CHAPTER ONE 
Some Issues in the Intellectual History of Fascism

FOR ABOUT three-quarters of a century, almost all academic discussion concerning Mussolini’s Fascism 1 has tended to imagine the movement it animated, and the regime it informed, as entirely lacking a reasoned rationale. It early became commonplace to attribute to Fascism a unique irrationality, accompanied by a ready recourse to violence. Fascism, it has been argued, was full of emotion, but entirely empty of cognitive content. Fascists were, and are, understood to have renounced all rational discourse, in order to “glorify the non-rational.” Their ideology, movement, revolution, and behavior were made distinctive by the appeal to two, and only two, “absolutes”: “violence and war.”2 Before the advent of the Second World War, some analysts had gone so far as to insist that “fascism” was the product of “orgasm anxiety,” a sexual dysfunction that found release only in “mystic intoxication,” homicidal hostility, and the complete suppression of rational thought.3 Marxists and fellow travelers argued that since Fascism was “the violent attempt of decaying capitalism to defeat the proletarian revolution and forcibly arrest the growing contradictions of its whole development,” it could not support itself with a sustained rationale. Its conceptions were “empty and hollow,” finding expression in “deceitful terminology” consciously designed to conceal the “realities of class-rule and class-exploitation.”4 For many, “Fascism [was] essentially a political weapon adopted by the ruling class . . . that takes root in the minds of millions . . . [appealing] to certain uncritical and infantile impulses which, in a people debarred from a rational, healthy existence . . . tend to dominate their mental lives.” Fascism, in general, constituted a “flight from reason,” advancing “the
claims of mysticism and intuition in opposition . . . to reason . . . and glorifying the irrational.”5 While there were some serious treatments of Fascist thought that made their appearance between the two world wars,6 all objectivity dissolved in the alembic of the Second. By the time of the Second World War, Fascism had simply merged into Hitler’s National Socialism—and discussants spoke of “nazi-fascism” as though the two were indissolubly one.7 Generic fascism was the enemy of “Western ideals,” of the “Enlightenment tradition,” as well as of the sociopolitical and philosophical aspirations of the French Revolution. It was the unregenerate agent of evil, driven by an irrational mysticism, and committed to mayhem and gross inhumanity. By the end of the 1990s, there were those who could insist that “fascism shuffles together every myth and lie that the rotten history of capitalism has ever produced like a pack of greasy cards and then deals them out.” As with Angelo Tasca, such a notion is advanced in support of a contention that the only use Fascism, like Mussolini, had “of ideas was to dispense with ideas.”8

FOOTNOTES
1 When the term “fascism” is employed in lowercase, it refers to a presumptive, inclusive,
generic fascism. When the term is capitalized, it refers to the movement, revolution, and
regime associated with Benito Mussolini. 
2 Mark Neocleous, Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. x,
13, 14, 17.
 3 Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933; reprint, New York: Orgone
Institute, 1946), pp. 110–11.
 4 R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (1934; reprint, San Francisco: Proletarian Publishers, 1974), pp. 198–99.      
5 R. Osborn, The Psychology of Reaction (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), pp. 5, 238, 239. 6 The best of these included that of Herbert W. Schneider, Making the Fascist State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1928). 
7 See, for example, Eduardo Haro Tecglen, Fascismo: Genesis y desarrollo (Madrid: CVS Ediciones, 1975). 
8 Dave Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice (London: Pluto Press, 1999), pp. 27–28.