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Emilio Gentile
a) The first nationalist and revolutionary mass movement born in a liberal European democ-
racy that introduced, in the organization of the masses and in political competition, the
militarization and the sacralization of politics. This involved the creation of a new kind
of party, the militia party, which operated in political struggles with warlike methods
and considered political adversaries as internal enemies that must be defeated and
destroyed;
b) The first political nationalist movement of the century that brought to power the pre-
eminence of mythical thought, officially sanctioning it as a superior form of political
expression of the masses, and established the sacralization of politics in the form of a
political religion and a collective liturgy, the cult of the littorio.
It is also appropriate to remember that the fascist party, before attaining political power,
displayed through its ideology but mostly through its new political style with its warlike
methods as well as with its rites and myths an explicit totalitarian calling, that is, the
aspiration of acquiring the monopoly of political power with the clear purpose of destroying
the liberal state and carrying out an unprecedented project for the organization of society
and the state.
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Fascism and the Italian Road to Totalitarianism: Emilio Gentile 293
a) coercion, imposed through violence. Repression and terror are considered as legitimate
instruments for the affirmation, defense and diffusion of the prevailing ideology and
political system;
b) demagogy exerted through constant and all pervasive propaganda, the mobilization of
enthusiasm, the liturgical celebration of the cult of the party and the leader;
c) the capillary organization of the masses, involving men and women of all ages, in order
to carry out the conquest of society and collective indoctrination;
d) totalitarian pedagogy, carried out from above, and according to male and female role
models developed along the principles and values of a palingenetic ideology;
e) discrimination against the outsider, undertaken by way of coercive measures that range
from exile from public life to physical elimination of all human beings who, because of
their ideas, social conditions and ethnic background are considered inevitable enemies
because they are regarded as undesirable by the society of the elect and duly incompatible
with the objectives of the totalitarian experiment.
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evil exclusively in accordance with the principles, values and objectives of the party, which
it helps implement. The analysis of the original nature of the totalitarian party, its ideology,
its organization and its political style is a preliminary and fundamental condition for the
definition of totalitarianism. The regimes, as Raymond Aron has correctly observed,
didnt become totalitarian by progressively slipping onto totalitarian land, but with the
thrust of their original intention; the will of essentially transforming the existing order for an
ideology.7
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Fascism and the Italian Road to Totalitarianism: Emilio Gentile 295
revolution, through the destruction of the liberal regime and the construction of a new state,
conceived as an unprecedented kind of totalitarian organization of the civilized society and
political system. As in totalitarianism, in fascist regimes there was a will to essentially change
the existing order through an ideology, even though the process of transformation followed
different paths, rhythms, and time frames compared to other totalitarian phenomena of the
time.11
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the absolute subordination of the citizen to the state, on the total dedication of the individual
to the national community, to discipline, to virility, to comradeship, and to a warlike spirit.
In the institutional realm fascism entails a single party as the organ of the continuous
revolution. The party provides for the armed defense of the regime, for choosing the di-
rective cadres and of organizing the masses in the totalitarian state, and for making them
part of a process, both emotional and fideistic, of permanent mobilization. Institutionally
fascism entails a police apparatus which prevents and suppresses dissention and opposition,
even appealing to terroristic measures. It also entails a political system ordered in a hier-
archy of functions, nominated from above and dominated by the figure of the capo. The
capo, invested with charismatic sacrality, commands, directs and coordinates the actions
of the party, the regime and the state. Another institutional dimension of fascism is a cor-
porate organization of the economy, which eliminates union liberty, enlarges the spheres of
intervention of the state and aims at achieving, on the basis of technocratic and solidarity
principles, the collaboration of the productive classes under the control of the regime, in
order to reach its goal of power while preserving private property and class division. Finally,
in the institutional realm fascism entails an imperialist foreign policy inspired by the myth
of national grandeur and of the New Civilization, aiming at supranational expansion.
To sum up this three dimensional definition of fascism:
fascism is a modern political phenomenon, which is nationalistic and revolutionary, anti-
liberal and anti-Marxist, organised in the form of a militia party, with a totalitarian con-
ception of politics and the state, with an ideology based on myth. Virile and anti-hedonistic,
it is sacralized in a political religion that affirms the absolute primacy of the nation as
an ethnically homogeneous organic community, hierarchically organised into a corporative
state, with a bellicose vocation for the policy of grandeur, power and conquest, and aiming
at the creation of a new order and a new civilization along supranational lines.
