f 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.

The Fascist conception of liberty merits passing notice. The _Duce_ of
Fascism once chose to discuss the theme of "Force or consent?"; and he
concluded that the two terms are inseparable, that the one implies the
other and cannot exist apart from the other; that, in other words, the
authority of the State and the freedom of the citizen constitute a
continuous circle wherein authority presupposes liberty and liberty
authority. For freedom can exist only within the State, and the State
means authority. But the State is not an entity hovering in the air
over the heads of its citizens. It is one with the personality of the
citizen. Fascism, indeed, envisages the contrast not as between
liberty and authority, but as between a true, a concrete liberty which
exists, and an abstract, illusory liberty which cannot exist.

Liberalism broke the circle above referred to, setting the individual
against the State and liberty against authority. What the liberal
desired was liberty as against the State, a liberty which was a
limitation of the State; though the liberal had to resign himself, as
the lesser of the evils, to a State which was a limitation on liberty.
The absurdities inherent in the liberal concept of freedo