Italian Fascism in Maturity

Inspired by the March on Rome, Germany’s National Socialists hoped to pursue a similar course of action, unseating the existing government and ushering in a new age of German greatness. Indeed, an associate of Hitler and fellow National Socialist, Hermann Esser, praised the Fascists as a “band of men filled with animosity,” adding, “We also have our own version of the Italian Mussolini: his name is Adolf Hitler.” Mussolini was, by all accounts, something of a hero to Hitler. But while Mussolini made an impression on Hitler, the feeling was not mutual, at least not immediately, with the former dismissing the latter and his cohorts as a “buffoons” in 1923. Whether Mussolini could see it or not, the Nazis and the Fascists shared important characteristics, many of these resulting from the Nazis’ conscient efforts at imitation. Like Hitler, Mussolini was a consistent militarist. The ideal of military discipline pervades his political and economic thought, replacing the ideological centerpiece of socialism, class conflict, with the argument that his one party state would create “a link that unites all in a common faith.” The economic ideas of Italian Fascism were premised on the idea that, in Mussolini’s words, the nation was “in a permanent state of war.” Mussolini understood a critical fact of realpolitik that history, particularly of the twentieth century, has confirmed again and again—that war provides the state with an almost unlimited number of pretexts for the growth and consolidation of its power. The Fascists spoke of the economy using the language of battle and military campaigns, calling for “general economic mobilization” and “real conscription, a real civic and economic recruitment of all Italians.” Mussolini was careful to stress that the fascist economic system—the cornerstones of which were syndicates overseen by the Fascist Party—would harmonize the interests of all social classes. The Fascist revolution would not undermine the progress of the Italian workers in their efforts at organization. Instead, as sociologist Simonetta Falasca-​Zamponi explains, Mussolini argued that “the resolution of workers’ struggles guaranteed the grandeur of the nation through social order [and] class collaboration.” Fascist economic reasoning was predicated on the enduring fallacy that the productive and efficient allocation of resources requires government oversight and management.

In the spring of 1926, Mussolini’s regime reorganized Italy’s economy through a package of syndical legislation, granting to several state-​controlled corporate bodies the exclusive right to administer their respective sectors of the economy. These syndicates were to be the mechanisms through which the omnipotent Fascist state would at last resolve all class antagonisms. Presiding over these bodies was a Minister of Corporations, charged with coordinating the various stakeholders within a given industry (for example, labor, government, capital)—much as our own government often advances “public-​private partnerships” to solve perceived social and economic problems. In point of fact, Robert Higgs has frequently pointed out the similarity between the “corporatist ideal achieved … under Mussolini’s regime” and the neocorporatist tripartism of the United States. In both, established, nominally private interests work in concert with the state to mutual benefit. Higgs further notes that although (like our own government) the Italian Fascist government represented its economic system as a “grand compromise between interest groups,” it was in fact designed to serve the interests of the state. American libertarians often worry about creeping state socialism, yet, in a number of important senses, American political economy is already markedly fascist. Once more it is necessary to reiterate that pointing out the common characteristics of the present day United States and Italy under Fascist rule should not be taken as a scare tactic or as rhetorical bombast. The similarities are real, measurable, and easily identifiable in the historical record. During the twentieth century, as the administrative state swelled, its gravity pulling ever more governmental powers into its orbit, the important, defining features of liberal, democratic government succumbed one after another to the malignant growth of bureaucracy. The Italian Fascism of Mussolini and the American Progressivism of Woodrow Wilson and others are ideological relatives, if not twins. ²

Intent on creating distance between fascist and socialist (and communist) ideas, particularly in economics, the academy has for decades overplayed their dissimilarities. In fact, they are very much alike in their essentials and in their embrace of a particular notion of modernity. As war historian Joseph Maiolo observes in his book Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941, “His [Mussolini’s] ideal—and that of a rising cohort of visionary public and private technocrats for whom wartime industrial mobilization and planned epitomized modernity—was a managed economy.” In Mussolini’s conception of the economy, everyone should perform a function, defined by the state, and receive a ration, allotted by the state. This kind of centralization and planning—in which the state need not actually own the nation’s various resources and industries—has become without doubt the most dominant politico-​economic paradigm in the world today. While it may be that following the Cold War state socialism and communism lost the global battle of ideas, fascism, in its most literal and historical sense, seems to have won. Towering administrative and regulatory agencies have taken the place of Italian Fascism’s syndicates, yet the aims and effects are quite the same—to proscribe the spontaneity and self-​determination of free economies and to gather power and property in the hands of an elite.

In many ways, from his military aesthetic and magnetic public persona to his police state, Mussolini became the model for all subsequent twentieth century dictators. Similarly, the word fascism itself came to stand in for and describe any number of authoritarian systems, becoming an emotive shorthand for our condemnations of police statism and attacks on civil liberties in general. We can and should recognize Italian Fascism as a unique phenomenon while also understanding it as one of many anti-​Enlightenment, modernist reactions against classical liberalism during the twentieth century. Mussolini ultimately represents a danger to which libertarians are well attuned—generally, the danger of thinking of ourselves and each other in terms of our membership within certain groups; nationalism is only a specific example of this. As George Orwell wrote in a 1944 letter, “All the national movements everywhere … seem to take non-​democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means.” Tragically, the crucial distinction between means and ends remains little understood in the general political discourse, but it is this distinction that libertarianism underscores, insisting that no end can justify the violation of individual rights. Fascism answers simply that the individual has no rights, that only the nation-​state exists. But what fascists of all kinds will never understand is that the strongest communities are constituted of free individuals who voluntarily join them. Italian Fascism, while promoting itself as an agent of scientific and industrial progress, was in fact a retrograde movement, discarding the genuine progress of eighteenth and nineteenth century liberalism. The good news, then, is that fascism can be defeated by a rediscovery of liberal principles.