole life, the Italians were obliged to christianise Rome and associate it with Christian idealism. For Dante, Christ, and Rome dominate the history of a thousand years. He views history as a vast moral and religious evolution, as an indissoluble whole, each portion of which converges irresistibly to its pre-ordained end. The Birth of Our Lord at the moment when Cæsar Augustus ordained that all the world should be taxed testified to God’s approval of the Empire. Christ, in submitting His Godhead to the judgment of a Roman magistrate, gave Divine sanction to Roman Law. Dante does not consider the miraculous origin of the Seven-Hilled City as the only proof of the privileges it holds from God, nor does he ascribe to it the more important favour of a special historical process. Rome for Dante is equivalent to Catholicity, to conformity to the plans of the Divine Providence, and the history of Rome raises the Roman State almost to Divine rank. Guelphs and Ghibellines find in the Roman Jurists and the Roman Legions arguments in support of their opposite claims, and when the advent of the Signorie involved them in a common downfall, the consciousness of an unbroken descent from Rome could never after be erased from Italian mentality.

The influence of Rome on all the mediæval institutions of Italy is obvious to anyone familiar with the period. But the Italians, at the dawn of modern history, were led by this unbroken tradition of Rome into a habit of going to Roman history and law for a solution of contemporary problems, and this, while it secured their supremacy in the field of jurisprudence, kept their mentality from developing on original and modern lines. Even when Italy seemed almost to have withdrawn from all competition in theoretical research, her jurists and historians stood out to proclaim the immortality of the national genius. The intimate relations of the past with the present could never be lost sight of by people who found in the political and legal activities of ancient Rome the principles from which arose their chief political idea, the dignity of man as a citizen. They overlooked the fact that such wonderful citizenship had never been bestowed on man as man, that the municipal liberties, the privileges of the Collegia, the rule over the barbarians, were the reward of the Romans, not the pre-ordained lot of Rome. Italian scholars felt with the deepest conviction that her genealogy alone endowed Italy with a primacy which they could not renounce. Even had they so wished they could not have been a modern nation in a modern world. The more they studied, the more did they convince themselves like Petrarch that they descended in an unbroken line from Marius and Sulla. Their historical mentality was already formed and they could not consider the human world otherwise than as a narrow collaboration of successive generations.

Dante, in his preface to the De Monarchia, has stated his idea of this historical succession. “All men whom a loftier nature leads to the love of truth seem to be most greatly concerned to hand down to posterity the fruits of their efforts so that, even as they themselves have been enriched by the labours of their ancestors, they may to the same degree endow their successors. Indeed, he who is steeped in the knowledge of public affairs is certainly far from fulfilling his duty should he not trouble to bestow the fruit of his studies on the Republic, not like unto ‘a tree by the rivers of water that bringeth forth his fruit in his season,’ but rather unto a baneful whirlpool that swalloweth up all things nor ever restoreth what it hath once swallowed.” Here we find the empirical expression of what Giordano Bruno was to conceive theoretically three hundred years later, thus foreshadowing the Immanentist doctrine of history and society that Vico was to develop some hundred and fifty years later still. Vico had, in his turn, to wait until the second half of the nineteenth century in order to be properly understood. His ideas in 1916 formed the basis of Giovanni Gentile’s Philosophy of Law, and at the present day are realised in the Italian Constitution as elaborated by the Government of Mussolini. But Dante’s scholastic training could not allow him to have the least inkling of the doctrine of Immanentism; his ideal Monarch is merely a magistrate appointed and endowed by God. For Dante all political power could only be lawfully derived from the Divine law. Scholastic philosophy could not conceive a law that should not be dependent upon a superior will or a pre-existing law. None the less, this empirical statement, such as it is, shows already how no speculation could satisfy the Italian mind unless it avoided the unhistorical position more natural in those countries that had themselves evolved an original form of society.

The removal of the Papal court to Avignon gave Italy a rude shock in affecting the good fame of the whole country. The humiliation of the Papacy is resented all over the Peninsula, and the eclipse of the Papal dignity diminishes the prestige not only of Rome but of Italy. A new religion, the cult of Rome, spreads in all Italian hearts, and its ruined monuments are scarcely less venerated than the relics of the Apostles. The glorious memories of the Roman Republic, the pride of the Roman name, give rise both to the unfortunate statesmanship of Arnold of Brescia and, a hundred and fifty years later, to the rash adventure of Cola di Rienzo. All those who cannot boast such an illustrious descent are contemptuously designated as barbarians, and this distinction gives rise to the feeling of the unity of the Italian races. The mystical and religious fervour with which the men of the Risorgimento felt for Rome, so strong that it led them to trample on their religion, was not stronger than that of the first humanists. Petrarch and Boccaccio were already preparing the way for the Renaissance, of which they are rightly considered as the first pioneers. These enthusiasts, who brought such inestimable benefits to the intellectual life of the whole world, nevertheless introduced into their own country the germ of many ills.

The men of France and England could never feel at home in the ample folds of Cicero’s toga as the Italians did. It was for them, indeed, a useful garment worn with perfect ease of manners as a ceremonial robe donned on state occasions, or a protective covering unfurled in their intellectual battles. Despite its assimilation and survival as late as the eighteenth century in the ample periods of Dr. Johnson or in the well-balanced sentences of Bossuet, it did not modify to any degree the mentality of countries with which it did not have a close affinity, although it left in the minds a certain number of ideas distinctly pagan, such as that of birthright. French and English scholars looked upon Rome as something definitely outside their own world, like the moon or the sun, and just as illuminating to them as the former is to the night wanderer and the latter to all the labours of mankind. This transcendental quality rendered Rome indeed semi-divine in their eyes, but fortunately kept them from considering themselves the lineal progeny of Marius or Cæsar. Their cult of antiquity was just as profoundly religious as that of the Italian scholars with whom they were often in the closest relations, only their attitude was more detached. They were thus able to cut themselves adrift from their masters with perfect ease when they had assimilated all that was needful to develop their own natural gifts. An abyss stood between them and antiquity; they were unable to appreciate their real connection with antiquity. Their historical information as to the intervening centuries could only be drawn from mediæval chronicles which, full of detail though they were, did not offer any comprehensive view even of a reign and much less of a century. They failed to understand the essential continuity of the history of all countries, and, while not making the mistake of considering the Romans as their ancestors, they could not conceive history and society as immanent in man.

Petrarch, on the contrary, considers himself perfectly Roman, although his lyrics are almost the first assertion of modern individualism. His familiarity with Livy, Cicero, Virgil, gave him an appreciation of classical Latin that led him to consider that of Dante barbarous. What matters to him is the form in which thoughts are expressed, not the thoughts themselves; he wanted art for art’s sake. Fortunately, his genius and the fervour of his cult for Rome sometimes animates his consciousness of the continuity of the past with the present. In the Canzone di Signori d’Italia the new Italy that was trying to recover her Roman and Latin tradition appears as a fully grown personality. Guelphs and Ghibellines, Romans and Florentines have disappeared, and Italy speaks the proud language of the Queen of Civilisation. As Francesco De Sanctis puts it, the poet is an Italian, conscious of the superiority of his race. Marius is mentioned as if he were an almost contemporary person. So deeply does the young poet feel the classical world that henceforth he considers the heroes of Greece and Rome as his ancestors. With personal pride he assumes the military glories of Marius and Cæsar no less than the ample rhetoric of Cicero. And in this assumption of a ready-made glory as Italy’s inherent right, cause of much subsequent political and moral weakness, we may find the first signs of the contribution that modern Italy is perhaps now on the verge of bringing to civilisation. It is therefore natural that Fascism should attack with energy the negative side of the legacy of Humanism, the Italian fondness for rhetoric, union of lofty words and mean deeds, while accepting and proclaiming the historical conception that links man to the generations past and future.

The Italians of the fifteenth century continued to revel in the glory of Rome and gradually forgot that there was an actual and living reality, hardly consistent with their superior attitude as the sons of Cæsar and Augustus. Prose and verse improved so long as the cult of antiquity retained its initial mystic fervour, that provided the religious element indispensable to all creative art. But when devotion to classical studies became a question of interest or vanity, it was only from the very greatest artists, from men whose real religion was the worship of art, that one could expect sincerity. All the others were only extraordinarily adept at the clever wording of other people’s ideas. They could never fail to deck any subject, no matter how mean, no matter how repulsive, in the full pomp of a Ciceronian oration, rich in beautiful sentences and displaying the careful study of all the figures of speech to be found in the classics. Fraccastorius describes a loathsome disease in the finest of post-classical hexameters. Politicians could act as meanly as they pleased, sure that the glory of Rome would raise them above the rest of mankind. Even their real superiority in historical feeling and in the interpretation of antiquity was a source of weakness. For when beaten in war they could always express contempt for the victors and call them barbarians, consoling themselves with their real intellectual and artistic superiority for their political humiliation.

In 1494 Charles VIII of France invaded Italy, meeting with no resistance worth mentioning. It is not surprising, since the despairing cry of Boiardo

is almost the swan-song of mediæval Italy. At the same time a twenty-year-old youth, destined to become the greatest poet of the age, Lodovico Ariosto, could sing with perfect Horatian art and with an equally perfect indifference for his country

and with all the selfishness of unconscious indifference

He has adopted the measures and harmonies of Horace and Virgil and, wrapped up in his pride in the glory of Rome, goes on singing his classical bucolic loves in complete indifference to the fate of his country:

Reality is a horrible dream, “improba seclis conditio!” he is shocked that

Such a perfect Latinist could but seek to dismiss this hideous reality by ignoring it and to find refuge in the glorious memories of the past or in the creation of a world of fanciful chivalry.⁠[5]

The sixteenth century witnesses the final divorce of Italian culture from real life, so that for two subsequent centuries, instead of developing the moral and social qualities of the individual citizen, as in England, in France and in the Netherlands, it tended rather to the atrophy of all real patriotism. But at this very moment, in opposition to this dissolving and negative influence of Italian Humanism, one of the greatest men produced by a land ever “magna parens virum” stands forth to proclaim that man alone is the creator of the historical world and arbiter of his own destiny. The public life and the posthumous fame of the Florentine Secretary are equally unfortunate, but the present age is better prepared to appreciate the truths contained in the works of Niccolò Machiavelli.

He, like all the intellectuals of the period, would have said “we” in speaking of the Romans, and he might have used the phrase of Leonardo Aretino, “Graecos ΠΟΛΙΣ, NOSTROS CIVITAS appellavisse,” had he desired to trace the etymology of that political reality so dear to his heart. But this identification was not sentimental; he analyses closely the differences between past glory and present shame. Strictly speaking, he is not a Humanist at all; like Galileo, he repudiates Neoplatonism and follows, rather, the experimental method. He carefully dissects the past for the benefit of the present, and deftly probes the wounds of the body politic. This empirical standpoint indeed would be a grave defect, did not his genius and sense of history as a living reality often lead him to intuitions that transcend both his method and outlook. The intuitions, the proof of the truth of which was to be one of the chief conquests of modern thought, are clouded by his prejudices or obscured by the inevitable limitations of his knowledge of facts. His conception of “virtue” is perhaps the most characteristic of those intuitions that allowed him to foresee ideas only to be understood by the end of the nineteenth century, and only to be acted on by the present day.

Of course, the idea in itself was not entirely new. One of the ablest historians of the fifteenth century, Philippe Monnier, has clearly pointed out that already in the twelfth century the centre of reality had been lowered from the celestial heights and firmly planted in the breast of man. The polemics on Frederick II’s definition of nobility are an assertion of the part played by man’s individuality in the formation of the world. After two centuries of Humanism, noble birth is an absurdity. For Piccolomini, Ficino, Landino, man cannot be born noble, he can only become noble through his own exertions. The Stoic precept of the absolute autonomy of the human will is frequently alluded to in discussion on the power of Fortune, against which Leone Battista Alberti strenuously asserts the power of man to forge his own destiny. Alberti, typical representative of the Renaissance, in all his moral works, emphasises the freedom of man from all external influences and above all from the dominion of Chance, and for him man’s life is a consequence of man’s actions. Neither Fate nor Chance are a cause of the varying circumstances of individuals.

Having these doctrines before him, Machiavelli was able to apply to the life of nations the ideas that governed the life of the individual. Rome had been powerful and glorious; Italy is weak and contemptible: the cause is the moral corruption of the Italians. Machiavelli does not always consider Italy’s invaders as barbarians; he is always ready to study their institutions and ways of living in order to discover the reasons for their military superiority. He firmly believes that Fortune can only display her power where no “virtue” has prepared a resistance. Italy, “vituperio del mondo,” will certainly return to her former strength could the Italians be aroused from their torpor. His attitude is identical with that of Mussolini’s government: Italy is slighted by the Allies, she is financially weak, the cause is the scepticism and self-indulgence of the people, the remedy a stricter conception of life for adults and a more religious education for children. Fortune, however, is not quite identified with Fate, and, while the latter is unhesitatingly rejected, the former is retained as a kind of background against which man can display more efficiently his will and “virtue.” This background, which he calls Fortune or Opportunity, is no less a conception than Croce’s “situation of facts.” His “verità effettuale delle cose” is the objective knowledge of the Crocian “situazione de fatto” and must be ascertained anew before embarking on any new action, for, according to the shrewd Florentine, “sono le cose umane sempre in moto.” It is, therefore, necessary to take one’s bearings before embarking on any course to realise one’s will. The best type of will is that which draws its strength from an intimate knowledge of actual circumstances and is consequently steady and resolute. Hence the profound morality of such will-power, pursuing its end without hesitation or incertitude, disdainful of half measures, its moral value immanent in the very act of volition.

It is no longer possible to continue to identify Machiavelli with immorality or amorality, now that his doctrines have been profoundly analysed by philosophers, jurists, and critics of the value of Ercole, Croce or Gentile. We only find in his works a transposition of the fundamental principles of ethics. What he calls “virtue” is not to be understood in its Christian sense. It is closely allied to efficiency but is an efficiency displayed in the accomplishment of the common good, in the realisation of a strong State. Hunger and necessity can render men industrious but only wise laws can make them good. Indeed the laws bring people to realise the necessity of justice; social intercourse gives rise to all the various conditions of life, including education, religion, habit, law, and ultimately to the standard of goodness. As Gentile points out, for Machiavelli as for Spinoza the common good is a product of society; the distinction between good and evil presupposes society, that is to say a system of laws. Hence the saying put into the mouth of Rinaldo degli Albizzi: “No good man will ever find fault with anyone trying to defend his country, whatever the means he may employ.” In commenting upon this passage Gentile rightly says that those who extend the common good from the country to the whole of mankind do not expand but rather restrict the meaning of the writer. Machiavelli by “Patria” understands the entirety of social and civilised life, that is to say that the State is the only historical and concrete form of mankind. He is fundamentally opposed to any indefinite, unsubstantial idea of man that would strip him of all the historical influences that determine his social and political life, and that would make of mankind a shadowy abstraction. Such ideologies could mean nothing to the sixteenth century Florentine, but they do not mean much more to the modern Italian, and this is the reason why Socialism in Italy never developed its nobler side. Men who, like Andrea Costa, were real idealists of the Marxian school were devoid of any influence, despite the respect due to their high standard of personal life. If the whole of mankind is to be the object of the duties of every individual, one might as well abolish those duties; what is the business of everybody is the business of nobody. Therefore, Italian Socialism was obliged to adopt not the high, if impractical, ideals of Northern Socialism, but an entirely materialistic form of propaganda, harping constantly on higher wages and shorter hours, in order to arouse the interest and secure the support of the masses.

Machiavelli was obviously too much a man of his age to be able to surpass the theory of man as an individual attempting to realise his personality in a world in which he could expand as freely as possible. He could not conceive the objectivity and consequent importance of the State as moral reality, and still less the intimate subjectivity of the objective world in which man realises his will. The very word “Fortune” kept to indicate actuality was misleading, and veiled his real notion of freedom; he severed liberty from law and by only retaining the former he gave the careless or ignorant an opportunity for the vulgar interpretation of his doctrines.

Time and the works of Bruno and Campanella, stripped of their heretical outlook, were to further in the mind of Vico the first maturity of the fruits of which the seed was to be found in the Florentine statesman’s ideas of “virtue” and political morality. Thus, while the other modern nations were necessarily getting more deeply embogged in their anti-historical attitude towards life, Italy, in the political idleness of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was slowly elaborating those doctrines that may yet prove to be the ballast needed by all countries to weather the present political and social storms.

CHAPTER III THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND AND ITALY

The contribution of England to the history of the world during the seventeenth century is so considerable that the very attempt to sketch it is almost an impertinence. It cannot be reduced into schematic lines, for there never was a richer synthesis of life. Never have religion, art, and philosophy pervaded the whole life of a people as they did in England at the end of the sixteenth and during all the seventeenth century. Very highly refined periods do not produce great arts and it must be said that with very few exceptions the creative generations are bound to be rather trivial. Strong minds, deep religious feelings, the virile consciousness of personal efficiency, do not make for tolerance and refinement in practical life; but they yield a philosophical, an artistic, a political harvest on which their progeny continue to live for centuries, elaborating and refining until tolerance is the order of the day in philosophical, religious and political matters, whilst dilettantism and criticism flourish, preparing the way for new generations of creative men.

The philosophy of Bacon was essentially oriented towards the world exterior to man, but it had already taken to consider moral and especially political life in the light of natural causes. The divine origin of the king’s majesty was in due time to be denied in consequence of such a view, although Bacon little suspected the fact and was ready to uphold such divine origin with all the force of his genius. Another consequence was to be the consideration of human society ruled by the same laws that rule the mechanism of nature, and this was certainly pregnant with political revolutions. The systematic empiricism so characteristic of English politics need not be traced farther back. Yet before coming to the political conception of Hobbes, who was the first great follower of Bacon and one of the first great political thinkers of England, the contribution of Grotius must be considered as Hobbes has a good deal in common with him.

Hugo Grotius was born 1583, twenty-two years after Bacon and five years before Hobbes. Like Bacon this Dutchman was a statesman and an ambassador. The practice of business had therefore a great influence on his ideas and was apt to temper the excess of doctrine of the man. His idea of natural law is a heritage both of Pagan times and of Scholasticism, and based both on the distinction established by the Roman jurists, between the jus civile and jus naturale, and on the mediæval notion of sociability, a special sense of which he supposes man to be endowed by Nature. The way such a notion is applied is, on the contrary, due to the more modern theory of Nature; and there we meet with an assertion that would have roused Machiavelli from his grave if he had heard it, and that undoubtedly has given origin to the negative understanding of history against which Idealism and Fascism are reacting with all their forces.

According to Grotius such jus naturale—the only branch of legal studies that can be treated is philosophy—is based on the essence of the nature of men. But such nature is the same all over the world just as Nature is. It will be the same for ever in spite of historical oscillations just as Nature will. The presupposition of this nature of man, postulated out of and against every experience, is a negation of history as the process of the gradual development of mankind. Yet unquestionably its introduction in modern politics was the cause of a great progress towards justice, and in Grotius himself it is balanced by his insistence on not taking positive law out of history. The lack of good metaphysical ground brought him to the postulation of an unhistorical reality whilst the recent improvement of historical researches at the hands of Jean Bodin and others induced him not to consider positive laws except in the light of history. To be fair, this instinct of society deeply inset in the nature of man was not of his own invention. It is to be found in Aristotle. It is to be found in St. Thomas. But then the instinct compelling man to live in community is understood in a very different way by the Greek philosopher, by the great Scholastic doctor and by the Dutch statesman. For if it is true that historical facts which are political, artistic, military, receive their definite character from the ideas of the generation that achieved them, it is equally true that the meaning attached to traditional ideas by any one man is to a certain extent modified by the whole life of his generation. So that Aristotle understands by Nature the transcendental power which planned the life of man as a part of its universal scheme; Thomas Aquinas sees in the nature of man that which was determined as characteristic of mankind by the Divine will; whilst Grotius sees in this sense of society something very much like the law of gravitation—not quite, however, since in him we see looming out already the ghost of man anterior to society, of whom nobody ever heard anything and which is, therefore, a pure conjecture. Considering this nature of mankind as his basis, it was inevitable that Grotius should think the best constitution of the state to be one the origin of which made it more likely to meet the requirements of such nature. Once the filiation of law as the product of this nature of man was established, private and public law obviously derived from the jus naturale, and the state must originate from an agreement of its components.

If Grotius had been able to realise theoretically the immanence of the jus naturale in society he would have foreshadowed all the political theories of the eighteenth century, and worked out his scheme with far more cogency than the men who came after him. As it is, the rationality immanent to human society is too difficult for him and his time, and unable to realise the moral will of the collectivity he is thrown back with Machiavelli on a very empirical notion of liberty. The subjectivism of Grotius is the subjectivism of the philosophy of his time alternatively empirical and rational, so that the contract by which men give themselves a form of government is irrevocable: they are free to assume it, not to reject it. Obviously the souvenir of the Reformation with its political struggles must have been quite fresh in the mind of his contemporaries and influenced him, as the Revolution of England was to influence Hobbes; otherwise it would be difficult to understand how men could be considered as free to choose a constitution and not to discard it. The contradiction was too patent not to be noticed, but there again the philosophy of Bacon and his followers influenced too much the thought of the whole century to allow any resolution of the difficult problem. It was the nature of man that led mankind to form communities, and the mechanicalness of this conception was so much a consequence of the mechanism of the philosophy of the time that once such communities had come to a contract entrusting their government to one man or a body of men, the government itself was conceived of as mechanical as Nature, and its laws as irrevocable as natural law. The contradiction inherent in the twofold notion of man’s nature, held by men like Grotius, led them to deny the liberty of man which was the ground of their theory.

Hobbes has a metaphysic so clear, so well determined, that his political conception is bound to have that cogency which belongs exclusively to the works of men whose philosophical grounds are theoretically first rate. That Cromwell should have offered him a high office in his government is not surprising. Obviously the mind and character of Hobbes are for prompt decisions and coherency of action. Yet his political theories are not fit for actual application. It is not impossible that his ideas should have influenced the political men of his days; but his Leviathan is the conception of a man to whom philosophy was doctrina corporum. Bodies can be natural or artificial, and the state is the most important of all the artificial bodies, man being both a natural body, the most perfect natural body, and an element of the state, the most perfect of all artificial bodies. Psychology is bound to occupy the foreground in his anthropology, and no philosopher ever laid a greater emphasis on the distinction between theory and practice. Thought is considered after the Cartesian doctrine as relatively free, and will as dependent upon thought; the superiority of the former is acknowledged indeed by all the thinkers of the time and of the following century. In psychology the consequence of this distinction is a conception of the volitive activity that foreshadows the more modern theories of determinism, against which all idealisms have fought their most strenuous battles and Fascism is actually leading a political crusade. For Hobbes asserts the necessity of surpassing the state of Nature, in which all men are free, by the sacrifice of some liberties and by the sacred preservation of the engagements of the contract. But on what ground can he require such sacrifice and faithfulness, except that of self-preservation? Thus selfishness is at the basis of the edifice and there looms already the capital sin of the more modern conception of Liberalism. The state is conceived as the algebraical sum of the citizens, the selfishness of whose life is guaranteed by the legislature.

But Hobbes was English and, despite the influence of French Rationalism, his logic was not so imperious as to prevent his views on actual life from taking the upper hand in some important parts of his system. Such an artificial agglomeration of political atoms, understood as it was to be the most realistic and naturalistic view of political life, could not have stood the test of application; and Hobbes is carried away by his own notion of the contract into a theoretical view of it which is distinctly superior in moral truth, and much nearer to historical truth. When men come to an agreement for the defence of the peaceful life of each of them the state comes into being; but it is not a temporary, mechanical agglomeration—it is unity wanted by men. In his natural state man enjoys some kind of security based on the concordia multorum, but this concord is not sufficient to ensure peace, it is merely enough for animals. To ensure human peace something more than common consent is needed.

Union, the union of citizens becomes something superior to the sum of their particular selfishnesses. Hobbes realises that such union is a living reality and even if he does not work out the way by which the notion of the state as a person can be reached, he none the less joins hands with all political idealism. In the middle of the seventeenth century he had an intuition of the conception upon which the Nationalism of all countries was to live and act; whilst Hegel was to work it out in an abstract theory and Italian Idealism to make it a reality by its good fortune in having met with a political movement able to realise this most historical of all the philosophical conceptions of the state. Hobbes had had enough political experience to realise intuitively that which his natural mechanism did not allow him to conceive on theoretical grounds.