Reducing this definition to a shorter sentence, I would say that: fascism is a modern,
nationalist revolutionary movement, organized into a party-militia, with a totalitarian con-
ception and practice of politics and is prone towards bellicose imperialist expansion.
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Fascism and the Italian Road to Totalitarianism: Emilio Gentile 297
in different preexisting right- and left-wing politics. These elements can be found in the
inheritance of Jacobin nationalism, in the myths and secular liturgies of the mass movements
of the nineteenth century, in neo-romanticism, irrationalism, spiritualism and voluntarism of
the various philosophies of life, in the activism and anti-parliamentarism of the new radical
anti-liberal movements of the new right- and left-wing revolutionaries, which operated in
Italy and in Europe before the break out of the Great War. But the connections between
fascist ideology and the intellectual and political movements in the years prior to the Great
War dont justify the definition of these movements, their ideology and their culture as
manifestations of protofascism or even of fascism before fascism. The problem with
this interpretation is that ideas and myths of these same movements merged into ideological
compendiums of cultural and political movements which werent fascist or were definitely
anti-fascist. The concept of protofascism is strengthened by a backward reading of history
to foreshadow, through a retrospective projection, the inevitable political result of certain
ideological currents. But it is one thing to study the cultural and ideological context of Italy
before the Great War in order to locate the factors which prepared a favorable environment
for fascist ideology. It is another to define that same context as fascist, and consider fascism
itself an inevitable consequence to it.
Fascist Totalitarianism
Italian fascism, as an ideology, a party and a regime was the first manifestation of a new revo-
lutionary and totalitarian, mystic and palingenetic nationalism. Other right-wing movements
and regimes born in Europe between the wars were inspired by Italian fascism, and each of
them adapted the fascist model, in part or in whole, to their national specificities. Fascism is
a form of modernist nationalism, which has appropriated itself with the myth of revolution.
Fascism conceived revolution, above all, as spiritual and anthropological revolution aimed
at transforming the human character, the style and way of life. Fascism assumes the idea of
revolution as a process of continuous construction of a new political and economical system,
a new system of values and life style, a new civilization.
The central nucleus of fascist ideology was the concept of politics intended as an enactment
of the will of power from a minority of activists directed to the realization of their myth, the
new civilization. Fascism tended to create a political group in society that was autonomous
in its choices and independent from all forces that had backed and conditioned its ascent to
power. Such a group was imagined as a class of modern Platos that had to build an organic
and dynamic state to develop the new fascist man.
Fascism summarized the essential traits of its ideology in the myth of the state and
in activism as the ideal of life. Fascist ideology was the most complete rationalization
of the totalitarian state, based on the statement of the supremacy of politics and on the
resolution of the private with the public, as subordination of privacy-based values (religion,
culture, morality, love etc.) to the preeminent political power. Deriving from this idea of
the totalitarian state is the conception of private and public life as total dedication and
permanent service in every activity, which the citizen must render to the fascist state for its
greatness. It is based on the conception of the individual as a subordinate element in a national
collectivity.
A consequence of this idea was the subordination of individual and collective life to
the absolute supremacy of the state. This was accomplished through a capillary organiza-
tion and the permanent mobilization of the population, instruments of mass politics based
on the rational use of the irrational. Another means for this subordination was political
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mythology and liturgy, which had the role of molding individual and collective conscience
based on the model of a new man, robbing human beings of their individuality in order
to make them cellular elements of a collective nationality, arranged through the capillary
organization of the totalitarian state. Fascism understood the importance of the masses in
contemporary society, but denied them the right and the means, as a mass, to express
political ideas and to exercise self-government according to the principles of equality and
liberty.
On the basis of cultural premises that stated the prevalence of the mythical doctrine in
community life and political action, fascists assigned a fundamental role in the enactment of
the totalitarian experiment to the institution of a political religion, giving great importance
to rites and symbols to revive and maintain the consensus of the masses. Actually, we can
say that the fascist state, in its properly totalitarian nature, aimed at completely absorbing
the individual in his material and moral reality. This project led the state to assume the role
of a religious institution with dogmas, rites, and symbols. For fascism, rites and symbols
answered to the irrational nature of the individual and the masses and, thanks to them, it was
possible to give the individual and the community the sense of belonging to a superior and
dominant reality, stable and eternal in the passing of time.
