The Fascist system is not a political system, but it has its center of gravity in politics.  Fascism came into being to meet serious problems of politics in post-war Italy.  And it presents itself as a political method.  But in confronting and solving political problems it is carried by its very nature, that is to say by its method, to consider moral, religious, and philosophical questions and to unfold and demonstrate the comprehensive totalitarian character peculiar to it.  It is only after we have grasped the political character of the Fascist principle that we are able adequately to appreciate the deeper concept of life which underlies that principle and from which the principle springs.  The political doctrine of Fascism is not the whole of Fascism.  It is rather its more prominent aspect and in general its most interesting one.

VII

The politic of Fascism revolves wholly about the concept of the national State; and accordingly it has points of contact with nationalist doctrines, along with distinctions from the latter which it is important to bear in mind.

Both Fascism and nationalism regard the State as the foundation of all rights and the source of all values in the individuals composing it.  For the one as for the other the State is not a consequence—­it is a principle.  But in the case of nationalism, the relation which individualistic liberalism, and for that matter socialism also, assumed between individual and State is inverted.  Since the State is a principle, the individual becomes a consequence—­he is something which finds an antecedent in the State:  the State limits him and determines his manner of existence, restricting his freedom, binding him to a piece of ground whereon he was born, whereon he must live and will die.  In the case of Fascism, State and individual are one and the same things, or rather, they are inseparable terms of a necessary synthesis.

Nationalism, in fact, founds the State on the concept of nation, the nation being an entity which transcends the will and the life of the individual because it is conceived as objectively existing apart from the consciousness of individuals, existing even if the individual does nothing to bring it into being.  For the nationalist, the nation exists not by virtue of the citizen’s will, but as datum, a fact, of nature.

For Fascism, on the contrary, the State is a wholly spiritual creation.  It is a national State, because, from the Fascist point of view, the nation itself is a creation of the mind and is not a material presupposition, is not a datum of nature.  The nation, says the Fascist, is never really made; neither, therefore, can the State attain an absolute form, since it is merely the nation in the latter’s concrete, political manifestation.  For the Fascist, the State is always in fieri.  It is in our hands, wholly; whence our very serious responsibility towards it.