Naturalism, determinism, organicism, and the naturalization of the “national character”

In Hippolyte Taine’s organicist naturalism, the terms “race,” “nation,” and “people” were somehow osmotic and often interchangeable, as derivations of the climatic and environmental milieu, which also determined the psychological disposition of human groups: “We may consider the character of a people as an abridgment of all its preceding actions and sensations; that is, as a quantity and a weight, not infinite, since everything in nature is finite, but disproportioned to the rest, and almost impossible to lift, since every moment of an almost infinite past has contributed to increase it.”Footnote ¹⁴ This almost unliftable weight was not only at the origin of all manifestations of existing civilizations, but also allowed for a civilization to be the subject matter of the social sciences, because of the “law of mutual dependence” that linked various social manifestations into a coherent whole: “A civilization forms a body, and its parts are connected with each other like the parts of an organic body.”Footnote ¹⁵

The investigation of organic and collective phenomena fostered the epistemological emergence of the human and social sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century. This emergence took place in the face of a rapid social change towards an industrial society, which brought together large portions of the population in workplaces and residential areas, complemented by a progressive extension of suffrage that opened their access to the public sphere.Footnote ¹⁶ The continuous, but uneven and unequal, access of ever larger masses to democratic processes produced friction between the concept of “mass” and that of “democracy,” potentially calling into question the very foundations of the representative regime.Footnote ¹⁷ The massive social change, the erosion of traditional social bonds, and the need for intellectual tools to counter the resulting disorientation favored recourse to the categories of the natural sciences. Extending the method of positive observation of natural phenomena to the study of the social sphere made it seem possible to elaborate paradigms to explain the functioning of human communities. Thinkers from Herbert Spencer to Hippolyte Taine and from Fréderic Le Play to Lorenz von Stein and Ferdinand Tönnies provided a highly usable frame of reference that could have repercussions in literature as well as in journalism, in political discourse as well as in the definition of new fields of knowledge.Footnote ¹⁸ In the Italian case, the collective dimension not only was epistemologically foundational for the new social sciences, such as anthropology—where the concern for criminal behavior of its founder, Cesare Lombroso, was applied by his disciple, Scipio Sighele, to the study of the criminal tendencies of the masses—but also incited new directions in traditional fields such as legal science.Footnote ¹⁹

What is at issue here, however, is not just the correlation between the emergence of the social sciences and the increasing relevance of the dimension of the collective, but also the process by which the collective dimension had progressively been defined in terms of national collectivity: in educated opinion, in political discourse, and in the social sciences. It was a process that paralleled, but did not entirely coincide with, that of the establishment of modern biological and ideological racism, on which research is now extensive. Revealing of this parallelism was the discourse on the Latin and Anglo-Saxon “races,” of naturalistic derivation and circulating since the mid-century but almost ubiquitous by the end of the century, which had a racist angle, but also a national profile.Footnote ²⁰ The para-scientific publicist Gustave Le Bon loosely used it in a book on the Psychological Laws of the Evolution of Peoples that was clearly racist in structure and inspired by the hierarchy of superiority established by de Gobineau.Footnote ²¹ For the historian (as well as Lombroso’s son-in-law) Guglielmo Ferrero, it had, above all, an institutional–political aspect. In his successful travelogue L’Europa giovane, Ferrero rather nonchalantly combined cultural attitudes, economic industriousness, and forms of government. The individualistic Anglo-Saxon “races” jealously guarded their freedom, founded on labor, and nurtured an industrial capitalism tending towards unstoppable growth and imperialist expansion. In contrast, the Latin “races”—Spanish, French, Italian—appeared destined for decadence because they were humanistic and unproductive. Moreover, they were inclined to divest themselves of their sovereignty in favor of charismatic leaders, tending towards Caesarism: “Caesarism is the society governed by classes that do not represent productive labor; that want to enjoy the pleasures of sense and high intellectual and artistic satisfactions, without demeaning themselves in the brutal occupation of producing.”Footnote ²²

