But this State of the Fascists which is created by the consciousness and the will of the citizen, and is not a force descending on the citizen from above or from without, cannot have toward the mass of the population the relationship which was presumed by nationalism.

Nationalism identified State with Nation, and made of the nation an entity preexisting, which needed not to be created but merely to be recognized or known.  The nationalists, therefore, required a ruling class of an intellectual character, which was conscious of the nation and could understand, appreciate and exalt it.  The authority of the State, furthermore, was not a product but a presupposition.  It could not depend on the people—­rather the people depended on the State and on the State’s authority as the source of the life which they lived and apart from which they could not live.  The nationalistic State was, therefore, an aristocratic State, enforcing itself upon the masses through the power conferred upon it by its origins.

The Fascist State, on the contrary, is a people’s state, and, as such, the democratic State par excellence.  The relationship between State and citizen (not this or that citizen, but all citizens) is accordingly so intimate that the State exists only as, and in so far as, the citizen causes it to exist.  Its formation therefore is the formation of a consciousness of it in individuals, in the masses.  Hence the need of the Party, and of all the instruments of propaganda and education which Fascism uses to make the thought and will of the Duce the thought and will of the masses.  Hence the enormous task which Fascism sets itself in trying to bring the whole mass of the people, beginning with the little children, inside the fold of the Party.

On the popular character of the Fascist State likewise depends its greatest social and constitutional reform—­the foundation of the Corporations of Syndicates.  In this reform Fascism took over from syndicalism the notion of the moral and educational function of the syndicate.  But the Corporations of Syndicates were necessary in order to reduce the syndicates to State discipline and make them an expression of the State’s organism from within.  The Corporation of Syndicates are a device through which the Fascist State goes looking for the individual in order to create itself through the individual’s will.  But the individual it seeks is not the abstract political individual whom the old liberalism took for granted.  He is the only individual who can ever be found, the individual who exists as a specialized productive force, and who, by the fact of his specialization, is brought to unite with other individuals of his same category and comes to belong with them to the one great economic unit which is none other than the nation.

This great reform is already well under way.  Toward it nationalism, syndicalism, and even liberalism itself, were already tending in the past.  For even liberalism was beginning to criticize the older forms of political representation, seeking some system of organic representation which would correspond to the structural reality of the State.