THE
PEDIGREE OF
FASCISM
A POPULAR ESSAY ON THE WESTERN
PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS
BY
ALINE LION
_Lady Margaret Hall, Oxon._
LONDON:
SHEED & WARD
31, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C. 4
TO
JOHN WALTER, ESQ.,
TO WHOSE QUESTIONS I OWE
THE FIRST IDEA OF THIS BOOK.
A. L.
_First Published_, 1927
CONTENTS
Part I
THE POLITICAL ANTECEDENTS OF FASCISM
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Is Fascism a Revolution? 3
II. Liberalism in Italy 10
III. Nationalism and Socialism 23
IV. The European War and its Effects 37
Part II
PHILOSOPHICAL ANTECEDENTS OF FASCISM
I. Philosophical Antecedents 58
II. Humanism and Renaissance 70
III. The Seventeenth Century 92
IV. The Seventeenth Century in France 114
V. Giambattista Vico 125
VI. Illuminism in England and France 137
VII. Nineteenth Century in Italy 154
VIII. Benedetto Croce 170
IX. Giovanni Gentile 189
X. Benito Mussolini 211
Index 235
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I should, perhaps, say from the first that I am neither Italian nor
Fascist. Yet, having lived in Italy from 1913 to 1927, I cannot but be
conscious of the fact that the country has undergone a deep change,
and have come to the conclusion that it is a change for the better.
My purpose in writing this book has been to bring to the knowledge of
people possessed of a fair amount of general knowledge, the conclusions
that might be formed by a specialist with regard to this change and
the value of it. Incidentally I have endeavoured to discourage both
those who would import Fascism, as it flourishes in Italy, into other
countries, and those who would hinder the spread of that philosophy
which, I hold, is its basis.
It is necessary to avoid, when possible, definitely partisan sources of
information; therefore I have turned to the works of Michele Rosi for
the history of politics and to Frederick Windelband for the history of
philosophy wherever general reading has proved inadequate or my memory
failed.
In conclusion I must offer special thanks to Sir Frank Fox for his
careful reading of my manuscript and his invaluable suggestion with
regard to it. I am also most grateful to the following whom I have
consulted as to historical or philosophical accuracy—Professor G. A.
Smith, Professor G. C. Webb, Mrs. Anne MacCormick, Miss Jamison, Miss
Mary Coate and Mr. R. G. Collingwood.
ALINE LION.
_Lady Margaret Hall,
Oxford._
Part I
THE POLITICAL ANTECEDENTS OF FASCISM
CHAPTER I
IS FASCISM A REVOLUTION?
If one may judge of the importance of a political event by the number
of articles and books printed on the subject there is no question but
that Fascism is one of the most important movements of the post-war
world. Strange to say, however, the light thrown by most of these
publications fails to illuminate the points most interesting to
foreigners. This is probably due first of all to the fact that most
of the writers have written either for or against it; moreover, this
movement, being peculiarly Italian, is difficult for a foreign mind to
grasp. In any case, it is a fact that in spite of all the good or bad
will of the journalists this revolution is far from being understood.
The lack of intelligent information regarding it is felt everywhere;
and it would be difficult to say whether the misrepresentation is
greater among those who admire it and, seeing in it a universal remedy
for all modern woes, want to introduce its method in other countries;
or among those who consider it just as a matter of incidental and local
politics. I shall try to put it in its historical setting, and I shall
consider myself fortunate if I can throw light on its relation to the
political past of Italy, and to the present political conceptions of
other countries.
The first question that invariably arises is whether Fascism is or is
not a revolution. This, however, must be answered by another: what is
a revolution? No word stands in greater need of a sound, common-sense
definition, yet a definition of it stands on the very threshold of any
impartial research on Fascism.
Is revolution merely a change of government? This is not sufficient.
If it were, the fall of Louis Philippe from the throne of France would
be a revolution; yet it is obviously by a license that one speaks of
it as the Revolution of ’48. The form of government may change without
any substantial alteration of the régime. Then does revolution imply a
change of régime? Yes, but, again, what is exactly a change of régime?
Without following any further this method of investigation let us
define Fascism as the introduction of a new conception of the relation
between State and Citizen, a new conception of political reality.
It is, therefore, a doctrine, a system, and as such is philosophy
expressing itself in history. This admitted, it is necessary to guard
against the abstract bent. of philosophical researches. The deepest
currents of speculative thought would never bring about a single change
of government by themselves; but then they do not exist by themselves.
It is only in the synthesis of history that we find them at play in the
world of historical reality, which is what it is because thoughts and
deeds are one.
The March on Rome did certainly mark the confluence of two streams
coming to mingle their waters between the banks of the Tiber. One was
torrential, the impulse coming from a fifty years’ accumulation of
economic and political mistakes in Italy. The other was deeper, slower,
the contribution of centuries of Italian philosophy enriched by the
intellectual thought of all Europe. The torrent is represented by the
political antecedents of Fascism: the deep stream by the philosophical
antecedents of Fascism.
To illustrate my figure a period of history presents itself as an
example. It does not correspond exactly to the present movement in
Italy, but it is at any rate familiar to one and all: the French
Revolution. We see there, also, the typical stream of philosophical
life carving a deep bed for the river to come: in the minds of
intellectuals, in the consciousness of the people, abstract theories
or works of artistic vulgarisation, prepare the bed for the river
that will become, under the impulsion of actual circumstances, an
irresistible torrent. So that this revolution whose intellectual
pedigree makes it the offspring of Descartes, and Hobbes, of Grotius,
Locke and the English political writers, besides the Encyclopædists,
Voltaire and Rousseau, has to the highest degree the qualities that
make it an element of universal life, and a fertilising principle
in the politics of all Europe. On the other hand it receives,
undoubtedly from the economic and political conditions of France, the
particular determinations that distinguish it as French, as belonging
to the eighteenth century. The form it took actually between 1790
and 1795 could not be introduced anywhere else; under that form it
was exclusively French, because—we must insist on the point—it had
received it as its actual and concrete determination from its immediate
antecedents.
