Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism

The rationale of totalitarianism was articulated before the Great War of 1914–1918 by Giovanni Gentile—the author of the variant of Hegelian idealism that ultimately came to animate Mussolini’s Fascism. Before the First World War, Gentile had proposed a conception of political rule that conceived individuals organically united in a society that found its identity in an “ethical state.” Gentile conceived society and the state intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, to the individual. Like Hegel, and Aristotle before him, Gentile conceived the individual outside society and the state only an “abstraction.”

--A. James Gregor, introduction to Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 11.