Fascism has no ideologies but a cogent system of ideas able to give what ideologies will never give, promptitude and coherence of action. These ideas serve as a criterion of action rather than a theory. If it draws the attention of foreigners as a beacon light it is because it does show a way out of the abstraction that in a certain sense seems to have perverted our modern vision of social and economic reality. The method it enforces of looking invariably at both the terms of any one relation is practical, as only can be a method the axle of which is a highly philosophical conception. For the divorce between thought and action pronounced by the philosophy of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries might induce us to believe that speculative thoughts had nothing to do with everyday life, whereas the simplest and humblest action or relation to be productive has to be the direct and immediate expression of a thought, scientific or speculative. The peasant who lifts his axe over his head before striking it into the wood is not making a choreographic flourish with his tool; its weight is augmented by the height to which he lifts it and the combination of the force of gravitation with his own sends his blade to the core of the wood. He certainly does not think of the force of gravitation, but he acts upon it. In the first contract, tacit though it may have been, the man who lacked hands to plough his fields and the men who had no field to plough, came into a relation that was the typical relation of the one and the many which has stood as the fundamental problem of ethics and politics in the philosophy of all ages. When synthesis rules theory and a synthetic view of reality rules practice then the relation is kept in consideration as the living bond of the two parties, and the greater product of the harvest is the common aim. But when analytic methods, either empirical or rational, prevail in philosophy, practical life is infected with a ferocious individualism, the necessary consequence of which is the unjust attribution of the harvest to one of the two terms, to the ruin of the relation which has to be bilateral if it is to be at all. This concrete way of looking upon every economic and social problem does not indeed present itself as a miraculous way of removing the class struggles, which are, after all, one of the main forces at play in the civilising process of mankind. It is merely the way of looking at it that befits the intellectual level reached by man through the efforts of genius and through the blood and tears of the many by which social and economic progress is achieved.