We talk about Fascism every day, not only in the West but also from Brazil to Argentina, from the Philippines to China. Almost always inappropriately, skillfully decontextualizing and confusing. As if inappropriately, there was talk of Napoleon and the Bonapartist "Old Guard" after the Congress of Vienna, the Yalta Pact of the 19th century, wanting to venture a strong and deliberately provocative comparison.
Zeev Sternhell's essay "Birth of Fascist Ideology" certainly remains the most profound and objective one for understanding the fascist phenomenon, with some clarifications, which we will attempt to advance below. Zeev Sternhell, far-left Israeli, anti-fascist and historical materialist, in addition to the one mentioned, he dedicated many essays to the issue: Neither right nor left, The revolutionary right, Against the Enlightenment: the history of ideas, Birth of Israel and many other articles and writings ranging from the American to the French Revolution.
The Israeli author is more of a political philosopher like Del Noce than a pure historian like De Felice, for this reason some of his intuitions are in my opinion brilliant and not outdated on the question of Fascism. We cannot even consider Guido Melis as the first authors of Fascism, nor an Emilio Gentile, as their empiricist vision, reductionist, phenomenological (especially that of Gentile, which merely transfers to the Italian case the method that Mosse applies to the German case), does not allow us to understand the phenomenon in depth.

Giuseppe Parlato is undoubtedly more acute and problematic, but the only brilliant and concise summary of Fascism is provided by Sternhell.
Sabino Cassese, who should be one of the most illustrious representatives of the Italian cultural elite, defines Melis as “the greatest historian of Fascism” (Corriere della Sera 4.1.2018); this is symptomatic of a certain cultural degradation that emerges even in the best intellectuals. For the Luxembourg Marxist philosopher Sternhell, against the historiographical current that is popular, social history is overrated, due to the ideological domination of an economistic "false consciousness". (capitalist but also Marxist) and abstract from profound reality; like Benedetto Croce, instead he affirms the centrality and supremacy of the history of ideas.
Italian Fascism cannot be understood with the methodology of social history, but misunderstandings and false ideology are created. Sternhell's historical and thought lesson, the intellectual and cultural symbol of authentic contemporary anti-fascism, it is unparalleled; the left-wing Jewish philosopher studies Fascism precisely so that Fascism never returns, not to pass the time or to bring home the monthly salary as a parliamentarian or out of a desire for success and notoriety, as happens in Italy, the country of anti-fascism where millions of people became famous or got rich by ranting about Fascism, repeating a series of banalities and clichés that ended up ridiculing those who uttered them.
Otherwise, the Israeli philosopher studies and analyzes in the most disenchanted way, objective, avaluative as possible the fascist phenomenon. Sternhell doesn't want to clear Mussolini, much less historicize or contextualize it. Sternhell is a political philosopher, he does not play with concepts nor does he manipulate historical-political concepts like a magician. The historical lesson for him is terrible. Strangely, for him the son and grandson of Jewish women killed by the Nazis when the young Zeev was just 7 years, the archetype of Fascism is not Hitler nor racism nor Vichy or the gas chambers, but it is Mussolini who boldly translates the message of revolutionary syndicalism into political practice. Nazism, vichism, Francoism are not dangerous for the history of humanity, since they would not have been political phenomena, but historical contingencies.
German National Socialism, for ours, it was a metamorphosis of nihilism, not a political doctrine. Mussolini, per Sternhell, vice versa he would have been a political genius: “under him art and culture thrived, he won popular consensus with skillful tools, there were no concentration camps in Italy and the Italians were not guilty of racial persecution like the French and Germans" says Sternhell in May 2017 to an Israeli newspaper.
Sternhell says that Mussolini was never racist or anti-Semitic, even in RSI he would have had some Jews at his side and no Italian or "Aryan" man was able to inspire or even fascinate him as the Jewish intellectual Sarfatti did. Mussolini's greatest enemy, the only one, per Sternhell, it was England, he saw British Imperialism in action, much more and far beyond Judaism, the global ideological domination of that Masonic and bourgeois enlightenment that he would have particularly despised. Fundamental and irreducible difference with Hitler's Nazism which saw an ally in British Imperialism and also with Francisco Franco who in his warmth of passive realist, not active, he didn't even try to take Spanish Gibraltar from the British.
The Sternhellian conclusion is that Italian Fascism, not Nazism, born il franchismo, nor Salazarism, it is the absolute evil of the contemporary world, but for a philosophical reason.