Such a happy intuition does not, however, take him any farther. His state has nothing of a moral reality, and the union of the citizens which it implies falls back on the ground of the law of self-preservation. The fact is that the state so conceived by Hobbes was an abstraction despite the happy intuition of the oneness of will implied in the contract; and his natural man another abstraction not to be met with anywhere. The identification of man and state only happens in history and there it was to remain, unlooked for in England until Hume, whilst in Italy Vico was to herald the reality of society and history as the creation of man between 1720 and 1730. Thus, like Grotius, Hobbes ended by denying the freedom of will that the very possibility of the contract had implied. His ideal state, his empirical state, his natural state, are so conceived that they continually oppose each other or are identified one with the other in his theory.

The state is therein as mysterious as Nature, and its laws are no less imperious than the laws of Nature, calling as they do merely for passive obedience, and at least in Hobbes’ theory the state is no less eternal than Nature, for after the contract the less the citizens have to say in the matter the better. Yet Hobbes was an Englishman and the fact was to tell; even in this most abstract theory he cannot lose sight of the realm of experience. And if the ruler was a bad one? Like all his countrymen the father of the Leviathan is ready to trip up his logic rather than to offer a scheme which after all might not work. If the ruler proved an inefficient or bad one the citizens could discard him.

In his opposition to the kingdom by the grace of God the father of the Leviathan is led by his methodical Naturalism—and not at all by a repugnance for any form of tyranny. The social contract is a purely human affair and nothing could be so ridiculous as the grounding of so human a reality as the authority of the state upon an act of the grace of God. But the more absolute is this authority the better; and his indifference as to the choice of the state-religion did not make for tolerance. Not to think of Cromwell when one studies Hobbes is impossible; for the philosopher in front of Nature, his almighty though mechanical Nature, is just a fanatic observer as intolerant as Cromwell and as energetic in the systematic application of his philosophical faith. Only men of faith can alter the historical world, for religion remains one of the greatest factors in men’s life, although it does not always appear under the cloak of a definite church. In such cases, however, it is often apt to be more intolerant and certainly more dangerous—as all abstract dogmas are bound to be—than those which have through their historical organisation received some kind of adaptation to the society in which they flourish. Cromwell was intolerant, was a fanatic, but no more and even perhaps less essentially so than Hobbes, and both are a perfect embodiment of the genius of England during the first half of the seventeenth century. Never has the life of a country expressed itself more fittingly in its theoretical and practical term. Hobbes like a bee had gathered after Bacon the best of Italy, and the echo of Campanella is to be detected in the most characteristic part of his theory of knowledge; he had, besides, imported the result of the most recent scientific works of the French and Dutch thinkers. England could prepare on his intellectual contribution to put forth the genius of Locke just as it could on the assumption to political life of new elements make ready for the organisation of the state that under William of Orange was to arouse the envy of the world.

The two fanatics, one in the immediateness of his faith in the righteousness of God, the other in the elaboration of his faith in Nature, had done a great deal in the way of shaping the character of modern England, and the theory of one and the revelation of the other held in germ much that meant progress for the whole of mankind. But both by their superlative intolerance and despotism called for the reaction that was to oppose most formally man to the state. For Hobbes at least the fact was inevitable, his Leviathan engulfs all rights and interests; at the same time in his theory of knowledge he picks up the trend of Campanella and sets the basis for a nearly Protagorean subjectivism. How far the theory of the Leviathan was from Italian mentality cannot be judged from contemporary opinion. The Italians, or at least the greatest number of Italy’s scholars, were giving themselves up to academical or to immoral pastimes. The Cinquecento had been personified by Ariosto, Machiavelli, Aretino, the three expressions of the Italian society during the sixteenth century. The characteristics of the times had been an artistic fancy, full of serenity, aware of its being a mere play of imagination and making fun of itself; an adult thought that swept away the illusions of fancy and feeling, to make its own way towards the shrine of science, at the very core of what is the world of Man and Nature; then a moral licentiousness, remorseless because unconscious, therefore shameless and cynical. Ariosto’s fancy is displayed to such an extent that it mostly aroused mere irony from his contemporaries. Machiavelli brings realism and logic to their ultimate consequence, arousing thereby a sense of repulsion in men far more wicked than he was. Aretino’s cynicism reaches such a monstrous pitch that the most dissolute men turn away sickly from his books.

That was the era in which the great nations of Europe were taking their definitive personal physiognomy. (England, as has been said, had already the features that were going to be the family likeness to be reproduced all over the Anglo-Saxon world by her sons.) As De Sanctis points out, the European races were building up the “Patria” so fondly dreamed by Machiavelli for his own people, a “Patria” which was to be a political unity, fortified and cemented by religious, moral, and cultural elements. At this same time Italy not only failed to build up a “Patria,” but was losing her independence, her liberty, and her beloved and treasured pre-eminence in the historical world. Not that such a catastrophe was realised except by the keen mind of Machiavelli. It was unconscious, it was bound to be unconscious, since it happened just because national consciousness had vanished. How could it have assumed national shape? The name of Italy was to become a geographical expression, for its inhabitants were not citizens, they were mere inhabitants, subjects by natural determination of this or that petty Prince. The geographical name of a region becomes the name of a nation through the very long or extremely short process of formation of national consciousness that permits of all its inhabitants coming on the historical stage of the world as a person, through the manifestation of a personal will in foreign politics, which are the country’s assertion as a personal conscience. Thus a people is acknowledged as a nation by the rest of the world the moment when, through an action, the final scope of which is purely national, it asserts itself as a living organism able to manifest a will and act upon it. What Machiavelli had termed the corruttela of Italy was the absence of national and religious consciousness, and he had pointed a way out of it.

He was too much of a positive mind not to realise that the difference between past and modern times was due to a spiritual difference. Not knowing what to attack in the mentality of his countrymen, both clever and learned beyond words, he thought that the only great difference between ancient Rome and the Italy of the Cinquecento were the political institutions which of old had been based on a religion that pervaded the whole of civic life, and now were quite a practical affair modified continually by the chance of other countries waging war in Italy. His great blunder, the notion he had that the Roman state-religion of Pagan times would be the one chance of salvation for his own time is to be considered with due allowance for the ignorance of the sixteenth century as to the real import of the notion of progress. Machiavelli pronounced human things to be always in movement, but in spite of this intuition he could not detect the processional character of such movement. As it was, it was sufficient to induce him to reject the notion of the natural state of Man as a constant so dear to Grotius. Yet it could not help him to realise that his own times, with all their wickedness, might be thought superior to Roman times; and Guicciardini, a friend of his, felt himself much wiser than Machiavelli because he had no illusion on the possibility of making a nation out of his countrymen. It was absurd to him, to be always calling on the Romans for example, it was just like wanting a donkey to gallop horsewise! But whatever the wisdom of Guicciardini, who made his God of his own private peace and well-being, a God no less exacting than the State of Machiavelli, and considered the world as his world, thereby enforcing to irrelativism the subjective atomism that was disintegrating Italy, Machiavelli was a wonder child of genius whilst his wise friend was merely a clever gentleman making egotism the special study of his life.

Mussolini’s view on the civic regeneration of the Italian politically amorphous classes is very much like Machiavelli’s. Political indifference is also to him a result of the lack of religiousness in the spirit animating Italians in their public life. But four hundred years have passed and he could not if he wished turn to the state religion of Pagan Rome. If the basis of social life has to be religion, the positive religion has to be the one historically belonging to the people.

In spite of the Machiavellian conception of history, the sixteenth century was to see the introduction of the experimental method, as practised in natural science, in the treatment of history at the hands of no less a man than Guicciardini. His Storia d’Italia is in twenty books and covers the period between 1494 and 1534, thus beginning with the invasion of Charles VIII of France and ending with the fall of Florence. Francesco de Sanctis, with the heart of a man of the Risorgimento, commenting upon this work, so remarkable from many points of view, says that the historical period of which it treats could rightly have been called “The Tragedy of Italy,” but that the historian has not the slightest notion either of the unity or of the import of this tragic drama. One could object to the great critic that to realise such oneness of drama was impossible to Guicciardini, as the tragedy had its root in the historian’s unconsciousness of this oneness or rather of the possibility of this oneness, since such oneness did not exist in Italy when Guicciardini wrote, except perhaps in the heart of his friend Machiavelli. People of other countries provided them with the political events and the philosophical theories that kept their brains going.

The works of Grotius were taken and easily studied in the land of jurisprudence, for the studies that went on flourishing were law and history. But the purpose was a sterile erudition, at least at the moment, for apathy had reached such a superlative degree that the martyrdom of men like Bruno and Socino passed unheeded—worse than unheeded, not understood—so that it is absurd to hear modern Free-thinkers reproach the Church with the death of Bruno, who was far from questioning the right of the Church to burn him. The Church in its practical policy, like all the institutions in Italy, was lacking in ideas and in life. The centre of civilisation had moved northward, and south of the Alps people were getting more and more away from it, more and more effeminate. In a land where indifference was the shroud of a martyr, Churchmen who knew Bruno for the heretic he truly was could not be expected to realise that apart from his heresy he had given the world an idea that would enable modern thought to realise the part played by religion in man’s life and to reject the very idea which had severed man from authority. The seventeenth century, inaugurated in Italy by the burning of Bruno, had in literature little to boast of besides the Jerusalemme liberata of Tasso, for it began with the Arcadia of Sannazaro and ended with the Arcadia of Guarini. On the other hand Campanella, the most eminent philosopher, was not the only one. Although the philosophers became less and less original they maintained a sufficient theoretical interest to accept all that France and England were throwing on the world.

Perhaps nothing is more expressive of the life of the mind than this temporary intellectual dearth and sterility of a race whose faculties were, even then, far above the average. Reduced to political non-existence and therefore to speculative unproductiveness, the whole country seemed to have gone to pieces just on purpose to let the new nations shake off the yoke of history, of a history too heavy with its pagan heritance to allow full play to the new forces of modern, that is to say Christian, civilisation. For modern thought and modern politics seemed to reject authority and history, in order to have the possibility of displaying what they held virtually in their mediæval and Christian youth. They rid themselves of the past just as the Church had done at her start, throwing overboard Pagan culture. But is it not allowable to think that just as the Church ceased to be anti-philosophical as soon as it had asserted its original intuition, modern nations will cease to be anti-historic now that the value of man as a man has been asserted, and has even been over-asserted? For if such were the case then Italy’s standing out of the game, in order to elaborate slowly the historical forces that may contribute to give back to the world the ballast it seems to have lost, would appear to be in harmony with the developing process of Mind. Nations have their dawn, their twilight, and their night, but Mind never rests or sleeps, and through their individual characteristics all the races tell more or less directly on the whole life of mankind. If Italy had to stand aside to let England and France assert the individual worth of the most inferior human beings, and work up systems where the weakest may be heard in legal circles, then her attitude all through the sixteenth century is that of a boxer training for his next match. To rid politics and law of the idea that legitimised all authority by appeal to the Will of God (as it was commonly understood to be a kind of Deux ex Machina) something had to be appealed to that could be considered as a religious support on the modern side. Nature was upheld as antagonistic to superior authority and religious interference. Yet Nature, at least to the men of the seventeenth century, was the work of God, and if mankind was endowed with a longing, or beset with a necessity for society, surely the Creator of mankind was responsible for it. The fact is that it was not of the will of God that the jurists and philosophers wanted to be rid, for they could have found cogent arguments to uphold the thesis, so dear a century later to Rousseau, that God had created man free, and that he was therefore at liberty to choose the political constitution that suited him best—conforming by so doing to the Will of God: it was the authority of men, the authority of tradition, which taught that it had always been the natural lot of some men to obey, and the natural lot of others to command; and that is far more Pagan in its political origin and Aristotelian in its theoretical form than Catholic. It was the hierarchy of birth, quite a Pagan notion, that men were fighting against in Northern Europe during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

Aristotle’s first book on politics settles the point for the hellenic world. Some men are born to be masters; some are born to be slaves. He that is to be a master is born with the qualities that befit command; he that is to be a slave is born with the qualities required to fulfil orders. Were it not so, Nature would have failed to fit each of them for the end to which it brought them into life. Man was what he was to be anterior to his birth. As to slavery, as an institution it was to be deplored; it was rather sad for the people who were born slaves, and terribly immoral at best, but it was an evil that could not be avoided inasmuch as it was essential to the nature of society. The metaphysics and religion of the day could not conceive of any alteration in the nature of things.

The Stoics and Epicureans did improve, but not much, the idea of liberty. The best thing for men to do was to know Nature and their own natural disposition, not to go against the natural bent of things and of their constitution. Thus the part of Fate was reduced and the dignity of man asserted. But the reduction and assertion would have been more verbal than actual had it not been for the Romans, who with their realistic mind could not overlook the fact that man’s virtus, or lack of it, made a lot of difference in his life. Their religion and philosophy though lacked originality and had no adequate notion of liberty.

Christianity was to relieve mankind from such a fate. Man is in the world to save his soul. The grace of God is necessary to him, but he only can achieve his own salvation. If you want your horse to jump, as the sportsmen of the old school used to say, give him his head; the freedom to use his neck, head and shoulder to the best of his ability. If God means man to save his soul, he must have given him sufficient freedom to be made responsible. And in fact the proclamation of this power of man is the import of the New Testament. Everything is possible to him that believeth. This is far from Aristotle, so far that men could not at first realise what it meant, and that the abolition of slavery is only recent is sufficient to show the slowness of the process through which the good word of the Gospel has reached theoretical consciousness and practical realisation.

Man’s liberty, man’s dignity, were asserted all through the Scholastic period and the prayer of Thomas Aquinas thanking God for the dignity He had bestowed upon man is a good proof of the fact. It could, therefore, only be through the greatest misrepresentation of historical facts that Pagan times were identified with the cause of liberty and equality of men, two ideas that are essentially Christian and were in their present form unknown to Paganism. Such perversion of facts cannot be, however, ascribed to a wilful adulteration of history. The men who upheld it are too many and some are too obviously sincere. Yet on the other hand it is impossible to ascribe it to an instinctive foreboding of immanence as nowadays understood. The only possible explanation is the force of repulsion for the immediate past that is inherent in the historical assertion of any new social force. A new age always asserts itself by fighting its antecedents and often the very cause of its coming to light.

Hobbes, rejecting sovereignty by the grace of God to enforce his own conception of the sovereignty of his Leviathan grounded on the Bellum omnium contra omnes, is merely conforming to the philosophy of Nature, which, as materialism, was to him a religion, a new religion that must take the place of the old one, at least amongst educated men. In its objectivity Nature stood to him as God; an awful divinity that had a good deal in common with the God of Calvin in the inalterability of its will. But few of the new thinkers had the courage to be as coherent as he was. For he was quite aware that the substitution of Nature for the God of Christianity, as the ultimate reality to which political forms had to be traced back, made for a greater implacability of political laws. The others sometimes pretended to believe and mostly did believe that the unknown quidditas which they call human nature had a luminous social instinct that had been marred through what they called the Dark Ages; and they did not realise that the belief in such nature of man was elaborated in the schools of the Middle Ages, and that if it was taken for granted as much as the geometrical postulate that makes the three inner angles of a triangle equivalent to two right angles, it was just as abstract and could no more be proved on experimental ground. The nature of man taken as implying the necessity of or longing for social arrangements is illustrated in history; but it is the essence of history to relate to men the deeds of men, thereby is enforced the necessity of having society in order to have history. So that isolated man cannot enter history. Of men anterior to society we can, therefore, know nothing. But prehistoric times are not of necessity presocial; indeed, the art that flourished in such periods shows the existence of social intercourse in times of which we have, up to now, no historical knowledge. In any case the philosophy of politics if it wants to borrow the experimental method of natural science must take history for its basis, with all the limitations that this implies, in order to reach positive conclusions. The political thinkers of the seventeenth century thought and acted as men of deep convictions, but of very faulty methods; the world they cast into shape reposed on an assumption which is the most metaphysic of all the metaphysic axioms they hated so much; it will be more and more obvious through the eighteenth century.

Italy stood aside. Italian minds could not have made such a position theirs. The attitude of a Bacon, of a Descartes, of a Hobbes, could not be assumed in the land of Machiavelli and Bruno, the fathers of the idea of history understood as a constructive process of Science and Society, of Campanella, the man who foreshadowed in the sixteenth century the phenomenologic conception of reality and the notion of immanence: which may have been, which was in fact heretic, but is undoubtedly the offspring of Christianity, and knows that it is. The race whose energy and virility had been maimed by the constant contemplation of the past, by thorough identification with the past, had been politically stunned like the people of the Bible who turned back when they should have been looking and proceeding forward. Italian scholars kept assimilating and admiring the philosophical production of foreigners, and the more readily praised and the more truly appreciated the new theories that they felt farther from imitating them. What they could give they gave, in legal and historical erudition, preparing the materials on which Vico was to build his imposing Scienza Nuova and preparing the historical ground for the philosophy that flourishes two centuries after him, just as Scholasticism had prepared the abstract ground on which the theories, that were to give their democratic or individualistic impulsion to the modern world, flourished two centuries after a reaction had started against the abstractness of Scholasticism.

Francesco de Sanctis realises it because he has lived for this oneness of Italy, thereby giving it the full reality of an historical person. Guicciardini was as interested in the calamities that befell the individuals as de Sanctis was in the tragedy of his country, and if he filled twenty books with the matter of two good books it was because Italy’s genius had lost for the time being its synthetic power. He was an accurate man, with immense knowledge and great acuteness of mind taking each fact in its most minute particularity, but losing sight of the importance of such events as the Reformation. He was a naturalist and uses the same methods as if he studied vegetables or minerals, looking into the intimate structure of facts to find out why they are as they are. Men therefore appear in his work like a product of Nature, whose actions are as fatally determined as those of an animal. It is impossible, therefore, to find in Guicciardini’s twenty books a single page alive with the feelings that throb in Machiavelli’s historical works; he keeps the calm brow of the naturalist counting the legs of an insect. And Italy, until Vico comes, will go on between these two ideas of history and society.

Guicciardini sees man free in appearance, but in reality bound to act according to the determinations of his character, of his temperament, of his circumstances; and the wise historian can very nearly make out beforehand that what he shall do with the same approximate certainty with which the naturalist can tell the way the swallows will take when the wind and atmospheric pressure are known.

Machiavelli foreshadows a kind of sociology and in his truly Italian synthetic view of history he sees the play of the various forces, spiritual forces, that make of the human world a different realm of reality from that of nature, where forces exclusively physical are at play. “Patria,” liberty, nationality, humanity, social classes, interests and passions, are to him forces that move man, but would never move a plant or a tree.

But the fact is, to quote again De Sanctis, that Machiavelli is the starting point of a period and Guicciardini is the ultimate end of the preceding age.

France, Spain, England, Germany and the Netherland, were overrun with blood, shed either through the War of Religion or in consequence of the Inquisition, in the proceedings of which the governments of the different states interfered to further their political interests though seldom on the side of mercy. In Italy there was no struggle; men do not face death or torture without passionate convictions; and while other races, young as they were, had such strong convictions the country which had reaped too easy and too rich a harvest between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, had given all that her assimilation of ancient wisdom could give, and at the end of her career she sat exhausted on the wayside to watch the young ones at play, as a connoisseur watches a boxing-match and takes all the hints which may be useful to him. Metaphysics could not flourish under such circumstances, as virility is the first requisite for original thinking, so Italian scholars stood on the watch taking law and thought from abroad.

CHAPTER IV THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY IN FRANCE

The history of France from the advent of Louis XI to that of Louis XIV displays in its development constructive tendencies so definite and constant that its edifice, at once harmonious and imposing, seems the realisation of an architectural scheme perfectly in keeping with the genius of France. Everything tended to that unification of the country, to that union of the provinces the necessary consequence of which must be the centralisation of administration and the concentration of political power in the hands of the sovereign.

The idea of absolute monarchy has never been conceived and realised in exactly the same way as in France. M. Jacques Bainville is fully justified in holding that the kings of France made it their main duty to concentrate all their efforts on identifying themselves and their dynasty with the development and consolidation of the unification of the country. But it has yet to be shown what is really the origin of a conception of political reality that so far seems to be unique.

Monarchy was indeed just as absolute in Spain and in Austria. But in both countries it remained comparatively feudal. So that the bourgeois origin ascribed by M. Bainville to the Capetian Monarchy, its intimate relations with the Middle Class amounting to a sort of mutual league against the great feudal lords, is sufficient to endow it with the modern character that attracts the student, eager to penetrate to the living core of the life of political institutions. It could not, however, account for the rationality of its development, for the harmony and beauty of its historical features. In the last half of the sixteenth and all through the seventeenth century France and her monarchy are endowed with a beauty that exercises a permanent fascination. It would be true to say that the part played by France at that time in the civilisation of the world was to a large degree æsthetic.

Modern philosophy, above all in Italy, understands art as the expression of the life of mind. Hence, a battle, a treaty of peace, a law, a form of government, can be considered an artistic masterpiece just as well as a poem or a monument. Now between the coronation of Henry IV and that of Louis XIV the monarchy of France perfectly expresses all that is positive and, therefore, historically constructive in the life of the country. Its spiritual and practical forces meet in the king’s person and receive thereby their historical realisation.

“L’Etat c’est moi,” says Louis XIV. “Cogito ergo sum,” says Descartes. The self-assertion of the king identifying the whole of political reality with his empirical person is not without affinity with the import of the Cartesian assumption in which the criterion of certitude, the root of all reality, was identified with the individual act of thinking. The self-assertion spontaneously coming on the lips of the Sovereign and that coming out of the meditation of the philosopher is one and the same thing. It is the consequence of sixteen centuries of Christianity, and in their mathematical conciseness the two formulas are the best proclamation of the genius of France in all its clear, simple and luminous logic. They are, however, at the same time a revelation of what is weak in that genius. To be so clear, so luminous and so simple, French philosophy was bound to be abstract and radical. The radicalness of mind common to the Jacobins and to the more modern anti-clericals and democrats caused the elimination of the feudal class as a factor in political life, a fact which was bound to carry in its trail the political revolution of the eighteenth and the economic one of the nineteenth century. When a government reduces a class to political non-existence the part formerly discharged by that class must be entrusted to another, which is bound to claim in exchange for the support offered to the government in the struggle against the class displaced the privileges previously granted to its rival for services rendered to the state.

France one, under the government of one man. It bears a family likeness to the tragedies of Racine and Corneille. Such an idea is great and beautiful as Horace and Le Cid. But it owes its grandeur to a simplicity that condemns it to leave out much of political reality, which is indeed as complex and multiform as life itself. Therefore, though it is beautiful, its beauty is bound to be a tragic one. When the concept had become a fact, when Louis XIV could say l’Etat c’est moi; when France was at least one under her King, the French monarchy was in the position of the bullet that has been shot right in the bull’s-eye. The aim is perfectly caught, the steely little thing is helplessly stuck there, useless. The funeral knell of absolute monarchy is rung by this identification of the Sovereign with the State. As a political institution it was perfect. Perfection is static and cannot, therefore, belong to life, which moves towards perfection but never is perfect.

Politically the feudal nobility was hewn down with the indifference with which a venerable forest is razed to the ground to make a French garden. The trouble was that society is not a garden which once laid down can be kept by a succession of good gardeners in consonancy with the plans of the architect. In France society was to go on living its historical life of eternal alteration and formation. The political abolition of the nobility was a most active ferment to breed more speedily the modifications to come. The French nobility lost its virtues; corrupted by the idleness enforced upon its members, it infested the moral atmosphere and this in spite of the very remarkable men produced by some of the old stocks. Soon the other classes required its social elimination and they wanted it to be as radical as the political annihilation had been. Undoubtedly the kings had been obliged to destroy what should have been their natural support in order to conform with the political conception that had been elaborated by logical French minds. The king and his people making one without the intervening links of classes—no constitution could be more simple; but its realisation required the amputation of what is necessary to the life of any monarchy.