Fascism was a political religion, with its own set of beliefs and dogmas. As a political
religion, it intended to define the meaning and the goal of existence, creating a new political
cult centered on the sacralization of the fascist state and on the myth of the Duce, with a
tight sequence of collective rites to celebrate the big events of its sacred history. The major
public ceremonies of fascism were organized not only to give a positive external image of
the power of its movement. They were also intended to actually carry out, in every-day life,
the myth of the fascist state, represented as a moral community based on a common faith
which united classes and generations in the cult of the littorio. The political cult was to be
the link designed to maintain the solidity and life of the prestige and authority of the state,
periodically reviving political faith in fascism and in its Duce. The celebration of the sacred
festivities established by the regime was basically an aesthetic dramatization of fascist
mythology, from the evocation of Roman greatness to the new birth of the nation through
fascist intervention, war and revolution. Even the myth of Romanity was an essential part of
the fascist political religion. The myth of Rome was to be an inspiration of civic virtues, a
sense of the state, in order to elaborate a model of new civilization.14
The major artificer of the fascist totalitarian experiment was the party, which had an active
and decisive role in demolishing the liberal state and constructing the fascist state.15 Its
position to the state, aside from the formal statements of subordination (that many historians
have taken too literally), was anything but passive and often influenced the decisions of
Mussolini himself, despite the unconditional exaltation of his image of supreme leader of the
party. The role of the Duce, in fascism, cannot be considered similar to the personalization
of power of authoritarian dictatorships as, for example, in Salazars or Francos regimes.
These personalized dictatorships werent created by a revolutionary mass movement and
didnt aim at institutionalizing such a movement in a single party regime. They didnt have
the principal objective of realizing the totalitarian myth through the organization, integration
and permanent mobilization of the masses and the creation of a new man.
Considering the central and predominant position assumed by the leader in the fascist
political system, I believe that it is possible to define the fascist political system as totalitarian
caesarism: a charismatic dictatorship integrated in an institutionalized regime structure,
based on the single party and on mass organization and mobilization. This regime structure
is under continuous construction to make it consistent with the myth of the totalitarian state,
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Fascism and the Italian Road to Totalitarianism: Emilio Gentile 299
consciously adopted as a reference for the organization of the political system, and actually
operating as a fundamental code of beliefs and behaviors imposed on both the individual and
the masses.16
Totalitarian Modernism
Fascism was the Italian road to totalitarianism. Fascist totalitarianism was a reality in contin-
uous construction that progressively shaped itself in the political culture, the institutions and
the fascist regimes life style, through a complex relationship between ideology, party and
regime. This complex relationship shows, through contrasts and contradictions, the constant
presence of a fascist totalitarian logic exuding from the ideology and political action of the
fascist movement-regime. Certainly, during its enactment the fascist totalitarian experiment
encountered numerous obstacles in society, in the old states apparatus and in the Church.17
Nevertheless, recent research proves that it also obtained many significant successes so that
at the eve of World War II the fascist regime was certainly more totalitarian than it had
been in the early twenties. By this time no opposition seriously threatened, inside the state
and society, the stability and the functioning of the totalitarian laboratory, and the resistance
encountered until then had accelerated, rather than hindered, the totalitarian experiment
especially in the second half of the thirties.18 It must be remembered that the fall of the
fascist regime was determined by the military defeat, not by the monarchy, the Church or the
peoples opposition.
An agreement can be reached with those who claim that fascism did not build a perfect
totalitarianism, provided that such a concept has a certain scientific validity. However, it
must be considered that an accurate study of those regimes considered completely and
perfectly totalitarian reveals that they also exhibited obstructions and obstacles, numerous
contrasts between myth and reality, between ambitions and results.19 In short, all totalitarian
regimes in historical reality are kinds of incomplete or imperfect totalitarianism. They
are incomplete and imperfect not only in respect to the various theoretical models that have
been elaborated by experts, but also in respect to their totalitarian projects, to the different
phases of development of the totalitarian phenomenon, from the attainment of power to the
creation of the regime, and in respect to the different historical and social situations in which
they took place.20
As a form of totalitarianism, fascism is a modern phenomenon; it is a movement-regime,
which was born in and belongs to the historical and social environment created by modern-
ization. Fascism emerged from the tensions and conflicts of modern society, accepting it as
an irreversible but modifiable reality. Fascism was not an attempt to return to the past or halt
the modernization process. Rather, fascism attempted to find a solution to the challenges of
modernity by jumping into a construction of the future, into the creation of a new civilization
foreshadowed by its ideology.