“Absolute evil” as the only serious and concrete political response to the Franco-Kantian enlightenment culture that has been dominant for centuries. Sternhell uses a Vichian-idealist hermeneutic method, with great correctness as a social scientist, although his worldview is progressive, from neoillumin, all in all also open to hypothesis “late Trotskyist “Soviet democracy”.
And as a scientist of political philosophy he investigates the philosophical-political substantiality of Fascism. Ours supports two strong theses with valid hermeneutic arguments, which according to Belardinelli (See Introduction to Interview on Fascism, Laterza 2017), they would have ended up convincing De Felice himself. Sternhell speaks several times of a "secret charm of Mussolini's fascism", due to the anti-materialist vision of the universe and profoundly humanistic voluntarism, revolutionary subjectivist and immanentist of the black-shirted elite, than with these assumptions, rare case in contemporary history, manages to gain power, and also argues that fascism was the most original and characteristic political movement of the twentieth century.
The first strong Sternhellian thesis is that Mussolini's Italian Fascism, not German National Socialism nor Spanish Francoism (which would be objectivistic and determinist like Marxism and liberal capitalism), it is a philosophical and political act of war against the bourgeois Enlightenment and contemporary scientism, the largest ideological act of war there has been in this regard from 1989 to today. Sternhellian Fascism sees the triumph of "Jacobin totalitarian democracy" in all contemporary politics, even when disguised as Bismarckian Giolittian liberalism or technocratic social democracy or state Bolshevism. The only possible antagonism to this, for Mussolini in “The Doctrine of Fascism” (and Sternhell is with him) it is a neo-humanistic political practice, not neo-legitimist or theocratic, of a state Right that is both traditionalist and revolutionary. I repeat, traditionalist; neither reactionary nor conservative.
The distinction is substantial. The second strong Sternhellian thesis is that it would not be possible to historicize Italian Fascism, as it would not have been a mere contingent phenomenon that goes from 1922 al 1945; where there is the impulse of a traditional and revolutionary state, which demobilizes the apparatus and institutional edifice of the materialist and bourgeois Anglophile West and of the more or less liberal "Jacobin totalitarian democracy", there would be Fascism in action there. During a Parisian conference in the late 1980s, Sternhell said that Fascism did not revive at all in Pinochet's Chile, who he defined as afascist, neo-Francoist, semi-liberal and libertarian, but much more so in the Tehran of the ayatollahs, although in writing he never elaborated on such a comparison, certainly very interesting. Fascism is not nationalism and ethnarchy (another substantial difference from Francoism and National Socialism), but it is the elite of revolutionary Syndicalism that eventually uses the idea of ​​the Nation State, which was of bourgeois origin, with a completely anti-bourgeois meaning and purpose, as a moral and organic community with an anti-individualist and anti-collectivist function; through the total use of the State (identity producer, organizer of the economy, monopolist of sociality) Mussolini attempts to resolve the irreducible antimonies of modernity. Sternhell perhaps exaggerates though, in my humble opinion, in some concepts.
If it is true that Mussolini was always an attentive reader of Sorel and if it is true that (as the Duce himself specifies in "The doctrine of fascism") Fascism will be the political and historical incarnation of the syndicalist and revolutionary fraction of Italian Socialism, it is also true that the political tactics used by the fascist leader in the phase of conquest of power and in running the state were antithetical to Sorelian armed social "spontaneism".. Mussolini was a hyperpoliticist and Sarfatti is right when she says that "Machiavelli was his only teacher" with the political school of the Italian Renaissance. Mussolini's elitism was entirely politicistic and then centered on the Reason of State, it was not a proletarian or productivist avant-garde, as it was vice versa in the syndicalist and Sorelian theory. In that sense, Carl Schmitt helps us. The latter defined Mussolini as the Machiavelli of his era (Schmitt, Historical-spiritual conditions of parliamentarism), specifies that the voluntaristic and immanentistic theory of Sorel's myth is an authentically political and conflictual theory in the Machiavellian sense; thus we return to the anti-Enlightenment substance, antideterminista, unnaturalistic of Fascism.
This theory, much more than the practice of the general strike, it could be Sorelian's contribution to fascist Mussolini. Another great limitation of Sternhell, the most evident and truly incomprehensible of the also precious essay "The birth of fascist ideology" (as already said, the best ever for understanding Mussolini and fascism, although contradicting the author's strong thesis, Baldini Castoldi inexplicably put it in the edition 2002 a swastika instead of a fasces as the opening image), is that he identifies the tactical defense of small property and the petty bourgeoisie made by the Fascism movement during the civil war as a defense tout court of capitalism. Thus concludes the anti-fascist philosopher, Israeli Marxist:
“The Fascist Regime of the Thirties is closer to the ideological synthesis promoted by the “Lupa” ( revolutionary trade unionist, 1911) than Stalinism is to Marxist principles. The evolution of Fascism occurs as a function of those primary objectives that the protagonists of an anti-liberal revolution had set themselves, anti-materialist and anti-Marxist which has no precedent in history. It was a revolution, the fascist one, for the nation as a whole, a political but also moral and spiritual revolution" .
