doctrine, now in its inception but destined to spread rapidly, will determine the course of a new culture and of a new conception of civil life.  The deliverance of the individual from the state carried out in the XVIII century will be followed in the XX century by the rescue of the state from the individual.  The period of authority, of social obligations, of “hierarchical” subordination will succeed the period of individualism, of state feebleness, of insubordination.

This innovating trend is not and cannot be a return to the Middle Ages.  It is a common but an erroneous belief that the movement, started by the Reformation and heightened by the French Revolution, was directed against mediaeval ideas and institutions.  Rather than as a negation, this movement should be looked upon as the development and fulfillment of the doctrines and practices of the Middle Ages.  Socially and politically considered the Middle Ages wrought disintegration and anarchy; they were characterized by the gradual weakening and ultimate extinction of the state, embodied in the Roman Empire, driven first to the East, then back to France, thence to Germany, a shadow of its former self; they were marked by the steady advance of the forces of usurpation, destructive of the state and reciprocally obnoxious; they bore the imprints of a triumphant particularism.  Therefore the individualistic and anti-social movement of the XVII and XVIII centuries was not directed against the Middle Ages, but rather against the restoration of the state by great national monarchies.  If this movement destroyed mediaeval institutions that had survived the Middle Ages and had been grafted upon the new states, it was in consequence of the struggle primarily waged against the state.  The spirit of the movement was decidedly mediaeval.  The novelty consisted in the social surroundings in which it operated and in its relation to new economic developments.  The individualism of the feudal lords, the particularism of the cities and of the corporations had been replaced by the individualism and the particularism of the bourgeoisie and of the popular classes.

The Fascist ideology cannot therefore look back to the Middle Ages, of which it is a complete negation.  The Middle Ages spell disintegration; Fascism is nothing if not sociality.  It is if anything the beginning of the end of the Middle Ages prolonged four centuries beyond the end ordinarily set for them and revived by the social democratic anarchy of the past thirty years.  If Fascism can be said to look back at all it is rather in the direction of ancient Rome whose social and political traditions at the distance of fifteen centuries are being revived by Fascist Italy.