Of course, naturalizing the opposition between a virtually despotic Latin Caesarism and an aggressively industrialist Nordic individualism, which proliferated thanks to widely circulated books such as those mentioned above, entailed a hypostatization of the hierarchy between “Anglo-Saxons and Latins” in terms of superiority and inferiority, so much so that a French Leplayan sociologist, Edmond Demolins, thought it appropriate to ask What the Superiority of the Anglo-Saxons Is Due To.Footnote ²³ On the other hand, in the same Anglophile circles, a few years later, the alleged weakening of Anglo-Saxon superiority after the Boer War was readily and smugly remarked.Footnote ²⁴

As in Taine’s blueprint, the notions of races, peoples, and nations could blur. The radical politician Napoleone Colajanni intended to counter the stereotyped hierarchy of “inferior” Latin races and “superior” Anglo-Saxon, maintaining that “in the reality of the present hour there are no longer races, but peoples. And better than peoples today are nations living and acting on the world stage”; thus, instead of races, “we should speak of psychic characters and the collective evolution of nations.”Footnote ²⁵

In the field of what was becoming known as collective psychology, the description of national character was often presented in comparative terms, as in the case of philosopher Alfred Fouillée, who concerned himself with education from a national perspective, then drew a psychological sketch of the French and European peoples.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, the subject of national pedagogy was often placed in a competitive perspective, as in the ongoing discussion on whether the English educational model should be imported into France as the most suitable for training a conquering imperial people.Footnote ²⁷

Even the foundation of the ancestor of Sciences Po, the École libre des sciences politiques, whose program manifesto was drafted by Taine,Footnote ²⁸ was driven by the objective of making the political education of the French elites competitive with that of nations at the forefront of military prowess, such as Germany, or imperial expansion, such as Great Britain. Its founder and director, political scientist and sociologist Émile Boutmy, wrote on constitutional history, on colonial administration, then on collective psychology.Footnote ²⁹ His elitism was moderately tinted by distrust for democracy based on universal suffrage.Footnote ³⁰ Universal suffrage in fact bore all the features that were considered conducive to a Caesarist outcome: it put the interests of the most numerous class above the national interest, and it made it so that the histrionic ability to stir the people’s emotions was considered the greatest virtue of a politician. Universal suffrage was a trump card which, however, would lose the game: all those peoples who had played the card “must resign themselves to suffering the increasingly brutal and cynical consequences, one after the other, of force and number.”Footnote ³¹

The process of naturalization of national characters, the nationalization of collective psychology, and the conjunction of democracy and Caesarism that we have briefly reconstructed were potentially highly usable in the discourse of political nationalism that would take shape during the first decade of the century and would in fact innervate it. Their late positivist imprint entailed the persistence of a determinist and organicist perspective in the political discourse, which went beyond the historic defeat of positivism by neo-idealism.Footnote ³² Especially when the singularization of collective characters coincided with the state–national dimension, organicism and nationalism interpenetrated. In this context Caesarism may be considered, rather than a political concept, a figure of speech, which did not merely designate charismatic leadership as a political model but, by extension, indicated a people, a “race,” a nation whose deep-seated characteristics—such as a deficiency of individualism—favored the acceptance of charismatic leadership.

The order of hierarchy

In its Tocquevillian and nineteenth-century meaning, the concept of Caesarism implied a mass of isolated, “atomized” individuals, resulting from the dissolution of social bonds related to the advance of democracy, over whom an authoritarian despotism was exercised.Footnote ³³ In the meaning that was becoming accepted at the end of the century, Caesarism was characteristic of some peoples rather than others, for reasons linked to national character, but also to historical conditions.

The Italian people might not have been as constitutionally prone to Caesarism as the French, on whom, according to Ferrero, the Napoleonic experience had left an indelible mark that from the original Caesarism of the Empire had generated an “oligarchic” Caesarism in the Orleanist period and a “parliamentary” and “administrative” Caesarism in the Third Republic.Footnote ³⁴ But the Italians were a people afflicted by the backwardness and misery of the countryside, as proved by the uninterrupted flow of emigrants leaving Italy by the millions for the Americas, which so distressed Pasquale Villari.Footnote ³⁵ It was an “exhausted and depressed” people, disintegrated, dispersed and incapable of valiant action, as proved by the defeat of Adwa in 1896, where to fight against the brave Menelik’s soldiers was sent, in Ferrero’s view, “a jumble of peasants in whom every virtue of courage was extinguished by a centuries-old tradition of docility; a jumble of poor, of servants, of the ignorant, of the indifferent, of the terrified.”Footnote ³⁶ Among the Italian ruling class, contempt for such a spineless people was combined with humiliation and patriotic concern not only in registering the uninterrupted series of military defeats suffered after Unification, but also in acknowledging how the masses of people emigrating in their millions to the Americas were made up of an illiterate and unskilled workforce, reflecting a desperately backward nation.Footnote ³⁷