Fascism today? 21st century and beyond
Fascism today? The neo-Jacobin intellectuals of the Anglophile West and the Anglosphere see Fascism almost everywhere, it is an obsession that from 1922 haunts them and from which they have never freed themselves. It is Weberian secularization, nothing else; it is the process of abstract and extreme rationalization of the neo-enlightenment and fanatical Jacobinism that Weber himself defined as the ideology of the "iron cage" of the West, complete with disenchantment with the world created by a ferocious and a-human capitalism. “Jacobin totalitarianism”, the totalitarianism of rights, it will be the horizon of the liberal-capitalist West, fascist “plebiscitarian democracy”., according to Carl Schmitt and the jurist Francesco Mercadante, the political antagonist of this. For the avoidance of doubt, I want to point out straight away that I don't think Fascism or a new fascism is possible in Italy. Despite the necessity, for mere survival purposes, perceived today by large sections of the population, of an unavoidable "return" not to the past but to certain traditional values. The fascist question today, reasoning in Sternhellian terms, it is the question of a neo-Machiavellian political elite that knows the art of the Insurrection of the revolutionary syndicalist and Bonapartist school, that we know how to create a state of culture, anti-Enlightenment and anti-rationalist, who knows how to guide and temper if necessary, on the level of a vision of the world and indeed of a great political tactic of the State, the process of mechanical and machinic rationalization that rages, who therefore knows how to embody and transmit fixed points, concretely “mythical”, who know how to radiate into the community to counter the irruption of the neo-scientist ideology of gender and machine man. There is no possibility of all this in Italy. At least I don't see it. And there isn't, consequentially, the possibility of a new Fascism since, even paradoxically there was a Mussolini in Italy today, he wouldn't know what to do. Decades of DC and PCI have exasperated the individualistic character, sceptical, resigned, materialist of the Nation, ending up bleeding the profound energies of these people. DC and PCI did not know the art of politics, but only that of the ideological and value-free neutralization of the political conflict. They have thus closed every door to the practice of a healthy creative policy. DC and PCI were the tactical factions of the foreigner (American or Soviet), they were precisely the exact opposite of the sovereignism that many today would like to attribute to him. The only sovereign "statists" of the time, at least on the level of a coherent theoretical-political perspective, they were Craxi and Giorgio Almirante. The latter, moreover, Parlato considers him a coherent political model of a neo-fascist alternative to the bourgeois and Masonic system, much more than the various far-right currents (http://www.secoloditalia.it/2014/06/giuseppe-parlato-almirante-uni-le-anime-del-msi-tra-unione-delle-destre-e-alternativa-al-sistema/). Unlike post-fascist Italy and ideologically driven by Neo-Atlanticism (among which Mattei himself should be included, the myth of contemporary sovereignists) , French Gaullism was a political culture itself antagonistic to the model of "Western totalitarian democracy" of Masonic and Jacobin substance, it was an authentic school of great politics. Gaullism was not well understood. The General was a French revolutionary, not a neo-legitimist conservative as he is usually described and as his successors will be, lukewarm conservatives. In the entire post-war period he and Imam Khomeini were the only ones who dared to question the sacred dogmas of Yalta. De Gaulle, already during the Second World War, he considered the Anglo-Saxons the first enemy of Paris, established a relationship of open conflict with the Anglo-Americans, much more than with the Axis (Cfr De Gaulle, War memories), then to Churchill's death (1965), he declared, as reported by the political scientist Mario Toscano (Cfr Designes in Diplomacy, p. 330), that the Anglo-Saxon was certainly a great statesman, but Mussolini was in his opinion greater and the only revolutionary of that bygone era. The General's political practice was, in his own way, in that particular context marked by decolonization, a practice of continuity with the great French tradition, of absolute opposition to the Anglophile West and a serious attempt at linear continuity with Richelieu's statist tradition, Louis XIV and Napoleon. The limits of Gaullist constitutionalism were certainly already evident to the General himself, that his political career was staked on the affair. It is no coincidence that we will then see neo-Jacobin "totalitarian democrats" of Masonic origin, come Macron e Mitterand, take advantage of the political mechanism of the Fifth Republic. This does not obscure, nor can it obscure the greatness of De Gaulle. Almirante understood Gaullism much better than J.M. Le Pen, indicating in De Gaulle the example of a modern state policy compared to the Italian Christian Democrat and Communist servility and the operational model of a conflictual geopolitics compared to the strict bipolarism of Yalta. J.M. Le Pen, on the other hand, originally opposed De Gaulle from Westernist positions, Atlanticist, libertarians, therefore absolutely anti-fascist. We will have to wait for Marine Le Pen – with Marion's ultratraditionalist and neoconservative variant -, which on a theoretical level will in some ways lead the Fn towards the model of Sternhellian fascism (The Israeli philosopher himself recognizes this today), so that the intrinsically French and revolutionary value of Gaullism is recognised. So, if there will be a new fascism, will be able to rise again from France, from the other West, from the only pole antagonistic to the Anglosphere as Putin's Russians well understood, not from Rome or Italy. But I highly doubt this too.
