In this brief exposition of what were Vincenzo Cuoco’s most important ideas on politics, we meet constantly with sentences that might be met from the pen or on the lips of Mussolini. Censure can do little to reform the moral and political life of man. Feasts and premiums are better means; and it is more likely that governments will improve the country by pulling the people to the good rather than by pushing them away from the bad. This is pure Fascism. The government must not act as a brake, but rather as a propeller or a helm. Public virtue must be nursed, not by diminishing the avidity of the lower classes, but by showing them the way to satisfy it. _The love of work_ is the one means of regenerating the lower classes. A good government must, therefore, destroy the callings that are unproductive; and to accomplish this the best way is to make it impossible for people to get as much money out of them as out of the productive callings. “Work,” writes Cuoco, just as a Fascist minister might, “will make us independent of the nations upon which we depend.” The Love of Man for his country must spring from self respect; and this, indeed, is as far as one could go more than a hundred years ago towards the identification of state and citizen, which is the basis of Fascism, and has been formulated in its speculative form by Giovanni Gentile in 1916. If a nation was to be created out of the patchwork Italy presented on the map it could only be through the education of the people, for the unification could only be attained by awakening national consciousness in the single consciences. Cuoco called this the formation of an Italian public spirit.