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Giovanni Gentile



         


Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944), Fascist philosopher, was the ghostwriter of 'A Doctrine of Fascism' which, signed by Benito Mussolini, described Fascism in the Italian Encyclopedia (which was edited by Gentile). He described the traits characteristic of Italian Fascism at the time: compulsory state corporatism, führerprinzip, abolition of the parliamentary system, and autarky. Gentile was minister of education and later a member of the Fascist Grand Council during the Fascist regime. He stayed loyal to Mussolini after the establishment of the Republic of Salò and was killed by communist partisans.

Gentile's philosophical basis for fascism was rooted in his understanding of ontology and epistemology, in which he found vindication for the rejection of individualism, acceptance of collectivism, with the state as the ultimate location of authority and loyalty to which the individual found in the conception of individuality no meaning outside of the state (which in turn justified totalitarianism).

Gentile was a notable theorist of his time, having developed his own form of Idealism called Actual Idealism or sometimes 'Actualism,' in which negativism was in itself considered a form of positivism by way that all senses about the world only take the form of ideas within one's mind in any real sense. An example of Actual Idealism in Theology is that though man may have invented the concept of God, that fact would not make God any less real in any sense possible, except where qualities were presupposed about what that existence actually entailed.

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The Writings of Giovanni Gentile (to 1935)

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Other revolutionary minded Italians of the inter-war period





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