12 quotes
Mussolini insisted that Fascism was the only form of ‘socialism’ appropriate to the ‘proletarian nations’ of the twentieth century.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
It can be said, in a qualified sense, that Gentile entertained considerable sympathy for the neo-Hegelian Marxist intellectual tradition.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
The intellectuals of Mussolini’s Fascism provided the most consistent, coherent, and relevant doctrinal rationale for the reactive nationalist and developmental revolutions of our time.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
Mussolini’s Fascism was a relatively benign form of reactive nationalism—in terms of the regime’s treatment of its domestic population.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
That Mussolini chose Gentile to author the philosophical portion of Fascism’s official doctrine provides evidence of the confidence Fascists entertained with respect to Gentile’s thought.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
In a nonspecific sense, one might say that almost all the other antiliberal, reactive nationalist and developmental revolutions in our century were deviant forms of paradigmatic Fascism—the more deviant, the more destructive.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
Fascism, National Socialism, Stalinism and Maoism were all species of a single genus, ‘totalitarianism.’
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
As late as 1947, Mao insisted that his program corresponded to that of Sun. Until December of that year, Mao insisted that his ‘new democracy’ would protect the ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘their industry and commerce.’ Because of China’s backwardness, he would continue to support capitalist development and ensure that both public and private, capital and labor, interests would benefit from the revolution.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
Gentile maintained, with Marx, that the ‘essence’ of man is not individual—but social. The human person is a function of a complex pattern of interactions with both nature and other persons in a law-and-rule-government environment. The human being is essentially a social creature (a Gemeinwesen)—and outside society, loses humanity.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
It was Stalin, Lenin’s unnatural heir, who ‘in the early 1930s… injected the adrenalin of Russian nationalism into the Soviet political bloodstream’ in an effort to restore some vitality to what gave every appearance of a failed revolution.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
What distinguished Gentile’s Fascist rationale from that which came to characterize the legitimating rationale of Marxist-Leninism was Gentile’s identification of the nation—rather than the ‘proletariat’—as the community of destiny that would shape our time. For Gentile, proletarians represented only component elements of a larger organic community: the nation. In the modern world, only the nation could provide the material, intellectual, political, and moral environment in which the individual might find fulfillment.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)
Gentile’s rationale was neo-Hegelian in origin, the same source out of which Marxism and Marxism-Leninism were to emerge. In fact, Gentile understood Marxism so well that his essay on the thought of the young Marx has not only withstood the test of time, but was, on the occasion of its publication, recommended as particularly insightful by V.I. Lenin.
The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (1999)