Descartes and the Roi-Soleil are so adequate an expression of their epoch that they may be considered as the characters of the prologue to the tragedy that was to bring the next century to its close. M. Jacques Maritain has rightly bestowed on Descartes the epithet of revolutionary, but it could be extended to Louis XIV if one did not run the risk of seeming paradoxical. For both their self-assertions, politically and theoretically absolute, are equally anti-religious and anti-historical. The position assumed by Mind whenever man is really religious implies self-negation. If God is, He must be infinite and Man, by comparison, nothing; at least such is the logical sequence of the doctrines upheld by most religious people. And when Mind is speculatively too poor to realise the necessity of the religious moment in which man bows down to everything that is not his beloved self and accepts the law that such recognition begets, man can turn to history and trace there intuitively (as the first great thinker of Italy has done), the part played by each one of mind’s activities. Religion then appears independently of personal conviction, a constant element in the life of man, more or less preponderant, always there, as the recognition of all that is to man not-self. It is where modern thought has failed to realise this, either theoretically or historically, that it knows only the first term of the relation which is the basis of every social organisation. Liberty and law are correlative terms just as are light and shadow. Liberty is the claim of the subject and law springs from the recognition of the object. Louis XIV and Descartes, thanks to their unbounded selfishness, assert emphatically their empirical individuality. For them the self swallows up the other term the not-self, that the modern world after them seems to ignore.

Descartes was endowed with the most precious gifts that make the scientist and the thinker. Yet it can be said that his greatest fortune lay in the fact that he embodies most perfectly all that is characteristic of the French mind. Foreigners, even when their knowledge of his language is far from perfect, can take his Discours sur la Méthode and read it with perfect ease and a feeling of intellectual and æsthetic well-being. To read this and to walk through the park of Versailles are equally indispensable to understand that great century in France. And both walk and reading make very much the same impression.

It is true that the reader will easily pick up in the Cartesian theories ideas known to St. Augustin and to the Scholastic Doctors against whom Descartes reacted so violently. The visitor might just as well notice in the park or on the noble façade of the palace lines and decorative patterns reminding him of the Renaissance Villas seen in Italy, but this does not deprive the palace and its setting of their purely French character. The fact is that the seventeenth century with the last half of the sixteenth and the first of the eighteenth, appears in the life of Mind, i.e. in history, as an Anglo-French period, whereas the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth had been in their artistic and intellectual production mainly Italian.

The ideas elaborated in France and in England had come from everywhere and from all centuries, Italy being chiefly the historical and natural agent of communication, a sort of historical point of convergence between antiquity and modern times as she is geographically between east and west.

The idea of originality, without playing upon words, can be called the “original sin” of our modern world; born from the contempt of Bacon and Descartes for the past, it is ending now in Futurism and Bolshevism. To attempt to create something new without roots in the past in art, politics, science or philosophy is not merely absurd, it is impossible. The living dialectic we term history displays each of its moments as the logical sequence of the preceding one and the elaborating stage of the next. The work of Descartes will live as long as our intellectual life lasts. Yet this very work, in which he inaugurates the anti-historical method, is the best illustration of the law of history, displaying as it does the riches of a mind in which were interwoven the legacies of the past and the germs of all that was to be subjective and positive in the philosophy of several centuries.

Louis XIV brought a political form to the precision of a mathematical formula, that is to say he made it absolute and by so doing rendered the evolution, characteristic of all social organisation, impossible for the monarchy he represented. That which is absolute is unalterable. To be absolute this French monarchy had to be static; whereas every political system must be dynamic. Perfection is the negation of development. The person of Louis XIV was the perfect realisation of France’s ideal of an absolute Sovereign and as such it was, therefore, the conclusion of the process which had brought him to the throne.

The method of English empiricism, which consisted, after Bacon, in looking at the exterior world with wide open eyes to get a notion of reality based on sense knowledge, was taken up in France with as much enthusiasm as the theories of Descartes were taken up in England. The two countries balanced each other, France tending to the unity of man’s consciousness, England to the full realisation of the world of senses. Life obviously is neither of these but their combination or more properly their synthesis. So that the mutual influence of both countries is the best illustration of the life of mind, single in its development, multiform in its manifestation.

What is tragic in the philosophy of Descartes is almost perfectly illustrated in his own life. No one has more eloquently proclaimed the subjectivity of life and reality than he has through his own scholarly selfishness. Only Louis XIV could be his rival in this self-assertion. The self-centred monarch, the self-centred scholar, can vie with each other. Therefore he may be held to be just as anti-religious and anti-historical as Louis XIV; the one could not forget the majesty, the other the genius, with which he felt himself invested to bow down in worship of the King of Kings, in worship of the Word of eternal thought.

Yet both were believers and convinced Roman Catholics. The contradiction of fact thus introduced in their lives find its most exquisite expression in the vow of Descartes, when he pledged himself to make a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Loreto if he could get rid of all the duties that fell to him as a soldier, as a man of the world. They prevented him from attending freely to the satisfaction of his longing for scientific researches. Hence his impatience to retire from this vast world, full of rights and duties, where men suffer and require help and love. The anti-religiousness of such feeling need not be emphasised, it is obviously worse than that of many people who, calling themselves atheists, were drawn into deifying nature or their own negation of God!

To tell man that he has only to turn his mind inwards to find in the most intimate recess of his soul the criterion of Truth and consequently of Justice, is a most Christian saying. But in the works of St. Augustin, where Descartes found it, it implies either the belief in God’s presence in the heart of every believer, or the immanence of the transcendental self in every empirical self, whereas in Descartes’ own writings and mind neither of the two is to be found. His rationalism seems brutally to reject belief outside philosophy, outside the theoretical and intellectual world altogether. It only seems to do so, because it is one of the first stepping-stones of Idealism, but of this he could not even dream and he went on establishing between will and knowledge such a relation that every rational act ought to be good and every irrational one bad. Hence the duty of vulgarising rational thinking through education, which was to become paramount in pedagogy and politics. Hence again the radicalness of the difference between educated and uneducated which was to produce in our modern democracies a class difference far stronger than that of the Middle Ages when a man could be made squire or even knight provided he proved his personal valour in actual deeds.

English philosophy received through Hobbes all the rationalism it needed to balance the excessive empiricism of Bacon and the world was ready for Illuminism, which, originating in England, became one of the greatest and noblest movements recorded in history in spite of its many flaws.

Italy could not, indeed, offer anything to make up for such rationalism and empiricism. With her political virility the whole country was daily losing its speculative originality and fecundity, for as Vincenzo Cuoco was to realise a century and a half later, the two manifestations of man’s genius, political and theoretical, usually go hand in hand. The intellectual gifts of Italian scholars were wasted in academic pastimes or devoted to works of erudition, which prepared for the genius of Vico the materials of his historical vision of reality, but were of little avail to counteract the impatience displayed by France and England, turning their backs upon history in order to feel free to shake off the yoke of every traditional authority. Feeling, intention, worship, so many elements of spiritual life, were almost discarded to make room for the goddess Reason.

Art and Religion were thus denied in their essence. Art could only be at best didactic or hedonistic, it was, therefore, considered at the service either of thought as a means of vulgarisation of scientific knowledge, or of sensation as capable of causing agreeable emotions. As to Religion it was disposed of in a more radical way. Theoretically misrepresented, historically ignored, it was to be tolerated by English philosophy for practical reasons as a political instrument and as the best educative force. It had been useful and necessary in the centuries of dark ignorance, but to the century that was to call itself the age of light it was a hindrance, an impediment of which mankind was to be rid at all cost. Illuminism, that is to say the enlightenment of the people, and the anti-religiousness of the philosophers were identified. The war waged against religion was confused with the war waged against ignorance. One step only was needed to make of ignorance a synonym for religion.

Nobody waited to enquire why religion was everywhere and why it was always a factor in social life; nobody anyway could have answered the question as it would have implied historical research, a synthetic view of history, for which no one was fit. The Italians lacked the philosophical basis for such work, France and England lacked the turn of mind necessary to do it with intelligence. Germany was still in her teens until Leibniz came to proclaim the intellectual coming of age of his country. Thus religion was a puzzling problem to philosophers and the lack of intelligence towards this enigmatic X was to breed a great many political difficulties. Religion alone could have made up for the oncoming individualism, first social, then economic, which threatened universal destruction.

Man was raised to the honours of the altar, hailed as ultimate reality in what is most negative and empirical in him. His intellectual activity was to become the principle of reality, which indeed it is in so far as it is transcendental and, therefore, divine. But the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries could only know this activity as far as it is empirical and, therefore, non-divine. Illuminism, with all its generosity and noble impulses, was unable to realise what transcends the reason and experience of every single man. It was to be the lot of Germany and, above all, Italy to conceive in speculative form the life of Mind and to realise the natural function of religion throughout history.

CHAPTER V GIAMBATTISTA VICO

In their studies of the Neapolitan philosopher, Croce and Gentile have done their work so thoroughly that to anyone approaching the same subject it would be very nearly impossible to say anything both new and good. The material here used to illustrate the contribution of Italy’s most original thinker to modern speculation and practical life will be drawn from the works of Gentile and Croce.

Vico is the most Italian of Italy’s thinkers. Yet a close survey of his ideas reveals in his works, besides the most Italian of intellectual heritage, the presence of the deepest and richest tendencies of the modern philosophy of Europe, be it French, English, or German. He is thus the best illustration of his own theory. In the man of genius the most concrete historical determinations blend with the broadest universality of ideas. But his critics have usually chosen to look exclusively to either of these according to their own nationality; and this way of abstracting from one of his qualities has made him obscure and baffling.

While his countrymen lived upon the contribution of France and England, Vico, to the naturalistic intuition of atomism, which implies individualism in morals and politics, opposed the idealistic intuition of history as the developing process of mankind. To the abstract contemplation of clear ideas that were a matter of mathematical intuitions and deductions he opposed the self-generated progress of mankind that goes on creating its own world. In this he revealed himself as a direct son of the Italian Humanism and Renaissance, an anachronism, and the fact was nearly fatal to his fame, as this put him, as a writer, in a position of great inferiority to Locke or Descartes. He never deals with the question he had sat down to treat, because he never realised beforehand where he was going, and it was only on his way that his mind became properly fixed on the point that was obscurely tormenting him. One ought not to read either the titles or prefaces of his books, for he usually starts on a traditional and even stale matter. Thus it is that starting as a good Platonist to write what Michelet took his Scienza Nuoa to be, that is to say a philosophy of history, he got stranded in the deepest speculation on the nature of man’s mind quite in contradiction to the doctrine of Plato. He had begun by considering the origin of man’s intellectual activity. The difficulty was great, but he casually observes that whatever the difficulty of the problem and its obscurity, one always has the steady light of the conviction that the world of the Gentile nations is the achievement of men; and that the principles of it must be found in the nature of our human mind and in the force of our understanding.

Such proclamation of man’s power to create his own world, the only historical world, was indeed a revolution and Rousseau’s theories, evolved to ensure the liberty of man to arrange society to suit his requirements, are childish compared to this sublime thought of a man who was a Catholic with all the humility and simplicity of a child. The qualities of the historian were in him balanced by those of the jurist and through the researches that were meant to give a philosophy of history he went on building a philosophy of Mind. But before starting to expound the forms of Mind’s activity, for which he claimed the right of historical citizenship, it may be good to note that Vico’s criticism or continuation of previous systems was simply dialectical; inasmuch as he contradicted the main thesis of his favourite authors just as well as those of Descartes, who was his pet aversion, or accepted them to transform them. For instance, he took the Cartesian certitude and opposed it to truth; calling certain that which is the result of particularising knowledge if one may term it so, or of knowledge directed to the particular. And he took the nature of man as Grotius or Hobbes had misunderstood it, a kind of mechanism the laws of which were as fatally unalterable as the instinct of beasts, and changed it into the nature of Mind, quite spiritual and—there is no other word—Christian.

Vico turned to the periods of history which were the most remote from the psychology of his time. Consequently he was led to study the inferior forms of mind such as imagination, violence, simplicity; whereas others had meditated only upon the nature of man as they found him refined by Religion and laws, and had grounded their theories on his mature intellect. They ignored the imagination of his youth. They studied his will morally trained and overlooked the wild passions of his forefathers. It is, therefore, legitimate to say that Vico came to reject the basis of man’s natural rights grounded as they were on a false notion of human nature; and gave concrete ground for the assertion of man’s spiritual rights and duties.

Art, or as he calls it, poetry, is not born through the caprice of man to give pleasure or clothe philosophic sayings. It was born out of natural necessity, it is in short the first operation of man’s mind. Man, before he can conceive a notion, such as table or dog, realises them with an operation not of the intellect, but of his imagination. Before he can reflect with a pure mind, he perceives with emotion. Before he can speak in prose he speaks in verses. The nearer poetry gets to the particular, the better it is; the higher reflection rises towards the universal the more perfect it is. Yet if one can say that the poet is the sense of mankind and philosophy its intellect, one’s conclusion coincides with the saying of Scholasticism, Nihil est in intellectu qui prius non fuerit in sensu, since without poetry it is impossible to have philosophy and civilisation. After many views on the subject, often contradictory, his real idea is undoubtedly that the first form of mind is poetry, anterior to the intellect and free from reflection and reason. Myths, he holds, do not refer inevitably to real men, they are essentially historical truth under the form it is wont to take in primitive minds. Any myth is an individual, as Hercules, and accomplishes individual actions—as he kills the Hydra or cleanses the stables—but it is also a concept, the notion of useful and glorious activity. It is, therefore, both a universal as the expression of a concept and a creation of man’s imagination as a particular fancy.

Passing to morality and to society, although he reacted against rationalism, Vico’s assertion of the irrational has nothing to do with Rousseau’s. He took for his ground history, literature, archæology and above all, law. Thus his first discovery led him to substitute for the Golden Age that had been postulated as the initial stage of mankind, “the natural state of man,” an obscure period in which man did not differ much from the wild beasts and was at best an irrational and non-intellectual being. He was to develop the great and immortal notion that lay hidden at the core of “jus naturalism,” the notion of society as immanent in man, which had been in the air since Thomas Aquinas had spoken of it as of a sixth sense of man.

Utilitarianism is the first target on which Vico opens fire, and he takes it as Hobbes and Spinoza had formulated it. Utility cannot be a sufficient ground for morals since it springs from the temporal part of man whilst morals are grounded on his eternal part. No principle of utilitarianism, whatever the forms ascribed to it by philosophers, can justify the process of differentiation, which is the constant development of social organisations. Deceit, force, need, imply as already in existence the society they are supposed to have produced. How could the supposedly happy and simple first owners of the soil be deceived into giving up their claims, if they had no desire whatever and no relation of any kind. For relations imply some kind of social state even if tacitly agreed upon. As to force, the first rulers were not merely strong in their individual force; their power had a far deeper root as they invariably appear at first as protectors of the weak and as antagonists of all anti-social and destructive tendencies; and their law was force indeed, but force a natura præstantiori dictata. The real ground of society is, therefore, moral, and as such essentially spiritual.

Yet at first sight Vico’s view of the origin of law and society appears very much akin to that of “jus naturalism”; but as soon as it is understood that Vico’s notion of man’s nature is the Christian or spiritual one, then the difference is quite evident. Law to him is natural to man because what is not natural can neither stay nor last. Fear is certainly the origin of society; not, however, the mere fear of wild beasts or hunger but the fear of oneself; fear of solitude due to remorse and shame. Out of shame Vico sees arising the senses of honour, fidelity, probity, trust in promises, truth in words, honesty in deeds. So that society comes to have moral consciousness for its ground, and one can indeed consider society as the realisation of man’s best nature, of man’s spiritual conscience. This sense of shame or modesty could be called by empiricism the sense common to all men that enables them to realise without judgment what is necessary or useful to men. It is through this sense of decency or shame that the moral consciousness is enabled to embody itself in institutions and give stability and certitude to the freewill of man which is of its nature most uncertain.

The nature of this fear, manifesting itself in remorse or shame, of this sense of decency giving rise to moral consciousness, is easy for us to understand on account of the systematic treatment Mind has received in subsequent studies, above all in the works of Croce and Gentile. This fear is what we usually call self-consciousness; and when we say that a child has grown self-conscious we mean that he thinks too much of the opinion of the people who surround him. Now in this case common language, as in many instances, lays a trap for our understanding, since at first sight it seems to imply that the child’s uneasiness of manners is due to a self-centred conception of himself; whereas it is in fact his realising the importance of his surroundings that makes him wish to please his elders, to attract their notice, or to appease their indignation when he feels guilty. It is, therefore, the consciousness of the non-self that we term self-consciousness. But this trap is easily avoided, for philosophy knows nowadays that it is impossible to reach self-consciousness except through the conscience of that which we are not, for We without the rest of the world in opposition to which we are We, means nothing at all. Thus the self-awe in which Vico sees the first origin of society is the consciousness man has of his not-self, of the exterior world, or, to use an image, of the immense shadow that surrounds him and is in reality his own negativity, all that which he is not. So that if man knows shame and remorse in the most absolute solitude it is because in his own heart he feels the presence of a nameless Power.

Vico’s is not a speculative hypothesis. Primitive men wandered savage and ferocious, without family ties or matrimonial bonds, were the prey of the wildest passions. Whence could they receive the law that would prevent their mutual destruction? They cannot be saved by the wisdom of men since human wisdom does not exist as yet, neither by God, He has retired among His chosen people and left to its fate the rest of mankind. But He has left them the character of men and their humanity is sufficient to save them. Thunder strikes them with fear, and the consciousness of their impotency, of their own limitation, suggests the confused and obscure notion of that which is not limited. And to appease the Almightiness of this infinite and enjoy its favour they refrain from some things and do others. They refrain from satisfying some of their physical cravings and Mind’s liberty is the result; so that liberty is born with her twin sister, moral law, out of the fear of God, out of the awe-inspiring consciousness of the not-self. The land becomes covered with altars; the caves behold the union of men and women eager to ensure the Divine favour to their nuptials; the soil is broken to receive the body of the dead who return to the gods. Ethics are born with the three fundamental institutions of society, the cult of the Deity, matrimony as the first call of society, the veneration of the dead as the first assertion of immortality.

Why has Croce been able to state, after this energetic assertion of Vico on the essentially religious origin of society, that the father of the philosophy of Mind agrees with the school of natural law in their purely immanent notion of ethics? Because like them he constructs his science of society independently of revelation. The natural law of the Gentile nation spontaneously created by men is the matter of his research not the supernatural law that came down on Sinai for the benefit of the Chosen People. It is not on the idea of law and its origin that he criticised Grotius, Pufendorf, and the rest, it is their idea of religion that is distinctly quite alien to his.

Religion for Vico can be understood first as a conception of reality as such; and this is the reason why it is in Gentile’s theories one of the essential moments of Mind as recognition of the not-self, or object. Second, it belongs to practical reality as the basis of ethics. In this case religion is the very essence of ethics as it is the very essence of truth.

It is, therefore, evident that what Vico intuitively, perhaps, unconsciously, is striving to assert is the eternity of religion, historically proved apart from any revelation. Thus in his search for the ground of morality he can abstract from positive religion, but how could he abstract from the knowledge of truth, or more than knowledge, the consciousness of truth? Plutarch, after describing the primitive religions and their horrors, wonders if it would not have been better not to have had any religion than to worship the gods in such impious ways. And Vico, after quoting him, observes that surely when he wrote this he must have lost sight of the fact that from such atrocious superstitions luminous civilisation developed in due time, whereas nothing ever grew on atheism. There is no such thing as historical or social life without a religion, full either of tenderness or ferocity, rational or fantastic, but in any case providing man with the idea, more or less clear, more or less noble, that there is something which transcends the individual, in which all individuals weld into one, and which provides man’s morality with the object of his moral will, and thereby means Law.

In his understanding of the period in which man had been a brute, Vico was much nearer to the Bible than the Protestants had been. He accepted as a matter of fact the distinction between the Gentiles and the Jews, as implying the radical privation of any supernatural help bestowed on the former, and he thought of them as being in a pre-moral state, a state that was indeed devoid of morality, but full of moral tendencies, and from which mankind emerged through the realisation of those tendencies. Such realisation is not on the other hand the effect of a Divine grace, it is NATURAL, due merely to the development of the natural light granted to every man that comes to life. Man’s free will is weak and between passions and virtue might succumb if he was not upheld in his efforts by Providence. For Vico makes an absolute distinction between the grace of God and Providence. The grace of God, in which he firmly believed, is an extraordinary help granted to some men and particularly to the Chosen People; Providence is the ordinary help of God granted to all men as their birthright so to speak, as inherent in their nature as men.

Vico stood henceforth as the best antidote to the dangerous side of Anglo-French speculation. The philosophy of Mind had yet to be developed, but it was sufficiently asserted to claim man and all his activities as belonging to spiritual reality, to historical reality. Thus what Vico called Providence provided the ground for a more human, that is to say, more spiritual, idea of liberty, just when the men who were going to popularise Illuminism were preparing for their task. But his was a far more difficult idea, and less palatable as well, for his liberty springing as it does from Religion, hand in hand with morality, is a double-faced divinity. One never can, according to such a conception of life, grasp liberty without law, or enjoy a right without satisfying the corresponding duty.

Passing from religion to law, Vico in his objective understanding of history rejects a justice that should consist in measuring everything, for says he, first this would not be the philosophy but the mathematics of law; then it is the duty of men to share the common goods in such a way as to preserve the differences required by the differences of deserts, and thus to maintain that which is the only true equality of men. The natural law, according to him, was born at first under the form of just desires, just violences; then it took the form of moral fables; ultimately it was asserted in all its rationality and generosity. Away goes with this the abstract and anti-historic notion of an eternal and natural law, superior to positive laws. Vico goes on bowing to the jus naturale philosophorum but instead of putting it high above history, he looks for it exclusively where it can be found—that is to say in history, making it thus historical.

After accepting Plato’s idea of an eternal Republic, Vico breaks it to pieces to come out with a quite different conception of his own. The only really eternal Republic is the eternal process of history in all the variety and succession of its modes of realisation, from the man-brute down to Plato. Every single truth has its practical manifestation, its practical consequences; to think in this or that way implies living and acting in this or that way. The divorce of theory and practice resulting from the difficulties that arose a century before between scientific men and their churches is here absolutely annulled.

Vico calls men to realise that in the human world of history, the only one real to man, since it is the work of man as Nature is the work of God, thought and action go hand in hand. Theories bring inevitably a modification of practical life. Man does not exist, at least not to our knowledge, as an individual devoid of a social and therefore historical frame. Art is the moment in which man moves in a self-centred world, abstracting from the universal, and is therefore the subjective moment of liberty, the moment of intuition. Religion is the moment in which man stands full of awe in front of the world which is his not-self, abstracting from the individual he is, and is therefore the objective moment of Law, the one link from the intuitive to the rational realisation of life as morality and, therefore, society. History, however, never shows the one apart from the other, as nature never shows one of two correlative terms absolutely apart from the other. Light or darkness may be prevalent, both are always there. Liberty and law have alternately held their sway over our modern, that is to say Christian world, and their synthesis may now be called into being by the grandsons of Vico. His theories could not be understood by the general public before practical life had shown the soundness of his criticism of the theories that were fostering the abstract individualism and liberty against which Fascism is reacting; and reacting through not a retrograde process, but through a forward movement which shall enforce liberty as the correlative term of law, and allow religion to discharge its function as the essential basis of man’s spiritual life and not as an instrument of politics.

CHAPTER VI ILLUMINISM IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE

The characteristic that distinguishes English Illuminism is the reasonable adaptation of its theories to practical circumstances; this is best illustrated in the greatest man it has produced. Locke was for the preservation of faith in Revelation and tried to make it agree with reason. It was as impossible for him as for Thomas Aquinas to think that God’s world should mean anything in contradiction with the natural light He has granted to man. He sees in the Scriptures the revelation of truths which would have been out of reach of man’s natural powers, limited as they were to sense knowledge. Such a view was characteristic of the fair-mindedness of the practical and political man, but it held a snare in the sanction thus granted to the most unphilosophical and unhistorical notion of Deism and natural religion. The fact is that the most energetic champion of Subjectivism after Descartes could not realise at all the religious position of man towards the Divinity which is assertive of objectivism. His ethics take human felicity as the higher aim of theoretical and practical activity, which is not original at all, but has the merit of being quite consistent with his subjective assertions. In his contribution to pedagogy the commonsense of the practical man comes to temper the theoretical individualism which inspired him and he thus keeps generally on a level above the theory afterwards formulated by Rousseau. But nowhere does this inconsistency of his practical application with his main system appear as clearly as in his work on the State.