Actuation, realisation, concrete life, whatever the field we move in,
whether we consider politics, artistic creation, or natural life, it
requires two elements, the one universal, the other particular. Now
history shows that the universal element spreads, notwithstanding
frontiers and the will of men. Its force of expansion is a quality
common to all ideas; but the particular is not to be imported, and
it is as impossible to introduce it in foreign lands as it is to
confine the other to any land. Hence the political applications of
the same theories in different countries differ from each other as
do the countries themselves. These differences, economic, political,
religious, intellectual, in a word the historical differences existing
between two countries determine the differences that the same theory
will undergo when it is adopted by the people of different nations.
The Italian patriots at the end of the eighteenth century were very
few, and all, without exception, intellectuals. Some belonged to
the higher or lower aristocracy, some belonged to the upper middle
class, but all were scholars, men of the widest reading. It would be
difficult to find nowadays a body of men so well informed. For one
thing, production has increased immensely and life has lost the leisure
that allowed intellectual tastes to be satisfied. The fact remains
that at the close of that century Italy could boast of men aware of
its inferior position, of its non-existence as a nation. Such men were
ready to try anything, and did try to imitate the French revolution in
so far as they could by founding the small republics that lasted one
season or two, dying away like plants of distant countries, when they
are planted in our soil. Their zeal, however, was not sterile, they
failed in their immediate purpose, because they wanted to introduce
not only ideas but the actual form in which these were expressed. A
constitution, a battle, the plan of a town, a project of economic
reform, each of these things is an expression endowed with an æsthetic
value varying with the degree of perfection attained by the man
who worked it out, and gave the idea that prompted him a suitable
realisation. But the essential quality of the æsthetic creator is to be
on a particular theme, the voice of his time and of the body of men he
represents in his act of creation. The men of the revolution were by no
means fair representatives of the people of France; but when they drew
up the constitution they certainly realised on the whole the desiderata
of most Frenchmen. Giving expression, giving form to the ideas that had
agitated the whole century, they did it in the only way that could be a
French way in those days.
Now the will of Napoleon, when he wished Italy to be politically a
copy of France, was a very empirical will, and the men who tried
to carry out his wishes because they loved Italy were not any more
transcendental. In this question they took no notice of what were
the spiritual and political conditions of their country, and yet
surely a constitution is an expression of mind. In all this however
their blunder paved the way to a better understanding of the matter.
Everybody realised that in order to have anything like an independent
government the first thing was to be a great and unified country. When
the ideas that had led in France to the Revolution and Republic were
developed in Italy, according to the mentality of the great Italians,
they blended with all that was particular to Italy and expressed
themselves in an Italian movement: the Risorgimento. It cannot be over
emphasised, for the importance of the point is great; the same ideas
that caused the Republic to become for more than a century the form of
French government, gave birth to the Kingdom of Italy.
Roughly, the same can be said of Fascism. Its ideas and doctrine
will spread whether they meet with favour or hostility, because they
are Italian just as Liberalism is English, that is to say they are
Italian in their methods of actuation and perfectly universal in their
philosophical content.
“Equality, fraternity, liberty,” was the eighteenth century cry, and
it might be the cry of the Fascists. Their revolutionary contribution
to the history of politics is the denial of natural rights, natural
rights being understood as something the determination of which is
anterior to the birth of man, as the quality of a cabbage or a rose
tree is anterior to its birth. Right is so narrowly linked to duty that
for this school of thought it cannot be anterior to consciousness.
Therefore man must be considered and rated in the State only according
to spiritual value and actual economic or intellectual interest.
The natural rights of man are denied. The spiritual value, entitling
man to citizenship, cannot be acquired by him once for all and enjoyed
without effort. He must daily and continuously be working for the
vindication of the rights he has won, and for the conquest of those
he seeks. Citizenship is not a chattel lying in a man’s possession:
its only reality is bound to the performing of the duties correlative
of rights. There Fascism meets with all our religious communities;
in all Israelite and Christian Communities or Churches the new-born
child is admitted on the pledge, taken for him by sponsors, that he
will discharge his duties and accept the law of the community of which
he becomes a member. Such a pledge he has to confirm on his coming to
adult state.
Citizenship becomes, finally, with the whole of political reality, a
moral, spiritual and Christian reality, and the only real equality of
men can be attained in a State in which each man is rated according
to actual value. For citizenship, taken as a birthright of man, is a
remains of Pagan times, when it was the lot of some to be born slaves
and of some to be born citizens.
CHAPTER II
LIBERALISM IN ITALY
For the foreigner interested in the political affairs of Italy a study
of the pedigree of the two elements of Fascism is essential in order
to distinguish what is exclusively Italian from what is to become
universal. It is therefore necessary to trace, or at least attempt to
trace, this pedigree in spite of the difficulty of the task.