This attitude underwent a profound change with the Great War, when an aspect of the Italian people’s Caesarist-inclined character was revealed that would later also be instrumental to the rhetoric of Fascism, namely the fact that, when disciplined in a rigid military system, the Italian people proved obedient. Indeed, it came as a pleasant surprise to discover that the Italian people in uniform, when engaged in the massive slaughter of the Great War, were capable of discipline and honor. Ferrero had been ready to retract his negative view of the Latin peoples: in a lecture in front of Italy’s French allies, he praised the virtues of the “Latin genius” against the Germanic destructive fury.Footnote ³⁸ Benito Mussolini, in his wartime diary, observed that the qualities exhibited by the Italian soldiers would have countered the pessimism of the patriotic poet Giosuè Carducci: “If he were back in the world, in front of these men who were marvelous in their tenacity, their endurance, their self-sacrifice, he would no longer say as he once did: ‘Our Fatherland is vile!’”Footnote ³⁹

It was, above all, the direct contact with the soldiers, especially infantrymen, that made it possible to acknowledge qualities hitherto unrecognized in the Italian people on a mass level. In this spirit, the philosopher Giovanni Gentile reported large excerpts from Volontà, a “trench journal” published by officers on duty at the front, to reject “the usual story of the incorrigible faults of the Italian people: undisciplined, lazy, volatile etc.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Instead, the officers witnessed that the Italian soldier was

The trope of the soldier’s virtues reflecting the those of a peasant, obedient and genuine, would recur more than once, also in literature: in his Viva Caporetto, or La rivolta dei santi maledetti, the heretical Fascist writer Curzio Malaparte praised the illiterate Italian infantry as the force that “gathered the most forthright expression of our race and gave the measure of our possibilities, our tenacity and our spirit of sacrifice.” “Our infantry, the most Christian of all, launched itself in the assault humanly: once, twice, ten times in a row,” only because it had to be done: “Obedience is a virtue and fatalism a defect (or a virtue?) which Italians possess in the highest degree.”Footnote ⁴²

As a matter of fact, an army of obedient fatalists could be an ideal army to be led to slaughter. Mussolini was cynically aware that “to the people who relinquished the spade to hold the rifle, we simply ask that they obey; and the Italian people, the people of the countryside and the people of the workshops, obey.”Footnote ⁴³ Besides obedience, another feature of the Italian people that was mirrored by the soldiers was, according to Franciscan friar Agostino Gemelli, later the founder of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, “their candor, their primeval character, sometimes puerile elements.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The image of an infant people, only capable, at best, of vaguely guessing what the ruling and intellectual classes knew lucidly and rationally, was shared by the liberal socialist Gaetano Salvemini: “The people, the multitude of peasants, of workers, went to arms, silent and collected, without really seeing the ideal motives that drove us, but confusedly presaging them.”Footnote ⁴⁵

A people passively virtuous, immature, and incapable of self-determination should therefore be incorporated through national pedagogy, as Gentile aptly suggested: “It is necessary for the superior Italy of culture and responsibility to take advantage of the treasure of moral energies hidden in the fiber of our people. Above all, we must cultivate the feeling of unity and social discipline.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Historian Gioacchino Volpe’s instructions for army officers recommended that the soldier ought to be reminded that “the war was a great national effort in which all classes took part”: no matter how much he had suffered for his country, the soldier “must not be fed the idea that the war is only his doing.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The convenient and recently discovered virtues of the Italian people in uniform could be put to good use, then, only within a framework of hierarchical and integrated order. The mass of the Italian people, appropriately given to obedience, had to be organized and directed, to be subjected to the command of a leadership. It was not a long step from here to the authoritarian Caesarism embodied by Fascism, and the step would soon be taken.