William of Orange stands to Locke as Cromwell does to Hobbes, not that the king can be compared to the dictator, but his reign beheld the inauguration of the political system which is the greatest gift of England to mankind; and this practical manifestation of the political genius of that country shows by its coincidence with its greatest theoretical contribution to philosophy how little practice and theory are severed in actual life, that is to say in history. Yet Locke was enforcing the distinction with all his might to avoid the inconsistency already noticed between the theoretical and practical aspects of his work. As Hobbes had done before him in England, and Grotius in Holland, he saw the basis of the State in a contract, but he was the first (although Algernon Sydney had prepared public opinion for such an idea) to assert that the collective will was embodied not in any single person, but in the majority of the people. There he was perfectly consistent with his gnoseology, the multiplicity of the data of sense knowledge destroyed the unity of the metaphysical conception. Only legislation, however, fell to the share of the majority; the executive and foreign policy were to be entrusted to hereditary monarchs. The exigencies of the new notions of liberty and equality of man were tempered by the practical necessity of insuring the continuity and unity of national development, which was the last assertion of historical necessities. Hence politics went on gradually losing touch with historical consciousness.

Yet the necessity under which Locke and the best thinkers of English Illuminism were of tempering their theories through practical considerations was symptomatic of the fundamental weakness of the whole system. Theories springing from a synthetic conception of life do not want readjusting to practical life, do not want a period of assimilation under their theoretical form and another of elaboration into practical systems. The best example of this is the simultaneous production of Gentile’s most important theoretical work known to the English-speaking scholars as the Pure Act and of its practical offspring the Fondamenti della Filosofia del Diritto, both of 1916, followed at five years’ distance by their political application by the Fascists who had, so to speak, no direct knowledge of such works; to say nothing of his pedagogy, the application of which the author has had the opportunity of carrying out with her own pupils. But then such theories are conceived without abstracting one minute from practical life, and their basis is history and society as they are in real life. Of Fascism the same may be said; its idealism does not prevent it from being the most thoroughly practical and realistic of movements.

The philosophy of the seventeenth century had, however, made this consistency of theory and practice an obviously unrealisable chimera for the men of the eighteenth century, and whilst French rationalism brought people to think of rational theories as capable of radically reforming society, English empiricism held that ideas may work very well in theory and very badly in practice. Such a distinction was the source of great difficulties. If thought and action were the terms of an irreductible dualism it was natural to say

Meliora video; deteriora sequor.

Indeed, the moral imperative of Kant could not be reached on such ground and in the literature and philosophy of the eighteenth century moral treatises and dissertations take such a place that there is no doubt as to the men of the period realising the difficulties of the problem. They had separated religion from philosophy, religion from law and politics, and as they had the jus naturale they must have natural morals. A sense of right and wrong due to the natural light granted to man by God was to be found in Scholasticism as the natural tendency to sociability already mentioned. It could, in fact, be traced to the Stoic school and even farther back. But this did not make things easier to the people who held positive religions to be useless, whilst on the other hand they were ready to admit their value as establishments providing for the moral care of the lower classes. In their abstention from history, the only use of churches they could see was to curb the egoistical tendencies of man in the classes which were denied the enlightenment that could provide educated people with principles of discrimination between right and wrong. They could not realise that this function of the churches is merely a consequence of the position of the believer towards his divinity, that such a position brings man to realise what is to him not-self, thereby giving to the moral law the objectivity which alone can free it from the constant alteration of selfish motives, and bestow the stability necessary to its efficiency.

A natural sense of right and wrong was acknowledged in order to find in Man himself an explanation of his moral life. This original predisposition, that was to ensure autonomy to man’s higher life having been admitted, the psychological mentality of the time did not hesitate to make it a matter of psychology to determine which was the organ of this natural function of man. Whilst such researches proceeded, Cumberland having already illustrated the Ciceronian doctrine of the lex naturae as the natural reaction of altruistic tendencies against the selfish motives of Hobbes’s theory, the Earl of Shaftesbury, a friend of Locke, contributed the best of all these theories. He claimed the autonomy of morals, freeing it no less from physiological than from theological fetters. For the intrinsic value of morals is equally destroyed whether you make good deeds dependent of the fear of punishment and hope of reward or on the mechanism of nature. Goodness, righteousness, and virtue are real of themselves, a reality; they can be conceived and understood; they cannot be inferred from anything else. Why he did not work out so original a notion is easily understood; the philosophy of his time afforded him little more than psychology, and his personal gifts and breeding fitted him rather for æsthetics than for so arduous a task; hence it was perfectly natural that his idea should have developed into a real eudemonism. The nature of virtue is to him harmony, he thus blends the conclusions of materialism and of the doctrine which upheld the social instinct of man; the supremacy was to be ascribed to the egoistic motives by the school of Hobbes, to the sense of altruism by the others. To Shaftesbury each of these schools held half of the truth and only the combination of both tendencies could produce in their harmony real morality. Neither lax nor ascetic morals must result from the harmonious combination of the two opposites. Such a theory implies the perfection of the individual as the ultimate end of all intellectual life; it throws light on the nobler side of Illuminism, and if it is not theoretically sound it is the blending of all that was best in a movement that was generous in its optimism.

The variety of the grounds which were ascribed to morality is sufficient to betray the original flaw of such philosophy. Even Lord Shaftesbury had been unfaithful to Locke, mainly owing to his own strong sense of the æsthetic, but also owing to the unsuitability of the great philosopher’s doctrine, as it was understood then, as a basis for a theory of ethics. Thus Utilitarianism came into being. “The best for the greatest number,” was to remain as the ideal or ideology of Illuminism; and the best in question became more and more the material best, and less and less the moral best. After the natural sense of sociability which had taken the place of the will of God at the basis of the state, after the natural sense of right and wrong which had been elaborated as a substitute for the Decalogue, very little was left of the tabula rasa idea of man’s soul upheld by Locke. All these natural senses were anterior to experience and when natural religion was added to them it was understood that all these innate faculties were constitutive of rationalness in practical life; and Nature was gradually opposed to history as rational to irrational.

This natural religiousness had had its first English assertor in Herbert of Cherbury. To him man’s soul is far from being tabula rasa; it is a book that opens naturally and displays its hidden treasure. And John Toland, in his efforts to retrieve free thinking from the interference of the State, determines the limitation of the state’s jurisdiction, to which the citizen’s actions must be subject but never his opinions; whilst he limited his request for tolerance for the benefit of that class of men whose social position enabled them to afford a sufficient culture to make a harmless use of such liberty. Then the negativeness of any liberal government was obvious, since in Toland’s notion of it it became like a simple set of brakes destined to act when the machine goes wrong and to keep the serene impossibility of an impeccable butler until order and peace are actually broken. Thus again the radical difference between educated and uneducated which had been fostered by the cultural movement of Humanism and Renaissance, assumed a religious and political significance which made the new idea of class a greater impediment to the self-making man than that of the feudal hierarchy which had always admitted the admission to knighthood of a valorous man whatever his condition. This cautious exclusion of the people from the new intellectual religion was a condemnation; the rational cult proved an artificial theory and could have no vitality. Yet it would be a perversion of facts to present it as due to the personal feeling of Toland or any other man. It was the consequence both of the predominance of Rational Reality in the systems then in honour, and of the traditional Humanism according to which there was the same difference between a scholar and a non-scholar as there had been once between the citizen and the non-citizen of the old pagan world. But the main feature is the anti-historical vision of life that made men incapable of suspecting first the social origin of the religious notions which had flourished from pre-historic time, then the impossibility of introducing social partitions in the life of the Mind. Of religion they only saw its practical organisation in the different churches; of the need from which the pre-Christian forms of religion had sprung they had not the slightest suspicion.

The rough and obscure notion they had of the Middle Ages was too often identified with religion and they had no possibility of realising the part played by the Church to keep the objectivity of a religious creed as a counterpoise to the anarchy-breeding self-assertion of man. Christianity had revealed the profound humanity, that is to say spirituality, of the world, and Man, feeling himself to be the main agent of God in the world, realised his subjective importance. Only God had remained above him—only the notion of God’s presence could enforce objective law. It is not the Decalogue and the Church’s precepts which are meant here. It is the recognition, essential to religion, of a reality existing besides his own self that compels man to realise such objectivity of law. St. Paul laid an emphatic stress on the fact. But the caritas sibi is that which raises the subject, raises us and enlarges our capacity until we are capable of taking in the object, all that we are not, the world in short; what modern philosophy calls the not-self. When man does realise this objectivity, this distinction of the world from him, his attitude is that of respect not only towards God but towards the world. Thus we have the religiousness, that Fascism is striving to enforce until it will pervade the whole of life, practical and theoretical life, since it does not part them. This notion of religiousness, however, is ultra-modern, and could not have been conceived in pre-Kantian days, in pre-Hegelian, pre-Gentilian days. It is not mediæval by any means, and Illuminism is one of the stages through which Mind has had to pass, to realise a subject capable of taking in the object without going back to Pagan objectivism. For this objective world must at all cost be such through subjective objectivity. If it is to remain a Christian world in its very objectivity it must remain a human world, the world of man, the world of the subject whose religious recognition of his not-self is a supreme self-assertion.

Before the end of the century Reason fell from her enthroned glory, and sentiment was glorified as the purest activity of man’s soul. So that the century of light ended by raising the less rational motives of man’s life to semi-divine honours. This reaction was due to the unilateral dogmatism assumed by philosophy in France owing to the political circumstances of the country.

With a democratic sense that is partly due to the democratic origin of the French monarchy, which to be absolute, had to rest on the support of the people, the thinkers of France did not dream of keeping their conclusions to themselves. What they considered true should be public. Perhaps, in their feeling that it is the duty of the man of science to communicate to the people the result of his studies, they hid the most beautiful motive of the whole century—one that is not brought out by the historians of philosophy—the imperative exigency of Truth that impels divulgation. It is frequently remarked that they were the real champions of Illuminism inasmuch as they claimed the right of the people to be enlightened; the idea of Truth which prompted such a claim is the loftiest part of their contribution to philosophy.

The French mathematical mentality, after having exported Descartes, had imported Newton, and as Hobbes and, before him, Bacon, had come to France to find the yeast they needed to develop their own theories, so now men like Voltaire and Rousseau made their leaven out of Locke’s and Hume’s doctrines and studied the political institutions of England. In France, from Montaigne, from Pascal, men had learned the cautious prudence, and the self-dedication to the object of faith that are nearly antithetic and usually never appear together Montaigne’s influence is due to the fact that he reflects the state of mind of all the western world, tired of religious struggles and the emphatic expressions of dogmatism on all sides; it was due also to his charming style and the purity of his French mind. So French is he, so much a man of the West, that his charm is felt alike by French and Anglo-Saxon minds. One cannot resist him. In his analytic scepticism he is so logically methodic, that his style is like the colour of a piece of antique bronze, inviting the onlooker to touch it whilst its lines, its lights and shadows reveal the powerful mind of the sculptor. Montaigne through his very respect for the Church helped to ruin the religious spirit of his countrymen, and the genius of Pascal could not have made up for it, even if its mysticism and its repugnance for the Moi haissable had not been tinged as they were by the self-assertive spirit of his time. Both mysticism and scepticism take their practical form in Pierre Bayle.

Few men ever enjoyed the gift of sympathy with which he was endowed because few men are so superlatively sincere. He does not renounce religion, he is indeed quite a religious man, but his religion is negative on account of his mysticism as a believer and of his scepticism as a scientist. To him the Thomist and Lockian point of view of the super-rationality of the Revelation is an illusion. In perfect sincerity he could say credo quia absurdum, and like Tertullian proclaim definitely the divorce of science from religion, of rationality from irrationality.

His next move was to divorce morality from religion. Men could be excellent in Pagan times and they can be wicked in Christian times, yet Christianity is superior to Paganism; obviously religious opinions are independent of the morality of men.

He then passed to politics. His idea of religion was far too high to allow him to consider it as an auxiliary of the state’s police as English theorists had often done, and since it had nothing to do with morals the Church could have nothing to do with man as a citizen. This evidently made not only for tolerance, but for indifference on the part of the state in all religious matters.

Expelled from science, morality, and politics, religion was thus as good as expelled from life by a mystic simply because he had the sincerity and coherency to be practically consistent with the theoretical ground of the philosophy of the time.

Voltaire overshadows the century as Louis XIV had done the preceding one. His greatness does not depend on his contribution to philosophy, but on his immense efficiency as a propagandist of the conclusions reached by philosophy. Like all the great and best men of Illuminism he was absorbed in the moral and religious problem and had most obviously assimilated the best English theories. Less sincere than Bayle, he took up his sceptical conclusions, without, however, sharing his mysticism, and in the prose of the greatest French writer of the century, he set to work to popularise the destructive criticisms of all dogmas. Voltaire may have been convinced that dogmas were harmful, but as he did not bring forward anything to put in their stead his influence was negative. What it would have been without the constant recall to present experience of English empiricism cannot be gauged; as it was, present experience was rather an incentive to dissolve and destroy the whole social order than to build; and towards past experiences there could be no recall whatsoever, or rather there was only one and an original one, but it could not be heard.

To Voltaire history offered no direct lesson. His belief in the supremacy of reason could only bring him to despise the incoherency of historical facts through which very often the rationality of history displays itself. His clearness of sight limited his outlook to the present, and this focussing of life was an abstraction which prevented him from realising the historical forces at play in the political and social circumstances of his country. His religiousness is strongly tinged with utilitarianism, as he held, like many Englishmen had done, that the purpose of Churches was to act as moral check to the lower class. All these fathers of Liberalism and Radicalism are more aristocrats than democrats. Their worship of culture and reason makes for political tyranny and a social system of caste as distinct as that of the Indians. Hence it evoked a reaction, and this found its spokesman in Jean Jacques Rousseau. People were tired of dry reason and its negativeness, they felt parched and longed for affirmative works; he came out, a man of genius, devoid of the mathematical and classical grounding of the others; entirely led by feelings and, alternately, by the most generous and lowest impulses he was a democrat.

Until Rousseau appeared the writers on political matters had been either followers of the jus naturalism or of the constitutionalist schools.

In Rousseau two streams mingle their waters, for he is an artist as well as the most original thinker France had after Bayle. As an artist he is the spokesman of his generation, and it is as such that his contemporaries took to him as they did in spite of his disreputable personal life. As a thinker, although the statement may sound very daring, he ought to share with Berkeley and Hume the honour of being considered as one who made the way for Kant. His were mere intuitions; they could not be more as he had no scientific or philosophic training. But as Professor Saitta has pointed out, his reaction against rationalism transcends very much what was grasped by most of his readers and even sometimes by recent critics. His passionate claim for the important part played by sentiment in the life of man and by all irrational forces, original though it is, is the impulsive reaction of an artist, whereas by the time he wrote, Italy had already had for some quarter of a century the works of a man who had claimed, with a speculative genius far superior to his, the acknowledgment of all the different activities of mind. And Giambattista Vico had been a jurist and an historian as well as a philosopher. So that his notion of Man was capable of taking in, not only his rational activity, or his sense relation to the exterior world, or his sentimental life, or his religious position, as rationalism, empiricism, sensism and mysticism had respectively done; but the whole range of man’s spiritual manifestations. Therefore, is it that Rousseau’s greatest intuitions are those that could not affect Italy in a speculative way. The man who was to pick them up was a German whose genius had all the robustness of his country at that stage, coming as it was to the fore after having fed on the intellectual production of Italy, France and England.

What affected Italian thought most was the weakest part of Rousseau. The idea to which he owed his immediate fame is that nature made man happy and good, but that society had made him bad and unhappy. He was thereby contradicting rationalism and empiricism, he was flinging his glove in the face of all Illuminism. And he could do it not on philosophical ground, but merely calling upon life to justify his assertion. That age of light was an age of corruption and misery. The lack of religion had brought in its trail the lack of seriousness; the abstract subjectivism of a century had made of each man a self-centred world. Liberty was, so to speak, constantly cried for out of tune since it could not be accompanied by the assertion of law. For all that the Jus-naturalists and Constitutionalists had admitted the liberty of men to make a contract and give themselves the form of government which suited them best; they had denied the citizens the liberty of declaring such contract lapsed when it had ceased to satisfy them. As this was due to their training in a philosophy that considered the world as a machine, Rousseau had no reason to follow them nor to see in the state a mechanism subject to laws as inalterable as those of nature. Therefore he realised the real essence of liberty as inalienable. It could be transferred, not alienated. Strong in this sense of liberty Man must fight all the unnatural edifice of society which, according to him, is the cause of all immorality through the inequalities of men it begets.

Once men accepted the notion of Rousseau—that Nature had made man good and society had made him bad—it became not only permissible but morally right to destroy the order of things which had been evolved by society and to invest man, every single man, with the consciousness of his sovereignty. Of the two tendencies which have been compared to two streams, one was the naturalistic individualism rooted in the thoughts of his contemporaries and which he expressed merely as an artist, as the greatest artist of the time; the other was the idealistic universalism which was personal to him as a thinker, but that was bound to remain a source of fleeting intuitions on account of his incapacity to raise it to speculative consciousness. He roused a powerful echo where men like Voltaire and the Encyclopædists failed to command attention; and even his art of writing could not have provided him with so great a fascination if most of the ideas and feelings he expressed had not been a living reality throbbing in the hearts of his readers, even of the lowest classes. It was the lowest side of his doctrines that spread amongst the people, the part which appealed to envy and hatred, two very powerful levers indeed, but of which Rousseau might not have chosen to make use had he been able to choose. His insistence on the distinction between the will of all and the general will tells eloquently of the intuition he had of transcendental self and of the ethic essence of the state; but all this comes to nought on account of his lacking a theoretical ground for such a notion, and he is obliged to fall back on the intellectual stock of his time; in spite of his genius, in spite of all sentimental intuition of a universal will, he is thrown back on a will which is merely the sum, the numerical sum, of the single wills. Thus it is that he gave us the system which enthrones quantity while it aims at quality.

His first principle that men are made all alike by Nature, happy and good, is, as most of the philosophy against which he was the first to react with the power of genius, perfectly anti-historical and, therefore, abstract. When it had received at the hands of Kant and Hegel a systematic and speculative treatment this principle was bound to have as necessary consequences Socialism and Communism. If the nature of man, thus hypothetically accepted, is as abstract and as unreal as an algebraical axiom, it was bound to lead to political and economic hypothesis just as abstract and as unreal. Since history shows us in the class struggles and individual competitions the main spring of progress, the condition sine qua non of all social life, it is impossible even to dream of the elimination of such class and individual differences. Life would cease to be dynamic, cease to be a moving process, it would be static, everything being brought to a standstill, which is death.

To look at real life, to turn away from atomistic individualism towards a subjectivism capable of comprehending all the objective world in order to realise finally what should be the Christian world which must be Liberty and Law, another century and a half was needed. Now we can look back to Rousseau and detect in him the obscure foreshadowing of the school of thought which was to redeem in the face of reason the irrational activities of Mind, not as the handmaids of reason but in their full autonomy and necessity. Mind is no longer pure reason, and philosophy does not exclude but imply religion and art, the two moments of law and liberty, although such distinction of activities does not destroy the vital unity of man’s conscience. Mankind is no longer the arithmetical sum of X beings reduced to the same type and value, it transcends the individual and can be realised as well in the smaller cell of society which is the family as in the greater cell which is the country. Consequently, for the abstract man of Rousseau a Man can be now substituted who never is Man as Man, but Man in his full reality as son, as brother, as husband, as father, as worker, as citizen, as believer, as artist.

To make this possible, however, a long process was required, the first stage being Rousseau and the application of his theories even in their negativity. For to reach Fascism, which really puts men on the same level, it was necessary to break through class distinctions as they existed then, that is to say as static partitions meant to stay as they were. It was necessary so that power should slip from the hands of people, who considered it as their natural birthright, into the hands of those who are actually fit to hold it. Again such a revolution was necessary so that a day should come in which neither the aristocracy nor the proletariat could think of eliminating politically each other.

And, as the philosophy of Italy proclaims, ethical reality is neither of the subject in itself, nor of the object, but of their actual relation; so Fascism does not allow class elimination but protects class competition as the best means of raising the spiritual and economical standard of the nation.

CHAPTER VII THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IN ITALY

It is not surprising that German philosophy found an adoptive country in Italy. Most of the speculative notions of Kant were formulated fourteen years before Kant was born in Vico’s De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia, and Hegel’s most original conception, forty-five years before Stuttgart had the honour of producing him, was acted upon in the Scienza Nova. Even if Vico had never been realised in his totality, people in Italy knew more or less that such ideas as those of the German philosophers were in the air and found them easier in Kant than in Vico since the former had brought them to systematic cogency. Vico, independent of any knowledge of Leibniz’s theories, had come to share several of his ideas merely because they faced the same problems and both had practical and synthetic speculative minds. Also Vico with his hostility for rationalism, his sympathy for empiricism and his criticism of both found himself very nearly in what was to be Kant’s position. His preparation, which was more legal and historical and archæological than Kant’s, closed the way to a clear and precise view; but it was superior in one sense inasmuch as that preparation provided him with a richer, a fuller view of reality, thus allowing him to foreshadow Hegel as well as Kant.

The greatest man who reacted against Rationalism and Empiricism in politics as factors of a sterilising Utilitarianism, reducing man to the most abject egoism, Mazzini, is an intuitive genius like Rousseau and like him a son of the eighteenth century, rising above his generation. But whilst the one showed little or no sense of history the other saw it as it really is, animated by ideas and created by the will of men. One writer had had a very great influence on the great Genoese, who never knew even as much as his name, Vincenzo Cuoco. He was what might be called a writer of political pedagogy, as the problems he faced are always practical and usually political. The education of which he was an ardent apostle was the civic education of the inhabitants of Italy; and like all men whose aim is practical he sets his ideal in life and not in science. He is the pedagogue of the first dawn of Italy’s national consciousness at the time of Napoleon. Born in 1770 in the Molise he died in Naples in 1823. Among the Neapolitan Jacobins he stood as an exception in the lack of enthusiasm with which he viewed the French Revolution. He had assimilated all the ideas of the French writers, but he was a student of all social, political and economical problems; so that it is no wonder that he should have come, through the influence of F. M. Pagano, to respect Vico and look askance at the new systems. His fundamental principle was that human reality is historical reality, that is to say the reality which is not, but for ever becomes, and goes on becoming and developing not through extrinsic causes, but through its own activity, intrinsic and autonomous; that such activity transcends the single activities and their historical determination; its source is identified by him as Divine Providence. Such was the principle from which moved all Vico’s philosophy, and though Cuoco could not even suspect the speculative value of it, he realised it practically, and it was to him a luminous beacon, more than sufficient to enable him to take his bearings in the political world and make out the right way to rid Italy of her troubles.

Thus he could not be satisfied with a French Constitution because Vico had taught that “governments must be drawn in conformity with the nature of the men who are to be governed....” The French Revolution seemed to him drawn for ideal men who did not exist. According to him a constitution must conform to the nature of the people and be produced by the people, through the few men who are fit to interpret its historical will and realise its particular requirements. Although Mussolini may not have read Cuoco’s articles it is greatly to his praise that he should so perfectly conform to the ideas of this first follower of Vico. Not that this fact is considered here as a coincidence—if Mussolini is the genius of Italy which he is hailed to be, it is but natural that he should realise in its practical application a theory which is so perfectly Italian. A constitution cannot be “good for every nation.” If it is supposed to be, it means it is good for nobody. Besides it must not be drawn like an abstract theory established once for all according to a philosophical notion of what is supposed to be the nature of man, and as such eternal; it is bound to be always temporary and historically determined, according to the vices and qualities, according to the ways and the history of the people.

In this brief exposition of what were Vincenzo Cuoco’s most important ideas on politics, we meet constantly with sentences that might be met from the pen or on the lips of Mussolini. Censure can do little to reform the moral and political life of man. Feasts and premiums are better means; and it is more likely that governments will improve the country by pulling the people to the good rather than by pushing them away from the bad. This is pure Fascism. The government must not act as a brake, but rather as a propeller or a helm. Public virtue must be nursed, not by diminishing the avidity of the lower classes, but by showing them the way to satisfy it. The love of work is the one means of regenerating the lower classes. A good government must, therefore, destroy the callings that are unproductive; and to accomplish this the best way is to make it impossible for people to get as much money out of them as out of the productive callings. “Work,” writes Cuoco, just as a Fascist minister might, “will make us independent of the nations upon which we depend.” The Love of Man for his country must spring from self respect; and this, indeed, is as far as one could go more than a hundred years ago towards the identification of state and citizen, which is the basis of Fascism, and has been formulated in its speculative form by Giovanni Gentile in 1916. If a nation was to be created out of the patchwork Italy presented on the map it could only be through the education of the people, for the unification could only be attained by awakening national consciousness in the single consciences. Cuoco called this the formation of an Italian public spirit.