Fascism presents itself at first as being essentially the expression of
the national consciousness of Italy. So it is; but it must be stated
at once that it is the national consciousness recently acquired by the
people of Italy, which, like an uncontrollable force, has worked itself
out, taking Fascism as its expression. Without this distinction the
student is induced by its nationalist character to see in the present
movement the last act of the long drama of wars and agitations that
led to the independence and unification of the country. The truth is,
that though it is practically the epilogue of that drama, Fascism
cannot be identified with the Risorgimento. The spirit which animated
the men of the days of Cavour and Garibaldi is totally and essentially
different from that which impels the followers of Mussolini to act as
they do. The wars of independence were due to the initiative of an
aristocratic minority; whose aristocratic and intellectual qualities
distinguished them and perhaps ensured their success. The leaders
of the Risorgimento were not hampered by anything like a popular
following; and their eventual agreement as to what was best for their
cause was always made certain by this intellectual selectness. All were
able, like Garibaldi and Mazzini, to see things as they were and to act
accordingly, not only to the extent of sacrificing their lives but of
sacrificing their dearest ideals as well. Republicans, they accepted
monarchy; ministers, of their own free will they relinquished power to
place it in hands they thought more fit than their own to realise their
dream; staunch Catholics, during their life they fought the Church
in its temporal politics, in an age when the best educated priests
would not admit and could not even see the possibility of distinction
between temporal and spiritual power. Only religious and idealistic men
can realise by how much such sacrifices surpassed for them the gift
of money, liberty, or even life. There is one English word that sums
up what these Italian liberators were, whether noblemen, solicitors,
writers, professors, officers, doctors: they were _gentlemen_ of good
classical education and wide reading who had assimilated what was best
in Europe. The common people, one cannot insist too much upon the
fact, remained indifferent at best, and that only as long as their
interests were not affected; the lower middle class were hostile, that
is to say the shop people and all the multitude of small functionaries
who saw their daily bread dependent on the existing state of things,
were openly against any change. How could such people feel the need or
see the possibility of building up a nation, one nation, out of the
harlequin coat presented by the map of Italy?
Thus a free hand was guaranteed to the small number of Italian
gentlemen then endowed with heroic souls. They had nobody to consult,
they were a State in themselves, a State without a lower class.
Perhaps for the last time in the history of the world we see there
realised the classical republic without a political plebs. No wonder
that they worked a miracle; they belonged politically to different
states, and yet by the force of their ideal they attained that oneness
of conscience which gives personality and reality to a nation. The
spirit of the nation existed before its material realisation; there
is no better illustration of the new notion that Fascism is bringing
to the fore in the world of concrete history, that of the nation as
a spiritual reality, independent of geographical and ethnographical
determinations. Never in history has this notion received a more
complete and actual realisation than in this first dawn of the national
life in Italy. The reality of the nation had its first affirmation in
the sacrifice of these men, for it is obvious that no sober man would
give up life, liberty, wealth, for something unreal; and, in fact, the
reality of Italy as a nation ceased to be questioned then and there.
Every advantage, of course, has its disadvantage. As the pioneers of
the Risorgimento did not need the people, they overlooked all the
problems that the necessity of obtaining popular collaboration would
have compelled them to face. All economic and social questions were
overlooked except by a very few; the spiritual education of the lower
class was not even suggested in their programme of action. Their aims
were the independence and the political unity of Italy, and to that
goal they directed their hearts and minds indifferent to the needs of
practical life, and to all the obstacles that seemed to make their
dream a theme for the lyrical effusions of poets. In fact they were
poets, all of them, for they created a reality out of an ideal vision
that was more an intuition than an intellectual conception. The very
manner in which they carried out their revolution was æsthetic more
than practical; they shut their eyes to all that was in contradiction
to their dream, exactly as the artist does who strives to express an
intuition through material realisation, and in order not to let the
objective world crowd his mind deliberately shuts his eyes to it, to
everything that is not his present ideal.
The economic and social questions could not in any case have been
faced, still less dealt with, as long as the nation was not a political
reality. Any attempt would have been sterile and perhaps even harmful.
First, it would have led the people to believe that under the then
present conditions the economic organisation of each little state
might have been so planned as to ensure the material well-being of
the population, that they could receive a greater share of political
importance and therefore of administrative attention from the local
governments and thus be better off in the harlequin coat than under
the flag of a united Italy. It was, moreover, expedient to hold to the
singleness of purpose that was more likely to make action coherent all
through the peninsula; only such singleness of aim made it possible to
men of so different temperament and breeding as professional men and
noblemen, Tuscans and Sicilians, Freemasons and ardent Catholics, to
think and therefore to act in positive harmony.
When a bullet has hit the bull’s-eye it has fulfilled its purpose, and
stays there in helpless immobility or falls to the ground a useless
thing. It was meant for that shot, and is bound to be purposeless when
it has made its mark. The generations of Carlo Alberto and Mazzini, of
Vittorio Emmanuele and Cavour, had certainly hit the mark when Rome had
become the capital of Italy. Was it to be expected that men who had
identified themselves with the goal should be able to take another goal
and fit themselves to a new task? Or could it be that the realisation
of the new State should bring, as its immediate consequence, a
ready-made generation of statesmen? Indeed, if there is one thing that
cannot be produced by a magic wand, it is a body of able and trained
political men.
When the days of heroic deeds were over the makers of Italy turned
to the government of the new realm and found themselves faced by all
the problems of national life. Inspiration and idealism proved out of
place, and although theirs was, what would have been called in England
or in France, a Conservative government, they had to rely on a very
strange electoral body. While they did not extend the vote at once,
they found in the middle class a set of Arrivists with an imperative
egoism that was to prove the curse of political life in Italy. It
is difficult for an English, French, or American citizen to realise
the kind of problems with which these men were beset. Above all it
is difficult to an Englishman; England has had five or six centuries
of political experience, a length of time sufficient to produce
electors and mandatories able to realise what are the duties of the
executive as well as of the legislature. In Italy, on the other hand,
the nineteenth century has seen all stage of political development
succeeding one another in a hurly-burly that has a good deal in common
with the succession of the events of a man’s life on a cinema film.
He passes from childhood to youth, and on to manhood, maturity and old
age in a couple of hours. If he actually could crowd all experience
into a couple of years the proportion would be better; but he would
have no fairer notion of reality and of his own rights and duties at
any stage of his life than the Italians could be expected to have when
they had to pass in less than fifty years through the political stages
successively experienced by the people of other countries in several
centuries.