Fascist totalitarianism was a form of political modernism that was intended to define a
movement which accepts modernization and believes itself to be in possession of a formula
to give humanity, dragged into the vortex of modernization, the power to change the world
that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own.21
Fascism was a manifestation of a new kind of modernism that I have called modernist
nationalism. It wanted to promote these processes by subordinating them to the goal of
strengthening the nation, in order to participate, as the protagonist, in world politics.22 Some
fascist scholars idealized the harmony of ancient times under the figures of the throne and
the campanile, but the major impulse of fascism was its dynamic sense of existence, its myth
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of the future. Fascists considered themselves, as did futurists, builders of whats to come.
Fascism had its own view of modernity in opposition to the culture, ideology, and style of
liberal, socialist and communist modernity. It claimed for itself the pretense of imposing its
own formula of modernity on the twentieth century.
To consider fascism a form of political modernism does not mean praising fascism or
denigrating modernity. Of course, if you identify modernity with the illuminist tradition
and liberal civilization, the exclusion of fascism or any other kind of totalitarianism for
that matter from modernity is automatic. Nevertheless, even if we share the ideal of a
rationalist and liberal modernity, we do not believe it consistent with a true scientific attitude
to transform such an ideal into a category of historical interpretation. There are new forms of
authoritarianism and irrationalism that dont represent the remains of premodern society at
all. Rather, they are created by the processes of modernization themselves, thus generating
models of alternative or antagonist modernity with respect to the liberal rationalist model,
as was the one I call totalitarian modernity.23
After the tragic experiences of the twentieth century, it must be established that modern
society was also the matrix of new forms of authoritarianism. One of these was totalitarianism
in its different forms and levels, based on mass mobilization, the cult of secular modern
deities (nation, race, class), the ethics of dedication of the individual to the community
and the myth of productivity for ideological purposes. Not only did modernization not
start an irreversible process of world disenchantment, it did not bring about, through
secularization, the disappearance of the myth and of the sacred. Rather, it produced different
metamorphoses of the sacred and new myths. The sacralization of politics, which had in
fascism one of its largest manifestations, is an essentially modern phenomenon, and it implies
modernization and secularization.
Modernity is an important generator of myths and political beliefs aimed at the con-
struction of the future. I believe that fascism, in its proper and essential traits as a form
of totalitarian modernism, belongs to a completely surpassed historical situation. This does
not mean, however, that rational and liberal modernity can celebrate definitive victory. The
history of the twentieth century leads us to realistically understand that irrationality and
modernity, authoritarianism and modernity, are not at all incompatible but can coexist and
may generate, in unanticipated forms, new threats to rational and liberal democracy.
NOTES
1. See Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York-Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995).
2. See Emilio Gentile, in Roger Griffin, ed., Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion (London
and New York: Routledge 2005), 3281.
3. The most sophisticated reappraisal of the concept of generic fascism is provided by Roger
Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991).
4. See Emilio Gentile, Fascism in Power: The Totalitarian Experiment, in Adrian Lyttelton, ed.,
Liberal and Fascist Italy 19001945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 139143.
5. The interpretation of totalitarianism as a continual process has been put forward by Hans Buchheim,
Totalitarian Rule: Its Nature and Characteristic (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1968).
6. I refer to the definition of revolutionary mass-movement regime as provided by Robert C.
Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind: Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change (New York-London: W.W. Norton,
1972), 319.
7. Raymond Aron, Democratie et totalitarisme, (Paris: Gallimard 1965), 290.
8. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, Inc, 1994).
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Fascism and the Italian Road to Totalitarianism: Emilio Gentile 301
9. See Piero Melograni, Fascismo, Comunismo e Rivoluzione Industriale (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1984),
2247.
