A. James Gregor: Trending quotes (page 2)

“Socialization was, in fact, the product of a maturation of trends already implicit in the earliest Fascist formulations. The trend that matured into socializations was already manifest by the time of the Second Convention of Syndical and Corporative Studies, held in Ferrara in May 1932. Its substance was provided by the persistent socialist and anti-bourgeois biases of radical national syndicalism conjoined with the totalitarian pretensions of neo-idealism.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 293

Study , Time

“Whatever one thinks of his Marxism today, Mussolini was accepted by his socialist peers as a Marxist theoretician. He rose to leadership in the Italian Socialist Party at least in part on the basis of his recognized capacity as a socialist intellectual.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 99

Thinking , Parting

“Gentile’s rationale was neo-Hegelian in origin, the same source out of which Marxism and Marxism-Leninism were to emerge. In fact, Gentile understood Marxism so well that his essay on the thought of the young Marx has not only withstood the test of time, but was, on the occasion of its publication, recommended as particularly insightful by V. I. Lenin.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 93

Time

“Gentile maintained, with Marx, that the ‘essence’ of man is not individual—but social. The human person is a function of a complex pattern of interactions with both nature and other persons in a law-and-rule-government environment. The human being is essentially a social creature (a Gemeinwesen)—and outside society, loses humanity.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 95

Law , Nature , Personality

“Fascism... was the socialism of ‘proletarian nations.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 135

“As have been indicated, many Fascist theoreticians, throughout their active political lives, acknowledged the affinities between Fascism and Marxist-Leninism. There were even Italian Marxist-Leninists--including Nicola Bombacci, one of the founders of his nation's Communist Party--who conceived of Fascism as the only viable form of Marxism for economically retrograde communities.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 168

Communication

“It was Stalin, Lenin’s unnatural heir, who ‘in the early 1930s…injected the adrenalin of Russian nationalism into the Soviet political bloodstream’ in an effort to restore some vitality to what gave every appearance of a failed revolution.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 176

Effort , Appearance

“Mussolini’s Fascism was a relatively benign form of reactive nationalism—in terms of the regime’s treatment of its domestic population. In the years between 1926 and 1932, when Fascism was establishing its totalitarianism, the special Fascist tribunals for political offenders pronounced only 7 death sentences.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 174

Death

“For Fascists, the state, animated by a profound sense of unity, was understood to be the ‘educator of civic virtue, rendering citizens conscious of their historic mission.’ Italy was to be Fascist, and Fascism was to be Italy. The nation was to be one indissoluble union; the interest of each was to be the interest of all. By 1929, what had emerged from the Fascist revolution was an unmistakable variant of the Gentilean neo-Hegelian state.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, (2001), p. 62

Education , Sense , Animals

“Mussolini was a well-informed and convinced Marxist. His ultimate political convictions represent a reform of classical Marxism in the direction of a restoration of its Hegelian elements.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 333

“By the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Marxist theoreticians had begun to evaluate fascism in a totally unanticipated fashion... More than that, as Marxist theorists were compelled to reinterpret fascism in the light of empirical evidence and political circumstances, the fundamental affinities shared by Marxist and fascist regimes became apparent.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 13

Fashion , Light , Time

“Mussolini insisted that Fascism was the only form of ‘socialism’ appropriate to the ‘proletarian nations’ of the twentieth century.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 191 (footnote 26).

“Fascism's most direct ideological inspiration came from the collateral influence of Italy's most radical 'subversives'.”

A. James Gregor

The Marxists of revolutionary syndicalism p. 130
The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000)

“Mussolini's revolutionary nationalism, while it distinguished itself from the traditional patriotism and nationalism of the bourgeoisie, displayed many of those features we today identify with the nationalism of underdeveloped peoples. It was an anticonservative nationalism that anticipated vast social changes; it was directed against both foreign and domestic oppressors; it conjured up an image of a renewed and regenerated nation that would perform a historical mission; it invoked a moral ideal of selfless sacrifice and commitment in the service of collective goals; and it recalled ancient glories and anticipated a shared and greater glory.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism, (1979), p. 99

People , Change

“What should be recognized at this point is the fact that Mussolini, whatever else he was, was a collectivist, who conceived human beings as social animals. He had learned that man was a communal being from Marx.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, (2001), p. 55

Communication , Learning , Animals

“Should one choose to seek out today’s fascism, one is counseled to look to the retrograde former Soviet Union, and the reformist People’s Republic of China. They are the natural hosts of a ‘resurgence’ of fascism.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, (2001), p. xii

People , Nature

“Fascism itself was a variant of Sorelian syndicalism which advertized itself as voluntaristic, neo-idealist and elitist socialism. This current of socialist thought neither Fascism nor Gentile ever rejected. ‘Fascism,’ Gentile insisted, ‘as a consequence of its Marxian and Sorelian patrimony... conjoined with the influence of contemporary Italian idealism, through which Fascist thought attained maturity, conceives philosophy as praxis.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 317

“Thus, by 1925, both Leninism and Fascism, variants of Marxism, had created political and economic systems that shared singular properties… Both sought order and disciple of entire populations in the service of an exclusivistic party and an ideology that found its origins in classical Marxism… Both created a kind of ‘state capitalism,’ informed by a unitary party, and responsible to a ‘charismatics’ leader.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Marxism, Fascism & Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism, (2008), p. 293

“Every element of Fascist doctrine can be traced to the belief system of revolutionary national syndicalism as that syndicalism emerged from the First World War.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship, (1979), p. 119

War , World

“While not a single Marxist ‘charismatic leader’ in the twentieth century made revolution in an advanced capitalist country (as Marx prescribed), or undertook the ‘withering away of the state’ (as both Marx and Engels insisted), or insured against the rule of elites (that both Marx and Engels identified as an essential of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’), or provide for the obligatory ‘rotation in office’ (again, as both Marx and Engels insured would be a post-revolutionary feature of socialist society), or resolved the problem of human ‘alienation’ (so emphatically lamented by the young Marx)—Western academics have never hesitated to directly associate Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Castroism, and even the barbarism of the Khmer Rouge, with the philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, (2001), p. 80

Problem , Country