Fascist logic we ascribe the fact that though we commit many errors of
detail, we very seldom go astray on fundamentals, whereas all the
parties of the opposition, deprived as they are of an informing,
animating principle, of a unique directing concept, do very often wage
their war faultlessly in minor tactics, better trained as they are in
parliamentary and journalistic manoeuvres, but they constantly break
down on the important issues. Fascism, moreover, considered as action,
is a typically Italian phenomenon and acquires a universal validity
because of the existence of this coherent and organic doctrine. The
originality of Fascism is due in great part to the autonomy of its
theoretical principles. For even when, in its external behavior and in
its conclusions, it seems identical with other political creeds, in
reality it possesses an inner originality due to the new spirit which
animates it and to an entirely different theoretical approach.

Common Origins and Common Background of Modern Political Doctrines:
From Liberalism to Socialism

Modern political thought remained, until recently, both in Italy and
outside of Italy under the absolute control of those doctrines which,
proceeding from the Protestant Reformation and developed by the
adepts of natural law in the XVII and XVIII centuries, were firmly
grounded in the institutions and customs of the English, of the
American, and of the French Revolutions. Under different and sometimes
clashing forms these doctrines have left a determining imprint upon
all theories and actions both social and political, of the XIX and XX
centuries down to the rise of Fascism. The common basis of all these
doctrines, which stretch from Longuet, from Buchanan, and from
Althusen down to Karl Marx, to Wilson and to Lenin is a social and
state concept which I shall call mechanical or atomistic.

Society according to this concept is merely a sum total of
individuals, a plurality which breaks up into its single components.
Therefore the ends of a society, so considered, are nothing more than
the ends of the individuals which compose it and for whose sake it
exists. An atomistic view of this kind is also necessarily
anti-historical, inasmuch as it considers society in its spatial
attributes and not in its temporal ones; and because it reduces social
life to the existence of a single generation. Society becomes thus a
sum of determined individuals, viz., the generation living at a given
m