Now no student of the history of politics, or even of art, ignores the
fact that when a nation has reached a political or artistic form it
is in the process of getting a mastery of that form that criticisms
arise, and that out of criticism comes the idea, confused at first,
then clearer and clearer, of the form that is to supersede it. This is,
in fact, the process of dialectic: it is the dialectic of history; and
in spite of the wish to avoid any special terminology, it is better to
call the process by its own name. At first 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 moment ends in
criticism of the whole theory; finally they set themselves to remedy
its shortcomings. This last moment coincides in the people with the
free consciousness of dissatisfaction, and in the leaders with a clear
understanding of the new tendencies to be satisfied, so that it is
not theoretical to say that 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 international culture of its scholars
put them in contact with all that was best or worst in the politics
of Europe. They would have been ashamed to be behindhand in what was
considered social progress.
Then two uncommon factors came into play after 1870. To make Italy, it
had been necessary to trample upon a good deal of historical tradition.
Not all the local governments were as bad during the eighteenth
century as they were said to be. Moreover, paramount had been the
prestige of the Popes. Against all the Conservative forces the men of
the Risorgimento had appeared as a lot of Jacobins; they had to fight
the Church in its temporal power, and although this power was not
essential to religion it had behind it a tradition of ten centuries.
With the government of the Popes the whole Italian civilisation was
closely connected; indeed, the best brains of Italy have always
realised that, whatever the faults of the Church, Italy is first of
all a Catholic country. Anti-clericals in their political activity,
men like de Sanctis, would not have printed a word against the Church
as historians. Indeed, the greatest thinkers of the time, Gioberti and
Rosmini, tried very hard to be good Catholics and great philosophers at
the same time.
Yet since they could not doubt that Italy must have Rome for its
capital as the seal of its political unity, the Popes had to be
deprived of their temporal sovereignty. The feeling about Rome was one
of historical mysticism, and seldom, if ever, have men found themselves
thrown into an irreligious attitude by a sentiment of that kind. No
contradiction could have been more profound, for it brought these
ardent lovers of their remotest past to make use of forces that were
antagonistic to the one institution that linked their present to this
same past. However, there was no alternative; adopting Illuminism as
one of the chief currents animating modern life, they had as their most
precious support the anti-Catholic movement, to which, as a matter
of fact, a great many of them belonged. Anti-Catholicism had a great
weakness in that it was not a national product, but had been introduced
into political life as a necessary stimulant to rouse the people from
their slumbers, as will be seen later on; now that they were awake it
divided the nation and prevented the welding of the new tradition to
its history of twenty centuries.
The statesmen of this epoch had no experience of the administration and
government of a big State: they were not conscious of the problems of
international relations; they knew nothing of the economic and social
exigencies of a population exceeding thirty millions of souls.
The people had no political education whatsoever. On the other hand,
the leaders would not be retrograde and became more and more liberal,
at a rate that did not allow the people to be prepared by experience
for successive steps in popular government. The sequence of reforms was
not historical, was not dialectical: it did not correspond with the
spiritual and economic development of the people, but was introduced to
make up for lost time and bring Italy up to the Western European level
as fast as possible.
With no tradition to make up ballast, the so-called “Right” could not
be termed Conservative because it originated in a revolution, and
it kept its old ideal as a target after it had been realised, and
therefore had ceased to be a principle of action.
What was to be expected under such conditions? The wonder is that the
nation did not go to pieces, and that the work of two generations of
constructive men was not destroyed by their incapacity to husband what
they had created. In the face of such facts one cannot help thinking of
Vico and his identification of divine Providence with the rationality
of history. This people was politically at the nursery stage; it had
no modern political science of its own, and therefore none of its
legislative acts were based on actual and practical understanding of
what were the national necessities. They were inspired by the example
of foreign governments and, consequently, could not meet Italy’s
peculiar necessities. What did for the others could not do for Italy.
Yet it was impossible to keep back a people so well informed of modern
progress.
The Italian Liberals, it must be said for their immortal fame, had the
clear-sightedness necessary to attain their aims, inasmuch as they
had reduced them to a formula that could be accepted by all the other
patriots. “Italy, one and free,” was their aim, and to this aim nobody
could object. The flaw of such an aim is that it is too simple to
correspond to actual reality. It sounds like an algebraical axiom, and,
indeed, is just as abstract in its basis as any mathematical formula.
For the Liberals the nation was exclusively constituted by its
territorial expansion and by the unification of the people of the
different states therein included. They could not change their aim,
and when they had to administer the new realm their eagerness and
singleness of purpose often blinded them to reality. As the unity
they had reached was formal, if one can term it so, their legislation
purposely ignored the differences between Sicilians and Tuscans; and
in their haste to unify internally what was already externally one,
they imposed what could at best be formal and artificial unity. Every
annexation had been preceded by a local struggle, and success was not
sufficient to cause equanimity in the triumphant party. All that had
existed under the old régime was an object of hatred to the Liberals;
and their ministers, even when they kept above such feelings, were
none the less unable to discriminate between the antiquated local laws
and those that were still useful and even good. They destroyed local
institutions, often created to meet actual requirements, to impose, for
instance, upon the people of Sicily Piedmontese laws, the inspiration
of which was usually imported from France or England. They had the
impression that it would be dangerous to the unity of the country to
keep some of the local laws, or to make new ones to meet the particular
needs of this or that province. In the minds of these passionate
creators of unity, unity was a quite fragile affair, produced by
them _ex tempore_; they did not see that it could only be the result
of a slow elaboration, bound to go on for generations, and that the
final success of their enterprise was more likely to be ensured by an
intelligent interpretation of tradition than by the application of
exotic doctrines that did not fit any of the historical characteristics
of the country.
The same singleness of vision was to prove blinding in regard to
several other points; but it will be enough to state here that the fact
that the men who had sacrificed themselves to the cause of unity had
all been gentlemen, led those in power to consider the higher classes
as exclusively constituting the nation they had brought into being. The
rest were politically non-existent; and in the haste to develop the
commercial and industrial possibilities of the country a good deal too
much was done to enthrone capital and invite thereby the advent of
Socialism.
Finally, another cause of trouble—indeed, another consequence of the
same lack of political tradition and education—was the impossibility
of forming proper party organisations. Who was Left—and who was Right?
