Fascism and Philosophy: The Case of Actualism

From the mid 1980s and for over two decades studies of fascist ideology conducted in the wake of the linguistic turn have delivered a transformed picture of the fascist phenomenon, all but reversing the refusal of an earlier generation of scholars to even grant fascism the status of ideology. Lately, however, a direct challenge to the cultural historiography of fascism has come from intellectual historians such as Martin Jay and Richard Wolin, who have traced the ideological roots of the 'linguistic turn' itself to thinkers associated with fascism, and, through them, all the way to a supposed anti-Enlightenment tradition dating back to the French post-revolutionary period. Seeking to respond to this challenge, this essay seeks to highlight the key role played by the Great War in fostering the ideological coalescence of fascism and in characterizing the confrontation that intellectuals on both the left and the right engaged with it.

The article focuses on the figure of Giovanni Gentile, best known as a neo-idealist philosopher, author of a systemic post-Hegelian philosophical system called attualismo (actualism), and Italian fascism's prime ideologue. Examining Gentile's war-time writings I argue that the development of actualism towards a systemic conflation of politics and philosophy should be seen as the result of Gentile's response to the Italian experience of the Great War culminating in the elaboration of a fully modernist philosophy of history in his seminal essay entitled "Politica e filosofia" (1918). Arguing that the Italian victory in the Great War had proven that all "history belongs to the present" of consciousness and is therefore "entirely immanent in the act of its construction," Gentile called for a new political subject that would orient itself towards this actualist vision of historical action, representation and consciousness. Fascism responded to that call organizing its vision of history around actualist principles.