A Total, Organic State by Michel Schneider (2018)

* Source: Retrieved on 20/4/2022 from Google Books

* First published: As the second chapter of Michel Schneider, 2018, Principes de l'action fasciste, Ars Magna.

* Note: This was translated by me, I don't speak french so I used Google Translator and simply polished the text, so expect it to be choppy.

Parliamentary, presidential or mixed regimes pride themselves of being “democratic”. In fact, according to the fascist analysis, they enshrine the absolute power of money in the capitalist system and are the reign of cliques and committees made up of bankers and big industrialists, that is to say elites to count down. Since the Athenian Ecclesia and, apart from the popular assemblies of a few Swiss cantons which approached, or are approaching, the official model of democracy, all the other regimes inspired by the American Constitution or the "Immortal Principles of 1789" have used of the magic word, particularly flattering for the people, to hide the power of occult powers which had only their own interest in view, even if this sometimes seemed to correspond with that of the popular community. These “plutocratic” regimes have disguised democracy to the point of transforming it, to use Marxist language, into a “superstructure of oppression”. The fascist regime, for its part, intends to be an advanced form of democracy. “Totalitarian” democracy according to Mussolini, “organic” according to most of the other European fascists. The association of the two terms democracy-totalitarian may seem paradoxical. In fact, it is so only insofar as the second term - totalitarian - finds itself charged, like that of fascism, with an evil charge inherited from wartime and amplified since the "Liberation" by political scientists and sociologists who managed to divert it out of its original, specifically Italian context. We know Gentile's explanation, the neo-Hegelian philosopher, spokesman for official fascism: “For fascism, everything is in the state and nothing human or spiritual exists and, still less, has value outside the state. In this sense, fascism is totalitarian; the fascist state, synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and strengthens the whole life of a people”. The epithet and the syntagm "stato totalitario" appeared in the mouth of Mussolini himself in 1925, in a speech at the Fourth Congress of the National Fascist Party which stated as the main line of the regime the omnipotence of the executive. He speaks of a “totalitarian will”. But while Mussolini invented the political term and imposed it, in Germany it was emitted on the periphery before being taken up once by Hitler in 1933 to say the total State ignores any difference between Law and Morality”, then proscribed in 1934 as a stranger to völkische thought. Besides, the notion of the state is foreign to Hitlerism. The real paradox appears when the professors, Hannah Arendt in her Totalitarian System, or Italian totalitarian that "and totalitarianism, Raymond Aron claim to define a model, a totalitarian reality from a certain number of criteria in Democracy that they determine, essentially by analyzing the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. At the end of her study, Hannah Arendt ingenuously admits that the fascist state is not totalitarian in the sense in which she understands the term, because it does not meet all the criteria defined by her! We have to face the facts, the fascist regime can no longer be accurately described as “totalitarian”. The infamous adjective, as it is understood today, can only be attached to the Hitlerian National Socialist and Stalinist Communist regimes. 

