Notes on Ball & Dagger reader
Alfredo Rocco (1925 [trans. 1926])
"The Political Theory of Fascism" — Selections from The Political Doctrine of Fascism

Alfredo Rocco (1875-1935)

Alfredo Rocco was one of the most important Fascist intellectuals. He became Minister of Justice (1925-1932) under Mussolini and was the primary source of the government's legislative program, particularly its repressive legal code.

Rocco's thesis

The situation: Italian earlier, incomplete nationalist unification; corruption, clientelism, personalism; economic backwardness. (Note the "underdog" sensibility of 383A/2/middle.) Turmoil. Mussolini originally a Marxist / Socialist (he edited a Socialist newspaper) but became dissatisfied with Marxism's applicability to Italy.

The fasces (the rod carried by the Lictors of Rome) represented strength in unity and the compulsion bound up in it.

Note the problem of collective action. We want to think beyond ourselves, but how to? Rousseau's idea of the General Will was unclear and was used in Latin America to justify dictatorship.

Fascism as critique of modernity

Fascism as critique of individualism (a.k.a. "atomism", "mere aggregation"), seen as the common root of liberalism, democracy, and socialism. The approaches of the latter may differ, but they are all inherently alienating. The ends of society are subordinated to those of the individuals composing it.

Also a critique of materialism (in the sense of consumerism), which is the only thing that binds these atoms into a society. These doctrines ignore "the spiritual inheritance of ideas and sentiments which each generation receives from those preceding and hands down to the following generation, thus destroying the unity and the spiritual life itself of human society" [313B/2/end].

Fascists offer inspiration & hope, a sense of common purpose, a sense of meaning & direction. [Note Weber's concept of charismatic leadership as a dissolution of traditional ties, traditional leadership.]

Action & sentiment [before ideas, or at least before intellectualization]. The "unconscious reawakening" of national spirit.

Fascism as constructive program

"For liberalism, the individual is the end, and society the means .... For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends."

The Fascist reconstruction of the concepts of liberty, government, and social justice:

Liberty = Not the liberal freedom to do whatever you want, politically, economically, and socially, but rather the freedom to do the things society wants you to do (and which you want to do because society wants you to do them). (And you're emotionally part of it.)
Government = Not the democratic rule of all but rather the rule of those who can rise above their own particular interests. (Hence the charge that the Fascists were corrupt. They were, but so was Italian political culture before, during, and after. [Corruption here means personalism.] The problem was that the Fascists held themselves to be above it.)
Social justice = Acceptance of the conflict between labor & capital [recall that Mussolini started out as a socialist] but rejection of Soviet collectivism, leading to stasis, and of liberal strikes, leading to anarchy. Resolution of the conflict (somehow) through the state. (The principle of the state mediating private conflicts seems o.k., but the idea that the state can itself be independent of class interests now seems naive.)

Philosophical problems:

Reification of "society". "Reification" = "treating a concept as if it were real". In Fascism, the leader/s was/were taken to represent the society. The body of the monarch and the body politic.
The "pragmatic problem": Who decides, and on what grounds is their power justified? In Fascism, the government decides, as the sole representative of society. But this just pushes the problem farther away: what makes the government the sole representative? How is it selected? etc.
The ambiguity of the term, "nation-state". "Nation" is an appeal to social solidarity through cultural unity (even if a fictitious, mythical unity), implying the rejection of "foreign" elements in the population. "State", on the other hand, is an appeal to social solidarity through administrative necessity, rationality, and success. As the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas points out (in, e.g., his 1998 book, The Inclusion of the Other) , these bases can differ greatly, and neither of them really supports a democratic society. Note the parallel with marriage, which can be seen in either its romantic context of a normative merging or in its practical context of a rational-legal (i.e., useful) contract.

OTHER, MISCELLANEOUS LECTURE NOTES

Quiz question: What is Rocco trying to prove in his essay, overall?