Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher Of Facism

The recent rise in Europe of extreme right-wing political parties along with outbreaks of violent nationalist fervor in the former communist bloc has occasioned much speculation on a possible resurgence of fascism. At the polemical level, fascism has become a generic term applied to virtually any form of real or potential violence, while among Marxist and left-wing scholars discredited interpretations of fascism as a "product of late capitalism" are revived. But these formulas disregard the historical and philosophical roots of fascism as it arose in Italy and spread throughout Europe. In Giovanni Gentile, Gregor returns to those roots by examining the thought of Gentile, Italian Fascism's major theorist. In Gregor's reading, Gentile's fascism was an anti-democratic reaction to what was seen to be the domination by advanced industrial democracies of less-developed or status-deprived communities and nations languishing on the margins of the "Great Powers." Sketching in the political background of late nineteenth-century Italy, industrially backward and only recently unified, Gregor shows how Gentile supplied fascism its justificatory rationale as a developmental dictatorship. Gentile's Actualism absorbed many intellectual currents of the early twentieth century and united them in a dynamic rebellion against the perceived hegemonic impostures of imperialism. The individual was called to an idealistic ethic of obedience, work, self-sacrifice, and national community. The first book-length analysis in English of Gentile's thought in over thirty years, this volume is valuable not only as a work of historical scholarship but as a timely warning. While Marxism-Leninism has passed into history,fascism may yet reemerge as an external threat to democratic nations.