Discrimination was impossible. Parties, like all historical organisms,
are called into being and developed according to, and in consequence
of, the political development of the country. In Italy they had to be
produced, planned and organised all at once, by the mere empirical
decisions of men, who, whatever their ability, or the loftiness of
their ideals, could not avoid the arbitrariness and the errors to
which the best individual men are subject, limited as their views are
by their personal feelings or ambitions. Therefore, what happened
was this: some followers of Mazzini who had joined the Liberals in
the struggle for liberty, stood out as republicans; some who had
followed Garibaldi and who had for ten years longed to take Rome from
the Pope, became anti-clerical democrats; the rest were not to be
clearly distinguished from one another because a man who was a staunch
monarchist may have been in the same time anti-Catholic if he was a
Freemason, whilst another might have had strong democratic tendencies
and yet stand for tradition. The best instance of this may have been
Crispi: he belonged to the Left, and certainly often acted and felt
like a man of the Right.
Such confusion was to reach its climax when, after 1866 and 1870, it
was understood that the king and the government, having obtained the
Veneto from Austria, had given up the intention of adding Trento and
Trieste to the kingdom. Then the extreme Left joined irredentism to
its anti-Catholic activity. They went on speaking of the ethnographic
right that such provinces had to claim themselves as Italian, and
they artfully bound their anti-religious campaign to a programme that
sounded highly idealistic. No wonder that the different governments
that succeeded each other should lose their time fighting the ghost
of financial bankruptcy. One thing only can be brought against them,
and it is that though all men of great culture they did not understand
how unhistorical were their actions. They should have known that their
conception of State and citizen, their idea of what is the function
of the government, had been taken ready made from other countries and
lazily accepted without any proper study of its antecedents. Some were
Anglophile, some under their new Germanophilism hid the most perfect
assimilation of French doctrines taken in their easiest and, therefore,
most abstract formulas. None took liberty for what the word had meant
of actual and positive political conquest to the average Englishman
of the seventeenth century; they did not even take it for what it had
meant of practical improvement to the Frenchman of the eighteenth
century; they took it as a rhetorical figure with an abstract concept
behind it, as soon as it ceased to mean independence from foreign rule.
They termed themselves Liberals, however, and when they came to be
ministers of a Liberal government they professed sometime a very
curious notion of what such a government should be; Cairoli put it down
in three words, _reprimere non prevenire_; an excellent motto perhaps,
when the citizens are used to the exercise of their duties and rights,
but soon proved to be dangerous in a country where traditions had been
trampled upon during half a century. In less than a decade Italy was
the prey of anarchy, for in 1878, the same Cairoli, had to defend the
king’s life in Naples at the risk of his own, and in Florence and Pisa
bombs were thrown against the crowds rejoicing over the king’s narrow
escape. The Liberals looked at the way legislation worked in France and
in England, but, like all followers of Illuminism, they took it for
granted that there existed a certain kind of animal which was the same
wherever and whenever you find Man, and they looked at the application
of the system, not at its origin, not at its philosophical and
political antecedents; in short, they did not see that it was brought
about by the whole history of the countries in which it flourished, and
they believed that it would work wherever men lived together in nations.
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:
“Ei dipinga il trionfo dell ’Italia
Assorta novella tra le genti.”
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
Fascism is the concrete way of considering any organisation or relation
in the light of the aim for which it was created. Such a method sweeps
away a good deal of claptrap rhetoric and a great many prejudices.
What matters is the actual working of an organisation towards its aim,
and not at all the exclusive interest of one of the two contracting
parties. Obviously this is the practical application of one of the most
famous propositions of the philosophy of Mind. It is just as obvious
that after a first period of political system exclusively for gentlemen
and by gentlemen, and a second period of a political system exclusively
drawn for the benefit of the lower class, it was natural that any sane
party should have tried a synthetic policy, above all in a country
where the mentality is essentially realist.
The motto of Fascism is order and hierarchy. This is the necessary
consequence of its taking into consideration always the aim and its
actual realisation. If efficiency is to be ensured to any organisation
from the family upward it is evident that every member of it must play
his part in the way which is most likely to ensure efficiency. Yet
this notion of discipline is a trifle more modern than it sounds, at
least in Italy. Nothing can better illustrate it than the example of a
football Captain and his men. The boy who acts as Captain, let us say
John Smith, has no authority over his fellows, except when, ceasing to
be John Smith, he is Captain of the team, and while they are actually
playing, practising or arranging a game. His authority is not personal,
it is actual to the sport interests of the team, or the school they
represent, so that it is not demeaning to any of his team to accept
the dictates of his authority. Indeed the boys’ commonsense is strong
enough, in England at least, to make them realise an idea which they
would comprehend with great difficulty in its speculative form. To them
it is obvious that their Captain’s authority is as absolute as it is
actual and impersonal. He is Captain as long as he is an actual value,
as long as he is a factor of efficiency to the general play of his
side. His authority does not diminish one whit of the players’ liberty,
because the will of every single player is that his side should win,
and such identity is that which makes the actual reality both of the
team as an individual, or rather as a person, in the world of sport and
of the single players as members of that team. The Captain is entrusted
with the co-ordination of a number of wills, and their welding into
one in his own person, so that each boy freely wants what all want.
Divergencies are merely negative—as is constantly shown by the negative
scoring of sides in which first-rate men play without this unification
of their single wills.
Thus football comes to illustrate perfectly the most difficult of all
the Gentilian notions instinctively acted upon by people who will
never be able to read one line of Gentile’s works, the notion of
liberty taken as actual identification of each single will which is
liberty with the common will which is law. Again the boys’ commonsense
would find it as ridiculous to argue over their Captain’s orders when
playing, as to go on considering him as their superior when the game
is over, or when they have detected among themselves a better Captain.