When this follower of Vico in 1802 reached Milan, capital of the Cisalpine Republic, Melzi realised his value and entrusted him with the foundation and direction of the first Giornale d’Italia. Four articles written in 1804 are probably those read and meditated upon by Mazzini and are of such a quality that they could be written to-day. To the men who did not see the point in so much zeal for the formation of public spirit he answers by a most coherent demonstration that political reality is spiritual reality. The spiritual building up of the citizen is the real conquest of political autonomy. To achieve such a task it was necessary to foster the love of agriculture, and of the militia—compare Mussolini—and to replace self-love and personal vanity with the love of the country and national pride. The “City” to Cuoco is not one thing and the citizens another, the prosperity of the former depends on the moral and practical efficiency of the latter. He was full of contempt for the dreamers who thought that everything may be expected from the laws. But the men who roused him to real passion were those who argued that the Army, the navy, commerce, were cares that should be left to the great nations, to England and France for instance. To this he objected that those countries had been small, smaller than the Italian states, and had grown through the steadiness and efficiency of their national will. Such efficiency and steadiness of national will he called “public spirit.” The regions whose inhabitants did not think of being or becoming a great country, would never be nations. For the small states there was one law; either to become great or perish. It may be timely to observe that this dependence of a country’s greatness on the conscience and the will of its citizens was asserted by Mussolini when he was still the head of the Socialist party in Forli in 1911.

Again in 1804, reviewing in his Giornale d’Italia a philosophical work, Cuoco expresses the desire to see philosophy flourishing in Italy, for the development of speculative thought was in close relation with the political state of society, and it was important that a nation should not be theoretically sterile. “It is a long time since we received it,” he writes, “first from France with the works of Descartes, then from England with those of Locke. The periods of political greatness of each nation always coincide with those of its philosophical greatness. The first strength is Mind; weak is the arm of those who lack it or think they do.” Doubtless this is pointing the way to Gentile’s affirmation of the impossibility of having the theoretical and practical activities of mind separate from each other just as the last quotation was pointing to Mussolini’s policy of “heroicising” the people of his country through giving them an heroic will and a national conscience.

No wonder that Mazzini should have realised what Rousseau could never see. The ethical nature of what goes under the name of “Nation” is a Mazzinian concept. When Hegel speculatively proclaimed this it had been already intuitively conceived, artistically expressed and religiously observed by the men to whom Mazzini’s ardent faith was like an electric current. The Mazzinian articles of faith were few, and had never been theoretically worked out. This helped their adoption by people who would never have grasped the import of a huge system. Whilst Rosmini and Gioberti were read by the few, Mazzini was on the lips and throbbed in the hearts of the many, so that the war he waged against materialism and individualism was effective. His mystic feeling spreads in young hearts as easily now as it did then. Lads take to sacrifice far more easily than men of a more mature age and Mazzini’s declarations all proclaimed self-sacrifice, self-effacement, even his idea of liberty.

At the very time in which the Anglo-French idea of political reality was introduced in Italy, to rouse the country once more into life with the magic word liberty, this young man, a poet, an inspired prophet, was ready with a new meaning for that word. According to Mazzini the individual is merely the representation we have of our own self when we look at it as one amongst many and see it limited to the short span of time between the birth and the death of its body, whereas the self which can conceive of liberty, and therefore realise it, is the self everyone of us feels when in the silent recess of Mind we have a right to claim, a feeling to express, an intuition to cast into sound or colour, and a faith through which we link ourselves to the political, family, artistic and religious reality that has given us the consciousness of such right or aroused in us such family, artistic, or religious sense. To him political liberty could only mean for Italians the liberty of shaking off foreign rule and creating the nation. It was not and could not be the liberty to attend one’s private affairs as one wished, for this last meaning of the word had been elaborated in his country through Humanism and the Renaissance, and it was not only obsolete, but was the cause of Italy’s corruption and decay.

The idea of empirical and transcendental self, implicit in this conception of liberty, came to produce the second article of faith in the Mazzinian doctrine. If man were to try creating a new natural kingdom and add it to the animal, vegetable and mineral offered to us by Nature, his attempt would be a vain endeavour. But political reality does not belong to the world of Nature but to the world of Mind, in which man is a Creator, and where nothing is really impossible to him that believeth. This most Christian view of the point frees the nation from natural contingencies and frees the citizens besides from the lazy excuse that man must accept the political and economic position of his country as determined by Nature. Thereby it forbids any idea of its being static. No one can find at his birth his nation ready-made for him; everyone must work to the best of his moral, intellectual, and bodily power to create it; since the moment the citizens cease to work at this, their political task, the country starts ceasing to be a nation and becomes a region whilst the citizens become inhabitants. The nation is not a geographical unit, it is not even history empirically understood, but it is history as far as history is process, development, programme, mission and sacrifice; in a word, human life.

In Mazzini’s insistency on the point one detects the desire to react against the negative side of the mentality which has been traced as a consequence of Humanism. The Italians had identified themselves with ancient Rome, and this had brought them to think of their national glory and history as a ready-made affair. In their country they saw the Temple of the past, and exploited their ruins morally as well as financially. Whilst the other countries of the western world had been fighting and labouring, for the conquest of their political and financial status, Italy had sat on her past glories and proudly wrapping herself in Cicero’s or Cæsar’s toga had taken tips from the whole world. Mazzini had grasped enough of Vico’s notion of man as creator of the historical world to bring to the fore, in the average man’s mind, the idea that was the import of all the historical philosophy of Italy and, therefore, the positive side of his country’s historical mentality.

Neither Cuoco nor Mazzini were philosophers, their task was, so to speak, to realise philosophy, to introduce other people’s theories into life, and this they did uncommonly well both of them, although Mazzini played in the Risorgimento so eminent a part that his gigantic historical figure overshadows that of Cuoco. But Cuoco, through his Giornale d’Italia and his subsequent writings had the greatest influence on the best poets and writers of the period, to begin with on Foscolo and Manzoni. For the first time since Savonarola’s days intellectual life in Italy beheld a spontaneous revival of Catholic thinking, and this, strong enough since it counted men as great as Gioberti, Rosmini and Manzoni, was not due to the initiative of the Church. It was spontaneous, intellectually so, and Vico may be considered as its forerunner. What was paramount was perhaps the moral system of Rosmini. He started out to fight Kant’s moral system as unfit for use on account of the subjective ground of the Kantian imperative, and meaning to fight it he developed it and found new ground for it. The moral, pedagogic and even pedantic spirit which spread in the intellectual classes of Italy during the last century has indeed a good deal in common with the moral movement which had accompanied in Germany the development of a national conscience. We have in both cases a reaction against the foreign ways of the aristocracy—but with a great difference since in Italy the aristocracy had very little of the feudal character and was so open to intellectual life that it responded to the call sooner and better than any other class—preluding a reaction against the atomistic political life of the country. To pass from Rosmini and Gioberti to Croce and Gentile, the thinkers who herald the coming of Italy as a modern nation, as much was needed as to pass from Leibniz, living in the days in which German intellectual life and national conscience could be at best the object of a mystical worship, to Kant’s time, when Europe realised that there were actually such things as German metaphysics and a German nation.

In both cases the philosophy has to be, and is, synthetic, for in both cases the exigency that opens life with the pungency of need, of deficiency, of negativeness, is the thirst for national assertion and foreign recognition. Obviously in both cases also it is the assimilation of foreign contributions that has enabled the scholars to realise the negative position of their respective countries.

After the unfortunate war of ’48–’49, Gioberti went into exile and philosophy was overtaken according to Prof. G. de Ruggiero by an invincible drowsiness. Drowsy, obscure, unconscious of their own positions, are epithets which can be justly bestowed on the thinkers of the time, for eclecticism prevails without the historical culture that alone can make it fertile. And of the most eminent philosopher of the time the best that can be said is that he did his best to lull to sleep his countrymen’s newborn consciousness. Among the Positivists, inferior followers of foreign tendencies, several remain first-rate historians, thanks to a few sentences of Vico kept like the seeds in Noah’s ark, and sufficient to prevent them from falling into a materialist metaphysic which would have been a sterilising curse to the newborn nation. Materialism was far more logical and coherent in France when the historians simply excluded the ideologies which were left hovering through the historical works—for instance, of as good an historian as Villari; but this was not unconscious. After the efforts which they had made to get rid of pseudo-idealistic metaphysic they did not want to entangle themselves in another metaphysic, were it to be materialist. On the other hand, they did not want, or were not able, to make theirs the position of English positivists. Ardigo, for instance, although he is the best Italian thinker that upheld Positivism, cannot be compared to a Spencer or a Mill.

But speculative voices are never silenced, although they may be hushed, and the spiritual exigencies which had produced Gioberti and Rosmini were slowly working themselves out in other minds. Neo-Kantianism gave birth in Italy to a series of historical studies in the field of philosophy, so that it became impossible for any decent professor to misrepresent the development of speculative thought as these two great exponents of Italy’s mind had done. Whilst Neo-Kantians achieve little theoretically, they do so much historically that one may say that the works of such men as Fiorentino, Tocco, and others prepared the ground for Spaventa and de Sanctis who in their turn have given us Croce and Gentile. All read German, English and French, besides Latin and Greek; so that we can say that the speculative theories of the whole western world were studied in their schools; and that, like the child who becomes self-conscious as he gradually realises the worth and importance of the people surrounding him, Italy has grown to speculative self-consciousness through the close study of universal speculation and of the history of her national political life, national art, national literature, national speculative theories, until her historians came to the idea of history as the co-ordination of all the different branches.

Bertrando Spaventa taught in the university of Napoli, and, a staunch Hegelian, he criticised Hegel in the same creative way as Vico had criticised Descartes and Locke. He developed and continued the intuition which is at the basis of all Hegelian system as Hegel could not have done, inasmuch as Spaventa realises Hegel’s logic in its historical position, that is to say as the fulfilment of Descartes’ claim. Thinking means causing to the French mind, whilst to Hegel it is not merely causing it is creating. But Gioberti had not only expressed the Hegelian intuition; he had completed it; thinking is creating, but to him proving also is creating. And Spaventa, rich with all the history of speculative thought, realised Hegel’s logic and prepared it to enter life, thanks to Gioberti’s contribution, although Gioberti himself had been far from realising it. The speculative possibilities of the Cartesian Cogito are exploited to the full; whereas they had been left aside by Hegel. Vico’s factum et verum convertuntur, pragmatically understood by the Positivists, is here realised as a process. But, as is the wont of Italian thinkers, the original part of his intuition remains at an intuitive stage and has to wait for the speculative genius of Gentile to work it out and modify it into the fieri et verum convertuntur which is the adequate expression of the historical dialectic.

Hegel’s most original and fecund motive was thus nearing its theoretical realisation at the hands of Spaventa, whilst Vico’s conception of life was practically illustrated by Francesco de Sanctis, whose important part in the shaping out of Italy’s present mentality cannot be overstated. The process of dissolution of Hegel’s and Vico’s theories was accomplished and the passage from dissolution to re-elaboration was done by de Sanctis. In his Storia della letteratura Italiana the philosophy of mind receives more than a perfect illustration, an æsthetic rendering that makes the most abstruse notion of dialectic a tangible object of meditation to the average reader. Æsthetic rendering is here used as excluding anything like theoretic exposition; and such æsthetic quality is insured by the great critic’s own gifts as an artist. His reading and philosophic preparation are incredible, not to be gauged; they are, however, assimilated by him very much in the way in which a great artist assimilates his technique and intellectual experience.

Doubtless Michelangelo, moving to sketch the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or the last panel of it, is carrying in himself the experience, the artistic experience of eighteen centuries. Yet he must have forgotten it all, at least as objective knowledge, to find it in himself flesh of his flesh, marrow of his bones, soul of his soul; so that he could move freely as an artist, in all the spontaneity and, therefore, liberty of creation. The character of his work is personal, so highly personal that it includes all the determinations which single out Buonarroti as a man of that land, of that religion and even of that particular moment of his religion, of that time, of such and such temperament and inclination, and singles out the whole of his production as belonging to that particular moment of the Italian Renaissance. The greater is the artist’s personality, the better he discharges his twofold function of microcosm and macrocosm of his world. It is an illusion of the nineteenth century to believe that personality in art makes for atomistic individualism. Just as it is an absurd error of the people who judge Mussolini and Fascism to believe that they have grown without roots. They would then be superposed to history, superfluous, unnecessary; whereas the great artist and the great politician belong to life, and in fact are historical life working itself out to expression or political realisation.

The Storia della letteratura Italiana, like an immense relief, unfurls the development of the life of Mind in Italy from the dawn of the Italian mentality right up to the days of the critic. For de Sanctis, Art is Mind individualising itself through the senses in the transparency of intuition; Art in other words, is life reaching the luminosity of form. This blending, this perfectly intimate welding of reason and sense, of universal and particular is Art. It is, therefore, individuality, not individuality taken as it is too often—as the contrary of universality, but as its realisation in the particular. For this relation of the universal and particular is constitutive of art, which is, therefore, neither individual arbitrariness, nor the mere reflection of life in the artist’s fancy, but life itself coming through its own development to intuitive transparency. Life cannot be a matter of which art would be the form; and religion, politics, science as elements of life are not alien to art or indifferent to it. None of this element can exist without art, and history leaves no doubt on the point—each new religion, new political system, new scientific progress is not to be parted from the artistic production of the time.

De Sanctis, like a medical student, follows step by step the corruption of Italy, gradually growing with the decay of religious and political consciousness, above all when Humanism, having reached its climax in the works of Poliziano, stopped providing a sincere feeling to the scholars who ceased to worship antiquity some fifty years after him. De Sanctis was a man of the Risorgimento he had laboured and suffered for the independence of his country, hoped and despaired of the future greatness of his countrymen. He was aware that in spite of Machiavelli, of Vico, of Alfieri, of Cuoco, of Mazzini, the greatest number of his countrymen had, so to speak, no souls. Knowing as he did that religion was the basis of all relation and the first cause of all real social progress, seeing in it the keystone of man’s recognition of the exterior world, he refrained in all his books from attacking not only religion, but the Church as well; although he was a staunch anti-clerical in politics until Rome was taken from the Pope. He drew such a graph of the development of Italy’s mind that from Dante’s onwards it shows all the forces of corruption preparing the series of invasions that made of his countrymen’s shame a byword, and the forces of reconstruction from Machiavelli onward. To the reading public he presented it as a mirror, in the transparency of Art showing the whole spiritual life of the people with its political consequences. He bade them realise that corruption had been the cause of foreign rule and tyranny, not foreign rule and tyranny the cause of corruption.

This was new indeed, too new for a generation which had achieved the political independence of the country with the belief that bad government and foreign rule were the cause of the people’s corruption. No wonder, therefore, that de Sanctis’ masterpiece, published in 1871, should have been practically laid aside for more than twenty-five years awaiting Croce and Gentile to take it up. The public that responded to their call when it came was exactly the one which de Sanctis would have wished to reach. The boys took de Sanctis up, and what is more curious they took him as their idea-provider; inasmuch as the big volumes, which could not be included in the schools’ syllabus, were turned to in the hour of need, when they had to write essays and found themselves short of ideas. No method of popularising and assimilation could match this, for the ideas thus borrowed by the young had to be exposed, proved and illustrated. The school lads and university men who enlisted as volunteers in the war, were mostly spiritual sons of de Sanctis, one of them being Mussolini, who told the author that he was a worshipper of that work. In the same way the idea of Croce and Gentile have spread even among people unfit to realise their theoretical import. Never, however, could they spread like those of de Sanctis, but he is so much so completely their spiritual father that most of their speculative notions can be found as intuitions in de Sanctis’ pages. There the boys get so familiar with them that when they come to a Gentilian theory, and the teacher takes the trouble to introduce to them the fundamental intuition, they grasp it at once as a matter of course and wonder why the teacher should think it so difficult to explain, for instance, the intimate relation of thought and action, the necessity of religion and the like.

CHAPTER VIII BENEDETTO CROCE

Benedetto Croce’s opposition to Mussolini’s government is so well known that to include him among the precursors of Fascism may seem strange. But here Fascism is considered as the political expression of the intellectual or rather spiritual forces which are bringing Italy to the fore and determining the growth of the Italian mind. Hence the necessity of including Croce in this account of the pedigree of the tendencies which have been realised in politics by Benito Mussolini. This naturally does not imply that all the ideas acted upon by Fascists are to be found in the theories of Croce, but that certain needs of Italian minds, more or less consciously expressed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had been formulated and worked out by Croce, who had either found them in de Sanctis or had developed them on lines suggested to him by that great critic.

One of the points on which this penetrating and far seeing man had most emphatically insisted was that the vague idealism which swept over some European artistic centres during the last century was alien to the Italian mind. The assertions that he met with from many quarters as to the impossibility of the artist’s realising his ideal was treated by him as exotic nonsense. An ineffable poem is not a poem at all, a harmony defying expression is not a harmony at all, a vision transcending colours and lines, shadow and light is not a vision at all. Italians had to be reminded of the necessity of being realistic; their greatness as well as the greatness of ancient Rome had always rested upon a sound sense of the relation between means and end. He described the Italian genius as a disposition rather to identify the end and means than to fit the end to the means. He enforced this claim, not only for artistic creation, but for historical researches or theoretical speculation as well. He had evidently realised the short-comings of men such as Gioberti and Rosmini. It was much better to start on particular problems with an adequate preparation, and develop them into speculative theories, than to start with an indifferent preparation on vital questions and come to inadequate conclusions.

Now if there could be in history such a thing as good luck, the friendship of Croce and Gentile, their flourishing at the same time, could be considered the most wonderful piece of good luck for Italy. By luck, however, we usually mean a certain combination of circumstances escaping our attention. Moreover, their being contemporaries of Mussolini, the one man fit to create a political world capable of bringing into living reality their most difficult conceptions—very often, in fact generally, without knowing anything of their theories—is a sufficient proof that there is no possibility here of invoking luck as an explanation of the concomitance of Croce’s and Gentile’s activity with that of Mussolini. It is much nearer to historical truth to state that Italy has reached one of those stages of her history in which she has always yielded a rich harvest of men of genius, speculative, political or artistic.

Any and every practical activity, says Croce, implies theoretical activity, since no action can be performed without knowledge. This however is not to be separated from the action; for the two forms of the spirit are distinct, not separate. Thus in any action, while the practical activity is explicit, the theoretical activity which is knowledge is implicit; in fact they are concomitant. The man of thought can no more think than walk without using his will; the importance of the will is just as great for the thinker or the artist as it is for the so-called practical man. But it is only through the wearing of the Pragmatist’s blinkers that one can be brought to see in the will the root of truth.

A distinction is, however, made by Croce between the knowledge required for a practical act, such as the disposing of a regiment of infantry for a review, and that of the philosopher or the artist. The one is an intuition, the other is a conception, and to make the ground of a volition you want both, for the combination is historical knowledge. There, obviously enough, Croce reveals himself a true son of Machiavelli, Vico, and de Sanctis. The Florentine secretary had been hinting as much when he insisted on the necessity of our knowing the actual truth about things (since human things are always moving), in order to govern in harmony with the times.

This historical knowledge is not an idea that will surprise after all that has been said about the constant tendency of Italy’s best thinkers to test the practicability of any concept on the concrete ground of history. To them, the natural realm of action being history, it was manifest that any knowledge or theory is liable to be acted upon only in so far as it is historical; and such knowledge becomes, under the name of condition of fact, the ground of Croce’s conception of the necessity and liberty of man’s will.

To the generally accepted ideas of means and end Croce was to bring a most radical change. First he proceeds to prove that what is known as the end, the purpose, or the aim is not to be distinguished from the will. When I wash my hands my purpose is obviously that I should have them clean; but then it is equally obvious that this means that I want them to be clean. Turning to the means, the washing of my hands in order to have them clean, supposes a condition of fact which means the availableness of soap and water, for I could not will to wash my hands if I had neither soap nor water. These material means are known by me to be available when I make up my mind to wash my hands in order to get them clean. So that purpose and means are all included in my act of will, which is nothing more nor less than the actual act of washing my hands. If the situation of fact did not include soap and water I could at best wish to wash them, never will to do so.

What is consequently to be rejected once for all is the idea of a definite plan that would not allow the taking into consideration of the continual variation of the means. Thus the men of the Risorgimento had to vary their purpose and to reconsider the means to attain it after and before each campaign, having to take as their actual will only that the realisation of which was in harmony with the then actual situation of fact. So that we can say that their real will, the will which created modern Italy, was exclusively that general will which was individualised in their many splendid deeds of heroism or renunciations of their former plans or ideals; these had been formed without the historical knowledge which alone could make them realise what was the situation of fact.

Now a good deal of admiration is usually bestowed on people of good-will and of pure intentions. Here, however, the very existence of such good-will, such pure intentions, is denied. The longing of the man who wishes he could alter the present state of public affairs in his country is not at all to be considered as a will to do so. For he does not will to do so as long as he thinks it is impossible. A wish of this kind has no value either economically or morally. Whatever the circumstances, if he knows them well, he will know that there must be at least one thing that he can do instead of deprecatingly shaking his head as he reads the paper by the fire. When Machiavelli tried to form a Tuscan Militia to free Florence from her trouble, he did not succeed; but when he left his boisterous and rustic friends over their wine and retired to the small library of his modest villa, he did the only civic duty that was left to him to perform; he plunged his lancet into the corrupted body of his country and prepared the way for the coming centuries. Criticism, that is to say negative criticism, when the country is in danger, or suggestion as to the ideal thing to be done, unless they are part of a plan of reform so in keeping with facts that it can be immediately acted upon, are merely pretending to be acts of will. I cannot keep by my fireside or lean at my window deploring the things which are going on and pretend that “I will to alter them.”

Yet it is often said that we can will the good in the abstract, while unable to will it in the concrete, and this means simply that we may have good intentions and yet behave badly. The answer to this has been already given; it may be well, however, to state it once more. Willing in the abstract, willing without acting accordingly, is equivalent to not-willing, since, according to Croce, a volition implies a situation historically determined from which it arises as an act equally determined and concrete.

The importance assigned in this theory to the knowledge of the actual situation of fact, and consequently to the historical judgment, invests with the greatest importance the possibility of error. Such possibility is, however, excluded by Croce from the theoretical realm of mind; for lack of knowledge, ignorance, is not error. It belongs to practical activity and we cannot err unwillingly. All errors are due to an interference of the will with our apprehension of reality; and as any volition is an assertion of our liberty we are responsible for it. Everyone knows that immoderate passions or illegitimate interests lead insidiously into error; that we err in order to be quick and finish, or to obtain for ourselves undeserved repose—that we err by acquiescence in old ideas, that is to say, in order not to allow ourselves to be disturbed in our repose, and to prolong it unduly, and so on. The possibility of erring in good faith is disposed of in this way by rejecting the possibility of an error not due to our own will. It thus becomes perfectly legitimate and wise to use practical measures to induce those who err to correct themselves, punishing them when this can be of any use. Croce’s defence of the Holy Inquisition, be it of the old Romans against the Christians, of Catholics against heretics, or of Protestants against Catholics must not be found surprising. It is the logical conclusion of his view on the responsibility for error; and he is not to be found shirking the consequences of his system any more than the Fascists. For it is hardly necessary to point out that their abhorrence of all vagueness and indefiniteness is bound to determine responsibilities in practical activity and consequences in theoretical activity. The necessity of having a single man responsible for anyone of the public services has been mostly realised in Anglo-Saxon countries; but where bureaucracy flourishes it is usually a Board, a Committee, in a word an anonymous body which takes decisions and steps for which nobody in particular is responsible. Therefore, to any complaint the answer must be “we thought; the committee held; it was generally supposed; the majority came to the conclusion ... that ...” In such case nobody stands responsible; and each member of the Committee, or Board, throws on the others all the weight of the unhappy step or decision.

With Croce’s theories such vagueness is destroyed at its root. The will of the people who take a step is their taking of the step, and both action and volition spring from their historical knowledge of the actual situation of fact. Such knowledge is therefore part of the action. The responsibility thus includes the assuming of the information necessary to the taking of the decision. Naturally this has always been the case, where man’s responsibility is really of importance. On board a ship, for instance, the officer in command has always known that his responsibility includes this knowledge. Ignorance of fact is the greatest fault whenever a decision has to be taken, whether the importance of the decision be great or small. This however, must not be held to imply the judging of an action according to its success. Historical judgments are not to be passed on the result of past actions; historical judgment must be passed on acts, not on facts.

