nd is properly
disposed and almost oriented towards an investigation of this nature.

First of all let us ask ourselves if there is a political doctrine of
Fascism; if there is any ideal content in the Fascist state. For in
order to link Fascism, both as concept and system, with the history of
Italian thought and find therein a place for it, we must first show
that it is thought; that it is a doctrine. Many persons are not quite
convinced that it is either the one or the other; and I am not
referring solely to those men, cultured or uncultured, as the case may
be and very numerous everywhere, who can discern in this political
innovation nothing except its local and personal aspects, and who know
Fascism only as the particular manner of behavior of this or that
well-known Fascist, of this or that group of a certain town; who
therefore like or dislike the movement on the basis of their likes and
dislikes for the individuals who represent it. Nor do I refer to those
intelligent, and cultivated persons, very intelligent indeed and very
cultivated, who because of their direct or indirect allegiance to the
parties that have been dispossessed by the advent of Fascism, have a
natural cause of resentment against it and are therefore unable to
see, in the blindness of hatred, anything good in it. I am referring
rather to those--and there are many in our ranks too--who know Fascism
as action and feeling but not yet as thought, who therefore have an
intuition but no comprehension of it.

It is true that Fascism is, above all, action and sentiment and that
such it must continue to be. Were it otherwise, it could not keep up
that immense driving force, that renovating power which it now
possesses and would merely be the solitary meditation of a chosen few.
Only because it is feeling and sentiment, only because it is the
unconscious reawakening of our profound racial instinct, has it the
force to stir the soul of the people, and to set free an irresistible
current of national will. Only because it is action, and as such
actualizes itself in a vast organization and in a huge movement, has
it the conditions for determining the historical course of
contemporary Italy.

But Fascism is thought as well and it has a theory, which is an
essential part of this historical phenomenon, and which is responsible
in a great measure for the successes that have been achieved. To the
existence of this ideal content of Fascism, to the truth of this