Thereby they teach the world a deep truth, that is to say that no value
can be considered as static, and that its realisation being dynamic and
actual it cannot be achieved once for all, but is a continuous process
of developing one’s own efficiency.
Hence the notion of discipline and liberty acted upon by boys playing
football results in a conception of hierarchy which is also shared by
Fascism, and is pregnant with so much social and political reformation
that one cannot insist too much upon it. Nor can one abstract it from
Gentile’s system, of which it is theoretically and practically the
centre. In their organisation the boys certainly do not consider the
team’s hierarchy as being definitely settled any more than Fascists
would consider any one political constitution or method of governing
as final, that is to say as perfect. To their young minds, full of
freshness and elasticity, it would sound absurd not to be able to alter
their arrangements and to modify their play in the best interests of
the team. If a boy slackens in his practice his unfitness will soon
betray the fact and his contribution to the positive scoring of the
team will be thereby diminished. But with this new view of hierarchy
which Fascism takes as being grounded on actual value, the most
unstable of all living reality thereby destroying every notion of any
permanent class or organisation—the contribution to international
politics of Fascism as the immediate consequence of its national and
political antecedents comes to an end.
Passing now to the exposition of the philosophical genealogy of Fascism
it may be well to remember first that there are no such things as
“national” philosophies, philosophy being the historical process of
infinite Mind; secondly, that as a consequence of the oneness of such
a process, there are no such things as brand new conceptions either
in the most sublime of theoretical systems or in their practical
realisation such as pedagogy or politics. Neither is there any such
thing as an international system, and this ought to be sufficient
to destroy any hope of internationalisation of mankind. Every great
nation is a contributor to the life of Mind, and may be said to
take in international politics a part which is proportioned to its
theoretical contribution. Each school of thought takes the problems in
the solution of which it displays the peculiarities which distinguish
its genius from another school, either when this has given to it all
the development of which its own genius was capable, or when it is
developing it on unilateral lines.
In philosophy good examples of this are the obvious derivation of
Bacon’s and Descartes’ problems from the Italian philosophers of the
Renaissance, and the mutual influence of English empiricism and French
rationalism; in politics the influence of England on France during
the whole of the eighteenth century and of both countries on Italy
during the nineteenth century. Looking at any history of philosophy or
politics serves to illustrate the point. For one follows the living
process through which theoretical notions are born one out of the
other, and one realises the part played by the characteristics of each
nation in the constructive play of historical forces. There could be
no stronger evidence both of the intellectual interdependence of
countries, and the absolute necessity of their political independence.
The relation of theoretical and practical life ought no longer to be
one of exclusive opposition. Pragmatism has done something towards
the simplification of it and the oncoming idealism is achieving it
in a way that may be said radical. In the history of the last three
centuries, however, we see philosophy considering thought and action
as the two terms of an irreducible dualism; yet such dualism must not
be considered a product of the perverseness of modern thought. Ovid
has left us a verse which settles the point even for people unfamiliar
with pagan philosophy. It is only the deliberate application of a given
system which may follow after its conception, but the spontaneous
conformation of political reality to the actual life of the mind is
generally simultaneous with the conception of the theories of which it
is the practical expression. A good illustration of the point can be
had from Germany. Lévy Bruhl has sketched the parallel development of
German philosophy and national consciousness in a work which is not as
famous as it deserves. After Hegel’s death, when his system has given
birth to its two political offsprings, the statolatry of Imperialism
and the myth of Marx’s Communism, the maximum force of expansion is
on the verge of being reached by Germany and the country is not far
from becoming the prey of national fanaticism, which is as blinding as
the religious fanaticism that appears in the history of all churches
when, having exhausted the force of expansion that is dependent on the
immediacy of their faith, they want to go on expanding artificially
through arbitrary force.
Few legacies of the first centuries of modern thought have been
as harmful as the divorce between the two manifestations of human
activity. It was, however, inevitable. Faith in the positive teaching
of the Church was the first snare into which early thinkers fell; for
it is not exact to say that they professed the existence of two truths
merely to escape danger. They firmly believed it. Most of them were
good Catholics, and as sure in their scientific maturity as in the days
of their childhood that the Church was right. On the other hand they
were sure of the result of their observations and experiments. They
were sure in both cases, and so they simply inferred the co-existence
of two truths. Nowadays, it sounds childish and the reciprocal
limitation of the two truths would be obvious to any modern student,
but in those days the problem had not received the light that it has
received since; and they were perfectly in earnest. The philosophers
followed suit for two obvious reasons; science was still for a very
long time identified with philosophy, and the sixteenth century
thinkers, when they were faced by the dilemma of being heretics or of
discarding their passionate researches, took to considering religion as
belonging to the practical manifestation of mind whilst scientific and
philosophic researches were its theoretical activity. One more step and
religion was to be identified as the enemy of science.
* * * * *
When Europe emerged from what has been called the Dark Ages of
obscurantism—in antithesis to the age of light to which belonged the
writers who thus labelled an epoch, which was dark and obscure to them
merely because they knew very little about it—intellectual life was
so full of buoyancy that men fretted at the tethers of a school of
thought which they could disregard after having come to such efficiency
under its discipline that they felt like boys coming intellectually of
age. Scholasticism having patronised Aristotle as “The Philosopher,”
Plato was for the first time opposed to him, then Neo-platonism; then
modern “national” schools of thought arose at the breaking up of
the intellectual world. For a United Intellectual States of Europe
existed during the Middle Ages; and the biographies of St. Anselm and
St. Thomas tell us eloquently how, in their centuries, a man could
pass from country to country to follow his studies with the greatest
simplicity. At the time of St. Anselm, nationality could not be traced
in a man’s works. By the time Roger Bacon wrote the differences had
developed, and it is not impossible to find his character as a sturdy
Briton standing out distinctly in his works. Such national tendencies
expressed themselves only in matters of little moment, and it is a fact
that the wonderful correspondence which passed between scholars kept
the humanism of each country in touch with that of all others; it is
none the less obvious that there were essential differences between the
character it gradually assumed in various countries, a character and
an attitude that may be identified as the initial stage of the various
European mentalities.