In any case, "organic" better expresses the reality of fascist society, in its hierarchical and corporative system. “In the organic state, the law of the whole dominates over the law of the part, at the same time as it facilitates the expression of the individual, of the particular in the sense of its collaboration with the general order. Between the living whole and its members, there is no opposition because each has its own function. All do not have the same thing to do, but each has to do what is proper to him”2. The State is organic, thanks to a system of hierarchical participations and each part, endowed with a relative autonomy, fulfills a pyramidal structure, of its function and is intimately connected to the whole. “Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal, will of man as a historic entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts The rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual. And if liberty is to he the attribute of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the Fascist State - a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values - interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people. No individuals or groups (political parties, cultural associations, economic unions, social classes) outside the State. Fascism is therefore opposed to Socialism to which unity within the State (which amalgamates classes into a single economic and ethical reality) is unknown, and which sees in history nothing but the class struggle. Fascism is likewise opposed to trade unionism as a class weapon. But when brought within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State. Grouped according to their several interests, individuals form classes; they form trade-unions when organized according to their several economic activities; but first and foremost they form the State, which is no mere matter of numbers, the suns of the individuals forming the majority. Fascism is therefore opposed to that form of democracy which equates a nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of the largest number ; but it is the purest form of democracy if the nation be considered as it should be from the point of view of quality rather than quantity, as an idea, the mightiest because the most ethical, the most coherent, the truest, expressing itself in a people as the conscience and will of the few, if not, indeed, of one, and ending to express itself in the conscience and the will of the mass, of the whole group ethnically molded by natural and historical conditions into a nation, advancing, as one conscience and one will, along the self same line of development and spiritual formation. Not a race, nor a geographically defined region, but a people, historically perpetuating itself; a multitude unified by an idea and imbued with the will to live, the will to power, self-consciousness, personality. In so far as it is embodied in a State, this higher personality becomes a nation. It is not the nation which generates the State; that is an antiquated naturalistic concept which afforded a basis for XIXth century publicity in favor of national governments. Rather is it the State which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity. The right to national independence does not arise from any merely literary and idealistic form of self-consciousness; still less from a more or less passive and unconscious de facto situation, but from an active, self-conscious, political will expressing itself in action and ready to prove its rights. It arises, in short, from the existence, at least in fieri, of a State. Indeed, it is the State which, as the expression of a universal ethical will, creates the right to national independence. A nation, as expressed in the State, is a living, ethical entity only in so far as it is progressive. Inactivity is death. Therefore the State is not only Authority which governs and confers legal form and spiritual value on individual wills, but it is also Power which makes its will felt and respected beyond its own frontiers, thus affording practical proof of the universal character of the decisions necessary to ensure its development. This implies organization and expansion, potential if not actual. Thus the State equates itself to the will of man, whose development cannot he checked by obstacles and which, by achieving self-expression, demonstrates its infinity. The Fascist State , as a higher and more powerful expression of personality, is a force, but a spiritual one. It sums up all the manifestations of the moral and intellectual life of man. Its functions cannot therefore be limited to those of enforcing order and keeping the peace, as the liberal doctrine had it. It is no mere mechanical device for defining the sphere within which the individual may duly exercise his supposed rights. The Fascist State is an inwardly accepted standard and rule of conduct, a discipline of the whole person; it permeates the will no less than the intellect. It stands for a principle which becomes the central motive of man as a member of civilized society, sinking deep down into his personality; it dwells in the heart of the man of action and of the thinker, of the artist and of the man of science: soul of the soul.”.  One could speak of “integralism” in connection with fascism because it integrates the individual, as a person, into community life and objectives.  In such a way that it becomes impossible for him to be a fascist in politics, and not a fascist in his profession, in his family or in his day-to-day ideas.  No form of state, however, exists in it's same view but in view of the service it renders, of the objective which it proposes to attain.  Fascism asserts that if one walks towards a great goal, the necessity of the walk commands discipline, and the greatness of the goal justifies it.  “Above all the State is the project of an action and a program of collaboration.  People are called to do something together.  The State is not consanguinity, nor linguistic unity, nor territorial unity, nor continuity of habitation.  It is in no way material, inert, given or limited.  It is pure dynamism - the will to do something in common - and thanks to it the idea of ​​the state is not limited by any physical term.  The state should not be a providence, but an authority.  An authority that sets goals, that gives itself the means to achieve them, and that decides.  The nation only exists as a conscience, as a superior will, insofar as it is guided by a State which exercises its “royal” power (rex: the one which shows the way to be followed with its right hand).  Any politics implies a will, and any will implies a hierarchy: the will of the demos, being plural, is always weak."  “The foundation of any state, says Evola, is the transcendence of its principle, that is to say the principle of sovereignty, authority and legitimacy.  The highest and most real legitimation of a real political order, and therefore of the State, resides in its analogical function, that is to say in the fact that it arouses and maintains the disposition of the individual  to act and think, to live, fight and, eventually, die, according to a goal that goes beyond his simple individuality”.  Fascist state is an attempt to preserve political unity in outdoor, public and legal space.  It aims to bring together in its hands the scepter and the crosier, temporal power and spiritual power, to reconnect with the notion of Roman imperium.  interior, private, and moral at the same time as in  citizen ".  There is not a general and abstract freedom, there are freedoms articulated according to the proper nature of beings.  It is a question of a concrete freedom, which is, at the level where it is exercised, a power, an authority.  “So what is freedom?  A power.  He who can do nothing at all is not free.  He who can infinitely is also infinitely free.  One of the forms of power is wealth.  Another of these forms is influence, it is physical force, it is intellectual and moral force.  On what are these various powers exercised in different ways?  On men.  And this power, to whom does it belong?  To men.  When a human freedom is at its highest point and it has encountered human objects to which to apply and impose itself, what name does it take?  Authority.  An authority is thus only a freedom arrived at its perfection”6.  The fascist revolution tends to create an organic society considering the individual, as through the functions he fulfills within the person, community, and recognizing his freedom only according to his social responsibilities and his  solidarity with the group and its objectives.  Everyone then participates fully in this universality” exalted by José-Antonio Primo de Rivera.  Friedrich Hegel, on another register, was the real community of destiny in inspiration of this idea: “The State is the actual reality of concrete freedom;  now, concrete freedom consists in the fact that personal individuality and its particular interests receive their full development and the recognition of their rights for themselves (in the systems of the family and of civil society), at the same time as from them.  they themselves become integrated into the general interest, or recognize it consciously and voluntarily as the substance of their own spirit, and acting for it, as their final goal.  It follows that neither the universal is valid and accomplished without the particular interest, the conscience and the will, nor do individuals live as private persons, oriented solely towards their interest without wanting the universal;  they have a conscious activity of this goal.  The principle of modern States has this extreme power and this depth of leaving the principle of subjectivity personal particularity autonomous and at the same time of bringing it back to substantial unity and, thus of maintaining its fulfillment until the end of the  this unity in this principle itself."  Basically, the great principle that fascism proposes, and which imposes itself in times of crisis, is the organization of solidarity at all levels of the popular community with a view to the realization of a collective project.  In this sense, fascism is a kind of “solidarism”.  

NOTES

1. On this subject, see Hannah Arendt, Le Système totalitaire, Seuil, Paris, 1972, and Raymond Aron, Démocratie et totalitarisme, NRF, Paris, 1968. 

2. Ernst Krieck, quoted by Jacques Ploncard d'Assac, Doctrines du nationalisme, Editions du Fuseau, s.l., 1965, p.  123. 

3. Benito Mussolini, Enciclopedia Italiana, volume XIV, p.  847 et seq.  

4. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, op.  cit., p.  219. 

5. Julius Evola, Men among the Ruins, op.  cit., p.  56. 

6. Charles Maurras, Mes idées politiques, op. cit., p. 52. 

7. Friedrich Hegel, Principes de la philosophie du droit, Gallimard, Paris, 1949, p. 194.