The distinction between action and event is by Croce emphasised as being grounded on the distinction between the act of one man and the act of the whole; and one might say that the action depends on the will of man and the event on the will of God. According to this theory the action of the man who shoots at Mussolini is the manifestation of his will, and his failure is the manifestation of God’s will; because the will of the whole, including the will of the chauffeur, who is driving Mussolini’s car, the wills of the people crowding the edge of the street, the wills of the guards told off to keep the road clear for the car and the wills of the Fascists thronging to catch a glimpse of their idol, which are also volition-actions, determine the event; and this is usually termed Providence, or the rationality of history. Thus when foreigners, even those who do not approve of Mussolini’s government, and Italians, either religiously or coldly, repeat at each new attempt, “the hand of God is on his head,” the conviction which they express is perfectly in keeping with Croce’s view, and is by no means equivalent to fatalism.

To express this relation of action to event in a less mystical form it ought to be said that the volition-action of any single man is his contribution to the volitions of the whole universe. On this point Gentile produced another theory some eight or ten years after Croce had given a systematic form to this doctrine which had been implicit in all his former works. This double contribution of Italy to the conception of conduct, if not an entirely new idea of liberty, provides two very original views on that problem, one of those which have always tormented humanity.

The first great step made by Croce was the consequences of his having denied any possible distinction between the volition and the action; for thus he was able to assert the oneness of liberty. We must no longer speak of a liberty of will and a liberty of action.

He quotes here as an example the case of a paralytic gentleman carried into the square in his servant’s arms during the revolt of 1542 and found after the tumult on the top of a church-tower. The terror had aroused in him such a will that he had climbed there. As a rule the paralytic does not will because he knows he cannot, what he can do at the most is to wish that he was in a different condition. It is quite inexact to say that he who is threatened and yields to the threat is deprived of his freedom of action. The old formula coacti tamen volunt says as much. Whenever people have been clamouring for greater freedom of action, what they really wanted was to have the conditions of fact altered. “Everyone knows,” says Croce,⁠[6] “that no vultus instantis tyranni can extinguish the freedom of the soul; no ruler, be he ever so strong and violent, can prevent a rebellion, or when all else fails, a noble death outwardly affirming the freedom within.”

Every step onward in Croce’s theories is admirably consequent upon the statements that have preceded it. As man in his theoretical activity apprehends the world and by knowing it makes it his, so through practical activity he collaborates in its creation. The second being grounded in the first, a will independent of knowing is unthinkable. The blind will is not will; the true will has eyes.⁠[7] Without this it would be difficult to see how actions could be both free and necessary. Indeed one can say that up to these Italian theories all the contentions on liberty were waged between two tendencies, one leading to the ever-recurrent conclusions of Determinism, the other to the assertion of free will. To detect that actions are at once free and determined it was necessary that knowledge of the actual conditions of fact should be considered as the essential ground of any volition.

Volition thus is not considered as arising in the void, but in a definite situation, under definite historical conditions, in relation to an event which cannot be eliminated. When the situation changes the act of will changes. This amounts to saying that it is necessitated by the situation in which it arises. But it also means that such act of will is free. For it does not make one with the situation, neither does it produce a duplicate of it. The volition-action produces something different, that is, something new; therefore it is initiative, creation, an act of freedom. Were it not so, a volition would not be an act of will and reality would not change through the action of men, it would not become, would not grow upon itself.

“This consciousness of necessity and liberty inseparably united is found in all men of action, in all political geniuses, who are never inert or reckless: they feel themselves at once bound and not bound; they always conform to facts, but always rise above them. The fatuous, on the other hand, oscillate between the passive acceptance of the given situation and the sterile attempt to overleap it, that is, to leap over their own shadow. They are consequently now inert, now rash. They, therefore, do not fix or conclude anything, they do not act; or, if they do, it is always according to what of the actual situation they have understood, and what of initiative they have displayed.”⁠[8]

If Benedetto Croce had been a prophet he could not have better contrasted Mussolini’s way of proceeding, always surrounded by experts and never the slave of data, with the way in which former governments proceeded in Italy, when ministers thought that by the grace of the people they had received some sort of super-natural light to discharge their duty. No practical activity could have been as vigorous as the theoretical reaction of Croce and Gentile against the futility, the abstractness, the pessimism, and above all the materialism that were slowly but surely destroying the third Italy! But their joint philosophical campaign, however brilliant it may have been, could not arouse the working masses to the new gospel of civic life. This had to be undertaken by a man of faith, endowed with the gifts that make the statesman and the popular leader. But the fact that three such men are contemporaries and that without previous arrangement the theoretical activity of the two former coincide with the practical activity of the third is a good argument on behalf of Croce’s theory of the freedom and necessity of man’s action. The situation of fact is the same for all three, and they therefore arise for the same purpose although they endeavour to realise it through very different means.

Since man’s action, his volition-action, is free, the question whether an individual has or has not been free to do what he has done is equivalent to asking if he has done it or not. Thus again the character of responsibility is emphasised in all human actions. Croce objects very strongly to the way in which criminal lawyers put a poor madman on a level with the guilty, for he who is mad is partially dead. Practical good and evil can be now identified with will and anti-will, with freedom and anti-freedom, with the reality of the will and its unreality. For evil, when real, does not exist save in the good, which opposes and conquers it; it is, therefore, merely the negative of good, and it would be impossible to find an act of will distinctly willing that which is evil as such. A man may want to intoxicate himself with alcohol, but in the act of so doing he expects the warmth that will spread in his limbs and the delightful oblivion that will free him from all cares. Hence that which he expects from drink is good. Such negativity of evil has always been current among theologians even before the days of Thomas Aquinas; but the theory deduced by Croce from it is quite original.

All practical activity is either economic, or both economic and moral. The economic activity is that which wills and effects only what corresponds to the condition of fact in which a man finds himself; the ethical activity, although it corresponds to these conditions, is that which transcends them.

Therefore, any act of the individual’s will is economic, but to be moral it must be an act of the universal will. The former is judged by the greater or less coherence of the action in itself, the other by its greater or less coherence in respect to the universal end which transcends the individual. No act can be moral without being economic, for however universal it may be in its meaning my action must be mine in order to be something concrete and individually determined. In practical life we do not meet with morality as a universal, but always with a determinate moral volition. On the other hand, it is easy to see that our actions always obey a rational law, even when moral law is suppressed; so that, when every inclination that transcends the individual has been set aside, it is necessary to will this or that coherently, not to oscillate between two or more volitions at the same time. And if we succeed in really obtaining our desire, if, while the moral consciousness is for the moment suspended within us, we abandon ourselves to the execution of a project of vengeance and execute a masterpiece of ability, even when, in this case, human society does not approve, we for our part feel satisfied, at least so long as the suspension of the moral consciousness lasts; for we have done what we wanted to do, we have tasted, though but for a little while, the pleasure of the gods.

The economic form of activity we easily recognise as individual, hedonistic, utilitarian, and economic; the moral form is just as easily identified. To be moral, an action must first satisfy us as individuals occupying a definite point of time and space, and must also satisfy in us the transcendental being who defies time and space. Croce having made this distinction absolutely clear, could face the question concerning the nature of law.

To him law is a volitional act concerning a class of actions. Therefore, where the volitional element or the element of class is wanting, there cannot be law. Obviously, however, the law is abstract; the act of will is, according to Croce, always of the individual, and the element of class is sufficient to deprive the law of anything like concrete life, be it an individual law or a social law. Since the freedom of human actions is logically bound up with his notion of practical activity, it is impossible to object that there is an essential difference between the programme of life laid down by any single man for himself, the programme of action laid down by any association, and the laws laid down by the state, the first being merely a matter of acceptance and the last relying on compulsion. Indeed, it is obvious enough that by compulsion one usually means the alternative of complying with the law or facing a penalty. Such alternative is the ground of a choice, and the citizen usually chooses, but always freely chooses, to obey the law rather than endure the penalty. The fact that some men do rebel is sufficient to prove that freedom cannot be abolished by compulsion.

Then what is the essential difference between individual and social law? An attempt is usually made to differentiate them by saying that the latter has emanated from and is sustained by a supreme power. But where is the seat of this supreme power? Surely not in anything like a super-individual, dominating individuals. It is only to be found in the individuals themselves. And in this case its power and value correspond with the power of the individuals who compose it; it is the law of a circle empirically considered to be larger and stronger, but whose will is law in so far as the individuals composing it spontaneously conform to such a will, because they recognise the convenience of doing so. Monarchs who believed themselves to be all-powerful, have realised at certain moments that their power rested in a universal consensus of opinion, failing which their power vanished, or was reduced to a gesture of solitary command, not far from being ridiculous.

Going back to the definition of laws as volitional acts concerning classes of actions, Croce shows that the so-called laws of nature or of grammar are no laws at all, because the act of will is lacking in them. Neither is the jurist, quietly elaborating rules from cases, a legislator. His excogitations will have to wait for a man of will, who alone, and sword in hand, will endow them with the character of law. On the other hand the so-called moral law, economic law, are no laws at all inasmuch as they lack the element of class! “Will the good,” “Will the true,” “Will the useful,” are all statements in which a volition is expressed, but then the object of such will is invariably the universal, whereas laws have for object something general; a class, not a concept. In short moral law, logical law, or economic law ought to be called principles instead of laws.

The character of laws being general and not universal, is perfectly in keeping with their mutability; since actual conditions are constantly changing. It is necessary to add new laws to the old, to retouch these or to abolish them altogether. Philosophically speaking, there is but one cause of changing the laws, viz., the will that in its liberty produces the new law in new conditions of fact. The question whether we should recognise Conservatism or Revolution as the fundamental concept of practical life, does not concern Croce in the least. For him every Conservative is also Revolutionary, since he is always obliged to adapt to the new facts the law that he wishes to preserve. Every Revolutionary is also a Conservative, since he is obliged to start from certain laws that he preserves, at any rate provisionally, that he may change others and substitute for them new laws, which he in his turn intends to preserve. Cavour, to use Croce’s own example, was a Conservative in respect of certain problems, and revolutionary in respect of others, to such a degree that he seemed to the Mazzinians to be a Conservative and to the clericals and legitimists a Revolutionary.

The demand for an eternal code, a universal, rational, or natural justice, in its claim to fix the transitory, is in open contradiction with the historical and, therefore, contingent character of laws. Were Natural Law permitted to enforce itself once for all we should witness, with the formation and application of the eternal code, the cessation ipso facto of Development, the end of History, the death of Life and the dissolution of Reality. Such an end of the world cannot take place because, if it is possible to develop theories which are in contradiction to life, it is quite impossible to make them concrete and actual: God, that is to say Reality, does not allow this to be done. Of such theories the best examples are surely Absolute Monarchy and Communism. Both as an ideal present themselves as an absolute, a perfect form of government and, therefore, would be, if realised, the end of life. Anything perfect in the way of political institutions would put a stop to any further progress since the new needs spring from the actual short-comings of present institutions, and from the new needs the new projects which will bring about new institutions.

The most intelligent Communists know nowadays that the historical necessities which have brought their party to the fore were economic and that that which has been done in passing, such as the improvement of working-class conditions, both materially and intellectually, is indeed what should have been its real aim. But Providence permits men to act upon their own motives; and well it may, since the will of the whole can always have the last word. Communists have done all they that have in the belief that it was done only in the process of getting nearer to their ultimate aim, the abolition of classes. The kings of France who, little by little, destroyed the Feudal order, and by so doing brought about the unification of France and the rise of the bourgeoisie, may have thought that they were merely working for the establishment of an absolute monarchy. Their real work, that is to say the task which was laid out for them by Providence, was to create a great nation and destroy Feudalism in France through the necessity in which they found themselves of getting the support of the middle and lower class in order to destroy the petty sovereignties of the great vassals. But when this was achieved the absoluteness in their conception of monarchy was bound to be the cause of its fall. For had it been possible it would have meant the cessation of development. A form of government if it is absolute is perfect, and it is the imperfection which calls for further development. Now Communism makes the same mistake when aiming at bringing about so perfect a society that it would not even need a government. If this came to be it would be the end of the world.

But this is anticipating Mussolini’s realisation of the fact, and it may be sufficient to state that Croce’s ideas, stated here together, were scattered explicitly in several essays published between 1897 and 1900, and collected for the first time in 1907 while they were implicitly pervading the whole of his own writings and those of innumerable journalists as well as running on the lips of the Professors who taught in upper schools and universities.

On this point of the essential mutability of laws and institutions, Croce lays a great stress. “We often meet in history with projects of new laws which are said to be better than the old, or good by comparison with those judged more or less bad, the new ones being proposed as natural or rational justice, whilst the old ones are rejected as unnatural or irrational, just as passionate erotic temperaments, uninstructed by the experience of their past, believe with the utmost seriousness that their new love will be constant and eternal. Such ‘Natural laws’ are historical, are transitory, like all others. All men know how, in certain times, and places, religious tolerance, freedom of trade, private property, constitutional monarchy, have been proclaimed eternal, and in other times and places the extirpation of unbelievers, commercial protection, communism, the republic and anarchy.”⁠[9]

From what has been said it might be taken that Croce has been merely destroying the religious reverence of his countrymen for the actual apparel of law. Nothing can be farther from truth. His contention was that laws being manifestations of man’s will must change with the changes in facts. The ideas of the eighteenth or nineteenth century can no longer be a living reality. The reality which he denies to the law itself he recognises as belonging to the single act done under the law, that is to say to the execution of the law. The indubitable truth, as to the necessity of acting in each case according to historical necessities, has induced people at different times and in different places, to proclaim the sheer uselessness of law. Benedetto Croce is most definitely against such theories. According to him, the best arguments to be used against them can be drawn from history itself, and if they do not rigorously demonstrate the necessity of laws they show well enough that such necessity has been generally felt in all lands and in all times. The necessity of laws, ordinances, justice, and the state, appears at all points of human history. Better a bad government than no government at all; and those who declaim against laws can well do so at their ease, for the law surrounds, protects, and preserves their life for them.

CHAPTER IX GIOVANNI GENTILE

The difference between the philosophies of the two greatest thinkers now flourishing in Italy is due to the natures of their minds. Croce always starts from a distinct problem, from a particular question, and rises to speculative heights partly through the vigour of his own genius and partly through his constant intercourse with Gentile, to whom any particular problem always presents itself from the outset sub quadam specie Æternitatis. On the other hand, Gentile starting thus, is led to pursue his researches on the central problem into all its particular and practical applications by a sense of reality so strong that he has been thought to recall Thomas Aquinas, by his vast erudition not only in the history of philosophy, but in the whole historical world. Yet, even apart from this, and from his special interest in all the problems of Law and pedagogy, the influence of Benedetto Croce always compels Gentile to keep in touch with actual reality. Their mutual criticism is perhaps the best example in philosophical history of the creative power of the critic. For except in one instance—where Croce insists upon seeing in his friend’s Actual Idealism the latest form of mysticism—the critic is always continuing the work which he is engaged in reviewing and revealing to the author the germs of truth that lie as yet undeveloped in his theory.

The import of Croce’s work is certainly more easily grasped than Gentile’s ideas as they present themselves in his theoretical world. Many Italians are acting on these ideas of Gentile’s who would be unable to formulate them; and that is the most remarkable thing about them. He became a professor at the age of twenty-one, exactly thirty years ago, and as Professor Wildon Carr truly says in his introduction to his own translation of Gentile’s Pure Act—which will be here constantly quoted—he has become famous not only on account of his historical and philosophical writings, but also by the number and fervour of the disciples he has attracted. A born teacher, he loves teaching, and in teaching has acquired much of his knowledge of mind. He never divorces theory from the concrete ground of life; and when he addresses people between 17 and 60 years of age he is constantly forcing them to test in their own actual life the truth of what he is saying.

He strongly dislikes the taking of notes; for he does not want the students to repeat his own words on the day of their examination. The lectures are only meant to help them to take their bearings, to enlighten them; they must read their set books by themselves and interpret them by their own wits. His words must be taken as an invitation to think out their own problems for themselves; he wants to spur them on, not to solve problems for them. Thousands of schoolmasters are actually following his pedagogy which so perfectly meets the requirements of the present generation, that it is admirably acted upon in the remotest villages and by people whose philosophy is that of commonsense and good-will. Gentile has produced not only a system of philosophy, but determined a current of spiritual life which partakes both of theory and practice—blending them perfectly.

Just as Bruno, Bacon and Descartes opened the era of subjectivism, individualism and liberty, so now Gentile opens a new era which is a synthesis of law and liberty since he postulates the individual as the relation of the empirical self to the transcendental self, since his subjectivism becomes concrete and capable of realising the object. This sounds somewhat abstruse and a few illustrations of the point at issue may be useful.

Fuel is not fire, and in order to warm myself, fire is the thing I need. But the fuel is necessary to the fire. The fire, indeed, is only so far as it consumes the fuel. Both are necessary; yet it is the fire which makes the fuel; since the coal, wood, or charcoal is fuel merely because the fire can destroy it as such. But the fire does not exist before it starts to consume the fuel. Now in knowledge the thing man knows is not knowing, it is known; therefore, the principle of knowledge is man. But can man know, in the absence of that which he knows? Obviously not. Shall we then go back to the old dualism and take man and the world, the subject and the object, as standing in opposition again? No; a thing is an object of knowledge because the subject postulates it as such and is therefore only in the act by which the subject knows it. The one single source of spiritual reality is man; but he realises the world only in so far as he realises himself as a knowing subject. And just as fire is fire as long as it destroys the fuel; so man is really man, a spiritual being, a subject as long as he acts as such. The point is often explained by practical illustration to quite tiny children, to whom no one would try to state it, as I have just done, theoretically.

Master: Why do you come to school?

Pupil: Because my mother sent me (—or—to learn to read and write.)

Master: If you come because your mother sent you, that is quite right; but until you see for yourself why you should come to school, you will get very little good out of it.

Pupil: But since I have got to come, I want to learn.

Master: And what do you suppose all the others come for?

Pupil: Why, sir, to learn.

Master: And tell me, what must I do if you are all to learn?

Pupil: I suppose you must teach us.

Master: Well now, what is a school?

Pupil: This is a school.

Master: You mean the building?

Pupil: Yes, of course.

Master: Don’t you think I could teach and you could learn in a field?

Pupil: Well, I suppose we could.

Master: Would that be a school? (No answer). It would. You see the building and the writing over the door have nothing to do with it. We make the school. For if to-morrow the authorities were to send us to a barn and put some poor people here——

Pupil (interrupting): Sir, I know, it would be a poorhouse.

Master: And the barn where we went?

Pupil: It would be the school.

Master: Right. Then who makes the school?

Pupil: The teacher and the pupils.

Master: Right. But let us go on talking about the same case. The authorities say that this place must be given up to house poor old people. Now I think that a lot of strong boys like you could carry the benches, blackboard and so on to the barn.

Pupil: Of course we could.

Master: And I might say to you: “Come this afternoon, all of you, and let us do it.”

Pupil: Very well, we would come, at least those who live near.

Master: And we would start teacher and pupils together, carrying the things.

Pupil: Yes, sir.

Master: Would that be a school?

Pupil: Of course not, sir.

Master: Then it is not enough to have pupils and teacher together to make a school.

Pupil: No, sir.

Master: What is missing, then?

Pupil: Why, sir, we carry benches and things, and that is not a school.

Master: Well, what exactly is a school?

Pupil: ... I don’t know.

Master: I’ll tell you. It is my teaching and your learning that makes a school. Do you see?

Pupil: Oh, yes.

Master: But if it is actual teaching and learning that make a school, what happens if the master is a bad master and does not actually teach anything?

Pupil: Well ... I suppose it is not a real school ...

Master: It is not a school at all.

Pupil: I see.

Master: Now if a boy does not want to learn at all——

Pupil: He is a bad pupil.

Master: He is not a pupil at all, as long as he persists in not learning.

Pupil: Of course he is not.

Master: And if he makes a noise and prevents the others from learning, what then?

Pupil: He oughtn’t, sir.

Master: I know he oughtn’t. But if he does not see that he oughtn’t, and goes on doing it, what happens?

Pupil: He prevents the others from learning and the master from teaching.

Master: Very good, and what is the result for the school, if, as you see, it is the actual teaching and learning which makes the school?

Pupil: It is just as before, when the Master was bad, it stops being a school.

Master: Now supposing you didn’t mind being punished rather than keep still, could you start singing or jumping about just to be funny?

Pupil: Well, no, not even if I did not mind being sent out, I couldn’t.

Master: Do you know why?

Pupil: Because I should spoil your teaching and their learning.

Master: And you would destroy the school.

In such a discussion, which may occupy several days or weeks, the child has obviously learnt some rules of life derived from highly speculative notions. The reality of any relation depends on two acts directed towards a common aim; therefore, the rights of the two parties are dependent upon their actual efficiency in the pursuit of the common aim. A master who does not teach must be dismissed; a pupil who does not learn loses the right of being a pupil. Similarly, if a landowner allows the ground to lie waste, he is not discharging his duties as a landowner and his rights to his property are not actual. This stands in complete contrast with the “Rights of Man” which could assert man’s liberty to use his property as he chose, the state only calling upon its citizens to pay taxes—and fight in war, because the state was understood as something external to the citizens. The relation between employer and employed is clearly parallel to that between master and pupil; in it the common aim is to realise as much profit as possible out of the enterprise. As soon as one of the parties diminishes the productivity of the enterprise, he forfeits his right to damage himself, the other party and the commonwealth. The state, though having no direct shares in the profit is enriched or impoverished according to the increased or decreased productivity of private enterprises.

In this is stated for the first time since Christ preached and lived the Gospel, the true equality of men that had been asserted in it. So thoroughly does Christianity realise that rights are correlative to duties, that before spiritual citizenship can be bestowed on a child in most Christian churches sponsors are required to take a pledge in its name, and upon its coming to adult state the young Christian must confirm that pledge and acknowledge the duties on which its rights depend.⁠[10] This is the reason why the Roman Catholic Church is at once democratic and hierarchical. A shepherd can become Pope, an Emperor can be deprived of his spiritual citizenship. The view of citizenship as a birthright is a relic of Paganism when slavery might be the predestined fate of some and citizenship of others. Political reality finally becomes spiritual reality; man is a citizen exactly in so far as he realises the state, through the act of consciousness by which, transcending the empirical element in his own will, he postulates such a will in religious objectivity, thereby making it law.

The little boy, in realising that his purpose in going to school is to learn, transcends everything in his will that is merely individual or private. His will ceases to be subjective, it becomes greater than the little boy, it becomes school life, it becomes objective and transcending the little boy, it is to him Law in all the majesty and imperativeness of the term. Again, boys become members of a football team because they want to play and eventually win matches. They want this freely and this choice, together with their individual skill in the game, produces the team as a unit for the purposes of play. But the team once formed, the captain chosen for his fitness to command the team in such a way as to increase its efficiency, and each member called to perform the part in which he can best serve the team’s interest, the act of will by which each member in perfect liberty wants to win a match transcends itself, become the team’s will, and as such, objective, sacred, inviolable law. The instances in which members of a team, disregarding the orders of the captain (in whom the eleven wills in all their liberty fuse into one and become law), play to show off their personal skill illustrate clearly enough by their effect on the score, the inviolableness of such collective will.

To realise the full force of this relation between liberty and law, the state and the citizen, is not easy, if one looks for it exclusively in Gentile’s philosophy of law; but his pedagogy makes it far easier and his lectures perfectly easy. There is something religious about it which pervades the whole of his philosophy as it pervades Fascism.