The best proof of this is to be had in the essential and irreducible
differences manifest in the conclusions to which Italian, English and
French philosophy came on the very same problem, which they found on
the threshold of modern civilisation. Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon
and René Descartes treated the same question when their respective
countries emerged from the later Middle Ages with their respective
schools coming to light from scholasticism through humanism. The
problem of knowledge faced them in this dawn of modern intellectual
life; and the same passionate reaction against Aristotelianism and
scholasticism compelled their researches to take the same bent. Yet
they came to widely different conclusions and the differences hold
good even to-day as characteristic of Italian, English and French
mentalities.
Bruno, whose metaphysic is wonderfully synthetic and pregnant with a
lyricism the echo of which runs through the work of Vico, faces the
problem of truth, of scientific truth according to him, in order to
find theoretical ground to reject the authority of antiquity considered
by his forerunners as the well of all worldly wisdom. A conception
known to that same antiquity but very uncommonly acted upon takes hold
of his mind. Truly old age must be wiser than youth, but antiquity is,
compared to his age, the nursery age of mankind, and a fairly good
student of the sixteenth century knows far more than Aristotle, because
he may know, if he chooses, all that Aristotle knew, and all that has
come afterwards to the knowledge of men. Each generation brings its
stone to the constructive activity of man’s experience. Hence the idea
he expressed _veritas filia temporis_. Thus he proclaims that which
will be the motto of every true Italian thinker; reality is essentially
and above all, Historical Reality.
In England, Bacon, starting on the same errand, through his researches,
was induced also to consider more and more that the regard of man for
the authority of tradition is one of the greatest obstacles to the
progress of science, and that servile veneration for Aristotle is,
above all, to be condemned as paralysing the initiative of modern
thinkers. Learning is not to be considered as the work of antiquity,
as a work already done; it is instead an arduous task still to be
accomplished and the first step on the way towards its accomplishment
must be the rejection of the old logic and its syllogism. Man must
trust to his personal experience, the immediate experience of his
senses. Nothing could be more anti-historical in its consequences than
this assertion, the unilateralness of which would be astonishing from
a man who felt the whole of historical and social world as a pulsing
reality, if it was not justified by the intellectual antecedents of the
English national consciousness coming to realise its own personality
just at the time in which Bacon thought and wrote. He could not very
well be expected to see the condition of his own experience in the
experience of his forerunners, in the age in which self-assertion
was the successful motto of every great man flourishing in England.
The abstraction thus made of all the historical past conditioning of
man’s experience was balanced for the time being by his own historical
and political sense and by the love of life as a whole so strong in
Elizabethan days. Yet henceforth reality in the eyes of any true Briton
was to be _Empirical Reality_.
A French thinker faces the same problem. René Descartes at first sight
is everything that Bacon is not; whilst the English philosopher is a
mixture of recklessness and worldly wisdom, anxious to enjoy everything
that power and wealth can beget, and drink to the dregs the cup of
life, the French metaphysician recoils from the cares of power and
the noisy turmoil of society. A longer consideration, specially from
a more philosophic point of view, reveals affinities that were going
to tell on their theories. Both lack the youthful enthusiasm common
to German and Italian thinkers, and both give shape to their theories
with a cautious prudence that marks them as men of the world. Their
conclusions betray their divergencies and affinities much better than
any analysis of their life and character could; for Descartes certitude
is reached by way of induction when in the silence of meditation he
comes to his famous statement _Cogito, ergo sum_. The touchstone of
certitude is identified with the actual consciousness of man in the act
of thinking. If I think surely I am; but of the rest, that is to say of
the knowledge of the exterior world I have no control, and traditional
science is communicated to me and was originally obtained through the
senses just as my actual objective knowledge, therefore it cannot be
accepted as certain. Aristotle and all the traditional fetishism come
to nought. The _tabula rasa_ is implied as definitely in this as in
Bacon’s work; in both cases man must begin his work from the foundation
and put to the test of his own experience, empirical in one case,
rational in the other, the legacies of his predecessors. The difference
however implied in the terms empirical and rational is fundamental
and the pedagogy and politics grounded on English philosophy whilst
laying down rules and formulas inferred from systematic theories, will
always be susceptible of being tempered by a direct call to experience
and commonsense. The rationality of French philosophy does not allow
of such adaptation. To this day the cogency for good or bad which is
characteristic of French theories is the consequence of their perfect
deduction from a first principle; hence the radicalness that mars
some of their practical application. With the exception of men greatly
influenced by foreign philosophy, the French thinkers all took reality
as being Rational Reality; and all their systems were bound to be
radical in their applications.
In their rationalism or empiricism, France and England threw overboard
the past that loomed indeed rather oppressive, and in so doing they
assert man, in his individual determination, as the ground of all
reality. It is perfectly allowable to consider that the two schools
were bound to stimulate and temper each other. The atom, the monad
at the basis of their system is always man, but at the outset the
unilateralism of Bacon’s gnoseology, a method based so to speak
exclusively on sense knowledge, called for the mathematical and
deductive method of Descartes in order to display all that it held
virtually of scientific progress. On the other hand the French
deductive method, although admitting the inference and resorting
to it in its research of first principles, stood in sore need of a
well-balanced recognition of the part played by sense perception in
human knowledge. This will be specially obvious in the political
consequences of the two theories. For both had their political system,
in which their common character prevailed, inasmuch as the seventeenth
century was for France and England the century of metaphysics whilst
the eighteenth drew the conclusions of their premises, seeing to the
application or realisation of all that was fertile as a suggestion of a
renovating process to be undergone by society.
Bruno’s historical reality was left in a corner, for it could not have
been integrated in our system to which it was then contradictory,
and still less in the political conditions that were to be the
outcome of our theories, since it was consonant with them only as far
as the individual was the basis of his reality as well as of ours.