Because of the genetic link between Fascism and the Great War—without which, as historiography has now established, the former is incomprehensible—but also because of the persistence of late positivist organicism among the political elite, Fascist Caesarism was a coin with two sides. On the one side, there was the charismatic leadership of Il Duce, on whom torrents of rhetoric were lavished; historiography has long identified this as a distinctive feature of Italian Fascism, and there is no need to elaborate here.Footnote ⁴⁸ On the other, there was an obedient, passive, but hierarchically organized people.

In the political culture of Fascism, the cult of the leader, embodied in the glorification of Il Duce, was intertwined with the legacy of hierarchical authoritarianism from the war period, often associated with the persistence of late positivist organicism in the conception of the nation. The result converged in the creation of a corporative state, as Fascism’s specific and original solution to the politicization of the popular classes and, ultimately, to democracy.

Organicism and state reform

This two-sided coin had obvious political connotations. In a famous article on Machiavelli published in his journal Gerarchia in April 1924, on the eve of the general elections, Mussolini dismissed the popular sovereignty that was soon to be exercised at the polls: “The adjective of sovereign applied to the people is a tragic joke. The people all, at most, delegate, but they can certainly not exercise any sovereignty.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Deprived of its power when deemed appropriate, it bore the same features of passivity and obedience displayed during the war: “The people only have one syllable left, to say yes and obey. You see that the sovereignty graciously bestowed on the people is taken away from them at times when they might feel the need. It is left to them only when it is harmless or considered harmless, that is, in moments of ordinary administration.”Footnote ⁵⁰

The process of disempowering popular sovereignty took place gradually, between the March on Rome in October 1922 and the enactment of the leggi fascistissime devised by Alfredo Rocco in 1925–6.Footnote ⁵¹ The process was closely intertwined with the internal dynamics among Fascism’s main political actors,Footnote ⁵² as well as the lively political debate within Fascism. This debate has often been branded inconclusive by historians, as it did not result in a precise plan for constitutional reforms, which were instead implemented through Rocco’s set of laws.Footnote ⁵³ However, the arguments that unfolded during that transitional period are a piercing indication of the political culture that underpinned the Fascist elite’s intentions and are well worth consideration. Here, we focus on two aspects that emerge from the theoretical contributions of Giovanni Gentile and Alfredo Rocco, which can help highlight the “other side” of the coin of Fascist Caesarism.

In the summer of 1924, when the echoes of the direct responsibility of the head of government in the murder of the socialist MP Giacomo Matteotti were shaking public opinion and undermining the stability of the Fascist government, the Fascist Party appointed a commission of fifteen eminent political figures to study a plan of constitutional reforms to permanently change the liberal state according to the Fascist seizure of power. The commission was chaired by Giovanni Gentile and lasted until January 1925, when the changed political conditions announced with Mussolini’s speech on 3 January, in which he claimed responsibility for Matteotti’s assassination and declared his intention to build a dictatorship, led to the expansion of the commission to eighteen government-appointed members, again under the chairmanship of Gentile.

The Sicilian philosopher’s opening speech was delivered on 28 October 1924, to mark the March on Rome’s second anniversary; from the very first lines it revealed itself to be based on a late positivist approach to the history of state institutions, of Tainian organicist descent:

The speech was also an exercise in fine-tuning the political application of Gentile’s theoretical idealism, placing it within a historicist narrative that focused on the present. Gentile’s historicist narrative was a correction of Benedetto Croce’s teleology that had considered the prewar Italian liberal state the actual realization of the inevitable historical advent of the idea of liberty. In the course of embracing Fascism, Gentile perfected the narrative by depicting the latter as the result of a line of continuity that stemmed from the Risorgimento, coalesced in the war, and was guaranteed by the person of the king.Footnote ⁵⁵ The interpretation of Fascism as the highest and most accomplished phase of liberalism entailed a pantheon of personalities through whom the idea had been asserted, first and foremost Giuseppe Mazzini.Footnote ⁵⁶ It was an effective formula that circulated in the political discourse of Fascism and was reworked in such claims as “Liberalism in Italy, according to an inflexible logical alignment, is being lived today by Fascism.”Footnote ⁵⁷

In Gentile’s 1924 opening speech, such continuity was embodied in the Albertine Statute of 1848 that was “immortal, like the Fatherland”: “But like all immortal things it is a cell or organism that develops and survives by perpetuating itself in the perpetuity of the spirit, which renews itself incessantly, and in itself even renews its own memories.”Footnote ⁵⁸ It was a way of declaring that the Statute could be adapted to the purposes of Fascism, whose political agency was given full legitimacy within the existing institutions, which, in turn, were deemed expendable to increasing fascistization.