If the 20th century was the century of political conflict between fascists and Jacobins, the 21st century will be the century of conflict between those who, still using twentieth-century political terms to understand each other better, let's call here the neo-Trockists and the neo-Gaullists. If we fall into globalist ideology, from Soros to Toni Negri up to the Anglo-American neocons, we find Trotsky. We also find it in a certain Europeanism à la Monti; it is necessary to sacrifice the Greek people, horror is necessary in Greece, said the former Italian prime minister, so that the pro-European dream can continue to walk. It was the vision of the Masonic circles of the ECB and the Bundesbank. A utopian and unrealistic vision, like any more or less liberalistic natural law and neo-Jacobin vision. To advance, the global dream requires sacrificial victims. First we sacrifice, then we'll see what happens. This is the directive. E’ the logic of the Jacobin genocides; the logic of Hiroshima. Today it is the logic of the social war on small businesses. And the French Yellow Vests seem to have this in mind. The political opposition to this dream, of materialistic global leveling, of absolute domination by large concentrations of a few multinationals, it necessarily has the form of the Gaullist national state, he cannot know any other; it cannot have the form of the fascist ethical idealist state, at least in my opinion, as this would presuppose a state of exception, the art of Insurrection and the supremacy of the Machiavellian elite that I have already spoken about. I see absolutely no traces of all this. I don't even think the peoples and nations of Europe want this, said in all honesty. Furthermore, Mussolini was the only Western politician who eliminated the more or less liberal Jacobin democracy; De Gaulle did not succeed. However, there is the usual French variable, that I wouldn't know what path it would take. Trotsky was a mediocre and inconsistent politician, mafu, Perhaps, the greatest political analyst of the last century. The commander of the Red Army understood Fascism better than anyone at the time and many judgments on De De Felice's Fascism come precisely from Trotskyist analysis. Trotsky did not speak of fascism as an agent of monopoly capitalism, but of a petty-bourgeois and rural middle class movement that was becoming politically autonomous and independent from the old bureaucratic-political class through a neo-traditionalist and neo-Bonapartist but mass regime, modern and avant-garde, not legitimist (Cfr. Rapone, Trotsky and fascism, pp. 171 and following); during Ethiopia, he wrote that Mussolini's great tactical plan was represented by the aim of liberating the Mediterranean from the domination of British Imperialism, his greatest and only enemy, which continued to softly dominate Italy from 1860 to the day of the Matteotti crime, and to achieve this goal he would skilfully contrast the Germans with the Franco-English, also setting fire to the dust in a new world conflict in order to achieve the objective of the disintegration of the United Kingdom Empire. Therefore Trotsky was a very lucid ideologue and the prophet of neo-Enlightenment globalism which started from 2000 to declare his social war on the middle classes and small property owners and one cannot shrug in front of a great figure in history, despite his undoubted political short-sightedness and despite the distance that separates me from him.
The conflict of the coming century will be anyway, ideologically, always the same as in the modern era. The great spirits, the thinkers of the contemporary era cannot be ignored with their immortal lesson of thought. On the one hand, mechanistic and transcendental rationalism or empiricism (Hume, Kant), on the other, immanentistic idealism (Machiavelli and Vico). Machiavelli and Vico, masters of Realpolitik, which Benedetto Croce rightly unifies in a superior humanistic ideal based on a school of historicist and political practice in civilizational antithesis to Jacobin totalitarian democracy and bourgeois Enlightenment. Consider in this regard the greatness of Italian pan-politicist realism that Hegel's disciple, rosary, J.K.F. rosary, reveals to us that Hegel's greatest noetic aspiration would have been to become the "German Machiavelli", but he didn't succeed. He remained a schoolboy, in terms of political philosophy, in front of the immortal lesson of the Chancellor of Florence.