For Liberalism, society has no life distinct from the life of the individuals, or as the phrase goes:  solvitur in singularitates.  For Fascism, the life of society overlaps the existence of individuals and projects itself into the succeeding generations through centuries and millennia.  Individuals come into being, grow, and die, followed by others, unceasingly; social unity remains always identical to itself.  For Liberalism, the individual is the end and society the means; nor is it conceivable that the individual, considered in the dignity of an ultimate finality, be lowered to mere instrumentality.  For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends.  The state therefore guards and protects the welfare and development of individuals not for their exclusive interest, but because of the identity of the needs of individuals with those of society as a whole.  We can thus accept and explain institutions and practices, which like the death penalty, are condemned by Liberalism in the name of the preeminence of individualism.

The fundamental problem of society in the old doctrines is the question of the rights of individuals.  It may be the right to freedom as the Liberals would have it; or the right to the government of the commonwealth as the Democrats claim it, or the right to economic justice as the Socialists contend; but in every case it is the right of individuals, or groups of individuals (classes).  Fascism on the other hand faces squarely the problem of the right of the state and of the duty of individuals.  Individual rights are only recognized in so far as they are implied in the rights of the state.  In this preeminence of duty we find the highest ethical value of Fascism.

The Problems of Liberty, of Government, and of Social Justice in the Political Doctrine of Fascism

This, however, does not mean that the problems raised by the other schools are ignored by Fascism.  It means simply that it faces them and solves them differently, as, for example, the problem of liberty.

There is a Liberal theory of freedom, and there is a Fascist concept of liberty.  For we, too, maintain the necessity of safeguarding the conditions that make for the free development of the individual; we, too, believe that the oppression of individual personality can find no place in the modern state.  We do not, however, accept a bill of rights which tends to make the individual superior to the state and to empower him to act in opposition to society.  Our concept of liberty is that the individual must be allowed to develop his personality in behalf of the state, for these ephemeral and infinitesimal elements of the complex and permanent life of society determine by their normal growth the development of the state.  But this individual growth must be normal.  A huge and disproportionate development of the individual