A year later, though, the work of the 1 met with Mussolini’s silent coldness. Meanwhile, in a speech delivered in Perugia in August 1925, Alfredo Rocco, the minister of justice, had put himself forward, outlining his concept of the preeminence of the state over the social forces that were instrumental in Mussolini’s ruling agenda, and rendered the commission’s proposals obsolete.Footnote ⁵⁹ The head of government in fact entrusted Rocco with the task of drawing a series of bills of constitutional relevance that would have profound constitutional impact as the cornerstone of the authoritarian and corporative state.

Rocco’s Perugia speech, despite being designed to replace Gentile’s influence, was set along similar lines of organicism and historicism. It was based on elements of political nationalism that Rocco himself had contributed to forging before the war. In particular, it echoed the biological conception of the nation enunciated in his 1914 programmatic text Che cosa è il nazionalismo e che cosa vogliono i nazionalisti (What Is Nationalism and What the Nationalists Want), where Rocco assumed that “the individual does not live only in the class, and does not live at all in the society of all men, but lives instead and principally in that social aggregate, constituted by men of the same race, which is the nation.”Footnote ⁶⁰ It revealed a combination of Paretian and social-Darwinist suggestions:

In 1925 (although he intended to reject “the so-called organic theories of the state” à la Leon Duguit, with its pluralist nature), Rocco retained the late positivist cast of his organicism:

He then moved from the Aristotelian definition of man as a social animal to dryly declaring “inconceivable” the “non-man” who did not live in society. Since the whole of mankind, as a species, was grouped into societies, it followed that

It was conceded that the individual was not to be completely annihilated, because “as part of his generation, [he] is still an element, albeit infinitesimal and transient, of society”;Footnote ⁶⁴ rather, the individual’s goals ought to adhere to those of society, which in turn resolved itself into the state, especially the Fascist state; “the same rights of the individual, when they are recognized, are but a reflection of the rights of the State that the individual asserts as his own interest and as an organ of a social interest converging with that of the State.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In Rocco’s view, the state, as the institutional form of the society, ought to establish its preeminence over the individual in all aspects of social life, and particularly in what he considered “the central problem of the modern world,” namely the relationship between capital and labor and the achievement of “justice between classes, which is a fundamental requirement of modern life.” This had to be done by preventing “class self-defense, a source, like the individual self-defense, typical of barbaric times, of disorder and civil war,” yet “class organization is a fact and a necessity and as such cannot be ignored by the State, but must be disciplined, controlled, framed within the State.”Footnote ⁶⁶

In the tight rhetorical style that followed “the slope of logical deductions,” and that has been considered typical of his political discourse,Footnote ⁶⁷ Rocco opposed Fascism to all other political theories, all seen as stemming from the same source, and assigning to society the aim of promoting the well-being and happiness of individuals, albeit through different means. “Liberalism, democracy, socialism appear to us, as they really are, not only as filiations of an identical theory of society and the state, but also as logical derivations from each other. The logical development of liberalism leads to democracy, the logical development of democracy leads to socialism.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Fascism was their opposite:

In concluding by assigning Fascism its series of forerunners, Rocco could not help but reproduce the historicist succession already outlined many times by Gentile, from Machiavelli to Giambattista Vico, then to Mazzini: “In Mazzini’s conception of the citizen as a means to the attainment of the Nation’s ends, obliged by a superior mission to the duty of supreme sacrifice, we see anticipated one of the fundamental points of the fascist doctrine.”Footnote ⁷⁰

A corporative Caesarism

While Gentile’s historicist pantheon influenced Rocco’s theoretical effort to legitimate Fascism, Gentile similarly incorporated Rocco’s indication that state control over organized labor was “the main problem of the contemporary age.”Footnote ⁷¹ This occurred during Gentile’s chairmanship of the above-mentioned constitutional-reform commissions, and especially the intricate discussions that took place there concerning the role of trade unions in the nascent corporative state.Footnote ⁷² In his opening speech in 1924, Gentile conceded that “the institutions needed to be updated to correspond to the real needs of the country and contain all the real forces of the people in the juridical organism of the State.”Footnote ⁷³ And the main real forces that ought to be acknowledged were the trade unions: “Trade unionism may or may not be liked, according to one’s taste, or rather one’s culture, but it is one of those grandiose facts with a universal and necessary, solemn character, which sooner or later must be studied and understood.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Through the tremendous war effort, all social forces had been engaged in the wartime economy, and trade unionism had acquired a national character:

This would give rise to a new civil society, no longer “abstractly conceived,” but “real, concrete, the only one that exists, the one that is the true content of the State,” where “individuals remain, but are grouped together, united and therefore promoted to a higher economic, moral, and intellectual power, by the very laws inherent to their social activity.” The representative system, “in consequence, must unfold and adapt itself to this new reality, whose features will not yet be definitive (what is definitive in history?), but are already clearly discernible.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Fascism would integrate the past and the future, continuity and change, with the aim of erecting a strong anti-parliamentary state.Footnote ⁷⁷

In a famous speech of March 1925 in Florence, which was republished several times, Gentile elaborated upon his teleological historicism, expounding his idea of the ethical state welded to conceptions of the individual and liberty, which he opposed to the individualistic liberalism of the Enlightenment and, before that, the Renaissance. Italian liberty was a recovery from the decadence of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, beginning with Giambattista Vico, Vincenzo Cuoco, and Vittorio Alfieri, and blossoming with Giuseppe Mazzini. The voluntarism that morphed into political religion, and the religiosity of the subject that acquired meaning only in the collective, the patriotic, and the national, both of which ideas Gentile draw from his rendering of Mazzini, were his specific contribution to the conception of liberty. Only by feeling within oneself, in one’s own conscience, that one’s self acquired meaning only if fused with the general will—and here the reference to Rousseau’s holistic concept was not accidental—only if the individual felt within himself that his own individual purpose coincided with that of the state, would the individual realize himself, and realize himself freely, because he was no longer the object of coercion, but the subject of will. And in exercising that dual will, individual and state together acted ethically. This was the state in interiore homine, within the individual, which constitutes the distinctive feature of Gentile statualism.

In this sense, liberty was authentic when it was the fusion of individual and state in the collective dimension of the nation. In this fusion, the state, like the individual, as a free subject had to have will. In order not to be “agnostic” like the old liberal state, the fascist state must have finalities; that is, it must act to achieve goals. And the goals were those indicated by the pressing needs of the time, above all the incorporation of social organizations into the state:

In March 1925 Gentile did not indicate precisely how this objective of reorganizing the nation’s economic, social and intellectual forces within the state was to be achieved, leaving the door open to different solutions. At the conclusion of the institutional-reform commission’s studies, the solution was indicated in the realization of a corporative system. As a matter of fact, the commission did not yield a unanimous proposal, but a final report complemented by two minority reports. In essence, positions converged in favor of a corporatism-based reform of political representation, but disagreements remained on the implementation of such a reform. Gentile’s introductory premise clarified how the corporative principle was the result of a merger of different positions:

The corporative order was a “complex idea,” for which “ready and easy assent” was not expected. However,

The corporative structure was therefore the form that the unity of national forces had to assume in order to meet the most pressing needs of political and social modernity, and at the same time to connect with the organic continuity of national life as it developed over time:

In the summer of 1925, before Rocco’s set of authoritarian laws, a consensus had coalesced around the notion of the corporative state. It was an authoritarian, anti-parliamentary, historicist, organic, and corporate idea of the state, which would inform Rocco’s decisive legislative intervention and last throughout all the years of the regime, forming the “other side of the coin” of Fascist corporative Caesarism. It was perhaps a less visible side of the increasingly glorified cult of Mussolini’s leadership, whose choreography invaded ever more aspects of Italian public life and even now constitutes its distinctive and recognizable feature. But it was a side forged out of the disorientation that Italian and European culture had experienced in the face of the advance of industrial society and mass democracy, as well as the persistence of organicist responses to social transformations formulated in the culture of late positivism. Its authoritarian potential would be tragically realized during the war and, in Italy, welded together with the widespread societal racism towards the working classes that in the postwar period would promote the seizure of power by Fascism, with the conception of a corporative state serving as the Fascist version of democracy designed to counter the political agency of the working classes.