After all that has been said it is surely unnecessary to point out the absurdity of considering Fascism as a reactionary tendency. It goes indeed steadily forward and its leader would not have the historical mind he has, if it meant to reject the labourers’ claim to preserve the recognition of their interests, which is the one noble conquest of socialism. The “reaction” was never against the working classes’ rights; it was against all rights that did not spring from duties. It was against exclusive power—tyrannical as all exclusive powers are bound to be—that it reacted with the full consent of the population, as sick of being bossed by a mob minority as the mob had been to be bossed by the gentry fifty years before. Truly it would be a strange illusion of the upper classes if they were to believe that Fascism had come to restore “the good old times”; for that which it has come to restore or rather to establish is the really Christian equality of men. Christian because it intends rights to be consonant with spiritual value and actual recognition of duties. The revolutions of the past were always justified by the necessity of enforcing the claims of a single class. Fascism in its synthetic view of life strives to enforce the rightful claims of all classes, and considers them rightful as far as they present rights and duties on the same plane. If it looks to the past it is to understand the present, but its knowledge and understanding of history do not allow it to believe that history proceeds backwards. Part II PHILOSOPHICAL ANTECEDENTS OF FASCISM CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHICAL ANTECEDENTS Fascism is the concrete way of considering any organisation or relation in the light of the aim for which it was created. Such a method sweeps away a good deal of claptrap rhetoric and a great many prejudices. What matters is the actual working of an organisation towards its aim, and not at all the exclusive interest of one of the two contracting parties. Obviously this is the practical application of one of the most famous propositions of the philosophy of Mind. It is just as obvious that after a first period of political system exclusively for gentlemen and by gentlemen, and a second period of a political system exclusively drawn for the benefit of the lower class, it was natural that any sane party should have tried a synthetic policy, above all in a country where the mentality is essentially realist.