Fascism having denied historical materialism, by which men are only puppets in history, appearing and disappearing on the surface of the tides while in the depths the real directive forces act and labour, it also denies the immutable and irreparable class warfare, which is the natural filiation of such an economistic conception of history:  and it denies above all that class warfare is the preponderating agent of social transformation.

Being defeated on these two capital points of its doctrine, nothing remains of Socialism save the sentimental aspiration—­as old as humanity—­to achieve a community of social life in which the sufferings and hardships of the humblest classes are alleviated.  But here Fascism repudiates the concept of an economic “happiness” which is to be—­at a given moment in the evolution of economy—­socialistically and almost automatically realised by assuring to all the maximum of well-being.

Fascism denies the possibilities of the materialistic concept of “happiness”—­it leaves that to the economists of the first half of the Seventeenth Century; that is, it denies the equation “well-being-happiness,” which reduces man to the state of the animals, mindful of only one thing—­that of being fed and fattened; reduced, in fact, to a pure and simple vegetative existence.

6.  Against Democratic Ideologies.

After disposing of Socialism, Fascism opens a breach on the whole complex of the democratic ideologies, and repudiates them in their theoretic premises as well as in their practical application or instrumentation.  Fascism denies that numbers, by the mere fact of being numbers, can direct human society; it denies that these numbers can govern by means of periodical consultations; it affirms also the fertilising, beneficient and unassailable inequality of men, who cannot be levelled through an extrinsic and mechanical process such as universal suffrage.

Regimes can be called democratic which, from time to time, give the people the illusion of being sovereign, whereas the real and effective sovereignty exists in other, and very often secret and irresponsible forces.

Democracy is a regime without a king, but very often with many kings, far more exclusive, tyrannical and ruinous than a single king, even if he be a tyrant.  This explains why Fascism which, for contingent reasons, had assumed a republican tendency before 1922, renounced it previous to the March on Rome, with the conviction that the political constitution of a State is not nowadays a supreme question; and that, if the examples of past and present monarchies and past and present republics are studied, the result is that neither monarchies nor republics are to be judged under the assumption of eternity, but that they merely represent forms in which the extrinsic political evolution takes shape as well as the history, the tradition and the psychology of a given country.

Consequently, Fascism glides over the antithesis between monarchy and republic, on which democraticism wasted time, blaming the former for all social shortcomings and exalting the latter as a regime of perfection.  We have now seen that there are republics which may be profoundly absolutist and reactionary, and monarchies which welcome the most venturesome social and political experiments.