The child is brought to realise what he is by looking at the various societies which co-operate in making him what he is. Being asked what he would say, If somebody meeting him in America asked him what he was and who he was, what would he say? He usually answers to such a question that he would say: “I am so-and-so,” but he is then asked: “What does that mean?” which brings the child to realise that the meaning of his name is that he is the son of his father and mother, he is what he is first of all as belonging to his particular family. Again: “I am so-and-so” conveys but little to a perfect stranger. What would he say next. “I am an Italian.” Very well, and “what kind of man in Italy?”... The child here usually pauses in great perplexity. It takes some time before he comes to speak of a possible profession and of his religion; and for this last point it is necessary to point out to him that there are several religions. Once he has got there, however, he realises so fully all that is implied in this kind of definition that one can hardly help being astonished by the readiness with which children or older boys work out Gentile’s ideas. The author has had the opportunity of noting how easily children grasped the true nature of their relation to family, country, religion, and school, and the fact that what they were depended on their consciousness of being a living member of such societies. The child thus acquires a religious attitude towards them. He realises the sacred character of the family, as based solely upon his own moral realisation of his relation to the members of his family. The family blood running in his veins, he is told has nothing to do with that relation. His father is his father in the spiritual way which alone binds them together, because he calls him his son and acknowledges paternal relationship to him with all the duties and claims that it involves. Gradually he comes to realise that he draws all his importance—his reality—from his conscious relation to the societies to which he belongs and which together make up the not-self; and that such societies are merely the various consciousness of single members transcending their poor, limited, empirical little selves and calling into existence their better and greater, transcendental selves. Man as a thing-in-itself is nowhere to be found; mankind vanishes like a phantom as soon as you try to meet it. If every man and boy in the world discharged his duty as a member of a family, of a school, of a club, of a calling, and finally of a church and of a state, mankind would certainly know peace and well-being, for man then would consider his relations, school, club and trade fellows, religious brethren and fellow citizens as belonging to his own self. But no man can do so perfectly, and it is as much as can be expected from him if he does what, in the sincerity of his soul, he knows to be the very best he can do and loves his neighbour merely so far as he realises him to be part of his greater self. The speculative ground of such a conception of life must be briefly stated before coming to the idea of Liberty and Law, and to that of citizen and state.

Spiritual reality is not Mind plus some spiritual fact; it is purely and simply Mind as subject, since any spiritual fact must be resolved in the real activity of the subject, who knows it. Common language expresses this by saying that to know something thoroughly we must make it our own. Strictly speaking we know no others. If we know them and speak of them they must be within us. To know is to identify, to overcome otherness as such. As long as we feel ourselves confronted by the spiritual existence of others as different from ourselves, something from which we must distinguish ourselves, something which we presuppose as having been in existence before our birth, it is merely a sign that we are not yet realising the spirituality of their existence. To us they are still nature.

This doctrine would be absurd if it were not considered in the light of Gentile’s notion of the transcendental and empirical selves, both meeting in man, as a concrete person in whom the infinity of the transcendental individualises itself through the finiteness of the empirical. The transcendental ego being one and the empirical egos being multiplicity itself, it is obvious that the differences are as necessary to the identity as the fuel to the fire. It is, indeed, through the process of transcending empirical differences that man asserts the transcendental character of mind.

Obviously all the difficulties of moral problems arise from an empirical conception of man and his relations to others. Empirically I am an individual, and as such in opposition not only to all material things, but equally to all the individuals to whom I assign a spiritual value, since all objects of experience, whatever their value, are not only distinct but separate from one another in such a way that each, by its own particularity absolutely excludes from itself all the rest. All moral problems arise from experience and arise precisely because of the absolute opposition in which the ego, empirically conceived, stands to other persons tormented by the supreme moral aspiration of our being that longs for a harmony in which we should become one with all others and with the whole world. This means that moral problems arise in so far as we become aware of the unreality of our being, as an empirical ego, opposed to other persons and surrounding things, and in so far as we come to see that our own life is actualised in the things opposed to it. But though this is the situation in which moral problems arise, they are solved only when man comes to feel another’s needs as his own, and thereby finds that his own life means that he is not closed within the narrow circle of his empirical personality, but is ever expanding in the activity of a mind superior to all particular interests and yet immanent in the very core of his personality. It must never be forgotten, however, that the reality of the transcendental ego, far from destroying the empirical ego, implies it.

Passing to the essential characteristics of what might be opposed as spiritual to what is natural, we find Gentile working out the distinction from the fact that anything natural, such as a stone, is whilst anything spiritual, mind, a work of mind, a political constitution becomes. Mind and being are opposite terms. A plant is, an animal is, in so far as all the determinations of the plant or animal are a necessary and pre-ordained consequence of its nature. All the manifestations by which their nature is expressed are already there, existing implicitly. The empirical manifestations of their being come to be conceived, therefore, as closed within limits already prescribed as impassable boundaries. In the natural world everything is pre-ordained according to the law of Nature, or, to use Gentile’s own words, everything is by Nature. In the spiritual world nothing is by Nature, but it becomes what it becomes through the activity of mind. Nothing is ever ready-made; nothing can be finished and complete. The social position of a family, the political system of a country can never be settled once for all; the members of the former and the citizens of the latter must go on creating it day by day and hour by hour. So is it with moral life. All the noblest achievements of the past do not diminish one whit the sum of duties still to be performed. The minute man stops realising in the inmost recesses of his consciousness what he must do for his family, for his country, or even for the firm to which he belongs, the family will be decadent, the country will begin to lose what his predecessors had painfully won, the firm will feel the incipient decay of a credit acquired through work and sacrifice. Nothing is ever done once for all; morally, intellectually, politically, socially, economically, everything is always to be done.

A hard gospel to preach when man is accustomed as he is now to hear only the proclamation of his rights. Sacrifice, self-denial is here pointed out as the way to greater conquests and to the assertion of a nobler and more powerful self. To find spiritual reality man must seek it and, seeking it, create it. This means that it never confronts him as an external reality. If man wants to find it he must work to realise it. So long as it is sought it is found, so long as it is being conquered or constructed it is to be found, so long but no longer. Empires show signs of incipient decay the moment the Empire builders stop building them, stop wanting to build them. Yet from this austere conception of life springs a beautiful notion of liberty, a splendid conception of man’s creativity.

Gentile has had the courage to study closely, very closely, the old scholastic Doctors, thereby acquiring a deep and almost unerring sense of Christianity; whilst his familiarity with the problems of law and the works of the Humanists and the Renaissance, have marked him with characteristics that sometimes cause his hearers to hail in him a Father of the Church. All this notwithstanding there are many points of doctrine upon which he stands in contrast with the theologians.

Where Gentile speaks of thinking he invariably refers both to the act of the will and to the act of the intellect; for he considers their distinction as having been abolished when through the work of modern psychology the very notion of a multiplicity of faculties was rejected. The mind is not now intellect and now will; but is known now as intellect and now as will. It should be observed, however, that the creative will does not create a world that issues from it and exists independently of it; it is self-creative just as any judgment is first of all self-assertive. No act of man’s will is ever directed to something already realised; man always wants to do an action. For instance, wanting a new pair of shoes merely means wanting to buy, to have, to get, a new pair of shoes; and since we have seen that any action is self-assertion, man in any act of will is wanting to realise his own self. In consequence of the unity existing between him and the world, man’s purpose is never external to him. Man realising his own self: such is the nature of mind, dynamic and dialectic at once.

This notion of dialectic enables us to meet law and liberty on their common ground, morality; spiritual reality is endowed with a life that is best called dialectic, inasmuch as it is never either completely positive or purely negative. Anything spiritual from the most intimate religious experience, down to any political form, family arrangement, or business establishment is so long as, not yet being, it strives to realise, to assert, to establish itself. Anything spiritual let us say, human, the moment it is, that is to say the moment it is accomplished, the moment it ceases to develop or establish itself, is dead or dying. Gentile uses even stronger language: he says outright, as a reality it is absolutely annihilated.

For him, as for Kant, the law of man’s will is the end that determines each act of will; since to be moral the will must have in itself its own law and its own end. The word moral can here have but one equivalent, namely, spiritual, that is to say possessing value. Morality so understood is an attribute of the entire life of mind, which must have an absolute value—be it truth, beauty, or goodness—such value being meaningless if it does not correspond to an ought to be, imperative hic et nunc as a consequence of liberty. Moreover, this binding imperativeness is universal—for imperative means necessary, and there can be no necessity without universality.

The good is, in conclusion, the value of man’s spirit in its dialectical actuality; it may be termed the most concrete form of spiritual reality. Any spiritual act is moral in so far as it is mind’s realisation; consequently the negation of morality cannot be understood without understanding this realisation, which is the spiritual process or development of mind as society. The good is development; and as such it implies evil as its negativity.⁠[11] Light and shadow, good and evil; in both cases the second term is the negative of the first. And herein lies all the tragedy of mind. Spiritual life is a complex of light and shadow, a constant struggle of the particular with the universal. Negativity opposes itself to positivity, evil to good, as the particular to the universal. Yet it is through their conflict and opposition that spiritual life realises itself, and this realisation is entrusted to the individual, who in and through his very particularity is the agent of the universal will.

Obviously, if we take man, the individual man, in his pure empiricalness, he can do nothing without superhuman help. But this notion of man, which is the ground of all the abstract forms of egoism, individualism and anarchy, is a mere fancy. No single man can so be deprived of the divine light of intelligence as not to know of his own existence as a person, as a self, and in the very act of knowing himself as such to assert what is universal in him. Man in short is universal in so far as he does not belong to nature, a pure object of knowledge, but is a subject. So that his moral law is nothing superadded to him ab extra, it is the life granted to him by Providence realising itself.

This is a far cry from ordinary selfishness. From this point of view the bellum omnium contra omnes appears as the materialistic fancy of a man whose idea of the world was inferred from the idea of the body. Man’s body is in fact one among many. But man’s will in his opposition to other wills reveals his universality. That opposition which had been taken as proof of the plurality and radical particularity of subjective will is insisted upon by Gentile as a proof of the unity and radical universality of such will. Men’s wills collide with each other, it is true, but they do so in the very attempt to enforce the claims of that in them which is universal. For will has not realised itself as long as it stands as one will face to face with another will or so many other wills. In such a position it appears as one among many, as accidental and particular, as having a law differing from that of the others; whereas it always claims to be Will, against which there can be no other will—experience shows us daily that nothing can be done when diverging wills are exerting themselves—and such is the characteristic of the moral will.

The statement of this problem, the moral problem, is very difficult indeed, and from a misrepresentation of the relations between my will and your will and his will, arise conflict and war; but our conception of war is not complete if we consider it apart from the conception of peace. War is nothing but the realisation of peace, which is the reconciliation of a duality or plurality of wills in the Will. This is why war exists and why there are private interests conflicting in the plurality of wills. Such war and conflict, however, are due to the particularity of the wills and last as long as each of these wills insists on realising itself as universal, ceasing when they compose their differences and accept as the common will that which has manifested its universality through the conflict. A peace without war cannot be conceived, since peace is the life of will and will cannot live but in a self-assertion which is nothing but the eternal resolution of the conflict through which it comes into being. Thus will is, and ever must be, concordia discors.

Whatever the social unit taken as an example—family, school, state, church—the reality of it is always in development and is intelligible only as a process. It never is, and always is, but only in so far as it realises itself in perfect liberty. This free realisation does not permit of the separation of its negativity from its positivity. In such a way, though realising itself as universal, the family or state can be thought of as a spiritual reality only in so far as it contains the particular element which offers an endless resistance to the process of universalisation. A society that perfectly unifies its spiritual diversity, abolishing every sign of variety, has inevitably gone to pieces since it loses all the spiritual forces that made it alive. Gentile goes so far as to say that in fact it is already dead. It is the eternally recurring opposition of interests and wills that permits the dialectic and dynamic unity of life to pulsate in any social constitution. Consequently the particularity of the will—to be resolved in the universal—consists in its negativity, without which the assertion of the universal could not exist as an act, for it would be a mere fact, not something due to the act of man but just something which is by nature.

There is no assertion of will which is not exclusion, suppression of its own negation. Thus society is empirically the agreement of individuals, and speculatively the realisation of will through an eternal process. Universal value is thereby identified as a process realising itself through the suppression of what is particular and negative. Society is not inter homines, but in interiore homine and it can exist between men inasmuch as all men are spiritually one man, with one single interest: the eternal increment of the patrimony of mankind.

Now society implies authority, a superior will imposed on the associated wills to unite them under a common law. Rousseau had conceived the state, the people as a passive body, reserving activity for the sovereign. Gentile having raised to speculative form the brilliant intuition that lies in the Contract, after having fully recognised it as Rousseau’s idea, now rejects his conception of the distinction between sovereign and subjects. What he actually denies is the passivity ascribed to the people, and the school is, as usual, the experimental ground of his notion.

School is a form of spiritual association implying a teacher, lawgiver to his pupils. It is not the teacher, however that, through his authority, brings the pupils to accept truth; on the contrary it is truth that confers authority on the teacher. The Ipse dixit implies a great knowledge of the master’s familiarity with science. Whatever the ground on which we acknowledge an authority, the authority is such as a consequence of our acknowledging it; and all the theories and inquiries concerning the source of a higher authority are to Gentile vain prattling. For him it is quite obvious that, however high such an authority may be it will never be higher than the height to which it has been raised by the people subject to it. Through this agency and this agency alone authority becomes law.

Authority is invested in the spiritual self, the universal person, ultimately the only sovereign. This transcendental self is the transcendental law of which we have spoken as moral law, the transcendental sovereign which has brought Gentile to reject Rousseau’s distinction between passive citizenship and active sovereignty because it throbs in every man’s breast and is the one law and sovereign that can impose laws and make them acknowledged.

It is now easy to realise that, although Gentile was first known as a Hegelian, by the time he wrote his philosophy of law he had fully developed the more realistic tendencies of his Idealism which link him to Thomas Aquinas, Kant and above all to Vico. The real difference between Gentile’s notion of political reality and that of Hegel—the likeness is too obvious to require pointing out—is a consequence of their different ways of working out their respective notions of reality.

In spite of his brilliant conception of dialectic Hegel’s intuition of Reality is not dialectical but intellectualistic, and therefore static. He realised that we do not conceive reality dialectically unless we conceive it as itself thought. But he distinguished the intellect which conceives things from the reason which conceives mind and his dialectic was in consequence a dialectic of thought, thought however being understood as the result of the act of thinking. Whereas to have a real dialectic, corresponding to the throbbing reality of life, what is wanted is a dialectic of thought, understood as the act of thinking. What has already been thought is as static as a stone. Hence the necessity in which Hegel found himself of separating thought and action, which led him to declare in the introduction to his philosophy of Right that Philosophy was a twilight bird, whose activity began at dusk when the day’s work was done. For Hegel a law in order to be imperative must be pronounced by something that is already in existence. But Reality in existence is nature. Hegel’s state belonging thus to static reality, being a fact, not an act, the citizen is nothing in himself; all his reality come to him from the state. This does not mean that he is annihilated (both in Imperialism and Communism he is very highly cultivated), but is as the little wheel of a huge engine which is carefully oiled so that the machine may go the better for it. His end is the state’s end.

Not so with Gentile. Reality, being really dialectical does not admit of a distinction between will and intellect. You do not act and then think about it. For life, natural or spiritual, is the reality: if theory, the activity of the intellect, is merely a contemplation of it, such theory is not even real. How can one think of something added to the real world? What could such an addition be? There is no way of conceiving knowledge except as a creation of the spiritual reality which is itself knowledge. If Reality is spiritual, in realising itself it creates both the will and the intellect. It is only through the empirical consideration of their manifestations that they can be distinguished; speculatively they are one and the same thing.

The difference between the idea of a good action and a good action itself is a difference between two ideas. In the first case we mean the idea which is a content or abstract result of thought, but not the act by which we think it, and in which its concrete reality truly lies. And in the second we mean the idea, not as an object or content of thought, but as the act which realises a spiritual reality.

The state can not be a fact, something already realised. It is the eternal process, the instauratio regnum boni always becoming, and dying to be realised by the consciousness of the individual in its own process of self-realisation. The state is indeed the moral reality of the individual, who to become a citizen realises himself transcending his empirical subjectivity. The state exists only in the hearts of men; it is the intellectual and practical activity of men realising themselves as spiritual reality. It is always being altered through the positive and negative manifestation of man’s moral will. Man is not and cannot be subject to the state, except in so far and in so far only as he is its creator. And creation means liberty no less than self-realisation means realisation of the not-self and therefore the law.

CHAPTER X BENITO MUSSOLINI

Now that we have traced both the political and philosophical antecedents of what is here called Fascism, since it expresses itself as such, but might perhaps as well be termed the political and philosophical coming of age of Italy as a great nation, we must turn to the man, whose lot it has been to embody such historical forces and bring them to actual realisation.

It may seem rather rash to compare Benito Mussolini with Dante and some people may think it a profanation. Poetry and politics put on the same level; a man considered by many little better than an adventurer (and appearing as such in the biography written by a friend of his, Miss M. Sarfatti); the new constitution far from being complete and, Fascist legislation comprising with a very few great laws, a sequence of decrees suggestive of tyranny! Such a comparison must seem to some absurd, although it is a fact that just as Dante embodied in the Divina Commedia all the philosophy, all the arts and politics of mediæval Italy, Mussolini is now embodying in the new régime all that is great and good in modern Italy.

It may be held, in fact, that political deeds do express the life of minds just as forcibly as poetry, therefore that they do not stand in a position of æsthetic inferiority to the compositions of poets, unless one chooses to compare the politics of a decadent period to the poetry of a great period. It may also be held that “adventurer” is an epithet that befits better the Duce of Miss Sarfatti than the Uomo Novo of Antonio Beltramelli, in whose book the same Duce appears as the herald of an entirely new period of the life of Italy. And the present book is concerned exclusively with what may prove of lasting value in the laws of the government of Mussolini, and does not imply an approval of what may be objectionable in the actual methods of government; it takes the view that tyrannical decrees and the like are inherent in the revolutionary stage of the régime and temporary measures bound to disappear when that stage has been outgrown. Our sensible souls may be shocked when we feel the violence of the hatred with which Dante pursues his enemies right into Hell or Purgatory. Mussolini’s soul is just as sensible and modern as our own. Not only would he forbear from hating his dead adversaries, but he does not hate his enemies even during their life. He can speak of them with the greatest serenity and recall the time when they were his friends without losing his sense of fair appreciation. He can compare with Dante for the violence of his hostility only when hostile attacks are directed against his task and are an impediment to him and his men in what he considers the work laid down for them by Providence.

But this is stretching too far a comparison which has been made merely to explain the impossibility of giving good grounds for the fact that Mussolini was the one man fit to realise in politics all the theoretical ideas and practical tendencies that have been traced in this work. Such facts are as mysterious as the nature of genius. Yet it may not be out of place to note that both Dante and Mussolini have the same love of learning and just too much intuition to contribute to the theoretical life of mind; and that the contrast which exists between some inferior passages of the Divina Commedia and those that make it an immortal poem is not greater than that which exists between what is objectionable in Mussolini’s way of ruling and that which is likely to be of eternal value in the ideals that underlie the whole of his political thought of action.

Through the political realisation of what was potentially included in their political theories France and England have shared, as we have seen, the honour of being the champions of Liberalism and Radical Democracy, just as through the political elaboration of the theories of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, Germany has developed Imperialism and Communism. Now that such political institutions and systems of philosophy have given all that could be had out of them, Italy comes forward and opposes, to what her thinkers consider as being henceforth at best abstract subjectivism, another subjectivism which—being freed from the materialism, mechanism and naturalism, that persisted in thought and life of former generations, being freed also from the practical reasons which compelled the thinkers of those days to oppose religion on account of the Church’s impediments to free researches—can identify itself with Mind, and more specially with the activity of Mind. The individual, the subject to assert itself in the activity of mind must have an object. Self implies Not-self. Therefore, liberty implies law. The citizen implies the state. The employer, or the employed, implies the enterprise for the productivity of which one employs and the other is employed.

In short, after the objectivism of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, after the subjectivism of the modern world, Fascism is the synthesis of both in politics, just as well as in philosophy, since, after the “everything through the force of privilege” of the former and the “everything through the force of numbers” of the latter, it comes and says “everything for everyone that shall deserve it through moral sacrifice and productive activity.” It tries to bring forward the Christian equality of men since it meets everyone on the basis of actual value. It tries to realise fraternity by getting men to feel that their real value is based on their realising as perfectly as possible the intimate relation of self and Not-self which brings each man to see himself in his neighbour, and his neighbour as himself.

Mussolini, to whom we must always turn as the living expression of Fascism, firmly believes that men may be called upon to sacrifice some of their most selfish claims and he hopes to make them realise that they must renounce their empirical selves to create thereby the State as their transcendental self. Fascism does not want men to look upon law—in the broadest sense of the word—as a sort of starry reality inalterable and indifferent to men; it hopes that they may realise how intimately it is related to every citizen, and from the very first year of their school life little children are mentally trained to see it as their own will transcending itself and becoming law in a kind of religious objectivity.

Mussolini, when he was still in his teens, used to sit up late in the inn kept by his father in Forli, and according to a man who used to meet him there, he was even then wont to distress himself at the materialistic form which Socialism had taken in Italy. Day after day he would make the same objection, “It is all right,” he would say, “to better the economic conditions of the people, and you do better them. But I cannot help realising that they are losing more and more the spiritual life which was for them religion and tradition, without taking anything of the higher and nobler side of Socialism.” He had read Andrea Costa’s writings and was devouring the international classics of Socialism, besides his Mazzini, so often quoted by his own father and the Republicans of Forli, who had never read a page of the great idealist. The thought that people were getting more and more indifferent to everything but food or rest, was a nightmare to him. When some twelve years later he became the leader of the Socialist Party in the same town he took up the official attitude of his party against religion. This may be noted in the articles he wrote as the editor of La Lotta di classe during the years 1910–1911. He is an orthodox Socialist, and pours out a lot of anti-religious and even anti-patriotic stuff in a style and with a choice of vocabulary that might befit indifferently an English, a French, or a German Socialist leader of the same period. Here and there, however, a single sentence attracts the careful Italian reader, or the foreigner familiar with all the shades of the language. A personal accent is felt; there is an original idea in an original wording; and it is either a request that the party leaders should be experts and the members qualified artisans; or an appeal highly spiritual, and in a way deeply religious. There are witnesses to the fact that when he had been in the morning issuing an official prohibition of all religious practises he often met in the evening with a theologian to see if there could be a way of re-introducing religion without detriment to Socialism. “For this people,” he would say, “above all the women, have no conception of life at all, since we have deprived them of religion.”

It would be, therefore, a profound mistake to see in Mussolini’s attitude towards the Church, and in the action of his government to reinstate religion all through life, a political move, intended to secure the support of the clergy. Religion is not a useful string on which he plays as the great artist he is, either to secure the support of the Catholics and their clergy, or to keep people quiet and insure their moral education. What he realised between 1900 and 1912, through an intuition of genius, is that the people had no general notion whatever, no concept of what is life, never even realised that they could ask themselves such a question as: What is life, what is the world? and that religion was necessary to them.

Mussolini firmly believes in the necessity of arousing strong religious conviction in the people of every class. He does so on ground provided to him by the example of his mother, by the result of his own observation and experience as a leader, and last, but not least by his reading of de Sanctis’s principal work. That great critic is, indeed, the one link between Vico, Croce, Gentile and Mussolini, whose genius was to create the political system in which their ideas receive practical realisation.

Fascism rejects the very notion of theory as distinct from action and is a constant expression in action of ideas far more easily acted upon than formulated, so that its most ignorant followers go as far as to reject the possibility of anything like an intellectual movement paving the way for them through the preceding generations, whilst they act all along in keeping with the spiritual atmosphere which that intellectual movement has developed and the ideas it has put in circulation. The reason of this lies in the æsthetic genius of Mussolini. Like the greatest artists produced by Italy, he is at once macrocosm and microcosm. The whole of Italy’s past, as in another Dante, converges in him. His avid personality takes it all in, to put it out again with such an indelible stamp upon it that what might be termed its Fascist-ness is the only character left to it.

Now what Mussolini hopes to obtain from the recrudescence of religious life is that the people should get a wider outlook upon Life in the highest sense of the word. He never uses philosophical terms to express it; yet so highly speculative is the notion that Giovanni Gentile is probably the only philosopher to have worked it out, and whosoever did not believe in Providence could be convinced that Providence exists just by studying Croce, Gentile, and the way their work attains realisation at the hands of Mussolini without any previous arrangement. By getting people to have a deeper understanding of life Mussolini means to make them realise that man’s individual life is not by a long way the supreme value, that man’s individual will is not by a long way the supreme law, that man’s individual circumstances are not in themselves by a long way constitutive of Life. All these aims he hopes to reach through religion.