10. For more references see Gentile, Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion: Definitions
and Critical Reflections on Criticism of an Interpretation and Gentile, La via italiana al totalitarismo. Il
partito e lo Stato nel regime fascista. New enlarged edition (Rome: Carocci 2008).
11. See Gentile, The Origins of Fascist Ideology 19181925 (New York: Enigma Books, 2004),
36340.
12. Max Weber, Il metodo delle scienze storico-sociali (Milan: Mondadori, 1974), 113114.
13. This approach has been theorized mainly by Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder and Maia Ashery,
The Birth of Fascism from Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994).
14. See Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1996); Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Gentile, Fascismo
di pietra (Roma-Bari: 2007).
15. See Gentile, Storia del partito fascista. Movimento e milizia 19191922 (Roma-Bari: Laterza,
1989); Gentile, Fascismo e antifascismo. I partiti italiani fra le due guerre, (Firenze: Le Monnier, 2000).
16. See Gentile, La via italiana al totalitarismo, 155159.
17. The attitude of the Church toward fascist totalitarianism is analyzed in Gentile, The Sacralization
of Politics, 6375; Gentile, Politics as Religion, 89104; Gentile, New Idols: Catholicism in the Face of
Fascist Totalitarianism, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 11, no. 2 (2006): 143170.
18. Among recent researches that corroborate the interpretation of fascism as the Italian road to
totalitarianism see Philip Morgan, The Prefects and Party-state Relations in Fascist Italy, Journal of
Modern Italian Studies, 3, no. 3 (1998): 241272; Alberto Cifelli, I prefetti del regno nel ventennio fascista
(Roma: Donzelli, 1999); Philip Morgan, The Party is Everywhere: The Italian Fascist Party in Economic
Life 19261940 in English Historical Review 114, no. 455 (1999); Gentile. Fascismo e antifascismo. I
partiti italiani fra le due guerre; Salvatore Lupo, Il Fascismo. La politica in un regime totalitario (Roma:
Donzelli, 2000); Gentile, Il totalitarismo alla conquista della Camera Alta (Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino
2002); Loreto Di Nucci, Lo Stato fascista e gli italiani antinazionali, in Loreto di Nucci and Ernesto Galli
della Loggia, eds., Due nazioni. Legittimazione e delegittimazione nella storia dellItalia contemporanea
(Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), 128185; Luca La Rovere, Storia dei GUF. Organizzazione, politica e miti
della giovent`u universitaria fascista 19191943 (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003); Didier Musiedlak,
Lo stato fascista e la sua classe politica 19221943, (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003); Gentile, Senato e
senatori nel periodo fascista, in Emilio Gentile and Emilia Campochiaro, eds., Repertorio biografico dei
senatori delItalia fascista (Napoli, Bibliopolis Ed. Coll.I Senatori dItalia, 2003): 190; David D.Roberts.
The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics
(London: Routledge, 2006).
19. For instance, according to Gordon Craig, the Nazi regime was not a perfect totalitarianism;
he writes: The populist nature of the Nazi regime deserves to be emphasized. Hitlers Germany is often
referred to as a totalitarian stare or a police state, but it was so only to a limited degree. Except for the Jews,
toward whom Hitler had an obsessive hatred, and former and potential dissidents, and homosexuals and
Gypsies, most people, at least until the war years, remained surprisingly unrestrained by state control, and
even those who were plotting to overthrow the regime found it relatively easy to travel abroad in pursuit of
assistance. Hitler rarely used the word total and denied that he wanted to be a dictator. Gordon A. Craig,
Man of the People?, The New York Review of Books, November, 20, 1997. As far as the Soviet regime, Eric
Hobsbawm maintains that Brutal and dictatorial though it was, the Soviet system was not totalitarian, a
term which became popular among critics of communism after the Second World War, having been invented
in the 1920s by Italian fascism to describe its objects. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of
the World, 19141991 (New York: Vintage Books 1996), 393.
20. These arguments have been developed in Gentile, Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Reli-
gion, 5761.
21. Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso,
1982), 16
22. See Gentile, The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism, Mod-
ernism/Modernity, 1, no. 3 (1994): 5587; Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism and
Fascism, (Westport: Praeger, 2003), 125. The interpretation of fascism as political modernism has been
recently developed by Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini
and Hitler (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007).
23. See Gentile, Totalitarian Modernity, in The Origin of Fascist Ideology, 363401.
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