His individual is, however, neither rational, nor empirical; he is
historical, and this implies that he cannot be considered bereft
either of his roots in the past nor of his projection on the future.
Nothing therein tends to diminish man; on the contrary everything
adheres to him, dilating his personality right into infinity. But this
notion of man was far too difficult to be realised even theoretically
in the sixteenth century, and the arduous task of the French and
English schools was to pave the way for the German and modern Italian
thinkers and provide them with a starting-point to reach the heights
from which the relation of the transcendental and empirical selves can
be detected, and the historical notion of man realised in the light
of such a conception. In Bruno it is not, however, a mere intuition
although it is realised only as far as the conception of science and
its historical development are concerned. The practical realisation
of this notion implied a new conception of tradition and authority,
which, far from being shaken to pieces, are in it invested with a new
and nearly sacred character. Antithetic thereby to Protestantism, it
knocked no less against the transcendent reality of God as understood
then by decadent scholasticism and by most Catholics.
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
_“Mentre che io canto, O Dio Redentore.
Vedo l’Italia tutta a fiamma e a foco”_
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
_“asperi
furore militis tremendo
Turribus ausoniis ruinam”_
and with all the selfishness of unconscious indifference
_“Rursus quid hostis prospiciat sibi
Me nulla tangat cura, sub arbuto
Iacentem aquae ad murmur cadentis.”_
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:
_“Est mea nunc Glycerae, mea nunc est cura Lycoris,
Lyda modo meus est, est modo Phyllis amor.”_
Reality is a horrible dream, “_improba seclis conditio!_” he is shocked
that
_“nuper ab occiduis illatum gentibus, olim
pressa quibus nostro colla fuere iugo.”_
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 ]
[1] The author wishes to state that being a Nationalist herself she has
been unable to assume towards Nationalism the purely critical attitude
that she has kept towards Socialism.
[2] Just as the idea of family in any one individual makes him feel
that the rest of the people are to him _not his family_, are to him
objective reality, whilst his people are to him THE FAMILY, and part of
his subjective reality.
[3] The author has lived in Italy as a student since May, 1913, in
constant contact with people of all classes.
[4] To refer to one single district and to facts directly known by
the author, it may be stated that in May, 1920, most of the province
of Udine having been organised under Don Sturzo’s white banner, the
peasants had their minds perverted by the very priests to whom they
had looked hitherto for moral guidance, to the extent of starving
their own cattle, of ceasing to milk their cows, leaving hundreds of
beasts howling day and night for a week. (Some of the land-owners,
above all those who were sportsmen, did their best, at the risk of
their life, to relieve the poor animals, but could not manage to go
round the stables every day.) The present writer is a Roman Catholic,
a friend of peasants wherever she goes and an animal lover; she could
not therefore speak with equanimity of a party who used the priests of
her own church to speak words of violence on the steps of the altar
or in the parsonage-houses, making bullies of country folk she has
known for thirteen years as excellent people, looking after their
cattle with so much humanity that they never sit down to a meal before
their beasts are fed. It is therefore better to state a few facts with
names and dates. In May, 1920, in San Martino al Tagliamento, Count
Francesco di Prampero was sequestered in his house with four men of
the white legion mounting guard on his doors, to compel him to yield
to the will of the priests and their followers. The same might be said
of all the land-owners of the villages where Don Sturzism flourished.
But Count Francesco di Prampero is selected here as being such a friend
of peasants, that he never lived with his family, since he was in his
teens preferring the company of his tenants, although he belongs to the
most ancient aristocracy.
In the same year groups of followers of Don Sturzo and some _Arditi
Bianchi_ went about with their white flag compelling people to kiss the
hem of it and caning those who would not, the _Arditi Bianchi_, who
were the armed legion of the party, being ready to shoot the obdurate
men or women. As a matter of fact, the most terrible harm was that of
the sacraments, in a province as religious as that of Udine, so that it
is no wonder that Benedict XV, asked by the present writer if he could
approve such things, was absolutely shocked and let her understand that
since the war it was his greatest torment.
Space compels to bring this note to a conclusion, and it may be said
that one of the foremost lieutenants of Don Sturzo, in that Province,
was Monsignor Gori, a canon of the cathedral of Udine, a man who
rejoiced over the defeat of his country at Caporetto, befriended the
invaders, and betrayed two women who had said to him that they were
praying for the victory of the allies, so that on his denunciation they
were condemned by the Austrians. This may give a fair idea of what
was a party that took such a man not only in its ranks, but as a main
agent, knowing him to be even then, before the advent of Fascism, in
antagonism with his Archbishop, whose patriotism has since brought upon
him the underhand persecution of the clergy that had been contaminated
by Don Sturzism even in its ecclesiastical discipline.
[5] See Francisco de Sancti’s _Storia della Letteratura Italiana_,
Lateza, Bari, vol. ii, chap. i.
[6] _Philosophy of the Practical._ 1912. Macmillan, London.
[7] Quoted by Wildon Carr’s _The Philosophy of Mind_ of Benedetto Croce.
[8] _Op. cit._
[9] _Op. cit._, page 491.
[10] The same can be said of the Israelite community.
[11] Negativity does not imply unreality.
[12] The way in which they are compulsory is not quite simple; but the
fact is that when the new institutions are framed men will perhaps get
their political rights as members of the corporations.
INDEX
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
MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
THE GARDEN CITY PRESS LIMITED, LETCHWORTH, HERTS
~~~ Transcriber’s notes ~~~
No attempt has been made to correct or normalize the spelling of proper
names or non-English text. The index is in original order. Footnotes
have been gathered at the end of the text, before the index. The
included cover is a modified version of the book’s title page and is
placed in the public domain.Project Gutenberg
The pedigree of fascism : $b A popular essay on the Western philosophy of politics
Lion, Aline