When he was a Socialist Leader he was struck by the immorality of women and by the cowardice of men. These would lay traps in which other people might lose their lives, as when they unscrewed the rails of the railway in the province of Forli, but they would not risk their own lives. Being at that time, a most orthodox Socialist he could not think: “let us stop this demoralising propaganda.” He believed that it would be all right in the end, when the end, with a capital E, should have come for this capitalist society based as it was on selfishness. He wanted a religion, and having then a mentality quite anti-historical, he really believed that he could give them a new religion if he could but find it. For this would make them realise, so he thought, that they did not count in themselves but only through their relations to others; and that to realise their better self, they must always look at the whole, which is nothing so long as single men are not conscious of belonging to it, but without which they can do nothing to assert their claims as rights and out of which indeed no claim of theirs can really be a right. Obviously, this is man transcending his own self to assert it through the very negation of its empirical nature.

It is impossible to insist too much on this point for the new conception of life that was reaching speculative expression in the works of Gentile was here, in this intuitive mind of quite a young man, who knew nothing of Gentilian theories, working its way towards practical realisation. Before the way in which he was to proceed from this to the economic theories that may rid the western world of strikes and lock-outs one fact must be put in evidence. From what has been said above, it is clear that his appreciation of the strength of any collectivity must be based on the degree of consciousness with which the single members realise such collectivity. He had at first not made out the import and the consequences of such a view. But the necessity of pleading his own cause, when he was tried in 1911 by the Tribunal of Forli, for having ordered a strike of protest against the Tripoli war, put on his lips a declaration that must be taken into consideration whenever Mussolini’s “Imperialism” is in question. In the records of the tribunal he is stated to have pleaded his case, saying that he did not love his country less than the Nationalists did; the difference was between his idea of a country’s greatness and theirs. He thought that such greatness depended far more on the spiritual and economic level reached by the people of a country, than on its territorial extension, the number of its inhabitants, or the importance of its colonies. To argue that he has changed his mind on this as on other points would not be consistent with facts. Since his advent to power the efficiency of the army and navy has been brought to a higher standard, but their effective numbers have not been increased at all; whilst the greatest care and expense have been dedicated to the reform of education, nothing being spared that can promote a deeper consciousness of the individual, and an immense scheme is a foot to improve the intellectual and spiritual conditions of adults, involving huge expense by the government and great personal sacrifice by the intellectual and artistic classes.

When Mussolini was in Forli he could not satisfy any of his realistic or idealistic exigencies. His intellectual position as a Socialist made him long for a paradise to come, a dream at best; his nature, like that of many in his province, made him long for actual facts. The position proved a difficult one and he was only kept going by the strength of his convictions which were most sincere. The man who was on his staff in the Lotta di Classe is still a workman and a Socialist; and speaks with as much regret for that time as with bitterness for Mussolini’s “desertion from the party,” a “desertion” which nothing will make him see as a consequence of the very sincerity to which he ascribes Mussolini’s power of fascination. It is this man who has furnished the author of this present book with the clue that made it possible to trace back the way through which Mussolini came to realise how unhistorical and, therefore, false was his position.

The adversaries of the Socialists were continually reproaching them for having invented the class struggle. Just because he was absolutely sincere Mussolini minded the accusation very much. For if that was so the responsibility was indeed a heavy one. He started, therefore, looking in history for the origin of that struggle. And it was inevitable that his Italian mentality should, through the process of his researches, emerge in all its national and personal definiteness; that he should reject, more or less consciously, all that is not concrete and actual. The Italians usually call “historical” a true knowledge or realisation of a given situation of fact, whether past or present; again they call “historical” the vision of life as the eternal alteration of such situations through a process which knows no regress.

To his relief Mussolini soon found out that the class struggle had existed always and everywhere, and that it was due to social and financial differences: and this cheered the convinced Socialist in him. His next step was to realise that not only had such a struggle existed in Rome, in Athens, and elsewhere, but that it was actually the main cause of social progress. And with this the Socialist triumphantly exulted.

The triumph was a short one, however, and the cause of this exultation was to prove a mortal blow to his Socialist faith. If class struggle was the main agent of progress and class differences the cause of such struggle, there could be no progress, no movement, when class differences had been abolished. So painful was the conclusion that he must have tried to reject it. When classes should be abolished, every thing would be for the best, granted that it could come to be.

His incursion into the history of the past had given him the one chance his realistic mind had been waiting for to realise that perfection does not exist, that perfection cannot exist, since it is only from the deficiencies of a form of society that the idea of what is to be the next form of society can arise. Obviously, it is by the inconvenience of an actual law that the next law is called into being. Life would have, therefore, to be static when the actual state of society would be perfect. A question remained and indeed was of moment. Could life be static?

The answer could not have waited long for so sharp an observer of life. Life is dialectic. The nature of life was manifest to him in the arts. De Sanctis had taught him to see that, whilst the very power of his own individuality was compelling him to realise that nothing is done but by single men acting, acting however as members of the various collectivities which determined their personalities. He could no longer think of choosing a religion and imposing it on his followers; they had one at hand which had been prepared for them by history. Little by little the truth came. Men did not act for mankind, they acted for their family, for their religion, for their country; they acted to better their conditions or to prevent them from getting worse. To release Man from his traditions was equivalent to taking the roots of a tree from the ground, and condemning it to dry, moulder and rot.

Was, then, Socialism a drug of such a kind that it could only do harm? Surely it had done wonders for the wretched lower classes of Italy! Then the outbreak of the European War spurred him to take the step which had become inevitable. His mind was ready; his genius had reached maturity; circumstances would do the rest.

It is necessary to realise the man and his Dantesque gift for looking at the idea and grasping facts all along, for discharging with personal passion a most impersonal task. It is equally necessary to realise why the people should have wanted him to succeed and give him that support without which his genius would have aborted as a sterile longing for action. According to Croce the act of will of any single man becomes an event and is granted success according to the way in which it stands to the will of the whole, and to the actual situation of fact. Macchiavelli, it must be borne in mind, tried to do with his Tuscan militia what Mussolini has achieved, and he only succeeded in realising how out of keeping with the times his scheme had been. Sadly, this forerunner of Mussolini, not inferior to him in genius or reading, had to sit down and write what the regenerator of Italy would have to do, the necessity of governing in harmony with the times and according to the actual truth of circumstances being one of the principles ever recurring under his pen. “Everyone knows,” says Benedetto Croce, who is by no means a Fascist, in the Philosophy of the Practical, printed for the first time in 1908, “that no vultus instantis tyranni can extinguish the freedom of the soul; no ruler, be he ever so strong and violent, can prevent a rebellion.” If people choose to use the word tyrant in the Greek sense of the word they may call Mussolini a tyrant, for he is and will be an unconstitutional ruler until the new institutions are so framed, that the new régime can function normally. But if it is implied by that, as the modern sense of the word allows, that he rules against the people’s will it is merely absurd, and one single fact could prove the contrary. When two years ago he asked that a certain sum should be subscribed in dollars towards the paying to the United States War Debt, the issue was many times what he had asked. It would not be true to facts to omit that although it was not compulsory, there was a good deal of moral pressure made to get the people to subscribe. But surely they did not need to cover it so many times and the excess was indeed most spontaneously subscribed.

The people of Italy do grumble at many things which are done by the Fascists, and anybody would do so. It is mainly, however, individual actions which are the object of complaint and not laws or public services. For it must be kept in mind that the actual form of Mussolini’s government has been called into being by the misgovernment or rather non-government of the people who preceded him in power, and the country felt the need of being governed in one way or another.

It has been shown in the first part of this book why Italy was not governed at all, why no public service could work effectively, why foreign policy had to be so inferior to the real position of the country, why the beautiful peninsula had fallen into a state bordering on anarchy. It is difficult for an Englishman to realise how a country could fall into such conditions. England has five or six centuries of political experience, a length of time more than sufficient to produce electors and representatives able to realise what are the duties of the executive as well as those of the legislature. Everybody in England is familiar with the process through which political forms come into being. People struggle to reach a certain form of government and that moment of dialectic ends when the form is reached; they then apply it more and more fully and during its application discover its limitations; this second movement ends in criticism of the whole thing; finally, people set themselves to remedy its shortcomings. This last moment coincides in the people with the full consciousness of dissatisfaction, and in the leaders with a clear understanding of the new tendencies to be satisfied. Thus the people learn to use a new form whilst they are using, then discarding, the one that came before it. In Italy nothing of the sort happened. The political leaders would have been ashamed to be behindhand in what was considered “social progress.”

The immediate aftermath of the war in Italy was as we have seen morally a tragedy. It seemed as if something had died, something spiritual. Everything seemed to be going to pieces. Nobody seemed to think, nobody seemed to realise that moral forces, a national consciousness had been produced by the general sacrifice. A few heroes were watching over the flame lit up in the young souls who had learned truth in the bitter experience of war. They were very few indeed, and they could only get a hearing through the actual violence with which they fell on the old political classes, who were intent on convincing the people that the war had to be forgotten as a nightmare, that man must forget it as soon as possible to throw himself again into his pursuit of material well-being.

Whatever the smallness of their number—when Mussolini founded the first Fascio in 1919 they were 150—they were enough to arouse a deep echo in the youth of Italy, which was beginning both for spiritual and practical reasons to conceive life as an energy, a force, a consciousness transcending the limits set by the interests of the individual, bound to upset violently the quiet and selfish life of the man intent on the satisfaction of his most empirical desires.

Mussolini’s belief was that you could make man realise that, if he is the centre of the universe, he is so through his relation to the universe, but that you could not do this by words. The only way to make men realise that selfishness, when it becomes absolute is bound to reduce society to atomistic irrelativeness and thereby to anarchy, was, according to him, action. If a body of men were ready to do, through coherent action and sacrifice of their individual wills, what the government ought to have done, then the people would know that they could cease from being bullied by the Bolshevist Socialists and followers of Don Sturzo, provided they were willing to sacrifice their individual wills, as the men of a team of football do when they want to win a match. He felt sure that he could call his countrymen to the sacrifice of life and to the acceptance of the harshest discipline if they could but be induced to cease centring their whole mind upon their precious selves. There was, however, no time to organise a religious revival; and his knowledge of men provided him with the one intuition that could be acted upon at the time. He called on them to defend the value of their own sacrifice in the trenches and in the field. Now that was not cold and distant as the idea of the nation might have proved; it was quite real to them and moved them consequently as nothing else could. Through the action of a few hundreds several hundreds of thousands were induced to fight for the defence of what had been their former action. The fighting however was only on a very small scale and mostly in the provinces where the tyranny of the Reds and Whites had to be broken; the breaking up of that tyranny made the people look upon the Black Shirts as their liberators. Peasant women and children were once more free to go to Church, officers and wounded men were once more free to go about in their uniforms without being attacked or insulted, workmen were once more free to attend their daily work and earn their money as they liked. The Fascists did not have to fight their way to power. They merely took it and were cheered on to taking it.

As soon as Mussolini was in power he was asked by his ministers what his programme was. He curtly answered “that it was to realise the full value of Italy’s sacrifice in the war.” He had no political programme and was so indifferent to party distinctions that he took ministers from every party, choosing them only according to their qualification as experts. What he required from them was the maximum of efficiency, and the maximum also of personal responsibility.

His first great move was the reform of education. For him the greatness of a country depended on the consciousness of its citizens. The work was naturally entrusted to Giovanni Gentile, who was the greatest authority on pedagogy. He had to face immense difficulty and he did it with such energy and indomitable will that the educational reform became law and was being applied eleven months after the march on Rome. The main features of it are the re-introduction of religious and moral, æsthetic and practical education in the schools where rational instruction had been paramount for twenty years. This was in accord with modern philosophy, reinstating in their lawful places along with imagination and intuition, all the activities of Mind which had not been duly recognised nor sufficiently developed in the last generations. Religion is understood as the one thing capable of providing man with a reasonable outlook upon life as a whole, with a deep consciousness of his own importance as a factor in the world, and with an equally deep consciousness of his nonentity as soon as he ceases to be part of a whole, and considers himself apart from his relations to his family, to his church, to his school, to his country. Æsthetic education is meant to develop the faculty of realising with great definiteness. The child must not describe in his small essays of ten lines or less something that he cannot draw, and he must not draw something different from that which he describes. “Practical” is a very bad term for the development of judgment in children yet it is the latest word of philosophy which is introduced here.

A good deal of the new education in Italy is done through the teaching of history. It may be pointed out, for instance, by the teachers, that Russia has had less importance in the development of civilisation than England or France, though they are so much smaller. This is pointed out as being a proof that the importance of a country has nothing to do either with the area it occupies on the map or with the number of its inhabitants. Athens and Persia may be opposed in the same way. The child is thus gradually brought to realise the creative power of man’s will when it is the “good-will” of the Scriptures. Such will is presented to him as the individual will with a plus. That is to say that the man who realises his duty towards his family, his school, country and so on, creates something and thereby is really the collaborator of God.

Another side of this education is the highly ideal notion of actual reality which is enforced. The child is taught that school is not a particular building, but any place where there is a master to teach and pupils to learn. The character of such a place is bound to the two acts of teaching and learning, therefore, their liberty is a sacred thing. He who prevents the master from being heard, the pupils from hearing him and learning what he says, destroys such liberty. Ceasing himself to listen and to learn, he loses his quality as a pupil, therefore, if his schoolfellows kick him out or the master, to protect their liberty and their right to learn, sends him away he has nothing to say, for he has forfeited his rights by ceasing to learn. He is a pupil in as far as he is learning. It is needless to point out that in consequence of this a workman is entitled to his rights as such, only so long as he is a contributor to the productivity of the enterprise in which he is working; that a landowner is the owner of his land as far as he discharges his duty as such, which is of making such land produce as much as possible for himself, for his tenants and for the country; that a man has the rights of a citizen as long as he is conscious of his being one and discharges all the duties correlative to his rights. The Gentilian reform with Mussolini’s authority has been able to infuse a new life into the teachers of the elementary schools. They have taken their work up as an apostolate. Boys and girls know now that manual work is as dignified as any, and that it has the merit of being always in demand and being more productive than shop and office work. They are taught that they must think, when they choose a calling, of their old people whom they may have to help and of the family which they are going to create. On this particular point the success is wonderful and the author has had several opportunities of realising it. In Rome she was met by the request of a widow, the mother of four children, to recommend her eldest son 15 years old, to a senator to see if he could not find him a job as callboy. Objection was made to the choice of the job, so badly paid and so tedious, good at most for a weak or less clever lad; the recommendation, however, was promised out of respect for the mother’s choice. But the morning after the boy appeared, rather shy, and full of apologies. He had understood that the choice of the job had not been approved. Might he say what he felt about it? Then he began to unburden himself. “You know, miss, I cannot stand the notion of opening doors, answering bells and carrying trays.... I want to have a real calling.... If I am a trained workman I can go all over the world, or stay here and marry, helping my mother all along, because I can get 35 lire a day and even more. If I am a real workman ...” He made up his mind to be a printer and was introduced to a publisher.

Religious and patriotic as it is, education in Italy is, moreover, grounded on a deep sense of what are the family duties of man, and on a few sound ideas of what is economic in every man’s life. Economy is by Mussolini transformed into a moral value. In this again we see his political genius going to meet Croce’s theories without knowing anything about them. For Croce, an action is economic when it is due to the will of a well-informed individual, it becomes moral when the individual’s act of will is consonant with the will of the whole. The most typical example is that known under the name of Campagna del Grano, which is meant to induce the landowner and his tenants to use the most scientific means of increasing the production of the soil, in order that the country should be either freed from the enormous expenditure of wheat importation or have it balanced by the silk, wine, fruit and oil which should be exported in greater quantities. Travelling teachers go from village to village and are met willingly by the peasants whom they address in the most homely way. First technical suggestions are made with statistics of results obtained in the nearest fields of experiment. Then they are discussed with the men. Finally, these are told that the result will be good for them as they will get more out of their land without their work being much increased, but that they must above all, remember that they will discharge the first of their civic duty; their productive activity is as constructive as that of the great scientist and as noble as their own life in the trenches during the war. You must no longer plough, sow, reap for your own self, that is to say exclusively for your material self, but for the state, which is that same empirical self plus its transcendental complement. Thereby ploughing, sowing and reaping are no longer the work of Man, slave of his material needs, but of Man transcending them, without disregarding them, however, and lifting his daily occupation to the dignity of a moral realisation of his own economic value. The state must, indeed, according to such ideas, be universally present as a moral factor in every branch of its citizen’s activity. It is, in fact, the all-pervading consciousness that man must have of his citizenship which expresses itself as government.

Such an assertion is believed by Fascists to be quite acceptable to the people and where the author has had the possibility of testing the truth of it she had the impression that in a little less than a year the peasants were generally getting used to it, and many acting upon it although they could not have explained it at all. This moral share of the state in every economic interest is that which has made it possible for the government to work out the scheme of the National Syndicates. This has nothing to do with the Fascist Syndicates which were until recently opposed to the Socialist trade unions as one political organisation to another. The new Syndicates are to be of no political colour at all; their action is to be purely economic and they are nearly compulsory.⁠[12] Every man must belong to one of them either as a labourer, a capitalist or an intellectual, the last category containing most professional men. When any economic conflict arises—causes of conflict have been reduced to the lowest possible number—the Syndicate of employers sends its delegates to meet the delegate of the Syndicate of employed. Such delegates are mostly the secretaries of the Syndicates and must belong to the calling of the men whose interests are entrusted to them; then they must have qualified and hold a diploma testifying to their technical and economic knowledge of the problems that they may have to treat. The fact that they must belong to the trade they exercise and actually exercise it, sweeps away all the professional secretaries of trade unions, who, living out of their leadership of the workmen, are ready to do anything to retain their posts. No less important is the necessity of their technical and economical qualification. Yet as for the moment there are no such qualified people to be had and the people are not yet used to choose their representative according to their value in the trade and common-sense they are appointed by the government. And this is one weak point of the organisation, although it is obviously a temporary one.

For the rest it is simply wonderful. The delegates of the two syndicates—employed and employers—meet, and they discuss the point at issue. Usually they come to an agreement because the greatest consideration is taken of the economic facts, local conditions of life, supply and demand of work and so on. Failing agreement, the syndicates themselves meet and discuss the matter. If the agreement is not possible the delegates meet again, but in the presence of a special magistrate, who studies the case and whose conclusions are enforced by law. No lock-out or strike is even contemplated; they have become an offence against the community, and as such liable to various penalties. Men are free to produce, but not to destroy.

This brings our study to a conclusion, since to deal with any one point of those which have been merely sketched here would require a whole volume. The people’s will is free so long as what they wish is for the common good and their own good, but it is not free to want anything that is either not for the common good or against it. Football is still the best example. The men of a team freely want to win the match and freely do what they are ordered to do by their captain, but they are not free to show off or to spoil the game, to spite the captain or any one of the men.

Mussolini makes no mystery about it; his party has come into the world as the negation of the Rights of Man as they were formulated in the eighteenth century; as the negation of Liberty as it has been understood, that is to say abstracting it from its correlative term Law; as the negation of democracy as far as democracy is understood, through a wrong interpretation of its Greek root taking people as equivalent to lower class, is quantity opposed to quality—whereas it is equivalent to the nation as a whole; as the negation of the equality of 1789 which was materially and mechanically conceived.

Yet such negations are the preliminary stage to affirmations—the affirmation of the rights of man arising from his consciousness of duty; of liberty as the positive term of Law, yet as inseparable from it as light from shadow; of democracy understood as the impossibility of any class willing to rule by force over other classes, be it by the force of wealth, arms, or numbers; finally, the equality of men, both moral and legal, according to which every man’s rights must be proportioned to what he does for the community.

The great new feature of it is the idea of state and citizen upon which the whole Mussolinian legislation and government is based although it seems never to mention it. Whilst in the Anglo-Saxon and French views of political reality the State is a function of the citizen; whilst in the German view, whether in its Imperialistic or Communistic form, the citizen is a function of the state, for modern Italy the state is the consciousness of the citizen transcending itself and postulating itself in religious objectivity.

No class differences, no financial differences may therefore be rendered permanent by the State. No care must be spared that may ensure their eternal mutability. Differences are necessary to permit moral, social, and economic progress; but their fertility lies in their elasticity. If “Avanti” was not the motto of Socialism the Fascists could make it theirs; as it is, reintroducing faith and belief at the basis of man’s life they seem to point to higher moral, political and economical conquests. The only motto that can befit the black shirts movement is therefore Sursum corda.

FOOTNOTES

INDEX — Transcriber’s notes

• Alberti, Leone Battista, 87
• Alfieri, 168
• Ardigo, 164
• Aretino, 101
• Ariosto, 101
• Aristotle, 65, 66, 67, 94, 107, 108, 172, 216
• Bacon, Francis, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 92, 93, 120, 146, 191
• Bacon, Roger, 64
• Bainville, 114, 115
• Bayle, 146, 147
• Beltramelli, 212
• Berkeley, 149
• Bodin, 94
• Boccacio, 81
• Bassuet, 82
• Bismarck, 25, 26
• Cairoli, 21, 22
• Campanella, 100, 101, 105
• Carducci, 43
• Carlo, Alberto, 14
• Cavour, 10, 14, 33, 185
• Cherbury, Herbert of, 142
• Corneille, 116
• Cola di Rienzo, 81
• Costa, Andria, 27, 28, 90, 215
• Carradini, 30, 32, 33, 40
• Crispi, 20, 24
• Croce, 88, 89, 125, 130, 170–188, 189, 216, 222
• Cromwell, 96, 99, 100
• Cumberland, 141
• Cuoco, Vincenzo, 122, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162, 168
• Dante, 78, 79, 80, 81, 168, 212, 213
• D’Annunzio, 48, 52
• D’Azeglio Massimo, 11
• Depretis, 25
• De Ruggiero, G., 163
• De Sanctis, 16, 77, 83, 101, 104, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 216
• Descartes, 64, 66, 67, 68, 110, 114–124, 126, 146, 191
• Ercole, 89
• Federzoni, 30, 32, 33, 40
• Ficino Marsilio, 87
• Fiorentino, 164
• Frederick II, 77, 87
• Fichte, 213
• Garibaldi, 10, 11, 20, 24, 33
• Gentile, 35, 59, 60, 76, 125, 130, 132, 171, 188–210
• Gioberti, 16, 159, 162, 163, 164, 165, 171
• Ghibellines, 78, 79, 83
• Giolitti, 37, 52
• Grotius, 93, 94, 95, 127
• Guarini, 105
• Guicciardini, 103, 104, 111, 112
• Guelphs, 78, 79, 83
• Hegel, 62, 76, 98, 154, 159, 165, 208, 209, 213
• Hobbes, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 109, 111, 122, 127, 129, 146
• Hume, 98, 146
• Johnson, 82
• Kant, 140, 149, 154, 162, 164, 203, 208
• Louis XIV, 114, 115, 116, 124
• Landino, 87
• Lévy Bruhl, 62
• Leibniz, 124, 163
• Locke, 100, 125, 132, 138, 189
• Machiavelli, 40, 41, 42, 86, 88, 89, 90, 101, 102, 103, 110, 112, 168, 172, 174
• Mâle, 69, 72
• Mazzini, 11, 14, 20, 33, 155, 159, 160, 161, 168, 185, 215
• Malespini, A., 77
• Maritain, 117
• Marx, 62
• Monnier, Ph., 87
• Melzi, 157
• Mill, 164
• Michelangelo, 166
• Minghetti, 24
• Montaigne, 146
• Montesquieu, 147, 149
• Mussolini, 29, 35, 37, 43, 76, 77, 88, 103, 156, 157, 158, 159, 170, 171, 177, 180, 186
• Nitti, 52
• Newton, 146
• Orange, William, 100, 138
• Pascal, 146
• Pagano, 155
• Plato, 135
• Plutarch, 133
• Poliziano, 167
• Petrarch, 80, 81, 83
• Piccolomini, 82
• Pisano Nicolo, 76
• Rosmini, 16, 159, 162, 164, 171
• Reggio, E., 75
• Rousseau, 107, 126, 128, 138, 145, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 207
• Salandra, 37, 42
• Saitta, 149
• San Giuliano, 37
• Sarfatti, 212
• Savonarola, 162
• Scholasticism, 63, 64, 108, 111, 119, 128
• Shaftesbury, 141, 142
• Sonnino, 37, 42
• Solmi, 76
• Spaventa, 164, 165
• Spinoza, 89, 129
• Sturzo, and his party, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53, 225
• St. Anselm, 64
• St. Augustin, 119, 121
• St. Thomas, 64, 94, 108, 129, 208
• Tasso, 105
• Toland, 142, 143
• Tocco, 164
• Vico, 65, 80, 98, 111, 124–136, 149, 154, 163, 165, 168, 172, 216
• Villari, 163
• Vittorio, Emmanuele, 14
• Wildon Carr, 190

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